Notes from a mother to her children in foster care
Notes from a mother to her children in foster care
Her memory of the midnight attack was muddled, but her battered body bore the story.
Purple bruises peppered her arms, legs and chest. Blood dried on her busted lip. Dark, swollen skin circled her bloodshot right eye. Hospital scans confirmed her ex-boyfriend’s attack had inflicted internal trauma too.
Now, hours later, he was in jail and Leah Gunion was home again. Concussion-weary and tender, she tucked her toddler back into bed and sat down to nurse her infant son. An 8 a.m. knock at the door disrupted her first moment of peace.
A woman waited at the threshold. Her polo shirt bore the insignia of the Florida Department of Children and Families. Thinking she was there to help, Leah let her in.
For the next six weeks, Leah would battle the state for custody of her children, though DCF investigators never suggested that she injured her kids. They didn’t accuse her of using drugs or failing to provide for her boys’ basic needs.
But she had lost consciousness from being beaten and strangled, briefly leaving her children unsupervised. They ordered Leah to never be alone with her children, or risk losing them.
“I’ll never forget,” said Leah, a 30-year-old widow and Army veteran, of the woman’s reason for the investigation. “She said to me, ‘If (your ex-boyfriend) had taken the children with him when he left while you were passed out on the floor, I wouldn’t be here right now.’”
The Florida Department of Children and Families, dependency courts and community-based nonprofits that deliver services to foster children and their parents are tasked with protecting vulnerable kids and keeping their families together whenever possible.
Yet in defiance of widely accepted best practices, Florida aggressively removes children from parents – most of them mothers – who have been battered by an intimate partner, a USA TODAY investigation found.
DCF considers exposing children to domestic violence a form of child abuse and holds victims responsible when their kids witness it. While other states have moved away from that approach, DCF cited domestic violence as the reason it removed more than 3,500 children from biological parents in 2018, an increase of nearly 1,400 from 2013. It is the primary reason for 25% of removals this year.
Florida dependency court records are confidential, which makes it impossible to understand the nuances of each case or to determine exactly why child welfare workers and judges believe an abused mother should lose her children.
But USA TODAY identified 22 domestic violence victims who were willing to share their stories and provide case documents that normally are hidden from public view. Over the past year, reporters spent hundreds of hours interviewing the women, their family members, attorneys, victim advocates and former child welfare workers.
Taken together, their experiences reveal a system stacked against women who are abused. Caseworkers and judges treat them like criminals on probation, even when their children have not been physically harmed, and impose a level of scrutiny that many parents could not pass. Any failing can be used against them to remove their children or delay reunification.
Mothers interviewed by USA TODAY were docked for using alcohol and marijuana, arriving late for appointments and expressing anguish over losing their kids.
Marion Phillips was criticized by her caseworker for buying her kids too many gifts. Foster parents also complained that she was late for visits with her children. But the state had put five of her kids in foster homes in three different counties, requiring hours of driving that she had to pay for and arrange while working full time.
Women who break down or lash out in anger can be labeled unfit. Latoya Bowles was accused of poor “impulse control” when she voiced suspicions that her children were physically abused in foster care. Another mother was called “erratic” and presumed under the influence of drugs or alcohol when she spoke quickly, stuttered and became upset over an investigator’s presence at her home.
To get their children back, mothers must complete time-consuming tasks that often are unrelated to the allegations against them.
Ashley Burbach, who was fined for misdemeanor marijuana possession at age 19, had her 3-year-old son taken away seven years later after her boyfriend strangled her. DCF also expressed concerns that she had used marijuana during her pregnancy. A judge refused to return her son for nearly a year while she completed about 40 random weekly drug screens until DCF dismissed her case because it couldn’t “sustain its burden of proof.”
Some abusive fathers were deemed more fit or more credible than the mothers they attacked.
In one case, a battered mother whom DCF accused of failing to protect her children from witnessing her husband’s domestic violence lost her kids, yet the man who beat and strangled her was granted custody of their daughter.
