Part 2: One woman's fight for kids - 'Am I a miracle worker?'

Vale Henson, a DeKalb County social worker, visits a home where children live with flies, garbage and gaping holes in the ceiling. (John Spink / AJC Photo Archive at GSU Library AJCP164-042b)

Credit: John Spink

Credit: John Spink

Vale Henson, a DeKalb County social worker, visits a home where children live with flies, garbage and gaping holes in the ceiling. (John Spink / AJC Photo Archive at GSU Library AJCP164-042b)

Note: This article originally ran on June 5, 1989 as part of the AJC’s award-winning “Suffer the Children” series.

On a typical day last fall, Vale Henson was looking for a dead baby.

Methodically she opened every drawer in the disheveled room of a north Atlanta motel where she had agreed to meet V., the mother. Then she checked the bathroom and wastebasket.

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For one awful moment, the DeKalb County social worker thought the week-old infant lay under a heap of bedclothes. "I'm calling the police," she said, spotting what looked like a bedful of dried blood stains at Motel 1 in Chamblee. The stains turned out to be chocolate, the remnants of doughnuts.

Still, Ms. Henson worries that V. is crazy and her children unsafe. Recently V.'s mother said her 26-year-old daughter poured gasoline throughout her apartment and threatened to burn up herself and her other two babies - a 1-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter. Ms. Henson thinks V. may be sexually abusing the 2-year-old, and she wants to get all three children into a safer home, at least until V. gets the help she needs.

But she has little chance of doing that. Once before she took V.'s daughter away from her and put her in foster care. And once before the courts gave the child back. Even if Ms. Henson did succeed in getting V.'s children removed from their home, where would she put them? There is a critical shortage of foster care homes in Georgia, and those homes that do exist are often "the pits," in Ms. Henson's words.

"What am I going to do?" Ms. Henson says. "Am I a miracle worker?"

The story of V. is the reflection of a child welfare system in Georgia that is failing to protect thousands of children as it is choked by mounting reports of abuse and too few resources to deal with them. From overtaxed and underpaid workers to a fragmented court system that often emphasizes parents' rights at the expense of children's, Georgia's child welfare system is traveling down a collision course, experts say.

"I've been here 31 years, and it's as bad or worse than I have ever seen," said Shirley Trussell, director of the DeKalb County Department of Family and Children Services. "Either we procure the resources to do the job or say to the public, 'We are no longer able to do this job.' "

In 1987, more than 39,000 child abuse and neglect reports were filed with the state - a 26 percent jump over the previous year's statistics that surprised even state officials.

"The cases we're coming across now are totally different than the cases we came across 10 years ago," said Jan T. South, a child protective services specialist for the state Department of Human Resources. "They're serious cases - children who have been sexually abused over long periods of time, children who are severely beaten."

At the same time, Georgia officials are finding it ever more difficult to attract and retain child welfare workers in an increasingly hazardous job that, for many, pays less than school teacher wages. The average caseload has grown to 32 families per worker, compared with the 17 recommended by national organizations. Ms. Henson's caseload normally tops 40, and some urban caseworkers deal with as many as 90 families at a time.

"It's not right for children's whole lives to be determined by a social worker who spends one hour a month with them," said Ms. Trussell. "And at best, that's what most of our kids get."

Behind the statistics are the individual children, whose suffering is often compounded by the system's failure.

'The Real World': A Place Where Toddlers Have Gonorrhea, Children Go Without Food 

It's Tuesday morning and Vale Henson (her first name is pronounced like valet) is getting ready to leave her cocoon of an office and enter what she calls "the real world."

At 35, Ms. Henson is a tall, healthy-looking woman with a round face, turned-up nose and a raucous laugh.

When she first got into child protective services, she worked as an intake worker for Fulton County, investigating cases of abuse and neglect as soon as they were reported. She compares the job to that of an emergency room triage nurse who must pick which patients need treatment first.

"I would come into work and have to choose between a 2-year-old with gonorrhea at Grady, twin babies left home alone or a family of five with no food. How do you make a choice?" she says, laughing at the absurdity. "I don't know."

Today, she holds the job of "ongoing protective services worker" for DeKalb County, trying to help those families that intake workers have confirmed as probable child abuse or neglect cases.

