A look at the CPS, obesity, and law enforcement.
“Probably most of [the CPS’s] calls are from mandated reporters, such as teachers. They see a kid who comes to school in old dirty clothes a lot, or see some bruises, or are told their parents are drunk or fighting each other or, possibly, hitting them. Or, sometimes, angry neighbors or relatives trying to get people in trouble. I see the worst stuff, the minority that actually merits a legal filing. I’ve seen little serious injury. It’s mostly druggy parents, neglect, loud domestic squabbles, and inappropriate discipline of problem children involving yelling and smacking around and belts.
And, yeah, there’s the sex stuff. Again, very little “nightmare” fodder — because that stuff ends up with the police. Typical scenario (at least in this jurisdiction) is a teenage Latina stepdaughter, with behavior problems and very low test scores and better-treated half-siblings, who claims her Latino stepfather touched her butt and brushed up against her. She wants stepdad out of the house. She tells a relative, who calls the Department. They remove all kids from the home. Unless mom immediately swears she believes daughter and kicks stepdad out of home, the Department will keep all the kids out of the home.” -Sheila Tone
There was a recent to-do where some Harvard profs suggest that extremely obese kids be taken away from their parents and put into foster care. This is, to me, a complicated issue. But, to no great surprise, it’s turned into something of a political topic. ED Kain writes:
Extreme obesity is no laughing matter, to be sure, and it’s very sad to see it in children. What strikes me as far, far more tragic is the prospect of state agents forcibly removing children from their parents and placing them in state facilities or with foster parents because they were not taught proper eating habits. Furthermore, there is only the “prospect in severe cases – of the state taking our children” because people like Katz countenance such an idea in the first place.
To which Mastermix responds:
Speaking of the real world, taking away children is well-nigh impossible unless the kid has been beaten hard enough to break bones, fucked by a close family member, unfed or otherwise seriously abused. I have a number of good friends and family members who are healthcare workers, and they’ll all tell you that there are cases that keep them up nights where a child is clearly being neglected but no state intervention is possible. Part of the reason is that it takes all kinds of money to run a good child welfare and foster care system, so the current system is overloaded and only able to deal with the worst possible cases. So, no, your roly-poly or non-vaccinated kid will, as a practical matter, never be taken away from you.
My views of the CPS are colored by two experiences. The first is that I worked for the state CPS in the southwest. It was only for a few weeks, moving computers around as they relocated from one building to another due to a weird state mandate requiring they relocate every two years. So I was a fly on the wall as the CPS employees talked about this and that. By and large, they seemed to be an earnest and well-meaning group of people. The exact sort of people that I would be inclined to trust to such a job.
The second is that I became an online acquaintance of Sheila Tone, one of my cobloggers at Hit Coffee. She’s a family services lawyer in California and has very different experiences. You’ll have to take my word for it that she is neither an anti-government Tea Partier or a woe-be-the-poor bleeding heart. A while back I wrote a post about a case in Washington state where the state was sued for not taking a kid out of parental custody and where the kid died. I expressed concern that lawsuits like this might make the CPS further err on the side of family disruption. To which, Sheila responded:
“COULD lead to?” Honey, we’re there already. Pretty soon every kid will just live in foster care, just in case.
You never hear much about kids taken from their homes for stupid reasons, but I see it every week.
And it’s true, we don’t. The state of California is wracking it’s brain to empower the CPS to become more proactive after some bad publicity surrounding inaction. Those who have their kids taken away are generally poor. Frequently minorities. Idiocratic. The kind of people that the middle class employees of the CPS look at with disdain more generally. Not the kind of people that white, middle class are going to get outraged about losing their kids. But obviously, middle class disapproval is not sufficient reason to remove a child from his parents.
Mastermix frames the issue of obesity and the CPS more generally as sensible liberals against wackadoo libertarians (and conservatives). But I think the issue might be better framed this way: Consider CPS as law enforcement. Because that’s what they are, to an extent. They wear pantsuits instead of uniforms and lack badges and guns, but they have people that fit that profile to do their bidding. But the same concerns we have about traditional law enforcement, such as profiling, classism, and power-grabbing incentives, apply equally to the CPS. the argument that some familial abuse goes unchecked means we should give the CPS more power is not much different than arguing that the persistence of crime means that we should give the police and prosecutors more power. Or that the children in family court are all that matters and the victims of crime are all that matters. While the CPS won’t take away your freedom, they will take away your children. This is no small thing.
