[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 20]
[House]
[Pages 28308-28309]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              CHILD SAFETY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Foley) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FOLEY. Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I want to take a moment to 
thank the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the 
Committee on Ways and Means, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Herger), for calling a hearing yesterday to examine the failure of our 
system to protect our children. It was a very, very difficult hearing 
for those of us who attended to listen to the traumatic and 
heartbreaking story of four young men in a family, the Jackson family 
of New Jersey.
  As someone who has worked on child protection for my career in the 
Congress and in the State legislature and as cochairman of the 
Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, I was shocked to 
hear and to see the photos of these four young men who were suffering 
at the hands of their adoptive parents. What struck me even more, or at 
least made me more outrageous, was the fact that the Division of Youth 
and Family Services from New Jersey had visited the home of this family 
over 38 times in the past several years.
  What did they fail to observe in these visits? For one, they failed 
to observe a 19-year-old boy who weighed just 45 pounds and was a mere 
4 feet tall; a 14-year-old boy who was 3 feet in height and, I believe, 
less than 40 pounds. Where were they protecting these children?
  The fact is, Mr. Speaker, most Americans treat their pets better than 
New Jersey cared for their children. We heard arguments, which we 
always do when there is a child tragedy, that, A, we lack resources and 
funding, we have too many caseloads. Those excuses and finger-pointing 
and blame-gaming must stop, because they are outrageous accusations 
suggesting money was at the root of the children's problems. The family 
received over $30,000 annually in a subsidy to care for these children 
from the Federal and State government. $30,000. There is no excuse that 
money, or shortage of money, was the reason these children were 
starved. Thirty-eight visits by a caseworker to this house indicates 
obviously that they had a routine appearance in the household.
  What did they fail to observe? One thing they failed to observe is 
that there were locks on the doors to the kitchen, not allowing the 
children to come into this home, into their own kitchen to eat. When 
you look at the photos, and you have probably seen these photos if you 
have picked up any paper in this country because they have been blasted 
across the headlines of every newspaper in America, including both TV 
and print journalists.
  We have to in this country get a handle on this problem because this 
is sickening to its core that children that would be in the hands of 
people would be allowed to be treated so miserably. And regrettably at 
yesterday's hearing a person, a man of the cloth from the church where 
the Jackson family attends, actually got up and defended the parents 
and started to blame the children, suggesting they had eating 
disorders, that they were violent children. We are talking about 19, 17 
and younger than that. I would have accepted some of that argument from 
this reverend had the family sought medical attention or had the family 
chosen to return the children to foster care because they were too 
difficult to care for. But no, they did not do any of that. What they 
did was cash checks from the welfare system and then fail to feed the 
children.
  Testimony from children's services indicate all of these boys have 
now had remarkable weight gain in the last several weeks. So the 
argument put forward by the reverend that these children were eating 
three square meals a day and they suffered from eating disorders is 
absolutely false and spurious when you look at the results of the care 
and feeding under Division of Youth Services of that State.

[[Page 28309]]

  At the end of the day, and fortunately for the gentleman from 
California's leadership in calling this hearing, we may get to the 
bottom of some of these problems, but we must act quickly. We are not 
talking about overdue library books, we are talking about human life. 
We are talking about children who are allowed to starve, we are talking 
about a system that is run amuck, and we are talking about only getting 
a response when some politician's job is on the line.
  It is time to get serious. It is time to get to the job of protecting 
our children. I only hope that there is never again an example like the 
Jackson family suffering at the hands of a State agency.

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