To her "clients," she can be mother and friend, cop and jailer, loved and hated by the children, who see her both as the heroine who rescues them from abusive adults and the villain who takes them away from the only people they know and love.

On this particular day, one of Ms. Henson's first stops is D.J.'s house, an apartment in a drug-infested Atlanta housing project where rat holes line sidewalks and a large portion of the red-brick apartments are boarded up.

As she enters the apartment, 6-year-old Michael is standing on the stairs scrubbing the walls. Wearing Hawaiian shorts and a blue T-shirt, the little boy is carrying around a bucket of Pine-Sol, soaping everything in sight. He's cleaning at the direction of his mother, D.J., who's reeling from drink or drugs or both. As he begins to wash a wooden coffee table, D.J. yells at him.

"Give me that rag," she says, her eyes drooping, her body swaying. "You don't put all that soap on the table. You see? He's a disobedient child. You can tell that by looking at him."

Michael trains his dark eyes to the floor and says nothing. He used to laugh and run when he lived with D.J.'s sister, Ms. Henson says. Since he's been back with his mother, he's become quiet and withdrawn, "like if you do something wrong, I'm going to slam you up against the wall," observes the social worker.

In a hot, stuffy apartment next-door, Michael's 2-year-old sister, M., is sleeping soundly on the bed. She's there because an 87-year-old neighbor worries D.J. will neglect to give the child a nap.

"I go get my baby every day," says Miss R., a tiny, white-haired woman who keeps the curtains pinned back with clothespins and a picture of Jesus on the bedroom wall. "I'm just in the world by myself. I'm the only one left of 10 children."

Ms. Henson is grateful for the watchful eye of Miss R. But she also holds the old woman partially responsible for these children's plight.

Last spring, Ms. Henson obtained an emergency order to take D.J.'s children and place them with their aunt. She had received more than six reports that D.J. was high on drugs most of the time, leaving her children at home alone and often forgetting to feed them, change the baby's diapers or put M. down for her nap. The final straw came when Miss R. called and said the baby had a large burn on her forehead.

"[D.J.] said the baby fell on the concrete outside playing," Ms. Henson says. "We told her, no, it wasn't true. The burn was V-shaped. I told her to take the baby to a doctor, but she didn't do it. We'd gotten so many calls from neighbors that finally I got the children picked up. I wanted to have the baby picked up because the mother's so crazy, because we've had so many reports of her alcohol and drug abuse, and her boyfriend's an addict."

D.J. herself had told Ms. Henson that sometimes her boyfriend "puts orange juice and cocaine on his tongue, swishes it around and shoots it in the baby's mouth."

Ms. Henson took the case to court, hoping to transfer custody of Michael and M. to D.J.'s sister.

"We got into court and told the judge the mother had drug involvement," says Ms. Henson. "We had repeated police reports, repeated hospital reports, we had all this documentation that people had reported."

"The judge clearly saw that the woman was a nut. She danced all over the courtroom. She was saying, 'Your honor, they're just trying to pick on me because they know I'm so cute.' And the judge comes back and says, 'Where do you have that she's not caring for her children?' "

Ms. Henson laughs. Indeed, she could not prove that D.J. wasn't caring for her kids because Miss R. took the stand and said D.J. was a satisfactory mother. Ms. Henson lost the case, and the children were returned to their mother.

The elderly woman later told Ms. Henson that D.J. had threatened her. In fact, Ms. Henson says, the old woman did not want to give up caring for two small children who look to her for the only love and warmth they receive.

"The court wants solid, hard-core evidence," she says. ''I don't have it. I already picked those kids up once on a whim. They only let you pick them up on a whim one time."

As Ms. Henson says goodbye to Michael, she assures him she'll check on him next week, although she knows she may not have time. Throughout the visit, he has followed her like a puppy, never speaking. Ms. Henson tells D.J. to stay away from booze and drugs. "I'll never do no more drugs. Heck no," D.J. says. "They couldn't give me a million dollars."

Driving out of the project, Ms. Henson says she's comfortable the children's lives are not in imminent danger. And frankly, that's about all she has time for. "We cannot save the world," she says. "I think after working this job for a while you learn to help those you can help and forget those you can't. Emotionally those kids aren't getting what they need. But you can't save the mental health of all these children. We don't have time. All you can do is hope to keep them alive."

