LA Times Syndicate Article
Sunday, September 26,
1999
By: Melissa Healy
After her baby was
blinded by a caregiver's shaking,
Mary Beth Phillips
descended on Sacramento, determined to make a difference
Mary Beth Phillips is
the mother of a 16-year-old daughter named Elizabeth
and a state-run
child-protection program called TrustLine. Her progeny are
linked by tragedy and
triumph--and by a discredited nanny named Colette Andrews.
When Elizabeth
Valentine Phillips was 6 months old, her mother returned to
her Oakland home from
a graduate class in neuropsychology to horrifying news:
The baby, left with
Andrews for an hour and a half, had been rushed to a hospital
comatose and
convulsing--the victim of violent shaking by her caregiver. Both
her retinas were
detached by the abuse. Elizabeth survived her ordeal to become
a gifted student,
songwriter and champion of children's causes. But she was
blinded for life.
Three years after
Elizabeth lay near death from her injuries, Andrews was
convicted of felony
child abuse. She was fined $100, required to perform 2,000
hours of community
service and put on five years' probation. The judge ignored
entreaties from the
Phillips family and from Alameda County Dist. Atty. Robert
Platt to bar Andrews
from working with children again. For a time, at least,
the convicted child
abuser worked again as a nanny for other families.
So Mary Beth
Phillips, then a 30-year-old mother juggling a graduate internship,
a doctoral
dissertation, a disabled child and a newborn, began a campaign
to spare other
parents the pain she had experienced. "I was clearly driven,"
she said.
Descending on
Sacramento, she urged lawmakers to create a registry of caregivers
whose names and
fingerprints would be screened for criminal pasts or histories
of abuse. Parents
could check the registry before hiring a nanny.
In the years since
TrustLine became a reality in 1993, the state has denied
its stamp of approval
to 3,981 prospective caregivers whose pasts are tainted
with convictions of
serious criminal misconduct--including murder and sexual
assault--or credible
allegations of child abuse or endangerment.
Most of the
caregivers who seek inclusion on the state-certified registry--an
average of 2,000 a
month--do so because it is required by government programs
that pay child-care
subsidies to low-income families.
Now Phillips and the
registry's administrators want to expand TrustLine's
customer base to
middle-income and affluent parents. So far, fewer than 200
caregivers a month submit
to the background check on their own initiative
or at the urging of
parents who want to employ them. In an effort to encourage
parents to ask
job-seeking nannies if they have been approved by TrustLine,
the program's
administrators have launched a statewide campaign to increase
public awareness.
They are pressing pamphlets on new parents as they leave
maternity wards,
posting signs in pediatricians' offices and advertising on
supermarket bags. A
Push to Take Program Nationwide.
And, at a time when
few Californians know about TrustLine, Phillips also
wants to take the
program national.
Congress in recent
years has taken steps to make it easier for states to
institute criminal
background checks on caregivers. But lawmakers have shied
away from debating a
national registry--a far more ambitious goal.
To bring TrustLine to
life in California, Phillips and her allies triumphed
over civil
libertarians, skeptical lawmakers and wary bureaucrats. If a national
registry of
caregivers is ever to take shape, Phillips warns, proponents will
have to prevail over
the same critics.
Chris Hansen, an
attorney with the ACLU's national office in New York, acknowledged
that criminal
background checks for any prospective employees raise hackles
among civil rights
activists. "You always have to be somewhat uncomfortable
about the notion that
we have to investigate everyone in order to catch one
bad apple," said
Hansen, who added that those turned away from registries
often are given
insufficient information and recourse.
To such objections,
one can add a more intractable obstacle: balky criminal-records
computers that cannot
share information from state to state.
Phillips keeps
pressing, however. "We need someone like [software mogul]
Bill Gates, with lots
of money, lots of energy and lots of computer resources,
to figure out how
states can talk to each other. . . . It's not impossible.
It takes will and,
more fundamentally, it takes collaboration between departments
within and between
states that have never worked together before."
Honored last year at
the White House for her work on TrustLine, Phillips
has pinned her hopes
on First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, with whom she has
discussed the program
at length. If Mrs. Clinton were to win a Senate seat
in New York, Phillips
believes that she would have the clout and the commitment
to rally the
political will and find the funds for a national registry of
caregivers.
But Phillips also
knows that if the TrustLine model is to take hold elsewhere,
it will be because of
parents like her. No politician, Phillips said, has
the passion--or
effectiveness--for the job that parents of abused children
do.
"I think, truly,
if Elizabeth had come through OK, I never would have gone
to Sacramento"
to fight for the program, Phillips said. "I wouldn't have had
that angst, that
agony."
One of Phillips'
earliest allies in fighting for TrustLine was Cheri Robertson
of Temecula, Calif.,
whose son, Bryan, was shaken violently by a caregiver
at the age of 10 months.
In the days before Phillips was to appear before
a state legislative
committee, she called Robertson for support. The next
day, with her baby on
her hip, Robertson flew to Sacramento to testify alongside
Phillips. As they
struggled to bring TrustLine to life, Robertson coordinated
visits and letters
from parents of babies abused by their caregivers, while
Phillips talked to
legislators.
Working both sides of
the Legislature helped, Phillips said. The addition
of an appeals process
for rejected applicants helped to quell early opposition
from Democrats, who
raised concerns about the rights of those rejected by
the registry.
Republicans were also skeptical, fearing that TrustLine would
create an unwieldy
bureaucracy. As legislation setting up TrustLine neared
a crucial first vote
in 1986, Phillips recalled, the state's Republican caucus
urged its members to
vote against the bill, a move that mobilized a small
army of angry parents
and established a pattern of lobbying that the group
would use again and
again.
"We were going
door-to-door through the Legislature, marching into these
offices,"
Phillips remembered. "We just walked up to the person in the office
who had a picture of
a kid on his or her desk. And we'd say: 'Here's what
we're trying to do,
and your guy is not supporting it. Can you drag him out
so we can talk to
him?' And they did! It was cool!"
Today, TrustLine is a
state-funded program touted on supermarket bags across
California. Daughter Elizabeth
Phillips is soon to be the keynote speaker
at a statewide
conference on child abuse prevention. Her mother falls into
unaccustomed silence
when she ponders whether TrustLine or her daughter is
the greater miracle.
"Just an amazing
journey," she said.