Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas here and for many foster children getting access to the health care they need is extremely difficult; a particular problem is birth control.

For the nearly quarter-million girls in foster care in the nation, access to contraception is simply chance. Without clear rules and regulations about foster children’s health-care needs, activists for foster youth care say girls, and boys too, frequently struggle for essential care.

Statistics show that girls in foster care are two times as likely to get pregnant. While rates of teen pregnancy have been going down across the nation, the same cannot be said for the rate of teen pregnancy among foster children. A study conducted by the University of Chicago of over 700 young people from three states reported that of the foster children surveyed, nearly 35% were pregnant by age of 17 or 18. This is compared to about 15% of children living with their birth families.

By 19, 46% of those children had experienced another pregnancy, compared to 34% for children outside of foster care who’d been pregnant once. Another study reported that of those surveyed nearly 50% of girls in foster care were pregnant by 19. Research shows that unwanted pregnancies and births greatly surpassed wanted pregnancies and births among foster children. While federal policies and legal precedents do exist to protect foster children’s reproductive rights, experts say that these frequently fall short of achieving the goal they intended. Instead, many create loose guidelines which are rarely followed.

Foster children are eligible for, and deserve, reproductive health-care insurance coverage, including contraception, under Medicaid. According to the National Center for Youth Law, states have to provide a program named “Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment,” that stipulates a package of benefits, like family planning services, for children enrolled in Medicaid. Plus, under section 1396d(a)(4)(C) of the Medicaid Act, states have to cover family planning services with no additional out-of-pocket cost.

But that doesn’t mean access is guaranteed, or that children can actually use those services.

Many places in the country privatize foster care, and the oversight of foster care facilities is frequently handed over by the state to specific, private organizations. Within a system which is already so exhausted of its resources, reproductive health care such as birth control becomes even more disregarded, particularly when access is managed by establishments or individuals who see it as unnecessary or purely elective, which we know isn’t true. Many girls and women use contraceptive for genuine medically issues such as endometriosis and PCOS.

Additionally, while agencies should be proactively having conversations about reproductive health with foster children, this is usually not the case. This means foster children who are living with an unfamiliar person or people are put in a tricky, even impossible situation, self-advocating for contraceptive care. This can be really scary for young adults.

Unfortunately, for many of these children, the best outcome in regard to accessing contraceptive care, and general health care stability, is to remain living within their biological family whenever this is doable. Taking children from their homes and moving them has the chance to sever any connection they had with a trustworthy family or community member that they would have felt comfortable discussing this with.

Our foster homes and departments must do better. On the Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR website, we encourage you to report complaints. They can save lives.

Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas here and unfortunately many times a child runs away when they’re in foster care, and worse, when we look for solutions from the foster placement agencies we get none. One such situation occurred with Shantel French.

French is a foster mom whose 15-year-old daughter had been missing for over a week. After living in French’s home for nearly a year, the girl was suddenly told, not by French, that she’d be moving to a home in the suburbs the day before Thanksgiving. She was going to live with a woman she’d only met two times. French’s daughter didn’t want to go.

The girl said that if she was forced to move, she’d run away. French told that to the girl’s caseworker at Bethanna, a community agency tasked with managing children under the city’s care. The plan was not changed. So, the girl ran. French knew she was on social media, so she checked there. Apparently, the girl looked tired. French was destressed at what appeared to be a lack of urgency from the agencies charged with caring about foster children. She’d reported the problem immediately to Bethanna and to police. But a caseworker texted a response for a photo of the girl an entire week after she had been gone.

French was worried why they wouldn’t have a photo and why they didn’t ask for one sooner. It looked like they weren’t trying hard to find her daughter and she was receiving little information. At one point, a caseworker told French that the girl’s case had been transferred to the new home. This meant French didn’t have rights to any information about her. Understandably, French was panicked.

When French contacted the media in an attempt to get answers, all she received was vague answers and a general feeling of “Don’t worry. We’re handling it.”

