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I would like to weigh in with my own observations as a home-based therapist working in with families in neighborhoods where drug trafficking was particularly prevalent. My experience is purely anecdotal and not based on any systematic research whatsoever.
I used to be a home-based counselor working with families referred by the county CPS unit in northern Lake County, Indiana. Northern Lake County, for those of you who are not aware, is where Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond are located which, at the time, were some of the poorest urban areas in the state of Indiana. I would do home-based work in some of the poorest public housing projects in all three of those cities.
There were a number of things that struck me about working in this area related to this topic of drug markets and child maltreatment. A high percentage of the families with which I worked were referred for some form of child maltreatment, largely neglect, due to some form of substance abuse. In many of these neighborhoods, especially the public housing projects, drug trafficking was conducted in an "open air" market. It was easy for me to identify the young men who were out in the neighborhood selling crack cocaine to other residents and occasionally the more "middle class" kids who would risk driving into these neighborhoods to buy these drugs. It was not unusual for many of these young men to wave me over and offer to sell me something until they found out who I was and what purpose I served in the neighborhood. I never told anyone that I was a social worker coming to preserve or reunify a family. That information became common knowledge in those communities where I worked and these "would be" salesman, sooner or later, found out that I was not interested in buying.
The other thing that struck me was that many of these public housing projects had police substations in them which suggested a "high police presence" in these neighborhoods. Rarely did such a "presence" discourage the level of drug trafficking that went on in those neighborhoods. Of course, my colleagues and I often speculated on the level of police corruption in those communities that allowed such trafficking to go on. Periodically, our suspicions were validated by newspaper and television reports of police accepting kickbacks or assisting in drug trafficking themselves in those neighborhoods. Every so often, if a politician wanted to be seen to be tough on crime and drugs, there would be a public announcement of a law enforcement sweep in these neighborhoods. Governor Bayh once sent 100 state troopers to help the Gary Police Department with “sweeping” these neighborhoods of drug dealers. Unfortunately, these officers only stayed a month before returning to their regular duty. Shortly afterward, the drug business returned to normal as if nothing had happened.
Many of the poor families with whom I worked were very open about their drug use because so much of their use was often public knowledge. Many of these families had long standing relationships with inpatient rehab programs, outpatient treatment centers and community support groups because they often came into contact with the law. In contrast, cases that were more "middle class" in appearance that involved some combination of child maltreatment and substance abuse were much more private with regards to both the child abuse and the substance abuse. It appeared to me that more “middle class” families involved with CPS were less likely to be involved with CPS as a direct result of their drug/alcohol use. This may have been due to their ability to hide their drug/alcohol use from the police and the public at large and/or because the police were less likely to arrest them for their use/abuse. It did seem that alcohol abuse was more prevalent with these families than drug abuse making their substance abuse seem more legitimate on the surface. However, I worked with one family where a middle class father physically abused his daughter for telling other people that he was growing marijuana in his basement. He was never prosecuted for growing the pot. It seems to me now that the “middle class” families in “middle class” neighborhoods that abuse drugs/alcohol and their children had more to lose in terms of status and respectability by having their private sins made public than many of the poor families in the poor neighborhoods were drug use and drug dealing was a much more open and tolerated activity.
Finally, I was often frustrated and dismayed at the nearly impossible task of staying sober that many of these poor, substance abusing families faced when they truly wanted to quit using drugs. There were many times when I would help a parent into inpatient treatment where after a 2-4 week stay (this was before the era of managed care) I would help bring him or her back home only to find a group of drug dealers sitting outside his or her very doorstep selling this parent’s drug of choice. I knew that it would be only a matter time before these folks would be back to using drugs again and referred back to CPS.
It seems to me now to be very clear that the dynamics that supported the drug trade in these very poor neighborhoods transcended the limits of my ability to impact the individual and family dynamics that supported the individual parent’s substance abuse. My experience working with these families is analogous to trying to teach a child self-restraint in a candy store where all the candy appears to be free for the taking and the store owner is gone on a very long vacation. I hope these observations add to the discussion of this topic. Thank you for letting me share them.
Mr. John M. Polstra, MSW, LCSW
-----Original Message-----
It seems to me that you bring up two points 1) the best way of measuring illicit drug markets/activity and child maltreatment and 2) the utility of ecological studies. I've studied both issues in depth, and will try to provide some clarity. As a warning, the e-mail below is quite long.
