> As a precautionary measure, the hospital followed mandatory reporting statutes and my wife and I temporarily lost custody of David. Thanks to our incredibly effective defense lawyer, we were cleared of all charges within two months, during which we stayed at the hospital 24/7 with David until we sorted out the legal procedures.
Holy shit. Parents bring baby to ER ... results reveal that baby was shaken (article later confirms this was not the case) ... parents lose custody for 2 months. Horror story.
> [O]ur nanny was eventually cleared of all charges, but it took four years for the court to recognize my son’s medical condition (a rare occurrence in France, as I later discovered) during which we were forbidden to speak to her and she was forbidden to approach children, thus losing her means of livelihood.
If you read the rest of the article, you will realize that this was the absolute happy path in that kind of situation. That's the real horror story: that the default path involves stuff like losing custody forever, incarceration, suicide, divorce etc.
Yes, after discovering hundreds of families living much worse situations, I consider myself as one of the lucky few. I'm grateful for that and this is why I can spend so much energy ensuring it doesn't affect too many other families in the future.
Something similar happened recently in Massachusetts with a doctor seeing an injury the parents couldn't explain and the kid being taken away for a while. Injury turned out to probably have been done by the grandparents who never told the parents because the kid didn't fuss, but the kids were taken away in the middle of the night.
My first inclination here is to blame the doctor. Per the Hippocratic Oath, doctors need to understand the implications of making reports like this and only do so in cases where there isn't reasonable doubt or plausible explanations other than abuse. Separating children from parents and making accusations like this is extremely traumatic in itself, so the evidence bar needs to be very high.
Even if the rules tell doctors that they need to make a report in a given scenario, they should not be following the rules when they know the bureaucracies that handle these reports are dysfunctional and prone to separating children without conclusive evidence. Imo they are responsible for protecting their patients from the system in these cases.
So you err on the 'some children are abused and die' side of things, and other people err on the 'some parents get separated from their children' side.
I don't think the line is at doctors reporting, and I'll tell you why.
There are many cases of MD's having patients where they know the whole family and can't believe that abuse would be going on, so they don't report things like spiral fractures and pattern bruising in a five year old. Those are markers of serious domestic violence and abuse, but since the doc knows the parent, and the parent has a sorta reasonable explanation, fine.
No. The doctor reports, then the parents get investigated. Sorry it sucks, but the point to fix is the people interacting with the family at the point of investigation, not the report by an MD, because unfortunately the MD is going to lean towards not reporting until it is too late.
That would be fine if the investigations were fair and followed basic principles of jurisprudence like "innocent until proven guilty", but it's plain to see that kids are being separated based on very flimsy evidence.
In my book, a doctor doesn't get to absolve themselves of responsibility by saying "just following orders" and that it's the investigative system that needs to be fixed. If they know the system is broken, it's both immoral and a deep betrayal of trust for them to report people without strong evidence.
Almost any injury can be framed as possible evidence of abuse. Parents shouldn't have to be afraid that taking their kids to the hospital after an injury will get them taken away. The vast majority of injuries are not from abuse, so a system with a low bar for evidence is going to end up with more false positives than cases of abuse. This is exacerbated by the fact that abusers, for obvious reasons, are often going to avoid getting medical care for the kids they abuse.
If your reasoning were applied more broadly, we'd put anyone accused of a crime, or of even planning a crime, in prison immediately, since otherwise crimes will occur (with people hurt/killed) that could have been prevented. There's a reason the legal system doesn't work this way.
I think the point is that the blame lies with DCF, not the doctors. Doctors should report, and DCF should competently investigate. In this scenario, the doctor did their job and DCF did not.
In most dysfunctional systems its functionally impossible for individual actors to fix any part of the overarching system and MUST necessarily choose between dysfunctional options with an eye on least bad outcomes.
> These people are working in the shadows, in darkness," Lamanna said. "They can show up at your house in the middle of the night with no paperwork, no court order whatsoever, and say we’re removing under the B, we’ve decided an emergency exists."
> According to DCF’s 2022 quarterly report, about 60% of parents are reunited with their kids within a year after being removed by DCF.
Anyone who feels justified in stealing kids from parents in the middle of the night, without any due process, WITH A 60% MISS RATE, is completely and truly evil.
Seriously, more often than not DCF realizes they made a mistake and the kid goes back home. Insane.
Reuniting within a year is not intrinsically evidence that it was a bad removal - a parent can change a lot in less than a year. Most obviously, one abusive parent can be jailed or kicked out and the children go home to live with the remaining parent, who may have been abused themselves. Rehab, counseling, parenting classes, diagnosis and treatment for mental illness, moving out of an unsafe hoarding home, etc, can all be done in that time.
The ones you want to really examine are the kids who go home in less than a week. At one point I think I read that New Mexico had about 25% of children who entered care returning home within days. Those are very likely to be children who were not at risk of harm in the first place.
Who gave DCF the power to take away kids in the middle of the night without due process?
Until we vote out of office the elected representatives who passed the laws that give government agencies such draconian powers, and insist on those laws being changed, we won't fix this problem.
There's a federal act (CAPTA) that requires states to adopt mandatory reporting rules, but the rules vary from state-to-state. Some states, simply by being in a particular profession you are required to report (even when not on the job); in other states it's specifically when evidence is uncovered while performing your duties; in some states, all people are required to report.
