It’s a really horrible reality that they need to make decisions like this. But which is worse - letting an abused child slip through the cracks, or take a child away from an innocent family?
There’s no good answer here. If there was negligence and a cover up, then yeah to hell with them, if not then mistakes have aweful repercussions. CPS must be one of the hardest jobs in the country.
The foster system does not produce very great results from what I understand, including the chance that a child will be abused by a foster family.
The statistically likely outcomes for a child with a loving family plummet substantially if they go into the foster system
Unfortunately an abused child going into the foster system isn't likely to see their potential outcomes improve by a substantial amount
Therefore, taking a loved child away from an innocent family is way worse and it's not even close
Their job is to protect at risk kids, not just shuffle kids to new homes
The damage that a false positive would do to a child is unfathomable
The foster system does overall help abused children, but fostered kids don't have as good outcomes in general as non-fostered kids
I cannot imagine that relocating a child to their grandparents is automatically worse than letting them stay in a home that stinks of burnt heroine, where their trash-bag full of laundry for the relocation stinks of urine.
Comparing outcomes of children who are being abused against children in foster care will show improvement generally. But there's still a pretty wide gap between their outcomes and the outcomes of children in healthy families
Also, do grandparents really count as "the foster system"?
There is always a balancing of false-positives vs. false-negatives, in any attempt to restrict any behavior. And while I agree that the consequences of the false-positives are dire, sometimes unthinkable, CPS and its power to remove children from their homes is in response to something also dire and unthinkable.
You seem to be arguing that the consequences of a false positive vastly outweigh the consequences of a false negative. Viewing the consequences of an admittedly light-duty false negative (that is, abuse or neglect that, for one reason or another, hasn't received a CPS response), and being on the periphery of another much worse false negative (via contact with a member of the jury), I am uncertain.
Which is worse? Lacking the power to remove a child from a bad situation, or occasionally sending a child into a bad situation? I don't have a good answer for that question. I just disagree with the idea that either is indisputably worse than the other.
Its awful that there is a situation that we have to choose at all. And unambiguously, the foster system must be reformed. The OP even quotes the family's lawyer as saying that CPS disproportionately goes after poorer families ("neglect" and "poverty" can look the same, even if the cause is wildly different). But I do not think the foster system is so broken that we should abolish CPS entirely and just accept actual child abuse as unpreventable.
I have not advocated for that anywhere.
> Which is worse? Lacking the power to remove a child from a bad situation, or occasionally sending a child into a bad situation
Actively using power to make someone's life worse is worse than failing to use power to make someone's life better. Even if the power is used with all of the best intentions
That's why the road to hell is paved with those
the problem is that fostering in most cases is the wrong way to help those children. instead the parents need help. but that help needs to be provided in a way such that parents and children can stay together.
but that is not what is done. instead the children are taken away and the parents are left to themselves: go fix your problems, and then you can have your children back.
pretty much the only cases where fostering is the right choice is where children are in actual danger or the parents need to go to prison for serious crimes.
How would you relatively weigh the cost of false negatives to false positives? The relative benefit of true positive to true negatives? 1:10, 1:100, 1:1000?
1. There's likely some other statistical assumptions I'm glossing over, but I'll leave that to someone more knowledgeable about that than I
Imagine having a loving family that treats you super well and being taken away from them.
Then imagine being placed in another home with new people you don't know, with new rules and attitudes that haven't evolved organically with you as you've grown. Now you start to get in trouble for stuff you used to do that your parents didn't care about, because the new parents don't have the same tolerance for the same things
That's not even that bad really
Imagine having siblings who throw the fact you're adopted in your face when they're mad at you
Or having foster parents that actually are abusers themselves, but they're better at not being caught.
I don't think you can really truly calculate the potential harm that taking a loved child from a healthy family and placing them into foster care could do
If one makes such a decision without weighing the tradeoffs, they're being negligent.
If they refuse to make the decision, then they're choosing to never place abused children in foster care which is one of the options in the decision process, so they're still making a decision. There is no escape hatch.
