Marcia's Testimony
Good Afternoon, my name is Marcia. I am a social worker and the Senior Manager of Youth Advocacy Program and Policy at Juvenile Law Center. Thank you for allowing me to speak about the important issue of having a local Ombudsperson.
Time and time again, as a society, we do not take accountability for the positions we place children and youth in. This is especially true for Pennsylvania, a state that is known for its punitive system and high incarceration rate and has the 7th highest youth incarceration rate in the nation. While Philadelphia has worked to decrease the number of youths in its juvenile placements, we still have too many young people in lock up and our city continues to remove children from their families at alarming rates. Philadelphia has the highest rate of family separation in the country — three times the rate of New York City and four times the rate of Chicago.
The Philadelphia Department of Human Services removes children from their family homes for what they deem to be safety reasons and yet fails to keep the same children safe in placements. “Safety is not a holding child in a facility like Wordsworth Academy where the police were constantly being called; where they were summoned over 800 times before a child died.”
Children are being put at risk. They are being removed from their homes and are forced into these systems that claim to be able to support them, to offer a better environment where youth are safe, and their well-being is promoted. Instead, they are not protected, they are harmed. They are in your systems and entering into homelessness, not graduating, trying to find help, on their own, and left to their own devices to try to figure out how to heal from the trauma your system has caused them.
“Your system does not promote emotional well-being, it does not help heal. Your system puts children in lock down, in solitary confinement, in physical restraints”. Your system removes children from homes for truancy but provides them no education. Your system places children in facilities with abusers and tells them to submit their grievances to their abuses or to call action-response lines only to be ignored. Your system makes children fill out reports that someone reads and calls “unfounded.” Your system promotes trauma, not healing. Trauma occurs in these placements, not healing.
Philadelphia children, like all children deserve an opportunity to be seen and treated as human, and as children. They deserve opportunities to stay in their communities with their friends and their teachers, their siblings. If they are placed in these systems, they deserve to have a place like a local Ombudsman office to ensure that they are heard, validated, check-in on, and hopefully removed from these horrific institutions. We want to promote healing in our youth, not harm.
Healing happens when:
1. Youth are validated for the abuse that happened to them.
2. When their reports are heard, and substantiated.
3. When there is accountability for the harm they have been left to endure.
5. When they are connected to appropriate interventions and supports to heal from the trauma.
4. When they have their basic needs met, and can remain home with their families, and or in their communities in a loving home environment. This can begin with this office.
I encourage you to think about the experiences that these young people have faced in these systems. As you all sit here and contemplate the validity, and urgency of the issues children and youth in Philadelphia are facing in these facilities, I want to leave you all with one question from one of our youth advocates. He said, “Ms. Marcia I wonder if we asked any of these people who work for these systems, if they had to send their kids into these systems, would they do the exact same thing they did to us, with the same rules, silencing, with the things we experienced? If they had to take what we received, would they accept it all without hesitation?” Would you?
I support having a local Ombudsman Office because you owe it to our youth in our city and their families, for failing them. If we do not implement this office, we are sending a message to children and youth that they are expendable and that we care more about saving a dollar than their lives, their care, their wellbeing, and their healing.
They deserve so much better. Thank you.
Banner photo credit - Emkay Lim via Unsplash