I've never encountered a state in which a medical doctor encountering evidence of abuse while seeing a patient is not required to report it, with the exception of some states exempting mental-health professionals told things in confidence (so a psychiatrist, which is also an MD, might not be required to report it depending on the state).
Not surprised it happened in France, they are much more of a nanny state (in good and bad ways) when it comes to parenting. Like the fact that paternity tests are banned unless you have a court order, etc.
reason.com has an entire long-running series of stories like this happening in the U.S. I've heard quite a few stories from the Netherlands. It probably happens in other countries as well.
It's an issue in many Western countries, where we've seemingly become risk-averse to the point where it's causing more harm than good.
Here in Norway the child protection services have been found guilty[1] of being too quick to remove children from their parents, and not letting the parents see them.
This seems to have led to the pendulum swinging too much in the opposite direction, where they now seemingly force foster kids to meet their biological parents against the kid's will[2]...
If the state decides that it is better for a child, of no relation to you, to be taken out of foster care and you are now their legal guardian: you would be happy with this turn of events? You have a job presumably, surely that would be better than foster care or an orphanage.
I can certainly see the other side of this argument though, it feels very unfair to saddle a third party with the responsibility to support a child they had no part in making.
You may find being willfully ignorant acceptable but that’s really not the norm. I do have kids. If I knew they were not mine I would not leave them but I would have kids that were biologically mine. Either ways I want to know.
I think the importance of the "making" part greatly depends on how long it's been since the making happened. The more time that elapsed, the less important it is, and the more important the child's existing bond to their (assumed) father is. If I suddenly found out my 10 year old didn't happen to biologically come from me, it's not like I'd love her any less. What kind of monster says "Oh, so the kid's not 'biologically mine', I'm going to stop loving them!"
Never gave it much thought because my kid's genetic lineage has never really been called into question. Obviously if something like this came up, you'd have to talk to your partner about a wide variety of topics ranging from trust to STDs. But "should I keep loving and raising the child" would obviously not be one of them.
The welfare of someone else’s child doesn’t register very highly on a majority of people’s radars beyond basic humanitarian considerations. How about government provided daycare and forcing the mother to work.
Possession is nine tenths of the law. It's not someone else's child if it's in your house and you need a genetic test to deny responsibility.
This idea that bloodlines are relevant is anachronistic superstition. Several of my friends are not genetically related to their children. It's simply not relevant.
Why are you trying to play off your limited anecdotal evidence as universal? It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization and continues to be so. What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now. I can understand people that want to adopt but that’s a conscious decision they made on their part.
> It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization
Technically this is appeal to tradition. Certainly it's true that our various worldly cultures are strongly influenced by this idea, but factually speaking... before paternity tests, there was literally no way to know for men if a child was their paternal child, especially in societies with very little physical attribute variance. Therefore , it's not really true that "it's the most important thing," because we've never been able to tell for certainty who a child's father is until very recently. Even with physical attributes, our knowledge of genetics is relatively recent in human history, so there's probably lots of false positives / negatives (with hair or eye color for example).
> What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now.
This doesn't make sense in the context, is this a red herring or a strawman or similar? I believe the discussions is around situations that would normally involve a paternity test, which to me all essentially double checking whether a woman could have been impregnated by some other person than the expectant father.
It’s the same thing. If a man has sex with a woman and the government then drops off a foster child 9 months later, that’s no different than being expected to raise a child fathered by another man with the same woman.
When it comes to "justifiable reasons for leaving your partner, the person you love and trust", infidelity is right up there near the top. You seem to be implying that the victim whose trust was irrevocably shattered should also be saddled with the financial burden which resulted from the act of infidelity. If that's how you truly feel then I'll just leave it at, "I disagree." There's not enough common ground to argue upon constructively otherwise.
Adopting is no big deal. Being cuckolded is generally considered one of the biggest betrayals in the human experience. It's incredibly relevant to know if your spouse is faithful to you!
Step-fathers and step-children are well known vectors of abuse. The Cinderella Effect was verified to produce more abuse from step-relationships up to and including lethal beatings from step-fathers.
Legally it might not be relevant for whatever structural reason, but the reality is that it matters a lot.
What's the outcome for the kid? Can the system even do much to help with the child's medical condition? If not, it's irrational for people to take their children in for examination; there's no benefit and you risk being accused.
He underwent surgery to remove the excess of fluid around the brain, and his condition progressively improved. It could have worsened without the operation, we'll never know. Now, at almost 8, he's doing great.
I've seen cases where parents call the ER after a collapse of their child, only to see their child wake up just fine a few minutes later. The EMT tells them it's not necessary to bring their child to the hospital given the child has recovered, but the parents insist. At the hospital, sometimes they have to insist too for a CT scan to be performed. This is where doctors find subdural bleeding and the parents end up accused, the child is removed for months, etc. Yet, the child gets no particular medical treatment. None of this would have occurred if the parents hadn't insisted!
Parents only know symptoms, which could be anything. Those same symptoms (or small variations) can lead to a very different diagnosis which is easily treatable.
Holy shit. Parents bring baby to ER ... results reveal that baby was shaken (article later confirms this was not the case) ... parents lose custody for 2 months. Horror story.