Worried their children could be taken again, eight mothers say they’re now afraid to call 911 if they’re in danger. Four mothers told USA TODAY they believe their children were abused or medically neglected in a foster home.
“The thing I regret most is that I ever called 911,” said a Martin County mother of two whose sons spent eight months in foster care after she reported to police that her boyfriend hit her and threatened her with a gun. “But I could also have been killed that night. Which one do you pick?”
DCF said in a written response to USA TODAY’s questions that it gathers information about mothers in order to determine behavior patterns and its “legal team does not use this information against parents in court.” It also said it does not hold mothers’ emotional outbursts against them, and makes custody decisions based on “an unbiased, fact-based approach to evaluating child safety.”
DCF Secretary Chad Poppell said in the same statement that children all over the state who witness domestic violence are simultaneously being abused, either physically, emotionally or both. But what’s more distressing, he said, is that parents are not taking the necessary steps to end the cycle of abuse. During the 12 months ending June 2020, he said more than 82,000 allegations of child abuse, abandonment or neglect also involved reports of domestic violence.
Working with families where there is ongoing domestic violence is extremely difficult, Poppell continued. Investigators have to make tough calls to determine whether parents can protect their children.
“We want to continually get better, and anyone on our team who doesn’t embody that value in everything they do will be held accountable,” Poppell said. “While I welcome oversight, I do worry that news reporting focused on a handful of difficult cases can leave the public and policy makers with the impression Florida’s child welfare system is in disarray. It is not … Florida is consistently rated as one of the top systems in America across measures of safety, permanency and well-being.”
Caseworkers and judges are under intense pressure to err on the side of protecting children. And homes where mothers are being abused can be dangerous for children in a variety of ways, including the emotional impact of witnessing violence.
But child welfare agencies that develop a supportive rather than adversarial relationship with families remove fewer children, and are more likely to save money and see fewer subsequent cases within 12 months involving the same families, according to an October report by a division within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Alabama’s Children and Family Services will often offer families food stamps, child care and crisis stabilization services rather than open an investigation.
In New York City, prevention programs, including some aimed at stopping domestic abuse, have reduced the number of kids in foster care by more than half in the past decade, according to the Administration for Children’s Services.
Michigan’s Children’s Services Agency emphasizes partnering with the victim parent, validating her strengths and protective actions and identifying the abusive partner’s patterns and triggers.
“We have a strong preference for maintaining children in the home of the non-offending parent,” said Danielle Martin, director of the agency’s quality improvement division and a certified teacher in its domestic violence training model.
Experts say Florida’s child welfare system focuses on the mothers’ behaviors rather than working to keep mothers and children safe from perpetrators. Even mothers who take the steps DCF encourages, such as calling police or fleeing to a shelter, can lose custody of their kids because agency officials use their history against them.
“It all comes down to her fault somehow, some way,” said Angie Pye, director of the Beacon Center, a domestic violence shelter in Daytona Beach. “No matter what she did, she should have done something different. That's the message that they give.”
Set up to fail
When police respond to domestic disturbances, they often notify DCF if children reside in the home, sometimes even if the kids aren’t present. So when a mother dials 911 because her partner is beating her, she unwittingly invites DCF investigators into her life.
Investigators are supposed to get at the root of problems that brought a family to DCF’s attention and offer assistance, but they often don’t have the time, training or experience to do their jobs effectively, USA TODAY’s investigation shows.
And since 2014, encounters with DCF have become increasingly adversarial.
A Miami Herald investigation that year exposed a series of child deaths – some at the hands of a mother’s intimate partner – and the Florida Legislature reacted, changing state laws to make it easier to take children from biological parents.
Front-line workers began removing children under the mandate of protecting them at all costs. Fueled by fear of being blamed for child deaths, DCF attorneys and judges followed suit.
