In nearly every Bay Area county, parents accused of abusing their children are kept out of the interview room when a social worker gets a court order to question their child.
But not in Santa Clara County.
Four social workers, including two supervisors, told the Bay Area News Group that, since at least 2021, they have been instructed by county lawyers to invite parents into all child interviews, even when one of the parents is suspected of abuse.
The consequences of that guidance have rippled through Santa Clara County school districts, where children have recanted their abuse allegations in front of their parents, according to Milpitas Unified school social worker Nicole Steward. In multiple instances, students came to school the day after their interview, terrified after their parent exploded at them for telling school officials about the abuse.
Even teachers and others who are required to report child abuse fear that doing so may backfire on the child whose parents are called in, she said.
The teachers “beg us to not call CPS (child protective services) anymore,” Steward told members of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council at the group’s January retreat.
County social workers have shared similar stories in recent weeks in interviews with the Bay Area News Group. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs. One social worker said that a girl clammed up in a recent interview that her mother was invited to. Separately, a social worker supervisor said a child’s mother explicitly told the child not to say anything to investigators about the alleged abuse while sitting in on their interview. That child was abused yet again earlier this year, the supervisor said.
The new revelations are reigniting tensions between Santa Clara County social workers and the County Counsel’s office that were uncovered late last year in a Bay Area News Group investigation into the county’s handling of the fentanyl-related death of 3-month-old Phoenix Castro. The coverage revealed the county’s heightened efforts to keep troubled families together and how the Department of Family and Children’s Services overlooked warning signs from its own social workers about the dangers of sending baby Phoenix home with her parents.
The two groups have been sparring for the last several months over allegations in a state investigation that county lawyers often overrode social workers’ attempts to remove children from unsafe homes.
That state investigation also highlighted concerns that “Social Workers are no longer able to interview children at school without a parent’s permission.”
“Interviews at school are often the only time social workers report being able to interview a child without concerns of coaching or being altered due to a parent’s presence,” the report said.
Social workers and supervisors say that the county’s interview procedures are another example of child safety decisions being taken out of their hands by county lawyers — a practice that they say prioritizes parental rights but puts children at risk.
Even a veteran California lawyer who has been at the forefront of advancing the rights of parents and families in child welfare cases says that always inviting parents into interviews after getting a court order is out of step with the rest of the state.
“I will tell you, I know of no other county that does that,” said Oceanside attorney Donnie Cox.
Spokespeople for Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and San Francisco counties all told the Bay Area News Group as a matter of course their social workers do not invite parents into children’s abuse interviews after they receive a court order.
Damion Wright, director of the Santa Clara County Department of Family and Children’s Services, gives a presentation to the members of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council on Dec. 1, 2023, in San Jose. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Damion Wright, the director of Santa Clara County’s Department of Family and Children’s Services, disputed that Santa Clara County always insists parents are invited to attend their child’s abuse interview, saying that “policies and practices provide social workers the ability to very quickly obtain an order from the juvenile court allowing them to interview children without parents present when necessary.”
But that doesn’t match what workers describe as their marching orders.
Alex Lesniak, a union steward with the department, said that “regardless of what is documented in the publicly available policy, the fact of the matter is that social workers are advised, instructed and encouraged to invite parents, no matter what, into interviews with their children.”
In an October training, Deputy County Counsel Bhavit Madhvani instructed about 45 department staff members to “ignore” a state penal code that gives children the right to be interviewed about their abuse in private, according to a copy of the presentation that was shared widely within the department. Madhvani did not respond to questions about the training when contacted through his office.
When asked why they instructed social workers to disregard a state statute, the Santa Clara County Counsel’s office said that they were responding to recent court decisions “to ensure compliance with the new legal standard” about interviewing kids.
But Cox, who represented the family who prevailed on key issues in one of the cases, Mann v. County of San Diego, said it was focused on invasive medical procedures and had nothing to do with interviewing children.
“They really need to go back and read those cases,” Cox said. “My understanding of this is that the statute is not null-and-void — it just needs to be interpreted in a way that is constitutional.”
On Saturday, the county for the first time acknowledged that they were advising social workers to invite parents into interviews after receiving court orders. After over a month of questions directed to the county, Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti said that his office will send out new guidance this weekend explaining that, after getting a court interview order, social workers “have the discretion to decide whether to notify and invite a child’s parents to the interview based on the social worker’s assessment of the situation and the potential risk to the child.”
Steve Baron told his fellow members on the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council at a meeting in early December that the tragedy of baby Phoenix Castro was preventable and the result of child welfare reform “run amok.” (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Steve Baron, a member of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council who was in the room when Steward spoke about children clamming up, was outraged to hear that kids were being interviewed in front of their allegedly abusive parents.
“I can’t even think of a response where I would expect a child to open up about abuse and neglect in front of a parent who did it, or in front of a parent who they think may be upset,” Baron said. “It just makes it more difficult to provide protection for children who have been abused and neglected. There’s no two ways about that.”