I'd encourage you to do the same imaginative thought experiment for the kid who's in an abusive bio-family. Would it change how you decide?
However the bar for that decision making needs to be very high
There is no room for false positives in this system. If that requirement leads to paralyzing the system, then the system is broken and needs to be changed
the well-being of the children needs to be the first concern, and it needs to be understood that separating children from their parents against their will is detrimental to the children's well-being because can hurt the children more than the abuse they receive from their parents (unless the abuse is actually life threatening)
most children will not have a problem to stay with other people for a while if they are given a choice. at least the older ones who understand what is going on.
for parents with young children, i believe the better approach is family therapy or living under supervision.
but these things can only be done if we as a society accept that these are cases of mental illness, and instead of punishment these people need help.
The question is how many are acceptable. 10:1? 10,000:1?
That strikes me as too close to Pascal's Wager to end in rational conclusions.
The question is a matter of having sufficient evidence, taking precautionary measures proportional to the evidence of abuse when it makes sense, and the use of prudential judgement. The last one is unavoidable. The law is not a mechanically applied algorithm. It is something that requires good judgement. The most important things are sound abuse laws, and competent people with good judgement who have a good understanding of abuse and the law.
I'm not sure that taking a loved child and putting it in the foster system is worse than missing an abused child and leaving it with the abusing family.
So I categorically dispute that "taking a loved child away from an innocent family is way worse and it's not even close".
If I interpret this charitably, maybe they only saw the worst of the worst because of their position as a surgeon?
If I interpret this less than charitably, you are implying that a single incidence of child abuse has about 50% fatality rate. This would be simply false. You don't have to go back further in time than 40 years, and it was commonplace for pretty much everybody to beat their children. If 50% was an actual fatality rate for a single incidence, population worldwide would have dwindled due to these fatalities.
In the case in question, the kid was already in the hospital. So at that point, we're at the "worst of the worst" situation... if it's abuse. So they want to be really sure whether it's abuse.
Note well: This is not to defend CPS for the things they did in this case. I am merely saying that this is why CPS wants to look very carefully at such cases.
I think it's questionable if a third party has a right to judge and take action
The greater problem with the CPS or similar agencies is underfunding. This leads to families only having dealings with them when the circumstances are suspected of being dire, rather than CPS having the resources to support parents in a meaningful way over a meaningful period of time. Such meaningful support helps to reduce the need for more drastic interventions and allows social workers to have much more knowledge of the families they are helping and of when interventions are needed.
i agree with your second paragraph. the focus needs to be on supporting parents to take better care of their children.
Stealing a child from an innocent family. Obviously. That removing a child from their parents to a random foster family is an administrative decision versus action that requires a jury is in itself kind of shocking. (Next of kin is slightly different.)
At the time, I remember finding that frustrating, but in retrospect I think it was the right approach. Why? Because invalid reports are always going to vastly outnumber valid ones, in part because it is easy to be judgmental about someone else's parenting for a variety of prejudicial reasons, so "innocent until proven guilty" should be the default stance of any agency tasked with investigating such reports.
That is why stories about shaken baby syndrome are so galling, because the faux-science sets up a "guilty until proven innocent" scenario, which is definitely the wrong approach.
From a practical standpoint, taking a child away from the innocent family is worse. Even if they somehow were to "rescue" the abused child, that's pretty much a lost cause. They aren't doing it to salvage the child, but to assuage some sort of guilt that they let it happen in the first place. The child will be placed in foster care, which at its best is merely inadequate and soul-crushing, but at its worst is some gauntlet of rape and abuse itself which few children are capable of surviving psychologically intact.
So when they take the child away from the innocent family, this is almost certainly a net negative response. Instead of helping more children, they are hurting more children.
It's a very easy answer, easily reached, and solidly objective. It's just not a comfortable answer, because most people want the answer to be different.
> CPS must be one of the hardest jobs in the country.