Investigators were constantly rushed and didn’t have enough oversight, said Stephanie Harris, a former investigator supervisor. In domestic violence cases, the go-to response was to blame mothers.
“It was an ethical conflict for me,” said Harris, who has bachelor’s degrees in psychology and sociology. “I would see something and want to dig deeper, spend more time with the family, learn more about them. They’d say, ‘Get the report done, get it in the computer and get out of there.’”
Her co-workers, from program directors to investigators, criticized abused mothers and their choices, she said.
Investigators don’t understand why mothers would let someone hurt them, said Paul Wheeler, a Gainesville-based marriage and family therapist who performs psychological evaluations on both batterers and victims.
Asking a mother why she stays with an abusive partner implies “What the hell is wrong with you?” Wheeler said.
Just 13% of investigators and their supervisors have a degree in social work, according to DCF data. Many aren’t married and don’t have children themselves. They often are fresh out of college and unfamiliar with poverty and other social conditions prevalent among the families they investigate.
Study after study in recent decades has concluded that the nation’s child welfare system treats women unfairly.
Mothers bear the brunt of caseworkers’ scrutiny because they are typically their children’s primary caregivers, while men – even violent men – are held to a lower standard.
National figures show that Black and Native American children are disproportionately removed and placed in foster homes, according to numerous reports cited by the Child Welfare Information Gateway, an information portal operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In Florida, Black children make up 20% of the child population but 30% of kids in foster care, state data shows.
But it is poverty that experts believe has the greatest impact. Poor children are far more likely to be taken from their homes, in part because they are more likely to experience abuse and neglect. It's also because parents without money have fewer child care options and can’t afford private attorneys to advocate for them, experts say. Some are uneducated or illiterate yet are expected to understand case documents and legal agreements.
These built-in biases hit battered women especially hard. Many depend on abusive partners for income, housing and child care.
Among the mothers USA TODAY interviewed, all but three of the domestic violence victims whose children were removed qualified as indigent or were represented in court by a grant-funded domestic violence shelter attorney. Four mothers struggled to come up with the money required to move out of the residence they shared with an abusive partner.
“Everyone has power in the process except the parent,” said Laguerra Champagne, the managing dependency attorney for Pasco and Pinellas counties. “The system has absolute power.”
‘A forever-gone feeling’
Doctors told Leah she’d never give birth to a child, but Jacob asked her to marry him anyway.
“Just watch,” he told her.
The day she said yes, they went to a courthouse. Then, on a hunch, she took a pregnancy test in an Army barracks bathroom. The result meant that celebrating their union with a champagne toast was no longer an option. Their focus turned to their growing family’s future.
“It was so perfect,” Leah said. But then, “it just like ... stopped.”
The news that her husband had fatally shot himself scattered her hopes like startled sparrows.
“I lost a forever,” Leah said.
She left the Army with an honorable discharge and moved home to New Smyrna Beach. Her son was born three months later in September 2015. A Veterans Affairs therapist helped her cope with the compound trauma of Jacob’s suicide and a rape she’d suffered before basic training.
She began dating Dustin Broadwater, an aspiring police officer, and gave birth to his son in 2017. Broadwater hit Leah and bit her older child that year, an arrest report states, prompting a DCF investigation. Broadwater told police that the boy bit him and that Broadwater bit back to teach him it was wrong.
Broadwater, who enrolled in batterers' intervention, anger management and parenting classes to defer prosecution, could not be reached for comment.
Leah agreed to a voluntary case plan – work or attend school, go to therapy, keep her sons’ immunizations up to date – things she was doing already. She completed those tasks and the case was closed.
After Leah’s relationship with Broadwater ended, she dated John Salsman, a military man who became violent when she broke up with him at his home in January 2018. Leah’s children were not present. Salsman was arrested, and a judge ordered that he have no contact with Leah – an order he violated when he attacked her that April.
Salsman called Leah and asked to come over, Leah said. In a moment of weakness she now regrets, she said yes. Salsman stopped by Leah’s apartment, saw some flowers on a counter inside and became angry, believing they were a gift from another man.