The department told the media that they work aggressively with police when a foster child goes missing. However, they couldn’t say how many foster kids go missing in a year since they aren’t required to keep track of that information. The reporter who worked with French was surprised by the lack of information provided to biological or foster parents when these situations arose.

Because of confidentiality, the reporter couldn’t get much information and went she asked about another incident the comments were the same. The reporter went on to discover that the other child, a 15-year-old foster boy who ended up on top of a train and was killed, was reported missing several times this year. But, the police had no record of a missing-person report for the final time he ran away.

Perhaps a report was filed and maybe the authorities are doing exactly what needs to be done. However, keeping these families in the dark doesn’t provoke trust, particularly when those kept in the dark are frequently worried parents.

French’s foster daughter did return, and she even told workers herself that she’d like to stay in French’s home. She also wrote a Family Court judge saying the same thing. Unfortunately, about a week after she came back, she was moved. French has no clue know why. There could be a good reason, but if there is, no one is telling French, her daughter, or the media. French remains committed to helping despite this troubling situation.

“I was a teen mom,” French stated. “I had my mom, but it was still hard. I always knew I wanted to give back if I could. That hasn’t changed.”

Corruption and this lack of communication must be stopped. On the Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR website, you can report complaints which can save lives.

Hello, we’re Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas and we know that according to the Department of Health and Human Services there are almost 13,000 children in foster care in Michigan. Nationally, there are about 400,000 children in foster care on any given day. What we don’t know is how many get “lost” in foster care.

One Traverse City-based author and advocate knows how easily that can happen. Shenandoah Chefalo put herself into foster care when she was 13 to escape her abusive parents. Before too long she realized that if she disappeared, no one would care or come looking. Now, she’s leading a grassroots project called #4600AndCounting, to help find those lost children. Chefalo spoke with Stateside about the “lost” children of foster care.

Growing up, Chefalo lived with her mother and had moved over 50 times before she graduated from high school. She remembers a lot of mental illness, drug abuse and addiction, and a great deal of men entering and exiting foster her lives. She assumed foster parents would be the best the state had to offer. She realized that foster care presented several of the same issues she had experienced before.

When she turned 18, she was removed from the system, but paid her foster parents to house her until she graduated. Chefalo was accepted to Michigan State University but realized that, if she went missing, she still had no one in her life who would come looking.

#4600AndCounting, a petition on Change.org she created, is designed to help the 1.1% of the child welfare system who go missing annually. An article she read about three girls in Kansas who had gone missing and state senators leading a hearing into their disappearance disturbed Chefalo because it seemed to her that politicians didn’t care. She contacted a Toronto-based homeless youth advocate and they talked about the lack of response.

The petition is about changing the response process. She wants to put create a safety kit for children going into foster care which would include a current photograph, a DNA swab, and medical and dental information. The issue is extremely serious to Chefalo. She’s quoted with saying, “It’s a proven statistic. We know that a lot of the kids that disappear from foster care wind up in human trafficking and human sex trafficking rings and organizations.”

It’s programs like this and people like her, and us, who can keep our children safe from these horrible outcomes. We, Kathey and Rob Raskin, aim to stop DHR corruption throughout the nation. If you have a complaint, please log it on our main page now.

This is Rob and Kathey Raskin of Las Vegas, and today we’d like to bring you the backstory behind the funds that are available to help families. “Norman money” is what some people call the family preservation funds that are provided for families who are in danger of losing their children to legal kidnapping at the hands of the foster care system. These funds were made available after a class-action lawsuit that was filed after one Mr. James Norman died while forcibly separated from his children by the state simply because he was impoverished. Sadly, some families years later became too afraid to take advantage of these funds later when Chicago’s Foster Care Panic resulted in the removal of unprecedented numbers of children from homes.

A Death Sentence

James Norman was a 37-year-old man who had a serious heart condition. He was also a recent widower and now-single father of three who was struggling to make ends meet after quitting his job to care for his cancer-stricken wife. Rather than intervene to help the struggling, grief-stricken family, child protective services removed the children from the home after a visit in which the family was found to be without electricity and living in a dirty house.