Jobs whose premise is fundamentally defective often are the most difficult. Think of how many times someone who worked for CPS or who was affiliated with them said (cynically) something to the effect of how "no matter what we do, it seems like we're always in the wrong". Well, that's because they are.
I absolutely agree that every time a child is abused in foster care, that's a damning failure of the system. But I do not share your belief that children who experience sufficient abuse to be removed from the home are permanently broken. Nor do I share your belief that the foster system is at best soul-crushing.
I do not actually believe that "mistaken child removal" happens with any great frequency, CPS tends to err on the side of caution in most such cases, though out of cowardice or incompetence I couldn't even guess. If I implied this in the first comment, then I retract that and apologize. However, though it might not be with great frequency, even the uncommon occurrence of that is horrible.
>Finally, do you have data that illustrates how often children are relocated to strangers' houses, vs. with family members?
I do not. I would remind you though, that this isn't quite the gotcha you might think it is. I would guess that it happens quite often that they are placed with (distant) family, but that's not a good solution for any number of reasons. Though not always the case, relatives have higher chances of being dysfunctional than random chance should allow for, they often allow the parents contact despite CPS warnings, they tend to be elderly and less able to provide the sort of care that is merited. Even if we assume that children are placed with them half the time and that they are always a good placement, that only halves the sort of problem I've hinted at in the first comment.
>But I do not share your belief that children who experience sufficient abuse to be removed from the home are permanently broken.
I hesitate with this one. I would offer to let you decide what the criteria for "permanently broken" is in this context, so that I can find the particular studies that would convince you. The life expectancy is roughly 75 years, and I'd suggest that if some large fraction of their life was dysfunctional, weighted to the earlier years rather than in old age, then this might be a good way to figure it. "Dysfunctional" could be somewhat objective, like being institutionalized, imprisoned, in the justice system, with debilitating psychiatric illnesses (alcoholism, etc), or just dead from any of those earlier than a person should die.
But you do the definition. I feel like I might be stacking the deck with my suggestion, and I can't even think of a good way not to do that. It's all pretty fucking bleak.
For myself, for my niece, I have to believe that doing the social support equivalent of taking them out by the woodshed as soon as abuse occurs is giving up way too soon.
Taking a child away from an innocent family is so much worse.
Given that CPS, like the police, have no obligation to help, it makes sense to error on the cautionary side of Do no harm.
Sacrificing the lives of some children and families for the greater good is not the type of utilitarian calculus the government should be engaging in.
Unfortunately many hospitals have mandated reporter policies, which in some states makes them effectively extensions of law enforcement bodies (including CPS).
My personal opinion is that this is in direct conflict with the need for privacy between patients and their providers, who are no longer able to exercise judgement about what is best for the people they are treating.
The linked article makes it sound as if the accusation was entirely due to a bad diagnosis of a medical condition, which was easily contradicted by standard medical tests/imaging that was available to the hospital staff.
But make no mistake, a $250mil judgement has nothing to do with the significance of judgement, and everything to do with juries that make up ridiculous amounts which are later reduced on appeal.
Bad initial diagnoses that are also criminal accusations have your kids sent to the rape orphanages for 5 months until a judge gets it settled.
> Im more concerned that there was insufficient review to catch a bad diagnosis before the state took action,
Well, same here. A few hostile glares from hospital staff are something I could weather, if 30 minutes later a second set of eyes tells the first that they're stupid and this is just an accident from whatever, and not shaken baby syndrome. Arguably, some minimally competent review would have caught not only this case, but many others.
Basically, hospital employees have reasonable access to patients/records as part of their care but CPS needs to go through a process for the same access. This particular employee wore both hats to obtain alleged illegal access to the children/records.
They are never punished for the horror stories they cause. There are of course super famous stories such as Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway, but there are several others that never get talked about in the media but become nightmares for the people involved.
I personally know of a family who moved back to India after their children were taken away from them for some time based on some stupid scare about a bump on the head the child got from colliding with a table while running around the house.
The teacher noticed, shouted abuse, got the cops involved.
Of course not a single person in this self-righteous chain received any punishment or even a rap on the knuckle.