She remembers being on her hands and knees on her living room floor with Salsman at her back, his arm wrapped around her neck, her breath faint, her vision fading to black. She remembers her 2-year-old waking up. Salsman stopped, picked up the boy and put him back in bed, Leah said. Later, she remembers crying in the bathroom. When she came out, Salsman was gone.
Leah called Broadwater, who had moved in with her as a platonic co-parent, and he drove her and the boys to a police station. An ambulance took Leah to a hospital, and Salsman was arrested. He later pleaded no contest to the January offense and was sentenced to two years’ probation.
Salsman could not be reached for comment.
Back at home a few hours later, Leah recognized the DCF investigator’s department-issued polo shirt and thought she was there to help.
But Leah’s outlook soon shifted. The woman’s main concern was that Leah lost consciousness during the struggle and her 1- and 2-year-old boys were left unsupervised, Leah recalled.
The woman’s assessment baffled Leah. “What happens when I go to sleep at night? What happens when I go to take a shower?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Though Salsman was in jail, the investigator told Leah that as part of her “safety plan” she could not be alone with her kids – but did not document that requirement, records show.
The investigator phoned Leah’s dad, Larry Gunion, to request that he check in with Leah regularly. He agreed.
Larry Gunion also told the investigator to contact him if she felt Leah’s boys were in danger and he’d pick them up immediately, he said. “They’re the light of my life, those little ones and Leah.”
The investigator told him they would meet in person to discuss the safety plan and obtain his signature. But that meeting never happened, he said, even after the investigator – with Salsman still in jail – wrote a second safety plan on April 27 to include additional relatives.
Leah tried to abide by the investigator’s instructions, she said. But Broadwater worked 12-hour shifts, her dad lived 20 miles away and had two jobs, her older son attended day care and she was still nursing her youngest.
Under stress, Leah consulted an attorney who told her that DCF couldn’t restrict her access to her children without a court order. So Leah quit answering the investigator’s calls, and the woman discovered that at times Leah was home alone with her kids.
“I think she waited in the parking lot for (Broadwater) to leave,” Leah said.
Just before 5 p.m. on Friday, May 12, as DCF offices closed for Mother’s Day weekend, the investigator appeared at Leah’s door – this time with a supervisor and a police officer – to take custody of her kids.
In vain, Leah begged them to wait for her dad to arrive.
As DCF officials left her home, her baby stared at her over one of their shoulders, crying inconsolably. Leah felt powerless, hopeless, drowning in a familiar sense of loss – like her husband’s death repeating.
“A forever-gone feeling,” Leah said.
Playing ‘judge and jury’
Florida law requires DCF investigators to inform parents of their rights at the start of an investigation. Parents are entitled to have an attorney present, to record interviews of them and their children and to know how information obtained from them will be used. But attorneys and former investigators say child welfare workers often ignore the statute and deprive parents of due process.
USA TODAY asked 14 mothers if investigators informed them of their rights. All 14 said no; they were not aware of those rights until attorneys or reporters later explained them.
The state provides indigent parents with an attorney once their case reaches court. In the meantime, mothers left to deal directly with investigators essentially hang themselves with their own words, said Champagne, the dependency attorney.
“Parents are starting out absolutely participating in their own lynching, so to speak,” Champagne said.
Twelve mothers said they were honest about their history and family dynamics, believing they had nothing to hide. One mother said that when questioned about her partner and their home life, she did not even know she was being investigated.
Four women said they asked for an attorney or tried to record their interactions with DCF investigators. One woman said a police officer took her phone away to stop her from recording.
Another, Ashley Burbach, said she insisted on consulting an attorney before signing a case plan that an investigator said was voluntary. The man summoned police and took custody of her son. Burbach is one of five mothers whose children were removed after they turned down “voluntary” services.
One Gainesville mother’s admissions during an interview with DCF almost cost her permanent custody of her two children.
