O.C. Agency Has Helped Underage Mothers to Wed

SANTA ANA —  Faced with what its director calls a terrible social dilemma, the Orange County Social Services Agency has helped make it possible for some adolescent girls under its protection to marry the adult men who impregnated them, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Times.

The marriages effectively preclude prosecution of the men on charges of child molestation or statutory rape, and appear to be in sharp conflict with Gov. Pete Wilson’s $52-million campaign to curtail costly teenage pregnancies by, among other things, severely punishing the adult men who in California are responsible two-thirds of the time.

The situation has raised a host of moral and ethical questions among social workers, police and prosecutors over how best to protect vulnerable teenagers, such as a pregnant 13-year-old Anaheim girl who was allowed to marry her 20-year-old boyfriend six weeks ago.

The practice has also created a schism within the Social Services Agency, where some supervisors are challenging the underlying reason why the agency is not using its considerable clout to block the marriages: that the girls will be better off with a father for their children.

“It is difficult to fathom the rationale for this agency’s contributing to the ongoing exploitation of a minor by an adult perpetrator, who should in fact be arrested, not rewarded with [these girls’ hands] in marriage,” one Social Services supervisor wrote in an internal memo to her boss.

“Many of these girls are physically abused and then deserted by these men, left to raise 2 or 3 children alone at age 17 or 18 [and] are totally unprepared to care for themselves or their children, having been deprived of an education,” the supervisor’s memo states.

Under California law, county welfare agencies bear the greatest responsibility for protecting children from abuse. Their social workers are empowered to take into custody youngsters they believe to be victims of statutory rape, which occurs when an adult has sex with someone 17 or younger, or the more serious crime of child molestation, when the minor is under the age of 14. In either crime, consent is not a legitimate defense.

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The recommendations of these social workers carry great weight with the Juvenile Court judges who decide whether the abused children should be taken away from their parents, kept in a children’s home such as Orangewood, assigned to foster parents, or--as in the cases of these girls--permitted to marry.

Larry M. Leaman, the head of the Orange County Social Services Agency, disclosed that over the past two years social workers have helped make it possible for at least 15 underage girls to marry--or resume living with--their adult male sex partners. Most of them were pregnant at the time or had had children with the men.

Leaman and a top assistant investigating the cases would not disclose how many of the 15 girls were married, but said it was “about a dozen.” They also declined to reveal the specifics of all the cases, such as the ages of the girls, and the age disparities with the men they married.

Leaman also declined to discuss the specific actions his agency took in each case “to accommodate”--as he termed it--the marriages.

But he said such actions can include recommendations to a Juvenile Court judge that a pregnant underage girl be married to the father of her child, or that the judge rule that the girl is no longer a dependent of the court.

In other instances, Leaman said, his social workers can drop their opposition to the reunification of the girls with the adult men.

In each of the 15 cases, he said, the actions were taken with the full knowledge that the girls would either marry the men or resume living with them.

“This is an impossible social dilemma and there’s really no right answer,” said Leaman, who has headed the Orange County agency and the Human Services Department that was its predecessor since 1981.

As a result of the agency’s actions--or inaction--some seemingly egregious cases of child abuse have gone without prosecution.

In one case, Santa Ana police arrested a 22-year-old man on suspicion of statutory rape for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. The man was never prosecuted, in part because social workers succeeded in getting a judge to terminate her dependency status, freeing her to marry the man, according to agency supervisors.

Leaman said a variety of factors are taken into consideration when the agency takes actions that allow the minors to marry their adult sex partners.

These factors, he said, generally include: consent from one or both of the minor’s parents; the minor’s desire to continue the relationship; the county’s concern over splitting up a couple who might become a functioning family, and the minor’s unwillingness to testify against her adult partner, if police and prosecutors could be persuaded to bring criminal charges.

The handling of such cases has caused a great deal of frustration and some degree of finger-pointing among prosecutors, social workers and police. They are asking some troubling questions: Are the men getting away with child abuse? Are the girls too young to get married?

Prosecutors say they cannot pursue statutory rape and child molestation charges against some of the men because they haven’t received criminal referrals from the police. Police complain that when they do arrest these men and refer their cases to prosecutors, social workers allow them to get married to the minors and this, in turn, has caused prosecutors to drop the cases. Social workers complain that they are having trouble removing abused minors from their homes because police refuse to assist them.

“It goes around and around,” Leaman said. “It’s a problem.”

Compared to the volume of cases his agency handles, Leaman said the number of times social workers recommend that the couples be allowed to continue their relationships is relatively small.