On top of losing his wife and his children, whom he doted on, Norman lost his car because he was too sick to return to work. Child protective services made no effort to help the man to get his children back or even to see them. A lack of access to public transportation meant the sick man would need to take three buses and walk a mile each way every time he wanted to see his children. By the time lawyers intervened to get Norman financial assistance, it was too late. James Norman died at age 38, and his children were left orphaned by a system that literally walked their father to death as punishment for falling on hard times. We, Rob and Kathey Raskin, think this is unconscionable, and it is time for us all to take a stand to put a stop to these flagrant abuses of the system.

We are Kathleen and Robert Raskin of Las Vegas, and our family’s personal story of DHR corruption has compelled us to raise awareness of the shortcomings of the foster care and justice systems. The average young adult will need to rely upon their families for financial and emotional support until they are 26 years of age. Imagine turning eighteen and being left on your own, with no one to turn to for help if you needed it and no family to visit on holidays? For the 23,000 young adults who age out of the system each year, this is their reality, but all of us can do our parts to help.

Assistance Is Available

Being removed from the home of a loving family is just the first of many tragedies that potentially await foster children. For many, they will never return to their families, instead being left to age out of the system with little community support. Studies have shown that adults who aged out of the foster care system are more at risk for arrest, incarceration, and homelessness, and most do not graduate college.

Most communities have organizations that are committed to helping former foster children who have aged out of the system, either by providing financial assistance, shelter, mentoring, mental health care, career coaching, resource tool kits,  care packages, academic guidance, job training, and even birthday and holiday cards. There are also national organizations that are dedicated to this cause. We, Kathleen and Robert Raskin, want to remind you that a simple online search will tell you which organizations are available and in-need of donations in your area, and many have regular monthly donation options available that you can just set and forget.

We are Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas, and today we’d like to discuss the surprising facts behind how children end up in foster care, and why. The system is overwhelmed, and without any checks and balances in place to prevent corruption, it can be easy for children who are in true need to slip through the cracks while precious resources are directed toward the unnecessary harassment of families. Studies have found that up to one-third of foster homes are abusive, with rates even higher for group homes and other institutional settings. With so many children being removed from homes for no good reason and abuse so rampant in foster care, it is clear that we need to take a closer look at how workers are determining which children to target.

Families in Need

Homicide is one of the leading causes of death for US children between the ages of one and 18, and all too often these deaths are at the hands of the parents. However, out of every 100 children who child protective services organizations investigate as potential victims of abuse, just six of these claims are substantiated with any evidence other than the claims of workers who may have financial incentives to remove children from the home and other “witnesses” who often turn out to be making false claims for ulterior motives. As for the rest, oftentimes the only real problem in the home is not abuse or neglect but rather poverty.

Children who are left in their own homes have been shown to fare better than children who have been placed in the foster system. It is common for children to be taken into care because they and their parents are living in conditions of poverty, and assistance with resources like child care, housing, and food can help families to stay together. Studies have shown that 30% of foster kids in this country could be safely with their families today if only they had housing that is safe and affordable. We, Kathey and Rob Raskin, believe we as a country need to take a closer look at how the financial incentives for removing kids can be redirected so they help families in need instead, where they will clearly do more good.

“My caseworker isn’t helping me.” It’s a common complaint to hear, but the reason behind it is not nearly as well understood as it needs to be, and that is why we, Robert and Kathey Raskin of Las Vegas, are here to help clarify it for you.

The Truth About Your Caseworker

The truth about your child protective services caseworker is that they may not even be qualified social workers, and their job is not to help you. Even the caseworkers who do have degrees in social work most likely began their careers with the best of intentions, but somewhere along the way they caved in to the pressures of their career, which is more about bureaucracy and winning in court than helping families. Like people in many other careers, caseworkers have quotas to make so they can bring in profits for their bosses, but unlike other careers these quotas will be paid with human lives.