Doctors preparing to operate on her baby boy, who was born with a heart defect, discovered fractured ribs and notified DCF. Reeling from the news of her son’s injury, Amber was honest with investigators about ongoing domestic violence with her children’s father and asked for help finding a new residence.
DCF blamed her for the broken bones and filed for expedited termination of her and the father’s parental rights. The department moved the kids from a relative’s home and placed them with a foster mother eager to adopt.
Amber’s attorney won at trial and her children were returned after she complied with an abbreviated case plan, but the yearlong separation still stings.
“My 8-month-old and my 1½-year-old daughter were snatched from my arms and I was totally unprepared,” said Amber, 31. “I feel like most of my trauma came not from the relationship I was in but more from what I had to experience and go through to get my children.”
USA TODAY typically does not disclose domestic assault victims’ identities. Some mothers, like Amber, agreed to be identified by their first or full names; others feared retaliation from the men who abused them or from DCF.
Except in the most dangerous situations, investigators can craft a plan with parents to keep kids safe in their care. In domestic violence cases, safety plans can include actions such as agreeing to alert police and call a relative to pick up the children if the abuser becomes aggressive. They are voluntary; every participant should sign and receive a copy.
Yet investigators dictate safety plan guidelines rather than building them around mothers’ input, and issue them verbally so that parents have no proof of the agreement, attorneys said.
“I don’t recall the last time I was provided a safety plan when I asked for discovery,” said Stephanie Rogers, a parent attorney in Miami. “A lot of times (parents) don’t even remember signing them. They weren’t given a copy.”
And because most mothers don’t have an attorney to guide them through the initial stage of a DCF investigation, they often agree to safety plans that are impractical and unsustainable. Investigators use any violation as probable cause to remove their children, USA TODAY’s investigation found.
In some cases, investigators tell mothers they can’t be alone with their children, or even require that they send their kids to stay with a relative – a step that requires a court order.
“It almost seems like they’re acting like the judge and jury,” said Margaret Julien, managing attorney of Miami-Dade’s dependency division.
In conversations with USA TODAY, four attorneys who worked for DCF within the past decade said that while at the department, they expressed alarm that safety plans provided child welfare workers an opportunity to unlawfully separate parents from their children.
These attorneys, who now represent parents in dependency cases, asked that they not be named for fear DCF may retaliate against their clients.
“Working on this side of the aisle, we can see it happening,” one attorney said. “(Parents) are told, ‘Agree to this or your kid will be taken.’”
Judge shopping
The morning before Mother’s Day 2018, DCF filed an emergency petition to take custody of Leah’s sons, alleging that she and her relatives had violated her safety plan.
Yet none of her relatives’ signatures were obtained, records confirm. Leah’s father, Larry Gunion, said he never saw the document.
The investigator also alleged that Leah took her boys to visit her abusive ex, who had just been released from jail, citing a neighbor as a witness, records show. Leah said she had no contact with her former partner after the night of the attack and had not taken her kids to his home.
A circuit judge ruled that DCF did not have probable cause to remove Leah’s kids.
She felt liberated, vindicated. But the separation’s impact on her children was evident.
Her baby’s steel-blue eyes were streaked with red, his face swollen from crying. Her toddler, whom DCF and police had picked up from day care, asked what he’d done wrong. “He thinks he was arrested,” Leah said, something she’d previously told him happens only to bad boys.
On Mother’s Day, Leah celebrated with her family over chips and salsa and Mexican cuisine and an afternoon at a park playground. “They were so happy to be home, you know, after that trauma,” Leah said.
A Monday morning phone call sapped all of Sunday’s joy.
The investigator she’d dealt with for weeks told her to be in court in just a few hours. “They judge-shopped,” Leah said, meaning when DCF disliked one judge’s ruling, they asked for another.
This judge ordered the boys be fostered until DCF approved Leah’s father for temporary custody. They were separated and sent to strangers’ homes once more.
