Deborah O’Flaherty-Lewis - Dedication and Compassion in a Challenging Field

Deborah O’Flaherty-Lewis - Dedication and Compassion in a Challenging Field Deborah O’Flaherty-Lewis feels if she has done her job successfully, that means her work has benefited all parties involved as much as possible. She works as a Child Protection Investigators Supervisor in Broward County, Florida. Her job is to oversee several Child Protection Investigators as they work within the community to protect children from potentially dangerous situations. She isn’t afraid to think ahead and offer solutions to some of her organization’s problems in dealing with Broward County’s at-risk children. She is a forward-thinker, capable of instituting sweeping organizational change in her department.

Her last resort is to place children in foster care or other state services. Often times the parents need some kind of assistance to take better care of their kids, not their children growing up without them. Deborah O’Flaherty-Lewis’s hardest days are when she has to take a child away from his or her family. In those situations, she feels no one wins. That is one of the reasons why she instituted a change at the Sheriff’s Office’s Child Protection Department where she works. All of her investigators must fill out unusually detailed report files on all of the children and families they work with. The purpose of these files is to get at the root causes of the problems arising between parents and children.

Obviously if a child is in serious danger, Deborah O’Flaherty-Lewis does not hesitate to remove them from that situation, but if there are suspicions of abuse or neglect, she and her team of investigators look for the reasons behind the allegations and work with the families to improve the lives of their children. Even with increased funding from the state agency dedicated to preventing and eliminating child abuse and neglect, the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), the less often children are placed in state care, the better Deborah O’Flaherty-Lewis sleeps at night. Her style emphasizes compassion for all parties involved in her cases. The fault of many child protection services run by the state is that they too often demonize the parents and treat them like the root cause of all home problems, according to O’Flaherty-Lewis. Sometimes children need to be removed from a situation, and O’Flaherty-Lewis won’t hesitate to do so, but she treats removal as a last resort, a solution that must be backed up with evidence. Her investigators carefully collect this evidence in their detailed reports on every family situation in their case load and attempt to record why families are struggling. Her expertise and experience in handling childcare programs and other government services make her the best advocate children and families in her county can hope for. Her compassion and dedication to her role as a Supervisor investigator, plays an important part in her ability to do her job to the best of her ability and to strategize the best possible outcome for each case she works on.