Good reporting. Growing up, the conventional wisdom was that child services would punish families that made them get a warrant with even more unreasonable inspection and a slanted write up. I suspect not much has changed, but this New York law is so oppressive that it’s probably worth the community involving warrants more often to force these inspections to become more cursory due to limited resources.
I appreciate the Miranda-style warning suggestion. I wonder why there haven't been more cases brought up to require Miranda warnings for more situations than just arrests. It is important information for people to know, and good for the authorities to remind themselves of other people's rights.
This boils my blood. The state should tread very carefully when breaking up families. Yes some children need protection but when the state starts to take over the role of parents they gain a scary amount of influence of the next generation. I know the intent is very different but this is what the Hitler youth was all about.
My father worked in this field for years. It was a mess. Once public case would occur with a child dying at the hands of an abusive parent. So policy would change. Then there would be a high profile case where they got it wrong and took a child off of a good family. So policy would change again. Every time the blame would fall on the social workers. It nearly broke my dad when he was managing a district branch.
I have no solutions as I want children to be safe at home but it sucks from every angle.
> I know the intent is very different but this is what the Hitler youth was all about.
This is wildly inaccurate. The Hitler youth was a fully voluntary group -- in fact, at times exclusionary even among favored in-groups. It was more like what would happen if you combined elite prep schooling, the youth wing ("Young _s") of a fringe political party, and scouting into a single organization. This didn't change until 1936, and even then, the upper ranks of the group were dominated by the description above.
My point wasn't the the mechanism is identical it's that the utility or the possible utility is manifested in the Hitler youth. I'm not saying the Hitler youth was compulsory or that state influence need to be compulsory to arouse my concern.
Having an arm of the state that focuses on installing values in children can allow bad things to happen. Families can install bad values in children but the distributed nature of families mean the system is a little more stable, as you're less likely to see the same bad values installed en masse. However, this does happen as problem cultures arise in populations. We see this particularly in urban gangs. But even in this instance the concentration of power is reduced.
> Having an arm of the state that focuses on installing values in children can allow bad things to happen... But even in this instance the concentration of power is reduced.
The Hitler Youth makes, if anything, the exact opposite point. What the Hitler youth demonstrates is that a movement that focuses on installing their values in children can use radicalized youth as a powerful component in their push toward fascist revolution. This is why the German response to the Hitler Youth was to criminalize the organization, not to dismantle child welfare laws.
The entire discussion is a red herring because "installing values in children" is not the goal of child welfare agencies.
Correct the goal of child welfare agencies is not to install values in children. However, when the state has to step into raise children, the state has no choice but to install values in those children.
In my original comment I said "when the state starts to take over the role of parents they gain a scary amount of influence of the next generation". This is one of the many downsides of state welfare having to go in. I'm not denying the need. It's just one of the many problems involved.
> What the Hitler youth demonstrates is that a movement that focuses on installing their values in children can use radicalized youth as a powerful component in their push toward fascist revolution
>> What the Hitler youth demonstrates is that a movement that focuses on installing their values in children can use radicalized youth as a powerful component in their push toward fascist revolution
>> Only about 5% of these kids are ultimately found to have been physically or sexually abused.
That statement tells you a lot about the "article". Only someone with a very strong agenda would view 5% child abuse as "only". "Mission Accomplished" I guess.
The opinion pieces sites one example of overreach by officials. Where are the stories about children saved from abuse? I guess that isn't relevant to the discussion.
One month of her children being taken away is a serious result. But there's a lot at risk here.
A 95% false positive rate is extremely high, and the cost, both in terms of the emotional health of those involved, as well as the strain on resources for a chronically underfunded public service, is far from zero.
Estimates are that around 16% of children are abused, so if you're only finding 5% it means you're substantially worse at choosing households to investigate than if you were picking at random. Of course that's a national average and some places may be better or worse, but really all that indicates is that resources are being diverted to the wrong areas. Every hour of time and every dollar spent investigating households without good reason is stolen from a victim who truly needed it.
Obviously not every investigation needs to find abuse to be justified, the whole point of the investigation is we don't know if something is wrong or not. But just because there is an occasional success does not mean that the current system is working, nonetheless optimal.