Moreover, Leaman noted that Juvenile Court judges and commissioners sometimes permit the unions, even though social workers have recommended a different course of action.

The simmering controversy was first brought to Leaman’s attention in June, after he wrote in the agency’s newsletter about the plight of a pregnant 13-year-old who had sought help from the agency. She had been abandoned by the 29-year-old who had made her pregnant, and then was kicked out of the apartment where she had been living by the man’s brother. Although Leaman assured his readers that the girl would be provided for, “she will forever be a victim of exploitation.”

After reading the newsletter, two senior social workers fired off a memo to Leaman, telling him that one of his own agency’s divisions “has in the past made arrangements to marry these children to the adult perpetrators. We thought you might be interested in the unorthodox handling of these situations by your own agency. The exploitation continues.”

Leaman’s reaction was swift, and he agreed that the concerns the two social workers had outlined in their memo “most certainly warrant investigation.”

But when Leaman informed the two social workers three weeks later that he had not turned up any evidence that the agency was facilitating such marriages, five supervisors jointly wrote him back, citing specific cases and complaining that “it is illegal and unethical for our agency to be involved in any way in the marriage of minors to adult perpetrators.”

“Workers may encounter difficulty in the future obtaining police cooperation in detaining minors if police believe either the agency or Juvenile Court will turn around and marry the minor to the perpetrator,” their memo stated.

Placentia Police spokeswoman Corrine Loomis said the practice of some social workers reunifying the minor with the adult has become an issue for officers.

“The question for us became, ‘Why do we [make arrests] when social services allows them to get back together in the end?” she said.

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One of the cases that triggered the social workers’ outrage involved the pregnant 13-year-old, Isabel Gomez, who was married six weeks ago to the 20-year-old man, Juan Pineda, with whom she had been living.

The marriage was approved by a Juvenile Court commissioner, the girl’s court-appointed attorney and her mother.

Gomez and her mother contend that marriage beats the life she was living as recently as April--skipping school, abusing drugs and running with a 17-year-old gang member.

“The social worker said I was too young,” said the seventh-grader, surrounded by stuffed teddy bears and tigers in the room she shares with her husband. “Then, when my mom told her that Juan took me out of the gangs, everything changed. The social worker changed [her mind] too.”

The Social Services Agency initially sought to keep them separated, but later went along with the marriage, according to participants at the court hearing.

“The whole thing, I’m sorry to say, smacks of racism and sexism,” one social worker wrote in a memo to Leaman. “I would venture to say most of the girls involved [in these marriages] are Hispanic and the justification for allowing them to continue to be abused is that it is ‘cultural.’ ”

Leaman rejects the notion that racism played a part in the agency’s handling of the 15 cases, even though all but one of the girls were Latina. “Every case is handled individually,” he said in an interview.

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Because of the controversy, Leaman has ordered a review of the way his staff handles cases involving pregnant minors and their adult sex partners. There are no governing policies, Leaman said, and each case is determined on its specific circumstances.

At the urging of some social workers, the district attorney’s office looked into the marriage of the 13-year-old girl but decided not to become involved.

“This is an unusual situation,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Middleton, who heads the office’s sexual assault unit. “I’m not sure we would have done anything differently even if we knew about [the marriage] before it occurred.”

Middleton said these cases are not as black and white as they might appear. He said the minors often refuse to testify against their adult partners, if the adults are charged with statutory rape or child abuse. Other times, the couple gets married before the charges can be brought against the adult. In those cases, Middleton said, the prosecution gets “derailed.”

Marriage laws, Middleton said, are vague, but generally allow minors to be wed if they get the consent of their parents or guardians.

Furthermore, Middleton said, his office takes into consideration what is best for the minor when evaluating cases for prosecution. “Is it best for the father and provider of her child to be put in jail?” he asked.

Marjorie Kelly, deputy director of the state Department of Social Services, said she is aware of Orange County’s handling of such cases and is monitoring the situation closely.

“People need to get together and talk about this. It’s an academic discussion that should be held at many levels,” Kelly said.

Although statistics on teenage pregnancies caused by adults would seem to indicate that the problem goes well beyond Orange County’s borders, Kelly said she is unaware of other counties handling cases in a similar manner.

Social services officials in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties said they were not aware of cases in which they recommended that teenage girls as young as 13 or 14 be allowed to marry adult men.

Many social services officials said they have only started linking teenage pregnancies to adult partners in the past couple of years. Before then, it was incorrectly assumed that teenage girls were getting pregnant from teenage boys, they said.

“This is new information,” said Judy Tanasse, a deputy director with Orange County Social Services Agency. “The whole of society is trying to come to terms with this.”