Daily Herald
Most of abuse done by system designed to protect kids
Posted on April 05, 2001
By Burt Constable

After two years of fighting charges they tortured
foster children in their care, Chuck and Vivian
Lehmann smiled Wednesday as a team of lawyers
explained how the Island Lake family were the real
victims - abused by an unfair, unconstitutional,
"Alice in Wonderland" justice system with a penchant
for punishing people first and asking questions later.

The Lehmanns are one of more than 150,000 foster
parents, parents, teachers, social workers, day-care
workers and even children railroaded by an Illinois
Department of Children and Family Services' process a
federal judge ruled "seriously and obviously flawed."

For Alvin and Ellen Onken of Arlington Heights, the
nightmare started when a neighbor child accused their
then-12-year-old son of sexually attacking their
daughter, who was 11.

DCFS dismissed all the charges in the Onkens' case,
but not until after their son had been arrested and
forced to sleep with a lock on his bedroom door, and
their young daughter had to endure taunts from kids
who called her bad names "she didn't even know," the
parents say. The teary-eyed mother hugged her kids and
husband during Wednesday's emotional press conference
at the federal courthouse in Chicago.

In a 102-page ruling, federal district court judge
Rebecca R. Pallmeyer ordered DCFS to revise and
improve its system for investigating allegations of
abuse and neglect. The class action suit was filed in
1997 by lawyers with the Chicago Lawyer's Committee
for Civil Rights, and the law firms of Lehrer &
Redleaf and Johnson, Jones, Snelling, Gilbert & Davis.

Under the old system, people were "branded as
abusers," listed on a register and sanctioned long
before they got a chance to defend themselves,
attorney Diane L. Redleaf said.

Documents show many of the cases were built entirely
on the false allegations of an ex-spouse, feuding
neighbor or disgruntled child, and often cost people
their jobs, their reputations and their children.

The case against the Lehmanns "was based on one little
girl's words," says Vivian Lehmann, who used to
volunteer with a child abuse hotline. Together with
her husband, a volunteer youth soccer coach, they
taught a class at church on how to be good parents.

As licensed foster parents, the Lehmanns took in three
troubled sisters. The youngest girl was violent and,
at the Lehmanns' request, was removed from the home.
During interviews with officials, that girl said she
had been forced to hang from a bar, which the Lehmanns
said was nothing more than a monkey bar the girls
enjoyed playing on.

That became the basis for a "torture" allegation that
eventually climaxed on June 24, 1999, when state
agents came to the house in the dark of night and
hastily removed the remaining two girls, age 10 and 9,
as they cried, "We don't want to go! We want to be
adopted," Vivian Lehmann recalls.

The girls, who lived with the Lehmanns for 31/2 years,
were sent to another foster home and have not seen the
Lehmanns since. All visits, phone calls and letters,
even a stack of "We miss you" cards from the kids at
church, were forbidden.

Those girls now have a new, permanent family.

"They adopted them out from under us while we were
going through this," Vivian Lehmann says.

The ordeal hasn't diminished their desire to be foster
parents, however.

Next week, under the orders of DCFS, the Lehmanns
should be re-licensed as foster parents, Chuck Lehmann
says. They've heard talk they might receive a little
foster boy soon.

Having lost their foster daughters and been forced to
defend their reputations, the Lehmanns realize their
legal victory stops far short of making everything
right.

"In those two years, how many kids would we have
helped?" Vivian Lehmann asks.

Clearly, the victory doesn't restore their foster
family. But some good will come out of it, Vivian
Lehmann says, noting, "it does mean the way they did
our investigation won't happen again."

Families strike back at DCFS
Daily Herald Legal Affairs Writer
By David R. Kazak
April 05, 2001

When Arlington Heights teen Heather Onken walks the
halls at Prospecp High School, she knows what the whispers are about.

In 1997, someone started a rumor about her older brother, Sean. The rumor sas scathing, disturbing and utterly false.

Sean, the rumor went, had raped his little sister. If there is anything worse than that, the Onken family said Wednesday,
it's the ensuing investigation the Illinois Department of Children
and Family Services began upon hearing the rumor.

"They told us that Sean couldn't be around any other
children," said his mother, Ellen Onken. "They tkld us Sean had
to be locked in his room, and we had to buy an alarm that would wake us up if he tried to get out."

