Suffer little children? The death of a child opens a window on a fatally confused bureaucratic system - child abuse victim Elisa Izquierdo

National Review, Feb 26, 1996 by Joyce Milton

IT was one of those horror stories that have become all too familiar to New Yorkers. On the day before Thanksgiving, an ambulance summoned to the Rutgers House project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan discovered the horribly scarred body of six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo. Elisa had not been seen much by neighbors since she was removed from kindergarten classes last spring. Reportedly, she had been kept locked in one room of the apartment and forced to urinate and defecate in a cooking pot. In an effort to exorcise the devils that inhabited the little girl's body, her mother, Awilda Lopez, beat her, tortured her with a stiff hairbrush, and pushed objects up her rectum.

This time, the news footage had personal resonance for me. Elisa's father, Gus Izquierdo, had worked as an institutional aide at the Auburn family shelter in Brooklyn, where a close friend of mine, John Harvey, was one of his supervisors. Izquierdo doted on his daughter, working overtime to provide for her, styling her long, curly hair himself, and making sure that she was always immaculately dressed. Elisa looked like a princess, and soon she had her very own Prince Charming. When Prince Michael of Greece visited her school and suggested that he would like to sponsor a child in need, one of the school's administrators mentioned Elisa. He met her and offered to underwrite the cost of her education.

But there was already a shadow over Elisa's future. Awilda Lopez had emerged from a drug-rehab center and wanted her back. In late 1991, Mrs. Lopez won the right to have Elisa spend every other weekend with her. Elisa returned from these visits anxious and depressed. Izquierdo and her teachers suspected that she was being abused, but after warning Mrs. Lopez against hitting the child, a family-court judge allowed the visits to continue. Then, in May 1994, the 34-year-old Gus Izquierdo died and Awilda Lopez was given full custody.

For John Harvey, the news of Elisa's death a year and a half later came as a shock but, unfortunately, not a surprise. Those who know the welfare system from the inside can only be thankful it doesn't happen more often. Thanks to confidentiality laws and regulations, most taxpayers have only the vaguest notion of what New York's Human Resources Administration actually does, and HRA workers themselves tend to be cynical about media interest in the wake of a child's death. Too often, such stories focus on the search for an individual scapegoat. The case of Elisa Izquierdo may be the exception. But as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the State Investigation Commission ponder reforms, they should look for the true answer to the question in the history of welfare policy, where the bright innovations of yesterday all too often become the crises of today.

In the 1960s, when young people leaving college with a liberal-arts diploma and no particular job skills were wondering what they could do for their country, one obvious answer was to become a caseworker with the city's Department of Welfare. Young, energetic, and politically sophisticated, the new recruits found themselves working under old-line social workers trained in the settlement-house tradition -- "little old ladies in tennis shoes," one of my friends called them. My ex-husband, who became a caseworker in 1967, straight out of Swarthmore College, was instructed by his training supervisor that on entering a new client's apartment he should run his finger along the baseboards to check her housekeeping. My ex had many skills, but knowing how to hold a broom was not one of them. It seemed self-evident to him (and to me) that his job was to help poor women negotiate the bureaucracy and get money, not teach them how to keep house.

Caseworkers at this time were officially known as welfare "investigators," and the tool of their trade was a book that spelled out in minute detail the basic household provisions that every recipient of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was entitled to. A fork was reimbursable at 17 cents, and so on. Each welfare grant was tallied individually, and subject to frequent revisions. And each time the caseworker submitted a new budget to his supervisor, he would be asked: "Where is the children's father? Why isn't he providing these things?"

These were good questions. But in the liberated 1960s, few recent college graduates had any enthusiasm for monitoring the personal lives of their clients. Even if they did, looking for absent fathers was a time-consuming and thankless task. The typical father was contributing just enough to help the mother eke out her welfare grant. Tracked down and informed that the family's check would be docked a dollar for every one he contributed, the father lost the incentive to do even that much.

Caseworkers also disliked the AFDC rules because they encouraged the break-up of families. John Harvey found that his response to the "Where's the father?" question got him into trouble with his supervisors almost immediately. "I did not know much," he told me recently, "but I knew that a woman with children was supposed to have a man at home. So I asked my supervisor, 'Why are we punishing the women who do, and rewarding the ones who don't?' This was such a stupid question that she couldn't answer me. She walked away shaking her head, as if to say, 'Look at the kind of people we're hiring now!' "