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Avalanche of Anguish
By DANA DiFILIPPO
Philadelphia Daily News

difilid@phillynews.com 215-854-5934

SHANNON BERTHIAUME knows she did something stupid, something she can't take back.

In a fit of frustration, the mother of three drove her minivan into a West Philadelphia elementary school in 2005 to protest the escalating racial bullying her kids had suffered there.

Although no one was seriously injured and the only damage was a scratch on the school door, Berthiaume was arrested and sentenced to a year of probation.

But her legal troubles were trivial compared to the avalanche of anguish that followed.

Social workers from the city's Department of Human Services took her kids away and kept them, pingponging between foster homes, for a year and a half.

When Berthiaume got them back, all three had been sexually molested in their foster homes, she said.

"My oldest son [then 14] came home bleeding from his rectum - a lot, like a woman bleeds [menstrually]," Berthiaume said.

That son, now 16, is in a group home for sex offenders, after DHS took him again when he molested his little brother. Her other two kids resent her for catapulting them into the misery that has marred their lives since their mother's arrest.

"DHS has destroyed my family," said Berthiaume, 37, wiping tears from her cheeks.

While judges and social workers often assume removing children from troubled homes will make them safer, the ordeal of Berthiaume and her family illustrates a disturbing epidemic in foster care:

Kids in foster homes are up to four times as likely to suffer sex abuse as other kids.

The odds worsen for kids unlucky enough to get placed in group homes and other institutional settings:

They're 28 times as likely to be sexually abused there, studies show.

And while predatory foster parents make the headlines, the abuse typically is child-on-child, experts agree.

As shocking as the statistics are, child advocates say sexual abuse occurs far more than even the most perverted mind can imagine.

"I've been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights, a New York-based nonprofit.

"It is quite common."

A parental protest

When fire forced Berthiaume and her brood out of their charred Kensington home in November 2004, they relocated to West Philly, where she enrolled them in the Samuel B. Huey Elementary School.

They were the only white kids in the school.

That didn't matter to Berthiaume, who married a black man and whose youngest son's father is Puerto Rican.

But it apparently did matter to some of their classmates, who rarely let an opportunity pass to call them racial names, beat them or otherwise bully them, the family said.

"My kids would come home crying every day. They were afraid to go to school," she said.

Berthiaume complained repeatedly to the school, the district, local and state politicians and even the U.S. Department of Education.

She still has a dog-eared file thicker than a phone book of her various fruitless pleas to people for help.

Finally, in May 2005, with the abuse unabated, she planned a protest outside the school.

She made up signs and kept them in her van, waiting for the perfect opportunity.

But fury overtook patience on May 24, when she picked up her kids from school - only to hear that bullies had pounced on her 8-year-old in the bathroom as he relieved himself, yanking painfully on his privates as they called him names, she said.

"I snapped," she said of the day that led to years of tears.

Berthiaume locked her kids in the van and steered toward Huey's front door. Berthiaume said she merely parked the van at the door to protest her kids' treatment; police said she rammed it.

Either way, she got arrested and spent the night in jail. Although acquitted of all but one (simple assault) of the five charges against her, she was sentenced to a year of probation, court records show. The case is the only blemish on her otherwise clean criminal record.

After her arrest, DHS took her kids, then ages 8, 10 and 12, and put them in foster care.