Sorta related. A friend has worked for CPS since the 90s. She told me that CPS (in California) has the right to enter a home without a warrant or any real judicial oversight. All they need is evidence there's child abuse going on at the home. No guidance on what qualifies as "evidence".
Well, if that isn't bad enough, it gets worse. The local police department knows this, and they use it to get around pesky search warrants. Basically, the local PD calls in a fake tip to CPS that there's child abuse going on inside a house they wanna search. CPS, in turn, calls the local PD for assistance to conduct a child welfare check inside the house. Once the PD is inside the house, they can pretty much search however they want - no warrant, and all the paperwork and accountability belongs to CPS. CPS is fully aware of what's going on; the local PD bullies them into continuing this situation, basically threatening to stop assisting them on all child welfare checks if they say anything. My friend told me it's easy to spot when this is happening because a half-dozen cops, dressed in SWAT gear, will show up to do a child welfare check, where it normally takes one rookie cop. She said she's participated in situations like this when there wasn't even any children in the house.
This is about Shaken Baby Syndrome, which I learned from one of your comments is a fraudulent diagnosis: only a fraction of the "shaken babies" are actually abused. The Ask HN was about 'useless projects'. From /u/rossant's conclusion to his comment:
> [...] But more importantly, think about all these professionals who have built an entire industry on false premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
oh, the submission was yours too, didn't notice until just now. Hah! I'd added the comment linked above to my favorites, which helped me track it down. Thanks for the links.
Edit:
> The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism. [0]
It's an unfortunate headline (percolated through here because of HN's policy of preferring original titles).
The actual case happened in Texas. Sounds like the family sold their house and moved to Reno because of it.
News 4 is the Reno NBC affiliate. They're including "Nevada family" to make it sound local, but that's not an appropriate headline for HN's global audience. Makes it sound like Nevada institutions are unfairly taking babies from their families.
Agencies like CPS have to walk a very fine line on the false positive vs false negative optimization.
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.
Right but unless the decision is "never enter children into the foster system," then there will be a decision boundary that results in some amount of both false positives and false negatives[1]. We can, like you allude to, adjust the boundary to weigh them differently.
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
> How would you relatively weigh the cost of false negatives to false positives
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
I have imagined all of those and still conclude that they need to be compared in order to weigh the pros and cons of making the decision.
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?
At no point am I advocating for not removing abused children from their abusive circumstances and placing them in foster care
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
No false positives is an unreasonably high standard, as it no false negative. For example, children do sometimes lie, or they claim abuse when there isn't any when under the influence of other adults who distort the child's notion of what constitutes abuse. Perfection is not attainable, whether false positives or false negatives are concerned. Mistakes will happen. You cannot assume the worst as a precaution, nor ignore evidence that strongly suggests abuse. We cannot control the world. Lots of crime happens that is never punished, sometimes because of the neglect of the state, but also sometimes because chasing down every crime does more harm than good. In the case of child abuse, an overbearing state with oversensitive notions of child abuse is dangerous. The state must accept its limitations and mind the common good.
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.
children should never be taken away from their parents unless the children's life is in danger, or the children are clearly fearing their parents. in other words, simply ask the children, observe the situation and collect evidence.
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.
This statement seems to be based on a false premise that foster care is bad care (it is often very good care where I originate from, UK) and ignores the fact that sometimes parents kill their children and that there are many children in desperate need of help.
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.
it's not the foster care that is the problem. even if the foster parents are perfect, separating children from their parents against their will is causing severe trauma to the children and often hurting them more than what the parents might do to them.
i agree with your second paragraph. the focus needs to be on supporting parents to take better care of their children.
I knew a guy who was a surgeon at a big children's hospital. He said that, if a kid came in with damage from abuse, and they didn't detect it and intervene, the odds were 50% that the next time they saw the child, it would be dead.
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".
> I knew a guy who was a surgeon at a big children's hospital. He said that, if a kid came in with damage from abuse, and they didn't detect it and intervene, the odds were 50% that the next time they saw the child, it would be dead.
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.
I think it's like this: If there is child abuse serious enough to require hospitalization, and the authorities don't intervene at that time, the next instance of child abuse serious enough to come to the attention of the authorities has a 50% chance of being fatal. (So I guess that I'm agreeing with your "worst of the worst" interpretation.)
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.
Man, I dunno how opiod-crisis-adjacent you are, but I am very close to it.
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.
To clarify, I'm talking about outcomes of children who are in families that aren't abusing them, versus children who have been placed in foster care (for any reason)
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"?
At least in my state (Washington), CPS prefers to relocate kids to nearby family members over actual foster homes, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
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.
> 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
I think the point is rather that the system should skew extremely heavily towards inaction. For example is better to let 10 children die than falsely rehome 1.
i don't see the problem in the foster system itself (yes the system may have issues, but that's another topic)
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.
The comment you are replying to talks about "false positive vs false negative optimization". Are there cases where CPS should just not do anything because the probability of abuse is so low? Yes. If you are implying that we should take "no chances", then CPS should just take everybody's children away from them. After all, there's always more than 0% chance that someone is beating their child.
I don't know if you read the lawsuit but, if the statements provided are true, Texas CPS exceeded any reasonable definition of appropriate behavior. The child was deemed not abused by multiple doctors as well as Oklahoma CPS. Texas CPS proceeded to take the children away from their parents and placed them in foster homes despite the standard procedure dictating they be placed with relatives. The actual behavior of the Texas CPS agents was also egregious.
> which is worse - letting an abused child slip through the cracks, or take a child away from an innocent family?
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.)
That's not what the lawsuit is about. It says that state agents were pretending to be caregivers in the hospital. They illegally searched the kids and accessed medical records. Also they kept the kids from their parents illegally.
