More Outrageous Taking of Children by State Agencies
Posted by Mr. Thoughtful on May 1, 2008
Several days ago I blogged on the case of the Michigan professor whose child was taken away by the state. I’ve since learned that this was not an isolated incident, but seems to be common across the United States and in England. Hans Bader, a lawyer who blogs at openmarkets.org, gives an excellent rundown of the shocking situation. I’ll excerpt parts of his piece, but if you are interested I encourage you to go to his blog and read the entire thing. http://www.openmarket.org/2008/04/18/legalized-child-stealing-in-arlington-county-virginia/
The Washington Examiner has a must-read editorial called “Baby Snatching by Arlington County.”
It shows that if County social workers seize your baby, based on false allegations of neglect, and put your baby in foster care long enough, you might never get your child back, even if you prove yourself innocent, because the courts will say it’s in “the best interests of the child” that your baby stay with the foster parents he’s gotten used to living with. (Taking that logic to its ultimate conclusion, a kidnapper who kidnapped a newborn from a hospital and then escaped prosecution on a technicality could keep the child, because the child would have bonded with the kidnapper by the time the kidnapper was apprehended).
That’s the gist of a recent Arlington, Virginia circuit court decision described in today’s Washington Examiner. County social workers took a baby away from her parents based largely on false, anonymous allegations that she was being starved, even though she was at her proper weight at the time they seized her from her parents. And although those allegations were later ruled false by a CPS hearing officer, the judge permanently removed her from her parents anyway, claiming she had bonded with her new foster parents and thus might be traumatized if she were returned. (He also cited evidence that her natural parents were not model parents, but that is not the test for terminating parental rights under the Supreme Court’s decision in Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). If it were, millions of healthy children could be removed from their families by social workers). Parents Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor spent a staggering $350,000 in legal bills in their losing fight for their child.
Although the circuit court decision is apparently justified by the so-called “best interest of the child,” its long run effect is to harm children by discouraging even fit, non-abusive parents from seeking advice or information from doctors or social workers when their children have behaviors or injuries that might sometimes be associated with parental abuse or neglect. Good parents will now worry about talking to doctors (who are required by state laws to report any possibility of abuse or neglect to social workers) or social workers lest it lead to unwarranted (and unreversible) seizures of a child by social workers.
Apparently, the state agencies committing these acts get money for each child they seize. There is therefore an incentive for them to take more children, even in cases where it wouldn’t seem warranted, at least to a reasonable person.
May 1, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I left this comment on the site you refer to, but it hasn’t been approved yet:
May 1, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Thanks for your response Dan, and for including a link to the court’s opinion. I’ve taken a quick look at it and I’d have to largely agree with your conclusion that it looks worrisome, although not as one-sidedly bad as reported.
As I read through the opinion I kept thinking that it would be helpful to at least read the transcript of the testimony. Many things about the court’s opinion were murky to me. The mother suffered from a condition called pervasive developmental disorder. I’m not clear from the brief mention in the opinion just how difficult that would make parenting.
While it is significant that the guardian ad litem appointed to represent the child’s interests recommended termination of parental rights, I’m still not convinced this was the right thing to do.
This is a difficult area and involves a weighing of the situation in foster care vs. this girl’s mother’s household that I don’t think I have enough information to do.
I am troubled by what I see as a pattern of state agency workers taking kids away from their parents for what I regard as not significant reasons, sometimes even trivial reasons. If the state terminates someone’s parental rights, I think the evidence has to very clearly support that action and the state should bear the burden of proof.