Accountability and Liability Rather than Child Welfare

The recent development of child welfare in New York City has been transformed by pressures from the judicial system. As a consequence of a series of lawsuits from the federal, state, and city governments, as well as private citizens, there has been a major shift in the practice of child welfare with a primary emphasis on liability and/or accountability. Little attention has been paid to this focus and its meaning for workers and clients within the child welfare system.

In February, 1996, Mayor Rudolf Giuliani announced the creation of a new agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), to deliver child welfare services, as well as a new commissioner of ACS, Nicholas Scoppetta, a former foster child and a federal prosecutor. Mayor Guiliani stated that “one of the most important elements in the [reform] plan is the emphasis on accountability.” Scoppetta’s first act was to establish an accountability review process to investigate internal mismanagement. This witch-hunt-like process led to childcare workers being subjected to unnecessary interrogations and unheard of standards of accountability from management. With case workers focusing first and foremost on protecting themselves, the obsessive concern for documentation to keep their jobs also facilitates emotional detachment and limits personal responsibility. The political leaders believed that enhancing liability would motivate workers to better meet the client’s needs through enhanced personal responsibility, but the results are that the clients tend to come last after the monetary and emotional needs of the insecure professionals.

Having worked for the ACS for some months, just long enough to complete the training core, and now working for a contract agency for the past year, I have experienced this emphasis on “accountability” directly and have seen its effects on the practice and delivery of services to the children and families in New York City. The number one complaint from colleagues is the overwhelming amount of highly repetitive paperwork. If it is done correctly, this form-filling-out dramatically limits the professional’s ability to perform the very services that the documentation is supposed to certify. We tend to surrender to the paperwork de-

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mands and become emotionally detached from the clients we are supposed to serve. The paperwork is a job in itself.

Michael A. Diamond’s article on “The Social Character of Bureaucracy: Anxiety and Ritualistic Defense” (1985) helps us to understand the function of accountability and ritualistic behavior in organizations. As Diamond points out, in organizations, ritualistic behavior and meaningless routines serve to suppress and deny genuine feelings and “plays a decisive role … in managing self boundaries and defending against anxiety felt during entry into the complex organization.” He describes a process in which “intersubjectively meaningful, collaborative, and effective social actions” are replaced with “meaningless, rigidly conformist, and routine actions.” A preoccupation with reliability and predictability not only indicates a focus on the control of subordinates, but a more collective desire for constancy or predictability in a very chaotic and ever-changing environment. “Under the stress of uncertainty and neurotic anxiety, bureaucratic form takes precedence over organizational mission and substantive output” as the organization itself is born out of the obsessional neurotic’s “need to preserve and secure the self against anxiety about losing control.”

Such an environment facilitates a worker’s emotional unavailability and therefore inability to meet the client where s/he is at. Instead, the focus is on changing or transforming the clients into who the organization (and its needs for predictability) needs them to be. As the organization plays its own role in the overall social processes, the workers continue to establish themselves in their historical role as agents of social control. Although the City is adapting and finding ways to protect itself from lawsuits, it inadvertently sets up barriers in its struggle to protect the children and families it aims to serve.

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