Your suggestion seems to be that requiring warrants is going to make the investigations more efficient (as poorly evidenced cases will not result in a search).
I would love to see evidence there, I think that's wishful thinking. Requiring warrants will simply mean fewer searches. I understand those who think that's a fair balance for individual rights. But I don't see it uncovering more abuse. I see it uncovering less, resources being kept equal.
Well the only way you're ever going to see evidence is if you try. We could always go back to the old system if there isn't improvement. But frankly, if there isn't enough evidence to convince one person who is familiar with child protection that further investigation is warranted, then further investigation isn't warranted. If that eliminates a lot of cases from someone's docket, good - they can reallocate those resources to where they are needed.
A naive interpretation of the statistical analysis, ironically, in fact suggests that we could do better at investigating this crime by simply sampling iid for CPS checks :-\
> Estimates are that around 16% of children are abused, so if you're only finding 5% it means you're substantially worse at choosing households to investigate than if you were picking at random.
Sampling iid would be unconstitutional and also obviously politically infeasible. So, the only people who are investigated are people for whom there is probable cause or at least an accusation.
Once you're sampling from a population for whom you have either probable cause or at least an accusation, the group under suspicion probably not an iid sample of the overall population and may even be skewed in the wrong direction. Eg, a physical abuser is more likely to conceal a bruise than the parent of a particularly careless child.
Additionally, suppose for sake of argument that abusers are in fact over-represented in the accused group. The behavior of both abusers and the abused confounds the statistical analysis. Consider alcoholism as an analogy (but also very correlated underlying pathology). Just like with alocholism, there are "high functioning" abusers who are able to avert suspicion and, in case of suspicion, manipulate the people who they are abusing.
So we are sampling from a constrained population in which abusers may in fact be under-represented, and then again within that group there are confounding issues.
None of this is to say that we should abandon constitutional rights, of course. But in a country with strong protections for the accused we might actually expect certain types of crimes to be more difficult to investigate and prosecute than a "just iid sample" approach.
(It's also possible that the estimates are wrong, and in both directions. It's additionally possible that the 16% statistic refers to a different definition of abuse than the 5% number. Etc. etc.)
You're right, the population of people under suspicion is not an iid sample of the overall population and it would be unreasonable to expect the same percentage of abuse. However, we choose who is in this population by defining the set of rules for which cases are treated as legitimate and which are dismissed. If it skews in the wrong direction, that's a failure of the system to properly filter cases.
Yes a kid who ran into a doorknob is more likely to show up at school with a visible black eye than the kid whose mom is used to covering black eyes with makeup, but CPS knows, or at least should know this and alter their behavior to spend less time investigating a single unconcealed black eye and spend more time looking at the kid wearing concealer on one eye on a regular basis. The whole point of having trained professionals investigate is because we know that accusations are a noisy signal that must be filtered.
I fully agree that the 16% number should not be treated as a target. For starters, that's just sexual abuse, the rate of physical or sexual abuse is necessarily higher. But the point is that when evaluating a system you can't simply say you find abuse at a non-zero rate and thus it's working - a broken clock is right twice a day, and doing anything at all will find something. You have to compare to a placebo to see what effect your actions are having. If you're substantially worse than the placebo, that doesn't mean sugar pills are the cure, but it means you need to do things differently.
"Estimates are that around 16% of children are abused"
Who is estimating 16% of children are abused?
It doesn't sound correct at all.
On it's face the simplest explanation is child protective services is investigating a different definition of "abuse" than whomever claimed 16% of children are abused.
> That statement tells you a lot about the "article". Only someone with a very strong agenda would view 5% child abuse as "only".
It also entirely ignores findings of neglect. An agent who inspects a home and discovers that the children are sleeping on the living room floor and have no clean clothing, for example, hasn't found evidence that children have been "physically or sexually abused", but has made a finding of neglect which is probably sufficient for intervention.
This isn't to say that there aren't problems here. The article goes on to discuss a number of real problems in home inspections from child services -- but this statistic alone isn't representative of the real situation.
It's 5% of the children in houses they search, not 5% of children. And they're searching the houses specifically because there has been an allegation of abuse or neglect.