1) Specifically, drug arrests can be problematic for the reason you suggest, but also because the location of the arrest may not directly correspond to the location of illicit drug sales markets. For example, a drug dealer who is not caught in the act of selling, but implicated by lower level 'associates' may be arrested at home, which may or may not be the location of where s/he does the selling. For this reason, criminologists studying drug markets will use drug incidents or 'calls for service.' Granted this too can be problematic because they may be related to police presence in an area.
More generally, drug markets are very difficult things to measure well. Ethnographers can often get very specific information about the workings of one market, but with such a low sample size, the information lacks generalizability. The problems with police data, which is more readily accessible (and therefore cheaper) have been described above. Survey data can be biased due to an individual's drug use and need to know where the markets are. However, police data has been commonly accepted as one valid way to measure drug activity (and is much cheaper), as long as the caveats provided above are noted.
For child maltreatment, the same issues apply. Again, researchers note the limitations of official 'reports' but they do provide some good information. Population-based studies are hampered by social desirability bias. I think researchers are making great strides in better estimating both child maltreatment and drug market activity, but there is still more to be done.
2) The past 2 decades or so, there has been an increase in the number and type of neighborhood studies. The idea is that neighborhood processes and dynamics (over and above family, parental, and individual characteristics) may place children at greater risk for maltreatment.
In a focus group I did with case workers (the results of which have recently been published in Children and Youth Services Review", a caseworker commented on one mother's strategy for handling the fear created by this having drug dealers highly visible in the neighborhood "*the mother says I don't let my kid go out and play. Well now, come on, you don't want a seven or eight year old under foot all the time, but you're scared if he goes out, so you're telling him you can't do this or you don't want to be hooked up with him so that's a real avenue for 'shut up, get in your room' or this kind of stuff." This caseworker was concerned that such a situation could lead to physical or emotional abuse.
Here the issue is not an individual's parents own drug use behaviors, but the environment created by having visible and potentially dangerous drug markets in the neighborhood. My interests lie in using information about these neighborhood dynamics to create places that place children at lesser risk for abuse or neglect. Such environmental change (which has proved very successful in the reduction of alcohol-related problems, see Harold Holder, Paul Gruenewald, and others, Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000) provides an additional and complentary means of preventing child maltreatment.
I am attaching a copy of a poster I (along with Barbara Needell and Paul Gruenwald) presented at SSWR last year that looks at drug activity and child maltreatment in more detail. The reference is:
Freisthler, B., Needell, B., & Gruenewald, P.J. "The role of social disorganization and drug and alcohol availability in neighborhood rates of child maltreatment." Poster presented at the Society for Social Work and Research annual meeting. New Orleans, LA, January 15 * 18, 2004.
I would be interested in hearing others thoughts/comments and any anecdotal information about this topic.
Bridget
Bridget Freisthler, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Department of Social Welfare, UCLA School of Public Affairs 3250 Public Policy Building, Box 951656, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (Phone) 310/206-16022 (Fax) 310/206-75641 (e-mail) freisthler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> lfontes@xxxxxxx 10/06/04 2:31 PM >>> This study feels a bit problematic to me for several reasons. For instance, we know that drug use is similar for whites and blacks, but drug arrests are way higher for blacks. So, what is the point, exactly, of studying drug ARRESTS? Arrests don't necessarily correlate to drug use or even sales (alcohol and prescription drug abuse, for instance, rarely lead to arrest, but can lead to intoxication that contributes to child abuse and neglect). So what I think you're going to end up finding is that-yes-where the police have a high presence you will find high rates of both drug ARRESTS and child maltreatment REPORTS. But this will not have much to do with any real correlation between drug/alcohol use or child maltreatment occurrence, both of which occur but are not generally discovered/prosecuted among the wealthy and the White. Once again, the communities where some people make their living in the drug trade will be stigmatized.
I'd be interested in others' opinions-perhaps there's something I'm not grasping here.
Respectfully, Lisa Fontes, Ph.D. Springfield COllege
-----Original Message----- From: owner-CHILD-MALTREATMENT-RESEARCH-L@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-CHILD-MALTREATMENT-RESEARCH-L@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Crampton Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 11:50 AM To: Child Maltreatment Researchers Subject: drug markets and child maltreatment
We are developing a study of drug markets and child maltreatment and would appreciate any references to previous work. While there are drug arrests through out Cleveland and the suburbs there are some neighborhoods with high numbers of drug arrests (for possession and selling) and we are curious how they relate to child maltreatment victims' addresses. I know there is a lot of research on parental substance abuse and child welfare and a bit on children exposed to methamphetamine labs, but I have not found much related to drug arrests and child maltreatment.
Thanks, David
David Crampton, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Case Western Reserve University 10900 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106-7164 216-368-6680
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