Your caseworkers job is to make sure the agency they represent has a strong legal case against you, and they will lie and deceive you and misrepresent your family and your lives to get it. They may tell themselves they are helping children, but if that were true then how can they possibly even have quotas in the first place, much less strive to meet them? If there are not enough abused children in a given period to meet that quota, how are those quotas then met?

That’s what we, Robert and Kathey Raskin, are here to ask, and we’d like you to join us.

We are Kathleen and Robert Raskin of Las Vegas, and here at StopDHR Corruption, we are dedicated to raising awareness of corruption and injustice in the child protective services system. Today we’d like to tell you the good news that a former DCBS caseworker who refused to cover up for the agency’s complicity in the near-death of an eight-year-old girl has had her case settled. This brave worker was ordered by her supervisors to cover-up this huge failure of the system, but instead she fought them—and won.

How Could This Have Happened?

Robert Wayne Baldwin was the lead social worker assigned to the case, despite the fact that he had been reprimanded and suspended without pay for his incompetence multiple times by DCBS in the past. Because of this incompetent worker, this child was left to be tortured by her father and his abusive girlfriend. In the past crimes against this child had been reported to authorities in California and Florida. In Kentucky Baldwin failed to intervene to help her despite multiple neighbors’ reports. The child ended up hospitalized and close to death after years of being stripped nude and forced to endure ice baths and beatings inflicted with a leather belt.

While we, Kathleen and Robert Raskin, are pleased with the outcome of the lawsuit because this whistleblower who was brave enough to take a stand saw justice, we wonder what kind of justice the child will ever see, if any. Her father and his girlfriend are now in prison, but her childhood is gone for good.

If you have been wondering whether there are any good caseworkers, believe us, Rob and Kathey Raskin of Las Vegas, when we say we are wondering the same thing. The truth is, there is a simple explanation for why so many caseworkers fail miserably when it comes to the task of protecting children, and that is that the system is simply not attracting quality people, and the way it currently works is set-up to drive good people away.

Violations of protocol are an everyday part of life when it comes to the foster care system, and children can—and do—fall through the cracks as a result. Children end up placed in homes with foster parents who have criminal records, who have been investigated for abuse, and who have no interest in the child outside of a paycheck. This is because many social workers who are qualified for positions in the child protective services simply do not want them, preferring instead to take easier and higher-paying positions with other organizations.

Because of the lack of quality workers, financial incentives to place children, quotas for taking children from their homes that need to be met regardless of circumstances, and stressful and unfavorable work conditions, the people who are left to watch over children often end up being those who should never be entrusted with such a big responsibility.

We, Rob and Kathey Raskin, think it is time for these organizations to take a second look at how they find caseworkers and foster parents. It’s time to change the standards. Won’t you join us in our fight?

The New York Senate is considering a bill that will allow child welfare agencies to stop payments to parents who have adopted children only to stop caring for them, and we, Rob and Kathey Raskin of Las Vegas, couldn’t be happier to see one less way people can continue exploiting vulnerable children who are in state’s care for money. There have been cases in which parents have continued to receive subsidies of up to nearly $2K per month for children who were no longer in their custody. This takes money out of the system that could have gone to these children and instead puts it in the hands of adults who are no longer fulfilling their caretaker role. Once you consider the fact that the state provides subsidies for over 17K children, you’ll see that the money saved by cutting these payments would really add up. Since 2012 alone, New York has ended subsidies for 500 children for this very reason.

Children or Paychecks?

The vast majority of adoptive parents are very loving caregivers, but there are also those who take children they then do not care for, only to continue cashing the checks they receive, and some do not longer know where the children they are receiving payments for even are. Subsidies were meant to help adoptive parents, but as usual there are always going to be those who abuse the system. Some have done so deliberately, while others simply adopted children whose needs were too much for them to handle and then simply failed to follow-through. One concern is that this bill could penalize parents who are not currently in custody of their child through no fault of their own, for example in the case of a child who ran away but the family is still in contact. We, Rob and Kathey Raskin, are concerned that these decisions could be left in the very same hands that created the situation in the first place—the corrupt child protection agencies and court system that far too often fail to property vet caregivers in the first place.