Study finds CASA Encourages Needless Removal of Children From Their Homes

Study of Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASAS) Finds Them Ineffective, Possibly Harmful, Advocacy Group Says
ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 8 (AScribe Newswire) -- The highly-touted Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program, in which volunteers investigate cases and advise family court judges on matters of life or death for children and families, does nothing to actually improve the lives of children and may well make them worse, according to a national child advocacy organization.

The evidence, says the National Coalition for Child Reform, is in a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself.

"The study offered concrete evidence of what we have long maintained," said NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler. "CASA is just another thumb on the scales of justice, tilting them against families. The entire program needs to be radically reformed - or abolished."

"There is no constituency in child welfare that has been the recipient of less critical scrutiny than CASA," Wexler said. "The grim findings of CASA's own study make clear it's time for that to change."

In a letter faxed this morning to National CASA CEO Michael Piraino, Wexler called on the National CASA Association to release the entire study and post it prominently on its website. Only a summary of the report was released at CASAs annual conference this week, and even that is not available online.

CASA is a program in which volunteers are appointed by judges to "investigate" cases brought before juvenile and family courts by child protection agencies. "Tens of thousands of dedicated, caring individuals are trying their best to help children," Wexler said. "Their motives are not in question. And there are a few CASA programs around the country which do a fine job, and might be models for reform of CASA as a whole. But the study shows that, by and large, CASAs have been unable to overcome racial and class biases that are virtually built into the CASA structure itself."

According to the summary of the study findings:

- The one major difference between children who had CASAs and children who didn't is that the children with CASAs are far more likely to be torn from their birth parents and thrown into foster care, and less likely to be reunified with birth parents once in foster care. According to the summary: "These differences were dramatic in size."

- The study found "no significant difference" between children with CASAs and children who did not get CASAs on a wide range of key outcomes involving child well-being. Most important, there was no difference in "exposure to violence and maltreatment."

"The study shows that children without CASAs, who are far more likely to remain in their own homes, are just as safe as children with CASAs who are far more likely to be taken away," Wexler said. "That means the only thing CASA accomplishes, in most cases, is needless destruction of families."

"Defenders of CASA will claim this is because they get the most difficult cases. But the study specifically controlled for that variable, making strenuous efforts to compare cases of similar severity," Wexler said. "The researchers were so shocked by their own findings that they speculate they may not have done a good enough job. But in fact, there is nothing shocking about the findings - they reflect common sense, given the class and racial bias built into the structure of CASA itself."

"Since it's a volunteer program, CASA volunteers tend to be people with time on their hands. That means that in a system which overwhelmingly targets poor people, CASA volunteers are likely to be middle-class or wealthy. And in a system in which only 37 percent of the children are white, 90 percent of CASA volunteers are white," Wexler said.

Wexler noted that the study found that when the children represented by CASAs were African-American, CASA volunteers gave them an average of one hour a month less of their time.

"If that's how they subconsciously react to poor black children, imagine how CASAs react to poor black parents - particularly when the CASA's recommendation turns into 'comparison shopping' between foster parents who look just like them and live in neighborhoods just like theirs and birth parents who don't."

"The finding that black children get less of a CASA's time is even more alarming since CASAs spend an average of fewer than four hours per month on a case. The oft-repeated claim that CASAs are the only ones devoting enormous amounts of time to a case - and therefore supposedly know it better than anyone else -- is a dangerous myth. It is dangerous because CASAs have virtually usurped the role of judges - the study found that their recommendations are almost always rubber-stamped."

In light of the findings, Wexler said that the federal government's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention should reconsider the awarding of taxpayer money to CASA and the Pew Commission on Foster Care should reconsider its recommendation to spend even more such funds.

Wexler also said that if CASA can't be reformed, serious consideration should be given to scrapping CASA and pouring the funds now used to administer the program into giving children actual lawyers. "Their mandate would be the same as any other lawyer - to advocate for whatever a child wants, if the child is old enough to express a reasonable preference," Wexler said. "CASAs don't do that. They advocate for whatever they think is best for the child. As a result, if the child disagrees, the most important person in the courtroom - the child - is the only one with no one fighting for him or her."

"Children shouldn't necessarily get what they want in these situations. But the best way to find out what is truly in a child's best interest is if everyone has an articulate advocate making his or her case. Deciding what is best is what we pay judges for. It's time they stopped ceding that role to amateurs."

For more information, contact Richard Wexler, 703-212-2006, rwexler@nccpr.org.

National Coalition for Child Reform: www.nccpr.org