Teenage Girl Defies Parents; Goes to DSS to Have Sex
It's a common occurrence

By Susan Greenleaf
December 2000

Patricia and Rev. August Rosado of New Bedford naively thought they could turn to the courts for assistance when their 15-year-old daughter left on June 5 in order to be with an older boy who drinks and does drugs.

 "My friends say if I tell DSS that you abuse me, they'll put me in a foster home and I can do what I want," she had told her parents. She wasn't happy with the rules at home. "She wanted to be able to come and go as she pleased, do what she wanted when she wanted and be with whomever she wanted," says the mother.

"We told her, 'Our rules aren't unreasonable, they're the basic rules that most parents have.' She was allowed to see her friends and go to the mall as long as someone dropped her off and picked her up."

The girl started to have problems before she ran away, the mother says. Her whole attitude had changed and her grades were going down. She was doing things that normally she wouldn't do like locking herself in her room. Finally they found notes from a boy they had no idea she was seeing. He had previously been in a boys' group home.. Because of his drinking and drugs, they forbade the girl from seeing him.

"We called up one of those Parental Stress Hotline numbers out of desperation and talked to somebody there," says the mother. "They suggested we call the New Bedford courthouse and speak to a probation officer to see if we could get her into counseling and to get a CHINS order. When I called the probation office, they didn't really explain the CHINS order to me, they just said the order would get your daughter some help and would get her into counseling and that's what we wanted for her.

"After she ran away, we called the police and found out that she had called them from a friend's house. She told them my husband abused her, which is absolutely not true.

"When the police finally came, one officer came here and one went to see her. Then two DSS workers came to our house and spoke to my husband, our other two kids, and myself. They also talked to her teachers at school the next day and basically confirmed that there was no basis for her allegations whatsoever. They dropped the whole thing but my daughter still refused to come home. So the two social workers and myself escorted her to my mother-in-law's house to stay for the night. In the car she told me that she would commit suicide if she couldn't be with this boy. Before this boy entered the picture, she was involved in a lot of church activities and was a straight "A" student. My husband is a pastor of a church and she never got in trouble because she was against drinking and drugs."

Given to DSS
The next day when the Rosados went to the courthouse, they met with the probation officer and a temporary social worker who sat in on the meeting. Mrs. Rosado said, "We talked for nearly two hours about everything that was going on and then at the end they asked us what we wanted. My husband and I said we wanted her to come home, but she needed to go to counseling to get help and she would have to obey our rules. She didn't want to go home so when we went into the courtroom, they put her in DSS custody temporarily and she went into a foster home that day." 

Before the daughter went to the foster home, the Rosados were led to believe that they would be in contact with her social worker and be able to work with the social worker to set up some basic rules the girl would have to follow.

"One of the first things we specified is that we didn't want her to see the boy because he was such a bad influence on her. This was supposedly established with the social worker and the foster mother and agreed upon," Mrs. Rosado said.

Two weeks later, the daughter was still seeing the boy because she had gone off with him from Friday till Sunday. Nobody had any idea where she was, including the foster mother who had called the Rosados looking for her. "We were panic stricken!" said Mrs. Rosado. "Afterwards she said she was with the boy so we're assuming it's true. If so, we're sure there's sexual activity going on between them since that weekend. We know her foster mother still allows them to go off together for the day to his mother's apartment in Taunton."

When the Rosados questioned the foster mother, they found out that the temporary social worker had never told the foster mother their concerns about this boy or about anything else that they talked about that first day in court. Basically he had just dropped her off at the foster home. He claims it was because he was only a temp so it wasn't his job. "Two weeks after this, my daughter still didn't have a regular social worker and I had to keep calling and pushing for one to be appointed. Finally when DSS appointed one, it was the same man I'm talking about that she ended up with," Mrs. Rosado said.

 She continued, "Her foster mother has three other girls living in the home, two are foster children and one is her sixteen year old daughter who has a baby and boyfriend living there. It's unfortunate that she had a baby so young but what kind of example is that for a foster child the same age? And if her daughter can go out and get pregnant, then obviously there's not enough supervision. I'm not saying it couldn't have happened here, but I know she would be much more supervised if she were at home."

According to Rosado, there is also a husband living in the home as well as their eighteen-year-old son. The father doesn't speak English, which Rosado sees as a detriment for her daughter in case she needed help from him. "My daughter and another foster girl don't even have their own bedroom; they both sleep on a futon sofa in the living room. So to me, she's gone from her own home with her own bedroom to a situation where she's living without privacy with all these people."

