> Some among the medical staff and social workers involved in the case thought that Jenn reacted strangely to the discovery of her children’s injuries. She didn’t show emotion or seem bothered. Her affect was “flat,” according to the D.S.S. report. The hospital’s abuse specialist concluded that the baby girl’s fractures were “diagnostic of physical abuse” and that the bruises were “inflicted.” D.S.S. concluded the boy’s injuries were also the result of abuse. A factor in this determination was that Robbie and Jenn did not have “a plausible explanation” for the injuries. “We had no idea,” Robbie told me later.

What’s perverse is that the state can take your kids away without a trial and on the basis of evidence this flimsy, and the expectation is that you are guilty unless you can provide an explanation they’re happy with. To add insult to this obvious injury, you will be held to account for your affect when dealing with the state apparatus charged with taking your children away and subjected to weird psychologizing by people without any particular psychological expertise (as if there is a correct way to respond to these questions in the first place). A tired and overworked social worker who just came from collecting six kids from a drug den can operationalize a gut feeling that your responses were “flat” and you’ll go to bed that night not knowing where your children are or when (if ever) you’ll get them back.

The idea that this only ever happens to bad people who deserve it is naïve in the extreme, and the annals of CPS are full of cases of outrageous mishandling and overreach.