As Leah turned from the judge, she saw her sons standing in the entryway. Her knees buckled. Her stepmother reached out to break her fall.
She’s been told she cried and screamed, that police had to carry her from the courtroom. She doesn’t recall any of it.
“I think (my oldest) opened up the door,” Leah said. “And they were just standing there staring at me. It’s the last thing I remember.”
Parents pay the price
After a judge approves DCF’s request to remove a mother’s children, she’s now expected to sign a case plan – a checklist of tasks she must complete within 12 months to convince child welfare workers and the court that she’s become a protective parent.
Mothers are supposed to show speedy progress in a sprawling, unwieldy and slow-moving system that is rife with inherent conflicts and double standards. Referral delays, service providers with no open slot in their schedules and waiting lists for basic classes are common. Some services may not start for months.
No matter who slips up, parents pay the price.
A mother’s medical records, police reports and decade-old stints in drug rehab can all result in associated tasks: substance abuse and psychological evaluations, random drug tests and mental health counseling, parenting and female empowerment courses.
These “kitchen sink” case plans vary little from one domestic violence victim to another, experts say, and often are laden with assignments irrelevant to the allegations.
“You’re not implementing anything that’s actually helping them,” said Christiana Griffith-Keith, a former case manager for Community Partnership for Children, a nonprofit that contracts with DCF to provide child welfare services in Volusia, Flagler and Putnam counties. “What the family needs is something that’s impossible to give – it’s just time.”
State statutes specify that children should be returned when the circumstances that caused removal are remedied, even if a mother is still completing her case plan.
Yet social workers, judges and service providers keep children away from mothers because they fear the kids will come to future harm, experts say. Reunification often hinges on opinions rather than facts.
“It’s hard to find those judges, caseworkers or anybody involved in the system who is willing to take that leap of faith on your client,” said Candice Brower, regional counsel for 32 north Florida counties. “It’s so much easier to not return or to remove because then you can say, ‘Nothing happened to this child.’”
USA TODAY interviewed two mothers who had participated in drug treatment programs nine or more years prior. They were required to take random drug screens – as many as three times per week – for months because the men who battered them accused them of substance abuse. DCF entered their lives because they called 911 after their partners beat them, not due to drug use allegations.
Nusha, a Jacksonville mother, lost custody of her two children after a DUI arrest. She was serving a year’s probation for resisting arrest after she became belligerent with an officer who pulled over her boyfriend for driving erratically, according to a police report, so the DUI resulted in a 45-day jail sentence.
Nusha's children were with a babysitter when she was arrested, but because she was removed from her own parents at age 15, she had no relatives to care for them while she was jailed, and her kids were placed in foster care.
She served her time, got sober and moved in with her boyfriend to get back on her feet, but he became abusive, Nusha said. She cut ties with him and moved into a domestic violence shelter while she worked to rent a home, purchase furniture and prepare rooms for her kids. Child welfare workers still refused to reunify the family in that home or at the shelter, asserting that the children would not be safe, records show.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m doing my case plan correctly. There’s no satisfying these people. At the end of the day, they’re still pointing at me like I’m doing everything wrong,” said Nusha, 26. “I feel like they’re totally against me and want me to fail.”
Two weeks later, her 3-year-old son was hospitalized with second-degree burns on his hands, and medical staff filed an abuse report on the foster mother. Only then did a judge overrule DCF and reunify Nusha with her children.
Rising panic
The judge who approved removal of Leah’s sons ordered DCF to vet her father as a caretaker so the boys could stay with him rather than in foster care.
An investigator evaluated Larry Gunion’s home that evening. And then nothing. He called DCF and hired an attorney who informed him that the paperwork was still awaiting approval, he said.
A week passed. Two weeks, then three. When the judge learned of the delay at the next hearing on June 4, 2018, she ordered the boys be moved to their grandfather’s home immediately.
Later that month, another judge returned Leah’s boys and closed the case.
DCF told USA TODAY that “emotional responses are natural and expected throughout child protective investigations — especially during removals. … the department does not label crying or similar reactions as indicators of mental health issues.”
Yet DCF attorneys filed another petition the next day, citing Leah’s emotional reaction in court the day her boys were taken as evidence of an untreated mental condition.
“The mother behaved in this manner as her children were being brought from the back of the courtroom with no regard to what affect [sic] this would have on them,” the petition states.
The new case required that Leah and her children be supervised for seven months. Leah didn’t care; the boys were home and they could get back to their lives – or so she thought.
She noticed the change in her 2-year-old right away.
It first manifested at bath time, a new behavior that seemed sexual in nature. Explicit gestures followed.
The questions that filled Leah’s mind fueled a rising panic. Who fostered her son? Who had been alone with him?
As much as she wanted to report her concerns, she feared DCF would blame her for the abuse and take her kids again. She dutifully completed her case plan, and a judge closed the case in January 2019.
Leah resumed dating Broadwater, her youngest son’s father, whom DCF had approved to monitor Leah’s safety, but the relationship again became volatile. She and her boys moved into the Beacon Center, the Daytona Beach domestic violence shelter, until she secured independent housing close to family members.
When Broadwater arrived at her new home to pick up the boys that June as part of their shared custody agreement, an argument erupted. Broadwater shoved Leah and threw her phone to the floor, a police report states. Prosecutors later dismissed the charge.
Leah executed her own safety plan that victim advocates helped her create: She called her mom, who contacted law enforcement. The next morning, she drove to a courthouse and tried to file a restraining order – a judge denied her request – then she visited Pye, the Beacon Center director.
“She was very afraid that day of the department,” Pye recalled. “And I stood right here in this building and said, ‘You’ve done everything right. Don’t worry about the department. They’re not going to take your kids.’”
Reassured, Leah left to pick up her sons – then ages 2 and 3 – from day care. She walked out of the building holding the boys’ hands and asked what veggies they wanted for dinner. “Yuck,” both boys replied.
Giggling, she turned toward the exit, but stopped short when she saw a woman seated at a picnic table in the day care’s courtyard. Leah had never met the woman, but her familiar uniform filled Leah with dread.
She wore a dark-green polo shirt.
DCF ‘has become the abuser’
USA TODAY’s examination of 22 mothers’ cases shows that the child welfare system re-victimizes battered women. Seventeen of the women say the system damaged their mental or emotional health; 11 say the experience traumatized their children.
“I called 911 for help to try to get out of the situation from being abused and controlled,” one mother said. “Now DCF has taken over that part and become the abuser and controller in my life.”
Another said nightmares have plagued her 3-year-old daughter since she came home from foster care, but child welfare workers blamed them on domestic violence that occurred before the girl was removed.
“It hurt to hear that,” the mother said. “I knew in my heart that was not the case.”
Seven mothers suspect their children were physically or sexually abused while in foster or relative placements. Eight said that child welfare workers misinterpreted their actions as harmful rather than protective.
DCF removed an Ormond Beach nurse’s three kids after she asked if her abusive boyfriend, whose home she was trying to leave, could help her pack the family’s belongings. She was juggling hospital shifts, child care and continuing education classes, filling out rental applications and saving money to get her own place. DCF denied her request – considering it proof she was resuming the relationship – and placed her kids with her ex’s family for four weeks.
DCF summoned an Alachua County woman’s batterer from jail as one of its witnesses to testify that she was an unfit mother because she smoked marijuana and let their child cry, records state. The man had beaten her and smashed her head into a wall with such force that the wound required four staples, but a court found the man’s testimony credible and their baby was placed with a relative.
The man was sentenced to four years in prison for felony battery.
“I get a hole put in my head, and I get a year of my life and my son’s life taken from us,” the 27-year-old mother said.
Nine abused mothers said child welfare workers characterized them as impulsive, combative, uncooperative, erratic or unstable.
Latoya Bowles, 32, was seven months pregnant when she told police that her boyfriend strangled her in their 2-year-old boy’s presence. Her son was removed two months later. And when her baby girl was born, DCF took her straight from the hospital.
“I did nothing to my son,” Bowles said, bursting into tears. “My daughter don’t even know me. When I go to visit, she cries.”
After 16 months, a Palm Beach County court would not reunify because of Bowles’ “impulse impairment.”
Bowles was removed from her own mother as a child, and spent time in juvenile detention. As an adult, she was arrested for altercations with her partner and resisting officers but was not prosecuted.
She posed no threat to her children, attorneys contended in a court hearing. She had separated from her kids’ father and complied with counseling and other requirements, records show. Her outbursts – which typically occurred after her children fell ill or showed up to visits with bruises – stemmed from her own traumatic childhood and her desire to protect her kids, attorneys said.
“Going through the system increases (mothers’ trauma) and makes it dramatically worse,” said Jonathan Jenkins, Hillsborough County dependency circuit chief. “We expect perfection out of the ones who are going through the most traumatic series of events in their entire life.”
‘This is not right’
The polo-clad DCF investigator and her supervisor interrogated Leah in the day care courtyard. A police officer soon joined them, and his body camera recorded the exchange that followed.
Darkness crept in from the edges of Leah’s sight lines. She thought she might pass out, like she did in court the day her kids were put in foster care.
She saw her youngest holding her knee. Sensed her 3-year-old lingering behind her. Felt the DCF investigator tugging her son’s hand from her grasp. She knew what came next.
DCF investigators and a police officer confront Leah Gunion
DCF investigators and a police officer intercepted Leah Gunion as she picked up her boys from day care in July 2019. The officer’s body camera recorded the interaction.
Ormond Beach Police Department
The investigator ordered Leah to let go of her little boy. Leah looked to the officer for help, but he was there to assist DCF, not her. That knowledge sucked the strength from her body and she turned away, deflated, holding tight to her son’s hand as the woman repeated her order.
“I can’t,” Leah cried, wrapping the boy in her arms. “Please, let me call my attorney first. They abused him in foster care.”
She pleaded again and again. Rage building, sobs shaking her body, voice rising as if the gravity of her words might grind the horror to a halt.
“This is not right. You guys are doing something illegal,” she shouted at the investigator and police. “You’re gonna go to hell for this.”
Leah got in her car and called her family, her attorney and Pye, the Beacon Center director. The group assembled at the DCF office after business hours. Leah could keep her kids from foster care only if she signed a safety plan stating she would not be alone with them.
In two weeks’ time, a judge found that DCF’s safety plan was a “reactive measure which ran afoul of (state law),” court records show.
Leah and her boys have settled back into their routine. She studies microbiology through the University of Florida’s online program. She takes her sons to preschool – a different one, because the DCF incident got her kicked out of the last one.
They play with the hose Leah uses to water her flowers, and splash in the mud on a summer day.
And then her youngest steps in an ant pile. He barely cries, but Leah frantically swipes at the insects that already have left red bites on his legs and between his toes.
Fear floods her face.
“They have a new preschool,” Leah says. Her voice trails away as she takes mental inventory of her medicine cabinet in search of a soothing cream, but her meaning is clear.
What if they call DCF?
The team behind these stories
Reporting: Pat Beall, Daphne Chen, Suzanne Hirt, Josh Salman
Editing: Michael Braga, Chris Davis
Graphics and Interactive Data: Jennifer Borresen, Dak Le
Copy Editing: Robert Abitbol, Kat Dow
Photography: Nigel Cook, Thomas Cordy, Brad McClenny, Rod Millington, Tim Stepien
Photo Editing: Chris Powers
Video Editing: Jasper Colt, Maghen Moore
Design and Development: Mara Corbett, Annette Meade
Engagement: Mary Bowerman, Jigsha Desai, Jennifer Sangalang