(Postscript: The children remained with their mother for four more months, during which time the mother was hospitalized for a possible drug overdose. She subsequently abandoned them in a shelter for the homeless. Today Michael lives with his father. His little sister is in foster care.)

The Signs of Child Abuse: 'It's in the Way Children Act; After a While, You Just Know' 

Well-trained child protective services workers know what signs to look for. "It's in the way children act," says Ms. Henson. "After a while you just know."

Georgia has 589 social workers to deal with the more than 39,000 reports of child abuse or neglect. The basic requirement is a college degree, although many, including Ms. Henson, have master's degrees in social work.

Once hired, workers receive one to two weeks of training. Some get special training in subjects such as sexual abuse, but many don't.

In recent years, the job has become increasingly dangerous, experts say. "You don't remove children from people's homes without creating anger," says Ms. Trussell.

When Ms. Henson visited one family where a child had been burned, the father pulled a sword on her. He told her he was Napoleon Bonaparte, then slashed a "Z" on the wall.

"He told me to get up and salute, and I stood up and saluted the man," Ms. Henson laughs. "I said, 'Yes, sir, aye-aye, sir,' and anything else he wanted me to say. Then I turned around and walked out and I told them I was not going back out to see that nut."

Generally the hazards are less severe, such as transporting neglected children in her car - children infected with lice, ringworm, scabies or impetigo. The department has issued the social workers plastic gloves, and Ms. Henson keeps a sheet in the trunk to protect the back seat.

The greatest hazard for most social workers, however, is an emotional one.

Life for a 3-Year-Old: Bruises and Blows, Fractured Ribs and Fractured Limbs 

Patrick was a fat-cheeked, Gary Coleman look-alike of 3 when Ms. Henson met him.

She was assigned the case after a public health nurse noticed multiple bruises on the toddler's buttocks as she gave him routine shots. When Ms. Henson went to the house to investigate, the mother told her the child had been beaten by his paternal grandfather in Alabama, with whom Patrick had been staying.

"So I bought the story," says Ms. Henson. "I didn't have anything else to go on."

Three months later, she was called by Southwest Hospital and Medical Center, where Patrick had been admitted semicomatose from some kind of blow to the head.

That time, the mother suggested he had fallen off a stool in the kitchen. The woman seemed quite concerned, Ms. Henson recalls, yet "something didn't click right with that case."

When she arrived at Patrick's house, the child was sitting on the sofa, his eyes rolled back. Even though the hospital had just released him, he didn't look right to her. She began making regular visits.

The week after he got out of the hospital, Ms. Henson found Patrick sitting on the same sofa, this time with a swollen arm. The child was clumsy, the mother said. Ms. Henson demanded that she take Patrick to the doctor, and the mother's boyfriend agreed to take him to an orthopedic surgeon. The physician found a spiral fracture, a break that is generally inflicted from twisting and a red flag to those who have been trained in the signs of child abuse.

When Ms. Henson called the physician, hoping he could help her build an abuse case, he instructed his nurse to tell her he would not have time to discuss his findings.

"I could not prove anything on this case," she says. "The mother was appropriately concerned in her voice. The doctor wouldn't help."

Nevertheless, she filed a petition in court, saying the child consistently received questionable injuries. Fulton County Juvenile Court Judge Romae Powell issued an order allowing Ms. Henson to have Patrick picked up.

But when she asked the Atlanta police to get Patrick, they refused, saying the order did not grant them proper authority and they would need some other type of clearance.

She had to get her supervisor to call Atlanta Police Commissioner George Napper before officers agreed to go to the house. When they arrived, Patrick was gone. The judge ordered the mother and her boyfriend to turn him over in court, and they did so the next day.

"The child is sitting up there with his arm in a cast, his eyes were rolled back in his head and they almost had to drag him in," Ms. Henson recalls. "I left straight from court - put that child in my arms and took him to Grady."

At the hospital, physicians discovered bilateral retinal hemorrhages behind both of Patrick's eyes, three fractured ribs and a spiral fracture to his arm. His buttocks had been beaten to a dark, leathery texture; his head was so battered and swollen, physicians had to put a shunt in his brain to drain off the fluid.

"I just cried," says Ms. Henson, who visited the hospital each day he was there. "I sat next to that baby's crib and cried."

(Postscript: Ms. Henson carried the medical reports to the Atlanta Police Bur eau and got the couple arrested for cruelty to children. They served six months in jail. Patrick is now in the custody of his grandmother.)

