In short, a woman is attacked with a knife and her newborn baby is stolen. The baby is found a week later and the mother is allowed to see it, but authorities keep the baby and take the woman’s other three kids, age 3, 9 and 11, out of their homes and away from their mother and place them in state custody “for safety reasons.”
Now, there could perfectly good reasons for them to have done so. Perhaps the house was a pigsty. Perhaps the attacker’s family threatened the kids. Who knows? Certainly not us. Thanks to the ridiculous privacy concerns that have grown up in the wake of the Supreme Court’s invention of privacy rights, we’ve now reached the point in this country where law enforcement can arrest people, and child protection agencies can swoop in and take children forcibly from their homes, and then, claiming privacy concerns, keep the rest of the populace completely in the dark as to their reasoning and the legitimacy of their actions.
I think this is a very troubling development in a country that is supposed to be free of unreasonable search and seizure and committed to due process and the public’s right to know. It seems that our freedoms and our protection from overzealous police and child care services are being eroded by the day. What say you?
ETA: I’m out for the night and have a pretty busy day ahead tomorrow, and so I likely won’t be back to respond for a while. But I would like to know what everyone thinks about this situation and whether or not the reasons for police and child service actions should be made public.
Well, just offhand, a very good reason for privacy in this matter would be that unwanted attention and publicity could mess up the possibility of reconciliation for the family. There may also be pending action that can’t be publicized for obvious reasons. Also, when it comes down to it, it really isn’t our business, from a personal standpoint. But I do think that the state’s actions should be in conformance with regulations and also that there should be checks to avoid abuse.
If the mother feels she’s been wrongly treated, and needs the massive weight of public opinion to bend the justice system her way, there’s nothing stopping her from going public with whatever details the official system isn’t giving out, is there?
Not that I think, in most cases, this would be a terribly good idea. The court of public opinion is a fickle beast. But it seems like, by not being free with the details of the case, the System is actually giving her more options than otherwise.
If it turns out she’s a victim of official heavy-handedness, she can shout about it to the rooftops. If not … why exactly do we need to know again?
I strongly agree. If this can be done without scrutiny it will be abused.
Child Protective Services can be aggressive, sometimes excessively so. I had a friend with a live-in nanny who became a problem: she acquired a troublesome boyfriend. They were caught at 3am speeding (135 mph) in a Porsche he’d “borrowed” from the garage where he sometimes worked. The police threatened them with arrest, to which she responded “You can’t arrest me - I have two small children at home!” She gave their correct ages: 3 and 1.2 - but omitted such details as the fact that these kids weren’t hers.
It’s considered child abuse to leave kids of this age home alone, so at 4am my friend was woken by a loud knock on his door. The policeman was willing to talk, but the social worker simply wanted to swoop in and gather up his kids. With some difficulty, he was able to avoid having them taken.
What SCOTUS case are you refering to? I think it’s just the policy of the involved agencies not to release details about cases like these, I wasn’t aware that they’re acting under some sort of judicial requirement.
I don’t know the facts of this case, but just for the record, CPS cannot take kids out of a home. It has to be ordered by a judge. CPS can make a case to a judge as to the why it thinks a household may be unfit, but they don’t make the decison. A court does. If these kids were removed, it was because a judge ordered it done, and the judge ordered it done because the evidence presented fit a prescribed set of criteria.
The image that CPS workers can, or even want to, just arbitrarily snatch kids away from homes is a bogus one.
Don’t you know that some people here are totally open-minded because they do not listen to facts, and only believe what they know to be true through anecdote and personal experience?
So don’t you go bringing facts and logic in here Mister!
I don’t like this kind of thing either. Someone should definitely lose their job over this. Very, very disturbing. There’s really no justification whatsoever for a headline that includes the phrase “Baby Snatch.”
Pretty hard to debate the issue as they are releasing none of the facts behind taking the kids into care. Maybe its overly officious CPS workers abusing their powers, maybe the situation that led up to it was so terrible that no one in their right mind would agree to let her keep her kids.
–or maybe it’s a media outfit jumping the gun and reporting on a situation that’s still pending? It seems likely to me that there’s a lot likely to change in this story as it develops.
There are only a few telling statements in the news: the kids were taken “purely for safety reasons,” with no further details; the newborn boy was abducted by a woman “posing as an immigration agent”; the mother’s “immigration status is not clear”; and the differing surnames of mother and child, implying that the mother is not married. These add up to the possibility that Mom may get deported without her kids.
I worked for a month at a child protection agency here, as a temp. There was a good paying job on offer, but I didn’t get it, and pretended disappointment. Because I know damn good and well that I wouldn’t be able to take it, I’m not strong enough to take that kind of routine, everyday, heart-wrenching. I saw files there 10-inches thick, helpless children abused in ways that make me want to summarily execute. Not enough shelters, not enough foster homes, even less decent foster homes, the dreary list goes on and on.
I don’t know where we find the people who can do that, but you won’t find him here, because I ain’t got it.
This is wrong. If CPS thinks there is an immediate danger to the kids they can take them without a court order. It is true that they will have to go in front of a judge pretty quickly to justify their actions.
The norm is to requrie a warrant, but if the child is at substantial risk, then a warrant is not required, but a warrantless apprehension must later be approved by a judge. Laws differ by jurisdiction, so never say never, but here in Ontario we have this:
Dio, would you please provide a solid cite for your statement?