The CPS also acts in a domain of great ambiguity. The cops enforce the law, or are supposed to. The criminal justice system is – or is supposed to be – consigned to the letter of the law. This act is illegal and will get you jail time. That sort of thing. The CPS has to make a grand assessment not based on a specific act, but based on the totality of behavior. This gives them a lot more leeway. And further, they are not hindered by the need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. So the end result is a bunch of people taking on the role of police detectives and prosecutors, seeing a seedier side of human life day in and day out, with a greater deal of discretion than your average cop or DA. So you run into a situation where it matters somewhat if you do illegal drugs, and matters a lot more whether you can win over the approval of your CPS investigators.
This isn’t cause for concern among libertarian wackadoos and conspiracy theorizing conservatives. This is a concern.
As for what it means about obesity in particular, I really don’t know. When you have kids that weigh in excess of 400 pounds, something has gone seriously wrong and is likely in need of remediation. But where do you draw the line? Do we hand over even more discretionary power over the CPS agents, so that whether or not you get to keep your child depends on whether you can sufficiently impress them? And there really is a slippery slope argument involved. I was overweight as a kid. No CPS officer would have taken me away from my educated, solidly upper-middle class parents on that account. But if I was poor, and my parents were not upper-middle professional-types, my parents did something objectionable but not actionable like refusing to vaccinate, and the CPS agent just had a vague suspicion that something “wasn’t right” in our household, it might be a different story. I’m not saying that they would do it. I’d like to think the people I met in the CPS wouldn’t. But I’m not sure how much I am willing to bet on that.
On the other hand… 400 pounds? Seriously?
A child who weighs in excess of 400 pounds is the victim of gross negligence. They are at serious risk of numerous health problems, both long- and short-term. While I would most likely not call CPS (or my state’s equivalent) immediately upon evaluating a patient this profoundly overweight, if there were not demonstrable effort on the part of the parents to address the issue then I would seriously consider it.
I have never experienced child protective workers to be overly zealous in prosecuting their duties. In the situation you sketch out toward the end of your paragraph, a “vague suspicion” would likely lead to no action. And CPS wouldn’t be involved in the first place in the absence of a report from someone else; their power to investigate isn’t pluripotent. If a teacher or hyper-vigilant pediatrician were to call in a report based upon nothing more than a sense of unease, in my experience that case would go nowhere.
I absolutely agree, however, that child protective agencies have much more power over the lives of the poor. They’re going to tread much more lightly with someone who clearly has the resources to retaliate with legal action than someone who can’t really fight.
It’s really not the 400lb kids being taken away that I am most worried about. I really am worried about the slippery slope (and this concern is genuine and not rhetorical). When I was in the 8th grade, I had a BMI approaching 35. Is that negligence? Even though neither of my brothers had it and, by the time I graduated high school, my BMI was in normal range? As we agree, they’re not going to touch my parents. But under different circumstances?
They wouldn’t take action on a vague suspicion. They wouldn’t have to, if they had obesity to hang their hat on. Officially. But really, they would be taking action on what they saw when they visit the house. Intangibles for which they would have difficulty making their case without the hat-rack. This is not too dissimilar for what they do about pot. My wife has to report positive test results, working in hospitals where the test-positive rate was roughly half, and most of the time they don’t get taken away. But if the CPS investigates and doesn’t like what it sees, they’ll take the kid away. Ostensibly for the pot, but also because they didn’t like what they saw.
While pot is a boolean variable, obesity isn’t even an integer. It can be calculated a number of ways (with the most prominent, BMI, flawed). Where do you draw the line? I look at horror at a 400lb kid, and viscerally favor something be done. But that’s changing the balance between parent and CPS when I worry about what discretion the latter already has. Which is why this makes me uncomfortable, even as I say “400lb?! WTH?! No!”
I guess some of it depends on where you stand on the dividing line. I haven’t talked to my wife about it yet, but I suspect her views are similar to yours. Most doctors, really, because they see the damage obesity causes in all its glory. And Plinko’s wife saw all the things the Georgia CPS-equivalent couldn’t do). And I’m relying on Sheila, whose job it is to keep families together and who sees families needlessly disrupted. Where we sit is where we stand, to a degree. Which damage are we seeing?
My wife used to work for the State of Georgia as a family counselor (contract agency, not as an employee of DeFACS) and occasionally as the social worker on-call for the Juvenile Court of the county we lived in at the time. I’ve heard more stories than most could stomach about kids in bad situations.
Her main job was to provide counseling for parents who were in danger of losing their kids. Most of them lived in deep poverty and almost all the parents were regular drug users (mostly meth, this being rural central Georgia), almost all the children were very young.
