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There is a really big problem with the child protection system, which a judge pointed out to me on Tuesday, while issuing a ruling from the bench: the same agency charged with providing support to parents is charged with removing children from parents. Why is that a problem?
The setting in which the judge said what she said helps explain: I represent a 19-year-old mother of two children under three. My client was in DCF care as a child and elected to stay past her 18th birthday in the adolescents program. So she has an adolescent caseworker.
That person is supposed to serve the role that parents serve to young adults: provide money, give advice, check in now and then, be there in emergencies. And my client has relied on her and confided in her, telling her, for example, of an incident of physical abuse by her ex.
Guess what happened then? DCF removed her children because she "allowed" them to be exposed to domestic violence. But eventually, her kids came home, and things were going OK. She had the adolescent worker, another worker for her as a parent, a therapist, and a caseworker.
Folks were seeing her and her kids every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Every little hiccup that usually attends parenting young, active children was documented: the time the younger child put a penny in his mouth; the time the older one opened the fridge and...
spread food around the kitchen; the time one of them opened up his diaper and played with his poop. Every incident is in a file, and with every incident, the workers responded calmly, helpfully, recognizing that this is the business of childrearing.
Then, the 2-year-old managed to reach a drawer, grab a pill bottle my client thought was properly closed, and eat a bunch of antibiotics while she was in the bathroom. My client responded right: called the doctor, DCF, and poison control, and took the kid to the ER. He was fine.
The DCF workers weren't overly concerned. They bought her some safety locks and made sure she installed them, followed up with the ER docs, etc. The same day, they wrote in the file, "Appears to be an isolated incident. No prior history of poor supervision."
And then, several days later, upper management stepped in with (I presume) a rule: if a child ingests prescription medicine, we remove that child. Never mind whether we can win the case. Let it be on the judge's head and not ours.
So we had a trial that was nominally about the risk arising from a single incident but actually trotted out a string of minor parenting challenges from the last year - all of which were deemed unimportant when they happened - to create a picture of a pattern of bad parenting.
And no one who knew this family was actually concerned about the children's safety. But upper management was concerned about the outside possibility of bad publicity if they didn't remove the kids and then, later, the kids were harmed. So they rolled the dice.
(In the mean time, these children were abruptly removed from their mother and placed in two different non-relative homes in the midst of a pandemic.)
In my closing argument, I really went in on DCF. I called the removal cavalier. I pointed out that there was lots of testimony about risk assessment concerning the children being at home, but none about assessing the long-term harm that might come from a three-week removal.
(Parents are entitled to a trial on removals within about two weeks, but trials often take more than one day, and with multiple lawyers involved - one for the kids, one for the state, one for each parent - resolution may not come for up to a month.)
The judge ruled for my client; she sent the kids home. But in her ruling, she made a good point: the problem isn't that DCF necessarily did the wrong thing so much as that DCF is charged with doing two things that are in tension: preserving families & protecting children.
I was furious about a plainly bad removal, but the judge was right: it's a systemic issue. And embedded in that is this truth: systems protect themselves. DCF is necessarily more alert to a 3% chance of serious injury to a child than a 75% chance of long-term psychological harm.
That's because if a child is harmed after DCF had a chance to protect her, the whole world casts blame. But if a child grows up traumatized and as an adult gets involved with the criminal justice system or the child protection system as an adult, no one puts that on DCF's tab.
And that is what happens: DCF, in the interest of protecting children from the trauma-related behaviors of their parents quickly and without engaging in supporting those parents in a transformative way, is creating a new generation of traumatized parents. See, e.g., my client.
Maybe the most frustrating part of all this is that it goes almost entirely unseen. The judges, mostly white, mostly from at least middle class roots, come from entirely different worlds than the parents who come before them.
They are unlikely, then, to understand the pressures the parents face. I remember a case where my client left a profanity-filled voicemail for a casworker after a visit was canceled. DCF introduced the recording as proof of my client's being unstable.
I had to introduce evidence that my client had taken two buses, a one-way trip of over an hour on a day with heavy snow, ON CHRISTMAS EVE, only to learn, upon arriving, that the visit was canceled because the worker had not come in, because of the snow, and had not called.
A poor person in Hartford would not have needed that explanation to listen to the voicemail and say, "I would have done the same thing." But the judge in that case (who was thoughtful and open!) definitely had no idea that a 10-minute drive is an hour-long bus schlep.
And, of course, it happened in a closed courtroom. No one could be there to look at DCF holding a woman's poverty and misery against her and say, "Are you fucking kidding me?" The same is true of my trial this week.
DCF removed a woman's kids for a bunch of things that anyone who has raised kids would look at and say, "That sucks, but I understand how it happened."
Not only is there no actual punishment for a questionable removal; there's no moral opprobrium. Everyone involved, from the frontline casworkers to the attorney to the Commissioner, walks away thinking they took sensible steps to protect children.
Only my client and her kids hold the trauma.
