Martha Gershun probably knows the child welfare system as well as anybody and better than most.
Gershun was executive director of Jackson County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) for seven years. The agency advocated for nearly 10,000 children during her time there, becoming one of the largest CASA agencies in the country. She retired from Jackson County CASA on May 1, 2017.
Her knowledge of the welfare system also extends beyond Jackson County: She served as a board member of the Missouri CASA Association and the National CASA Association. More than 650,000 children in the United States are victims of abuse and neglect every year, she said, and more than 76,000 CASA volunteers advocate on their behalf.
During her time at Jackson County CASA, an idea gradually took shape to write a book about children in foster care, and that idea culminated in Gershun’s first novel, titled “Care & Custody: A Novel of Three Children at Risk.” It’s scheduled for release June 5 on Amazon.
“Near the end of my time at CASA, I realized that the story would best be told as a novel,” she said. “I had a lot of thoughts about how to improve the system. I could have written an angry essay, but nobody would read it. But if I were to talk about those issues through fictional children, maybe I could engage readers about those difficult issues.”
Gershun has developed strong views about what’s wrong with the child-welfare system, but she decided to wait until she left CASA to fully express them publicly.
“I think that people with information and insight have an obligation to share it with the community,” she said.
“Care & Custody” is a modern epistolary novel, told using emails, court reports, school essays, photographs, case files and police reports that show firsthand the trauma experienced by three siblings, ages 6, 8 and 13 at the novel’s beginning and three years older at its end.
Gershun is Jewish and a member of Congregation Beth Torah, and the novel has a Jewish element: The character of a CASA volunteer who advocates for the three children is Jewish. Jackson County CASA was founded by the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women.
The main emotions that surfaced in her while working at CASA and while writing the novel were anger and gratitude, she said.
“I’m very angry at the system,” she said. “We do not do right by children,” she said. “We take them away from their parents and then we screw it up. I went looking for a state that has a good child welfare system, and there isn’t one. The system often makes it worse.”
Some very good foster homes exist but some very bad ones do, too, she said. Fixing the family of origin yields the best outcome.
“And it’s very important to keep siblings together,” Gershun said. “These kids have been traumatized, and the only support they’ve had often comes from each other. The system often splits them. That trauma is often irreparable.”
Gershun was first drawn to this work because she had wanted to work with vulnerable children and was doing literacy work for low-income children when CASA had an opening.
Despite the heart-wrenching nature of the work, she was able to keep a hopeful attitude at CASA about the individual outcomes of specific children, and the agency had adoptions almost every week. She attended as many adoption ceremonies and family reunifications as she could to stay optimistic, “even though I was continually upset because of the issues that delayed those reunifications, and some never happened at all.”
“Every adoption story is a success story in the child-protection system,” she said. “There are some happy endings and some sad endings in the book. I wanted readers to see what I had seen, that sometimes it turns out OK in the end and sometimes it doesn’t.”
She said the hardest part of writing the novel was “giving a clear voice to the children.”
“My own kids are grown up now, and to remember what things look like and how children talk when they’re 8 or 13 was very hard,” she said. “Giving dialogue to children is really tough.”
Gershun wrote the novel in about seven months. The easiest part was that she knew the story’s plot before she started writing. She worked from a detailed, chronological outline to track the children’s ages as the story unfolded.
“It was so clear to me exactly what happens to the children and when,” she said. “I think that’s because I wrote the story of three children, but in my time at CASA I saw thousands of children, and while every story is unique, every story has the same pattern.”
Gershun received a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University and a master’s in business administration from the Harvard Business School. She also holds a graduate diploma in economics from the University of Stirling, Scotland, where she was a Rotary International Fellow.
She volunteers at the Jewish Family Services Food Pantry and does some consulting work, and she is helping run Tom Niermann’s campaign for the Kansas 3rd District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Gershun’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, the New Yorker, Kveller, The Kansas City Star and The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. She thinks she might write another novel, but she’s “waiting for something else that I care this much about, and I haven’t found that yet.”
That caring is the heart of what motivated her to write “Care & Custody.”
“I hope people will read this book and feel motived to support public policy that would help these kids in a better way,” she said.
