By Jerome Miller

On and on they come: studies, blue ribbon reports, five-year plans and critical books on child welfare. On Their Own is another call for reform, focusing, on older adolescents who one day find themselves redefined as incipient adults and unceremoniously dumped from "care" into the streets.

Clearly, this is an unusually vulnerable population. A plethora of studies reveal that teenagers aging out of foster care are unlikely to complete high school and are more likely to end up jobless, homeless, abusing drugs or in the criminal justice system.

The authors-a reporter (whose publications include Youth Today) and a former state child welfare director-are well-acquainted with the child welfare system. They know its foibles and missteps. Moreover, they flesh out the depressing statistics with stories of kids caught up in officially dispensed care.

Those compelling stories illustrate the wrenching dilemmas that have come to define state child welfare and juvenile justice systems. We meet Reggie Kelsey, whose dismal sojourn through foster care ends when he drowns in a river. The three Brooklyn-bred Williams brothers begin their journey in a large children's institution, then take separate paths: Lamar graduates from college, marries, and buys a home; Jeffrey goes to prison for armed robbery; Jermaine is killed in a drug deal gone awry.

In the end, the authors of On Their Own offer sound advice and suggest laudable goals. Their effort is better than most.

Unfortunately, that's not saying much.

On Their Own is in a long tradition of reform screeds in child welfare and juvenile justice. While lifting the curtain but slightly on the pandemic harm being done to troubled and troubling kids in systems ostensibly designed for their care, the authors deftly avoid any discussion of the elephant in the room: a bankrupt child welfare system that is, at best, a necessary evil virtually beyond redemption.

In his brief introduction to the book, former President Jimmy Carter poses the question that seems logical to a sensitive "layperson" but confounds the "professional": "If we willingly give our own children the benefit of our support as they struggle to become independent, productive adults, why do we tolerate the abrupt withdrawal of support for youth who are aging out of care?"

Carter seems unaware that these systems will not and cannot allow staff to deal with their charges as though they were their own. Child welfare (and by implication, juvenile justice), have quietly become engines of what is known to medicine as "iatrogenesis," wherein the treatment creates as many problems as it purports to allay.

Our modern, so-called helping professions have, in the words of the late medievalist scholar and contemporary social critic Ivan Illich, "very effectively and very strongly changed the everyday usage of 'care."' That word now describes a commodity, primarily subject to the rules and standards that govern the market.

It is the kind of care that Northwestern University's John McKnight characterizes as showing "the ugly mask of love" while compulsively inflicting the evils it seeks to address. Take this description in On Their Own of a child's introduction to care:

"The process of removal typically starts with a call, often anonymous, to a child-abuse hotline. A social worker comes to investigate. If assessment shows the child cannot safely stay at home, the social worker petitions a court for a removal order. If the judge agrees with the assessment, the child is removed, usually by uniformed police officers, and often suddenly."

Raquel, one of the young people in the book, vividly remembers her "removal" 18 years after it happened: "The policeman held my hand and walked me across the street." She looked back 'and saw her mother standing there crying, but says, "I didn't kn6w why."

The authors make a telling observation: "The psychological trauma created by the removal, combined with the neglect or abuse that preceded it, leaves the child forever changed and forever different from other children."

I happened upon this narrative shortly after spending an hour with Jim, an adolescent boy who, after two years of therapy, is still recovering from his immersion in child welfare "care." I fear that the untimely juxtaposition of the two events probably skewed my perception of this too-civil book.

Jim was referred to me after a neighbor walked in on him fondling her 5-year-old son. Like Raquel in the book, he had been removed from his mother's home. Like Raquel, he will carry the memory for the rest of his life.

He was removed after his father, barred from contact because he drank too much and had hit his wife, went to his wife's third floor apartment at her request to carry their large, partially crippled dog down the stairs for a walk while she visited her doctor.

Child welfare officials learned of his visit by happenstance, and that evening a social worker and two policemen all but burst into the boy's home. The social worker dragged 7-year-old Jim from the shower, wrapped him in a towel and carried him into the chilly night, screaming for his mother, kicking and attempting to free himself-a scene punctuated by his hysterical mother's moans and pleas for her son.

Jim's mother died of cancer months later, and he continued in foster care for five years. During the final two years, he was regularly molested by the adult son of the foster parents. Jim's subsequent sexual involvement with a 5-year-old boy mimicked what he was exposed to while in foster care.

To its credit, On Their Own doesn't give knee-jerk abeyance to the remedies that have become articles of faith among professional "reformers" who drop from the sky in the wake of whatever latest disaster afflicts an agency. The litany is as predictable as it is useless: better managers, more trained social workers, more money, newer information systems, posher offices, more tracking paraphernalia and whatever other technology _will relieve us of personal responsibility for what we have done and will resume doing later.

The authors offer various remedies to help agencies better serve older youth, such as recognizing the heterogeneity of the population, providing educational liaisons and advocates, helping them engage in school life, exposing them to career options, helping them meet start-up needs, minimizing moves, recognizing the pull of the youths' families and raising expectations.

Unfortunately, having cleared some of the detritus masking the psychic lesions that officially dispensed care has inflicted on adolescents now about to be "emancipated," the authors ignore the fact that their fine suggestions should have been in play when the child began his or her trek through the Byzantine labyrinths of the system. The remedies come 10 to 15 years too late.

The crucial implication of On Their Own lies unacknowledged: "Professionals" must begin relinquishing hitherto sacrosanct roles to "laypersons" in the communities from which the children come-hands-on adults who are not embarrassed to offer authentic concern over officially prescribed care, perhaps even a bit of sympathy.

Regrettably, this book isn't up to the task of shaking the foundations of a "care" system to a point where it implodes. Why so fearful? Given the brain-searing realities of children embedded in a euphemism, the risks of such a "catastrophic success" would range from minimal to nonexistent.

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