A Big House, a Middle-Class Family - And a Father Who Molests His Daughter 

When she first started the job, Ms. Henson took cases such as Patrick's home with her at night, wondering if there was something she missed, something more she could have done. Often she combed her closets for clothes, sheets, pots and pans for the many people she felt were driven by poverty into a cycle of violence.

She's changed since then. "Honey, I take my hat off when I leave work," says Ms. Henson, a divorced mother of three. "I don't worry about these folks."

It's her way of surviving, she says. There are too many depressing cases, like the 4-month-old who recently underwent six hours of surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital for vaginal tears after a man had sex with her. That was a colleague's case, but in a recent six-month period, Ms. Henson had two other children under 2 with gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease.

Sexual abuse cases are particularly tough, she says. "These perverts never get prosecuted because the mama often doesn't support what the children are saying. It's hard working with these mothers because so often financially she's getting so much out of the deal."

The W.'s are a case in point. If it were up to Ms. Henson, Mr. W. "would be six feet under." She makes similar statements about his wife.

Mr. and Mrs. W. were high school sweethearts before they married more than 20 years ago. Three of their four children - a 9-year-old son and daughters, 16 and 17 - still live at home, a large brick house in an affluent DeKalb subdivision. He's a district manager for a large Atlanta corporation; she works for a bank.

On this typical day, Ms. Henson wants to stop by the W.'s house and check on the girls, who are under her protective custody by order of the court. In the winter of 1987, Mr. W. agreed to plead guilty to sexual molestation charges after admitting he'd been having sexual intercourse with S., his older daughter, since she was 9.

Mr. W. was placed in an Emory University program that treats sex offenders and ordered by the court not to go near the house or the girls.

The case became Ms. Henson's after S. told her story to a school counselor earlier this year.

It was not the first time the girl had told of being abused.

When the case was assigned to Ms. Henson, she found on file a card dated 1979 that noted a pediatrician who had examined S. reported she suspected sexual abuse. The case was evidently closed after the mother told a caseworker that her husband had promised he would never have sex with their daughter again. She promised to kick him out if he did.

"That child stayed in the home six, seven years until it was reported again," Ms. Henson says. Now the family's beyond help, she feels. As with many abused children, especially when the abuse has gone on a long time, the victims are attached to their father.

"To both of them, basically, he's a wonderful dad," she says. "She's sick of being [molested], but they love him to death. The mother loves him. They're one big happy family. Isn't that sick?"

As Ms. Henson weaves her car down the W.'s tree-lined street, she spots Mr. W.'s company car in their driveway. "If he's here, his butt is grass," she says under her breath. "He's going to jail today. Just wait. I knew I'd catch them one day. Those child molesters, I hate them."

Ms. Henson rings the front doorbell, and Mr. W. - dressed in white shirt, tie and dark pants - answers. She asks him what he's doing there, and he nervously tells her he's picking up his mail. "I assume the girls aren't here," Ms. Henson says to him. "You're not staying here, are you, Mr. W?"

"Oh no," he says. Ms. Henson is fuming as she drives to the nearest pay phone. She wants to ask her supervisor if she can have him arrested that afternoon, but her supervisor is at lunch. While she's on the phone, Mr. W. zooms by.

On the way back to the office, Ms. Henson considers her options. She could try to have him thrown in jail. But why bother?

"If I had a protective mother, or if one of the kids wanted him out of their lives, but I'm going to bat by myself," she says.

She learns later that under this particular protective order, the best she can do is get him charged with contempt of court.

She feels the case is no longer worth her time. "I have no leverage," she says. "I have custody, but what does that mean? It means I see them once a month, and they don't want my help. I think I lost this one."

'For the Most Part, You Know What Needs To Be Done; You Don't Have the Resources' 

In some of Georgia's child welfare offices, turnover is as high as 50 percent a year - or more. "The job is extremely hard," says Ms. Trussell. "There's not a whole lot of positive feedback emotionally, it's physically dangerous, you're legally very vulnerable. For the most part you know what needs to be done, but you don't have the resources to carry it out."

And for that, after nine years, Ms. Henson earns an annual salary of $25,500.

"That's how we value children in our society," says Douglas G. Greenwell, director of the state Division of Family and Children Services.

