In 2001, while Violet Rittenhour’s children were in protective custody pending an unfounded child welfare investigation, she was informed that her son and daughter had been hospitalized for alleged physical and sexual abuse.

She thus learned first-hand about a flaw in the child welfare system that is emerging following the death of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, whose parents are charged in her murder: the danger of removing children from parental custody and placing them in potentially worse situations.

Child welfare reform advocates said yesterday that Nixzmary’s death should not be a reason for the Administration for Children’s Services to increase the number of children it places in foster care.

“If the outrage and disgust we all feel over the death of Nixzmary Brown becomes an excuse to turn back the clock and return to the days when the operating philosophy of ACS was ‘take the child and run,’ it will not reduce the number of children who die,” the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, Richard Wexler, said.

Yesterday, the attorney for Nixzmary Brown’s grandmother, Maria Gonzalez, said he met with ACS officials to discuss visitation rights for his client. According to the lawyer, Raul Meruelo, Nixzmary’s siblings are currently in foster care, but the grandmother would like permanent custody of them or temporary custody, pending the resolution of custody issues. Mr. Meruelo said the meeting was “positive,” and that his client would probably see the children “soon.”

Mr. Wexler cautioned that a “foster care panic” – a spike in foster care placement like the one experienced in New York City during the 1990s after the death of Elisa Izquierdo – could lead to unnecessary and possibly dangerous foster care situations.

In fact, ACS officials reported increased calls to their abuse hotline, as well as increased foster care placements last week.

Between January 12 and January 19, ACS said it received 2,179 reports of abuse and neglect, compared with 1,272 during the same period last year. During the same week, ACS placed 194 children in foster care, an 8.9% placement rate, compared with 84 placements and a 6.6% placement rate during the same period last year.

Yesterday, an ACS spokeswoman could not provide statistics on the rate of child abuse in foster care, but she said there were 30 fatalities among children known to ACS in 2005, including six homicides to date. In 2004, the administration reported 33 such fatalities, the spokeswoman said.

An April 2005 study conducted by a Washington-based foster care provider, Casey Family Programs, and Harvard University Medical School researchers showed that nearly one-third of children who had been placed in foster care reported having been abused.

“That’s typical,” Mr. Wexler said. Placing more children in foster care creates “not a better system, just a bigger system,” he said.

“Make no mistake, what happened to Nixzmary Brown is a terrible thing,” the president of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, Sharwline Nicholson, said. But removing children can unnecessarily hurt families, causing the children especially to “pay too high a price.”

Still, the ACS commissioner, John Mattingly, yesterday defended his administration and the reportedly high number of foster care placements. “More children are being placed, but the rate at which children are coming into foster care is not up dramatically; the children who are coming into care are doing so because we think that is the way to make sure they are safe,” he said in a statement.

In the case of Mrs. Rittenhour’s children, it seems they were removed from foster care just in time. Yesterday, she shared an essay her 14-year-old daughter wrote about being sexually abused at age 10 while in foster care, beginning with the words, “I am scared of ACS.”

Mrs. Rittenhour described her fear that ACS caseworkers and police will come back, knocking hard on her door. “ACS is under fire and every parent that comes in contact with them, and their children, will have to pay,” she said.