Social Worker Is Useless
"I now have the number of the foster family, but it's like not having a number at all. I leave messages and nobody ever calls us back. That's the whole thing with this case that upsets us, nobody informs us of anything. We're not called by the social worker to let us know anything about what's going on with my daughter. I have to call him and leave messages and more messages, and he doesn't call back. The only way I get through to him is to call his supervisor and then he'll call back."

Mrs. Rosado said, "At one point, a little over a month ago, people told us that they've seen our daughter on the street with this kid and at the railroad tracks. So I called up the social worker and left messages. Of course, he never called me back until I finally had to call his supervisor and only then he called me back."

Mrs. Rosado demanded to know why her daughter was still seeing the boy when it had been established that her daughter wasn't allowed to see him. The social worker's answer was, "I have to check into it, I'll call you back." Again he didn't call back until the Rosados called his supervisor. When he finally did call, he said, "The supervisor, myself, the foster mother, lawyer and counselor had already decided that your daughter can see this kid once a week for a supervised visit."

Upset by this turn of events, Mrs. Rosado asked, "What about the parents? Don't the parents get to be in on this meeting? The least you could've done is call us and informed us of your decision so we would have some idea of what's going on. Now, we find out what's going on through people seeing my daughter in the streets!" His answer was, "Well, yes, I should've called you but I get busy." Rosado says, "It's so frustrating because my daughter has a lawyer, a counselor, all these avenues to keep her informed and explain things to her but there's nothing for the parents."

The last time Mrs. Rosado went to court on September 22 it was with the understanding that the case was going to be continued to a later date. She went with her mother-in-law because her husband was working. "When I got there, I talked to my daughter for a while and then her lawyer. I thought everything was going well. He came to me and asked me what I wanted to be done. I said, 'I'd like her to come home again.'" Rosado said.

"I also explained to the probation officer my concerns about the freedom my daughter had in her foster home and how it had been agreed upon that she should only see the boy once a week supervised and that this was definitely not happening.   The probation officer said, 'I'll let the judge know what you want."'

Tricked by Court
"We went into the courtroom and all of a sudden, it was a hearing, I had no idea it was a hearing until I walked in. The probation officer never told the judge what I said and the judge never allowed me to speak, so my daughter was turned over to DSS custody permanently for six months! There was no reason to be in their custody other than the fact that she refuses to come home. There's no neglect or abuse, nothing!"

The Rosado family is going now to family counseling every Wednesday, but they feel it's one-sided. "We're doing everything we're supposed to do to make it possible for her to come home, but she's not doing anything that he's asking her to do. It's going to be a long process. Her whole thing is, she'll come home if we give in and allow her to see this boy, when she wants to, wherever she wants to.  I told her social worker; 'If you were a fifteen-year-old girl and you were living in a foster home that allowed you to go wherever you want, when you want, would you want to go home?'"

Mrs. Rosado said, "Now she hangs out at the apartment of a twenty-one-year-old girl who's pregnant and lives with her boyfriend. We can see a big change in her lifestyle since she left home. My fourteen-year-old is very hurt by her sister and all that has happened."

"I think the big problem is there's no communication with the parents. There's nobody explaining anything to us. She has a lawyer, but we have nobody. They do everything for the kids, which is great; but in a situation like this, there's no parental rights whatsoever. We're just totally lost and confused. We don't know what's going on because we can't afford a lawyer. I called Legal Aid a few times but nobody ever called me back. We're trying to get someone to help us without it costing us a million dollars."

She continued, "I want to see something happen, not just for my daughter's sake but for other parents out there. It's just unbelievable that when you just get down to it, parents have no rights. And the sad part is that the kids know it and they know they can do whatever they want. I've met parents whose kids have said to them, 'Hey, if you don't slack up on your rules, we can just call DSS and tell them you're abusing us. They'll put us in foster care and then we can do whatever we want.' It's getting to be a trend, it's getting to be a thing that they're all talking to each other about."

"When this first happened we didn't know where to turn. We talked to pastors and tried to find counselors, but we ended up calling the court because of someone's recommendation. We wanted to prevent anything from happening and basically everything we wanted to prevent has now happened. The only thing that has gotten me through this thing is that I have my faith; that's the only way."