The problem of child abuse and neglect in Georgia is far more complex than a lack of money, however.

Workers such as Ms. Henson say they are hamstrung in their efforts to protect children by uncooperative physicians, reluctant school officials, untrained police, inadequate foster homes, a complete lack of programs for abused children and their families, a criminal justice system that doesn't prosecute, and laws that place a higher premium on animals than on children. In Georgia, it is a felony to kick a police dog but normally only a misdemeanor to kick a child.

Critics of the child welfare system say caseworkers often fail to remove a child from his home before it is too late. Some blame recent federal and state legislation that puts a greater premium than ever on keeping families intact. In 1980, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act to cut back on the number of children living out their lives in foster care.

But that law presumed that a myriad of services would be pumped into troubled families to get them to stop abusing their children, such as drug counseling, day care, housing and parenting skills.

Georgia has done a good job of keeping families together, state officials say, but the support services often haven't been there.

"We may well be saying, 'Hey, we want everyone to stay home,' " says Gerald V. Gouge, chief of the state's Child Protective Services Unit. " 'But we don't have the resources to help you.' "

'Leo Sat There in the Window Looking For His Daddy' - But He Never Showed Up 

For all her toughness, Ms. Henson gets attached to the children she's hired to protect. In her Decatur office, she keeps many of their pictures tacked to the office divider that surrounds her desk.

During lunch on this typical day at a Po Folks Restaurant, her eyes mist as she recounts the story of Leo, a 9-year-old who has raised himself in the shadow of an absent alcoholic father.

Leo is one of the rare cases in which Ms. Henson has taken steps to have parental rights terminated so the child can be put up for adoption. The process is complex, and state officials say they attempt it in fewer than 5 percent of the cases.

By the time he was referred to Ms. Henson, Leo was getting himself up in the morning, going to school alone and coming home to an empty house at night. "He even fried pork chops," Ms. Henson says.

He came to authorities' attention when he was brought alone by ambulance to Grady Memorial Hospital after he fell chasing a dog. When hospital staff asked whom they should call, the child told them he had no one but his father. He did not know where his father worked or stayed.

Ms. Henson sat with Leo through three court hearings.

"Leo sat there in the window at court looking for his daddy. 'Is he coming?' he would ask me. I cried. I had to go in the ladies room and cry.

"I wrote the father two horrible letters and told him what I thought of him," she says. "I said, 'We're not going to make you take Leo, believe me. But come to court, just come and say hi to him.' He never came."

Leo has been with a foster family for three years. The family wants to adopt him, but recently an aunt appeared "out of the blue," says Ms. Henson, and she wants him. By law relatives get priority, despite what the child wants.

Ms. Henson considers Leo a success story because right this moment he's with a family that seems to love him, and he appears to be happy and safe. Such stories keep her going, even make her upbeat about her job.

She's made her last stop of the day at a house located worlds apart but within walking distance of the DeKalb courthouse. Inside, flies swarm over garbage, old shoes and shirts that are strewn about. For furniture, there's a car seat and a couch with no cushions. Sides to cartons have been tacked to the ceiling in some places; there are gaping holes in others.

Four boys, including 8-year-old twins, are being raised here. They are the sons of a 37-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man.

On this particular day, Ms. Henson asks Mrs. S. how the children did in school. Dressed in a stained blouse and skirt, the mother says she doesn't know. She's not even sure where they go to school.

There have been reports of abuse, but Ms. Henson has no intention of taking the children away. She did that once before, and the twins ran away from foster care and found their way back home.

"Our goal is to keep these families together," she says. "Because nobody wants to adopt any of their children. No matter how bad parents may be, they still have rights."

Furthermore, she says, Mrs. S. loves her children. "There are cases where we can tell the mother could care less about her children, but she nurtures those children. She's limited, mind you, but you cannot put your middle-class values on these people. You have to look at what do I have better to offer that family. "For this family, all we can do at best is keep them from beating the kids, keep the lights on, keep the utilities on, keep clothes on the kids' back, keep food in that house and encourage them to send the kids to school. That's the most we can offer."

It's close to quitting time, and she's happy to be driving back to the refuge of her office. "It's nice to come back, away from the real world," she says as she walks inside.

Yet she can't help ending the day remembering how it began. "I wonder where V. is," she says, throwing her files on her desk. "I hope she doesn't go killing those kids."