CHICAGO - The kids who scrambled for dog scraps on Wednesday were bathed, fed and fingerpainting Thursday, safe in a state children's shelter.
The squalor in which the 19 children were found - eating off feces-littered floors, sleeping on filth-stained mattresses - sparked national outrage.
The good news, child advocates say, is that outrage may draw attention to the crisis of child neglect and abuse.
The bad news is that the issue's complexities could be ignored in the rush to place blame - on relatives, on state agencies, on any or all.
The state Department of Children and Family Services - which previously investigated three of the families - is being criticized because it didn't intervene. "Our role in this is to protect children; that's our mission," says spokesman Scott Hamilton. "But we can't save every case."
The relatives charged with neglecting the children - five mothers, a father and an uncle - await a Feb. 25 court date. Six are out on bond while the seventh, a mother who also faces felony child cruelty charges, remains in jail.
Until the case is resolved, the 19 kids - plus two others who were not in the apartment when police arrived - will stay in a shelter or in foster care.
The 19 children - ranging in age from 14 to less than 1 - are among hundreds of thousands who figure each year in abuse or neglect cases, according to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse.
In 1992, the committee says, nearly 3 million children were reported abused or neglected. About 40% of cases were substantiated; of the rest, some were judged groundless, but others just fell short of complete confirmation.
Committee spokeswoman Joy Byers says nearly half the reported cases involved neglect - the failure to provide life's necessities that is charged in Wednesday's case. While abuse may get more attention, "the whole issue of neglect is a major concern," Byers says.
Among advocates, debates rage over when to remove children from potentially abusive families and when to try to keep families intact.
Child welfare agencies say they are overburdened, struggling to stem abuse that flourishes in drug-racked, impoverished families.
Critics say agencies are more inclined to give parents the benefit of the doubt than to give children every possible protection.
Meanwhile, the public becomes more outraged with each grim case. In Chicago in the last year alone:
-- An autopsy showed that 3-month-old Robin Ann Marie Buchanan died of starvation. Her mother, Bernia, 34, was charged Jan. 31 with felony cruelty.
-- Sandra Brandon's three children - a boy, 6, and girls 4 and 5 - were left alone for three days in a house that police said contained only a box of potato flakes, ketchup and a jar of Miracle Whip. On Jan. 19, Brandon, 26, and her boyfriend, Elvie Holmes, 27, were charged with child neglect. The state took the kids from them briefly in 1989 after one girl was hospitalized for a broken arm, but returned them.
-- And in the most notorious case in recent memory, Amanda Wallace, 27, the mentally ill mother of 3-year-old Joseph Wallace, was accused in April of hanging him with an extension cord shortly after a judge ordered Joseph returned to her custody.
If such cases have any bright side, say advocates, it is the attention they draw to the issue.
President Clinton, at a prayer breakfast in Washington, mentioned the case. In Chicago, Vice President Gore said the child neglect problem isn't limited to one city.
"This should serve as a warning bell throughout this country," Gore said during a visit to a west side high school.
On Wednesday after the latest case came to light, Hamilton says, the DCFS child abuse hot line received 1,606 calls - an all-time record.
Child abuse reports soaring Number of child-abuse cases reported each year, in millions:
