She helped thousands of Alaska children through the roughest of times, when they were taken from parents because of abuse or neglect, and she guided her staff on how to do the same.
Now, after 25 years with the state Office of Public Advocacy, Barb Malchick is retiring. Her last day was Friday.
“She’s by far the single person who’s made the greatest contribution to child protection in the state for the last 20 years,” said Brant McGee, the state’s first public advocate and for years Malchick’s boss. “The only credit I can take is for being smart enough to hire her.”
Malchick started with the agency soon after it began, representing the interests of some of Alaska’s most vulnerable children in court. Toddlers with burns and bruises. Girls and boys molested by the people who were supposed to care for them. Babies neglected while their mothers and fathers drank or scrounged for drugs.
For the last 15 years, Malchick, an attorney, worked as a supervisor, with a smaller caseload but responsibility over other guardians ad litem and attorneys as well as the volunteers known as court appointed special advocates.
Is the system for protecting children better than when she began in 1985?
That thought occurred to her in recent weeks as she packed up her files and mementos. She started to ask herself: Have I just wasted 25 years?
“I used to joke when I first started this job, saying my goal was to put myself out of a job, you know, get rid of abuse and neglect in Alaska,” Malchick said. But “the rates of abuse and neglect are just as bad today as they were 25 years ago.”
What’s changed for the better is how the system responds to those cases, she said.
Laws are much tighter, spelling out what constitutes abuse and neglect, and what the state needs to do about it.
Judges in the early years of her work were reluctant to immerse themselves in the life of a dysfunctional family. Now they talk about cases involving a child in need of aid as being their most important, and are hands-on, she said.Back in 1997, Malchick went to court to get the right to talk publicly about usually secret child protection cases. She didn’t reveal any children’s names, but she gave enough specifics to put a vivid face on the statistics about child abuse. One case involved a little girl who had been repeatedly reported as endangered, but the state didn’t take custody until report number 17, after the 6-year-old was raped.
Malchick’s advocacy on that and other cases prompted then-Gov. Tony Knowles to push reforms through the Legislature.
She was a fierce advocate, but never alienated the other side, McGee said. She was respected. And with her staff, she was a beloved and creative leader, he said.
Public defenders are now making a career of representing parents in civil cases, when in the old days they would have wanted to move to criminal cases, Malchick said. The same with assistant attorneys general, who argue the state’s position.
As to the oft-criticized Office of Children’s Services, Malchick says its staff are the “unsung heroes.” Some of their new strategies — such as assessing whether a child is safe overall — have good potential, she said. But she still wants to see more done early on, before families are broken, and more at the other end, for older teens aging out of foster care.
Malchick, who at 57 just competed in a national hockey tournament and has played on the same softball team since 1982, says she loved her job to the end. But she is ready to let up-and-coming advocates take over.
Almost. She is hanging onto four cases involving teenagers. She’ll keep advocating for them in court, as a volunteer.
She’s been on too many committees to count and intends to see a couple of pet projects through. One involves providing training on the Indian Child Welfare Act. She wants those in the system to understand how poorly Alaska Native families were treated in the past, why they need extra protections, why they may distrust the system.
As her last day was wrapping up, she hadn’t decided what to do about the comfy down-filled chair that sat in her office all those years. Everyone called it the therapy chair. When one of her staff shut the door and plopped down in it, she knew that probably meant case loads were too high and someone needed to vent.
“It was very cushy to sit in, and very hard to get out of,” she said.
Read more: http://www.adn.com/2010/05/07/1268786/voice-of-abused-children-steps.html#ixzz0t2Rm31zT