Having worked in a position where it was part of the job description to periodically report parents to CPS, my experience was that it was actually quite challenging to get CPS to take up a case, even when there was lots of evidence suggesting abuse was taking place. In general, CPS seemed to work very hard to prevent false positives, and concerned itself far less with false negatives.
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.
> But which is worse - letting an abused child slip through the cracks, or take a child away from an innocent family?
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.
Do you have some data to support the position that foster care is at best inadequate? Do you have data to support the position that mistaken child removal is as widespread as even e.g. child abuse within the foster system? Finally, do you have data that illustrates how often children are relocated to strangers' houses, vs. with family members?
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 need to give this a little more thought, but tomorrow or maybe this weekend I can dig up some studies to back up this conclusion. I think that it should be possible to show how that those removed from homes by CPS and placed into foster care have long term economic and psychiatric issues into adulthood that put them (more or less) on par with those who aren't removed and continue to suffer abuse as those people move into adulthood. That should settle any doubts about the "at best inadequate". Or do you interpret the meaning of my words differently?
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.
I've first hand knowledge of how problematic the extended family of child abusers can be. But the argument from CPS and the courts is that all else being equal (including probability of abuse in the new digs), the familiarity of grandparents, aunts/uncles, adult siblings is better for the child than a foster home or ersatz orphanage. I'm not sure if there's data to back that up, but given how frequently this occurs as an informal arrangement (I'm currently watching this particular arrangement unfold with my parents-in-law and a niece, and the particular details of that situation are, as you say, pretty bleak), I suspect that it is, on balance, the best outcome for a shitty situation.
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.
There is a good answer - probabilities aren’t the way to subject law abiding parents to the torture that is having their children kidnapped and sent away. You either have proof that parents are criminals beyond a reasonable doubt or you don’t. It doesn’t matter if some bad parents are missed - why should that have any bearing on the individual rights of good parents?
It's pinned on the hospital because there was a CPS consultant on the hospital's payroll that was seemingly allowed access to the children/records as a CPS consultant by using their hospital employee role.
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.
> it makes sense to error on the cautionary side of Do no harm.
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.
> I wonder how significant their negligence was to lead to a 250 million judgment.
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 diagnoses happens. Im more concerned that there was insufficient review to catch a bad diagnosis before the state took action, or in follow-up to a precautionary action.
Bad initial diagnoses, when the concern is purely medical, rarely cause problems outside of trauma. You get the shit scared out of you maybe, but the doctors/specialists ask for more followup tests just to be sure, and it gets sorted.
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.
The problem with pseudo-regulatory agencies like the CPS and the "think of the children" argument is, while they do of course do a lot of good, there is no meaningful way in the system for punishing them for false positives. So it's not a meaningful self-balancing system that reaches a meaningful equilibrium.
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.
This happens way too frequently and is very traumatic for parents and the child. There was another prominent case in Boston where police and CPS (they call it DCF) showed up in the middle of the night, without a court order, based on their arbitrary judgment that it was an emergency, and stole the parents’ newborn away for them for months:
https://www.nbcboston.com/investigations/federal-lawsuit-mov...
The worst part is the defendants in the lawsuit (DCF) tried to claim qualified immunity for kidnapping children. Parental rights are a core part of the human experience and shouldn’t be violated in this way.
>Just a housekeeping note: it seems a lot of the arguments in this thread have entrenched into parents rights vs child’s rights.
No, it's "parent's rights" vs. "concern troll's" rights.
Blessing arbitrary "bUt I tHoUgHt It WaS aBuSe" complaints with the guns of the State is, the overwhelming majority of the time, not in a child's (or society's) best interest.
That includes "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" reporting personnel who are so very eager to "save" some kid from evil (because it's everywhere, don't you know) that they end up assuming it's everywhere, which is how a kid walking half a block down the street or playing in their front yard becomes child abuse.
After all, they're trained professionals, and when have trained professionals ever been wrong about assessing risks? Besides, those employed by the bureaucracy have sovereign immunity anyway, so there will be zero personal consequences if they get it wrong: privatize successes, socialize failures.
> Blessing arbitrary "bUt I tHoUgHt It WaS aBuSe" complaints with the guns of the State is, the overwhelming majority of the time, not in a child's (or society's) best interest.
I can totally buy that it happens some of the time (and every time it's a tragedy), but the overwhelming majority of the time? I find it hard to believe. It's not like the US government has an unlimited CPS funding to meddle with every parents.
Parents have rights. The children belong to them first, not the state. It is absurd to contemplate anything different, unless you think everyone is just a slave to the state and whoever is in power, or if you aren’t a parent and don’t understand the experience. Taking someone’s child away from them during the critical and beautiful first few years is frankly a form of torture, a cruel and unjust punishment that should only be undertaken if the parents themselves are being jailed.
In any fair society, rights like parental rights are removed only when someone commits a sufficient crime beyond a reasonable doubt as a result of a legal process. One low skill CPS worker shouldn’t be able to decide that some parent should have their children removed.
Well, if that isn't bad enough, it gets worse. The local police department knows this, and they use it to get around pesky search warrants. Basically, the local PD calls in a fake tip to CPS that there's child abuse going on inside a house they wanna search. CPS, in turn, calls the local PD for assistance to conduct a child welfare check inside the house. Once the PD is inside the house, they can pretty much search however they want - no warrant, and all the paperwork and accountability belongs to CPS. CPS is fully aware of what's going on; the local PD bullies them into continuing this situation, basically threatening to stop assisting them on all child welfare checks if they say anything. My friend told me it's easy to spot when this is happening because a half-dozen cops, dressed in SWAT gear, will show up to do a child welfare check, where it normally takes one rookie cop. She said she's participated in situations like this when there wasn't even any children in the house.