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(Source: Multnomah County Sheriff's Office - Faces of Meth™) |
Ore. Child Welfare System Inundated with Meth Kids
Oregon officials say the impact of methamphetamine use on families in the state is easy to measure: the number of foster children has doubled in the past three years, ABC News reported May 30.
Alcohol and other drug-related arrests of parents are blamed for the trend, with much of the increase due to raids on makeshift meth labs. "Meth has emerged as nothing short of a weapon of mass destruction in our community, leaving in its wake its greatest casualty, and that is our children, one child at a time, by the hundreds," said Walt Beglau, the district attorney of Marion County.
"The number of calls we started getting in child welfare around meth-using parents ... shot through the roof," added Jason Walling, head of the county's Child Protective Services. "We've seen a rise on average of 35 to 38 children coming in to foster care a month, 'till now we have well over a hundred children a month coming into foster care. And in March of last year we saw approximately 165 children come in, just in that one month ... It has led to the most devastating crisis that our community has ever seen, in my opinion."
Juvenile court Judge Pamela Abernathy said her goal is to get meth users into treatment and reunite them with their children whenever possible. Otherwise, she said, "We are going to have another child on our hands who is going to cost society millions of dollars in special medical services, special-education services, juvenile delinquency and prison."
However, federal laws adopted in response to the crack epidemic require states to terminate parental rights if children stay in foster care too long. That works against rehabbing meth users, who often require lengthy treatment stays.
Meanwhile, Oregon is suffering a shortage of foster homes and foster parents to deal with the influx of children into the system. In Salem, churches have stepped up to help.
"If a community doesn't care about their children, we don't deserve to be called a community," said John Stumbo, pastor of the Salem Alliance Church, which has pledged to recruit and train 100 families to provide foster care. "If a neighborhood doesn't care about their children, we're not a neighborhood."
"It's pretty easy to have the excuse that it's the government's problem. Let the government take care of it. Even churches can use that line," added Stumbo. "That was something that the mainline churches did, and we as evangelical churches avoided that for decades. But there is a new movement that is rapidly growing among evangelical churches that we must bring the love of Christ in tangible, practical ways to our cities. We must care about human need wherever it's expressed. To only care about the soul and not care about the body is is an oxymoron of sorts."
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