Scale of Texas' tough task unprecedented

The scale of the decision by Texas child welfare workers to take 416 children into state custody dwarfs any endangerment response in Utah — or anywhere else for that matter.

Removing 416 children from their homes would be an overwhelming task for any state, local public and private child welfare workers said Tuesday.

Texas is literally warehousing the kids taken from the compound, although many had been placed with relatives in nearby towns.

One element in that case that may cushion the trauma for the children involved is their mothers are with them.

Texas Child Protective Services authorities have said they want to keep the mothers and children together as long as the mothers are willing to stay with the children.

This particular group of FLDS "operates in a sense as one, huge extended family," Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, told the Deseret Morning News Tuesday evening. "A case can be made that taking away all the children is like taking away all of the siblings in a family where several children allegedly were raped and beaten.

"On the other hand, the facts don't always turn out to be as CPS alleges," he noted.

Wexler, who keeps close tabs on child welfare agencies nationwide — including Texas and Utah — said Texas is particularly unprepared to take so many children at once.

"For several years, (Texas) has been going through a foster-care panic, with huge surge in removals in the wake of deaths of children "known to the system,"' he said.

Whether or not these children needed to be removed, their suffering has been increased because Texas has taken so many other children there is little room for these children in the system," he said. "And that is a lesson every state should remember."

An option like that or an all-out call for help is really the only option at that scale, local child safety advocates believe. They said while the welfare of the children in the case is clearly the top priority, they privately said they wonder if the move might be a kind of pre-emptive "better safe than sorry" strategy.

"I certainly agree that the way children — particularly young women and girls — are treated is de facto abuse or worse," one state Division of Child and Family Services caseworker said. "But from what I've seen these kids are in no way neglected; not nearly to the degree of some of kids we meet here and around Salt Lake."

Utah has 2,600 children in custody/foster care on any given day. The number of kids taken from the compound in Texas amounts to just under a sixth of that total but is about half the number kids removed from Utah homes in a year.