And all DCFS had to go on, Ellen Onken said, was a rumor started by a kid in junior high.

The Onkens' tale comes on the heels of a scathing rebuke of DCFS by a federal judge in Chicago, who on Monday declared
the state agency's investigative process into child abuse "seriously and obviously flawed."

Chuck and Vivian Lehmann, former foster parents from
Island Lake, fell victim to that flawed process two years ago when they lost their three foster children because DCFS accused the couple of torturing the children.

That "torture," it was later learned, was a monkey bar the girls
enjoyed playing on. By the time DCFS cleared the Lehmanns, the girls - who were forbidden from contacting the couple - were adopted by another family.

Sean Onken was also cleared of wrongdoing after nine months living under a cloud of suspicion by state and local authorities, the family said.

But the Onken children have never really woken up from
their nightmare. In March, Sean was eating dinner with friends at a Mount Prospect restaurant when another group of kids came up and started a fight. "They called me a rapist," the soft-spoken teen recalled.

Heather cannot make new friends, she said, because most of the school thinks she slept with her brother. Her only friends, she said, are the "true ones" she's had since sixth grade.

The whispers in the hallway, she said, are always there. "I can't even talk to my brother at school without everyone saying
something," she said. "I keep thinking, 'Won't it just stop?' but
it never does."

The Onkens and Lehmanns have joined 150,000 others in
a class-action lawsuit against DCFS brought by the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a few private firms.

The suit seeks no money, said attorney Bob Lehrer, one of the
attorneys. "It's seeking only that the system be fixed," Lehrer
said.

What's broken, according to U.S. Federal District Court Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer, is how DCFS investigates child abuse
cases, and she's given the state 60 days to come up with a fix.

Those investigations, she said in a 102-page report, are
unconstitutional and harmful, mainly because DCFS needs only "credible" evidence to brand someone as an abuser.

As to how DCFS investigates those who work with children - including teachers and day-care workers - Pallmeyer noted that
74.6 percent of those accused of abuse by DCFS eventually were found to be innocent.

"This court is confident that this staggering expungement rate is
due to the relatively low standard of proof required to indicate a
finding" of abuse, Pallmeyer wrote in her ruling.

Other aspects of the investigative process DCFS caseworkers employ, Pallmeyer wrote, are "not constitutionally adequate."

Carolyn Cochran Kopel, DCFS chief of staff, wouldn't say Wednesday whether the agency plans to appeal Pallmeyer's ruling, but she added, "If we don't appeal, we have to make changes."

Kopel called the ruling "narrow," applying only to child-care workers DCFS deals with, not all of the agency's cases.
Possible changes, she said, would be to release information about a person being investigated to an inquiring child-care employer when accusations are accompanied by physical evidence.

The key, Kopel said, is finding balance in all investigation rulings. "Our main concern for raising the standards (is) for the cases where there is no evidence, no witnesses, and a nonverbal or
very young child as a victim," Kopel said. "This is the basic
see-saw that child welfare faces. The government has decided it is more important to protect children than people's privacy, but what is the balance?"

Kopel said DCFS presumes lawmakers, Cook County's public guardian, and the public want the agency to "err on the side of
protecting children."

Lehrer dismissed such a presumption. "The question shouldn't be whether to err on the side of children but whether the determination of abuse is accurate," Lehrer said. "Because an inaccurate determination is harmful to both the accused and the children."

He also brushed aside Kopel's assertion that Pallmeyer's ruling
is narrow. Yes, he said, it does address only DCFS' investigations regarding child-care workers, but the reasoning, he added, can be - and likely will be - applied across the board as the case moves further along.

"That same reasoning applies to families, too," he said. "And it's
difficult to believe (Pallmeyer) will come to a different conclusion
when that aspect of the case is addressed."

And, he added, the decision has national importance, as 48 states have child welfare systems similar to Illinois - systems he said Pallmeyer has now labeled "fundamentally flawed."

"The changes (DCFS must make) are going to be big ones," he said. "Their system is fundamentally flawed, so there has to
be fundamental changes.

"If (Kopel) wants to call that narrow, I think that's a very peculiar reading of the word 'narrow.'æ"

• Staff reporter Teresa Mask contributed to this
story.