The main thing I would say about what you’re bringing up here is that drugs and our War on Drugs play a critical role in that dichotomy, between the DCS workers who feel unable to do even half of what they should and the family attorney dealing with people who don’t belong in the system. Both are true experiences and real problems and solving are going to be hard because we should be tougher in some ways and we need to back off in many others.
The problems of the first half (the DCS employees) is that absent strong evidence of imminent danger, it’s very hard to deal with kids in very bad situations – neglect, malnutrition or abuse. It’s also very hard with young children who often aren’t able to tell their own stories. Now, most of those parents should keep their kids and the DeFACS counselor was there to help them navigate the system – get into drug rehab, get a job, get assistance with housing, food stamps or utilities to provide a better life for their families. My wife worked with a lot of people on those things. She also took their kids to court-mandated doctor visits or meetings with other family.
Some were the kind of situations most of us would agree that even Foster care is better than where they were. But even in those situations, she said invariably those young children loved their parents and would never leave them, no matter how many beatings they endured or how little they ate. In those situations, it was her job to recommend the kids stay or if they started the court proceedings to take cutody (where the DeFACS proper would take over). I can hardly imagine a harder call in my life than making that judgement, with the future of a child and family in my hands like that, even knowing it only moved the case on, not that it was a final judgment.
On the other hand, you have cut-and-dried cases where the police do have evidence in hand and they moved straight to revoke custody. Unfortunately, a lot of those cases are merely that the parents were caught possessing drugs, even in small amounts and often marijuana. I’ve seen plenty of stories on Balko’s blog about parents arrested for pot possession and then losing their children, which is absolutely heart-breaking and outrageous. I would guess a lot of what Sheila Tone sees might be like that.
To circle this back to the weight thing. I think it’s clearly possible that a child’s extreme obesity could be a sign of some kinds of parental abuse, I would expect we ought to be able to fit it in with the existing definitions of abusive behavior and act accordingly. We should not be adding obesity as a sign of child neglect or abuse at all.
“Mastermix frames the issue of obesity and the CPS more generally as sensible liberals against wackadoo libertarians (and conservatives). ”
If it came off that way, I didn’t mean it to. If there’s a general point I wanted to raise, it’s this one: Why do libertarians run away from causistry? Why don’t they look at cases, acknowledge some role of the state, and talk about the proper limitation of that role? In real-world politics, that’s the discussion we have. Because, as you point out with this comment:
“On the other hand… 400 pounds? Seriously?”
There’s a role for the state here. (Unless you think only “liberals” are going to talk about a proper role of the state. But that’s not right, is it?)
You also don’t mention the critical role of family court in all of this. CPS is to law enforcement as family court is to criminal court, i.e., not the same thing. Family court is more reparative and restorative than it is punitive, and part of its role is to reign in CPS excesses, which, at minimum, are rarer than, e.g., SWAT team excesses.
“You also don’t mention the critical role of family court in all of this. CPS is to law enforcement as family court is to criminal court, i.e., not the same thing. Family court is more reparative and restorative than it is punitive, and part of its role is to reign in CPS excesses, which, at minimum, are rarer than, e.g., SWAT team excesses.”
Yes, this too.
I think that the problem, for me (wackadoo libertarian) is that, according to the gummint, someone who is 5’8″ and 200 pounds is obese.
The whole point of my post is that this is exactly not the kind of case where CPS gets involved, nor should it be.
It seems to me that it is far more likely that there be fatty creep than there not be.
So the possibility of a slippery slope trumps the actuality of a real social problem?
You’re asking me to choose between two social problems.
I prefer the fatties.
If it came off that way, I didn’t mean it to.
Fair enough.
Why do libertarians run away from causistry? Why don’t they look at cases, acknowledge some role of the state, and talk about the proper limitation of that role? In real-world politics, that’s the discussion we have.
While there are extremes in every camp, I don’t take criticism of the CPS or the belief that they should be reined in as a belief that the CPS shouldn’t exist. Nor do I believe that Balko’s and Kain’s criticisms of the cops are a belief that we shouldn’t have them. Rather, they’re looking at the power dynamics. Arguing that these agencies simply have too much of it.
There’s a role for the state here.
Viscerally, I agree. I nonetheless worry about where one ends and the other begins. My concern about a kid with a BMI of 35 (me, 8th grade) is genuine and not rhetorical in nature. Which is what makes me so conflicted over this. Leaning in favor of Doing Something, but hesitant all the same and taking the concerns of overreach seriously.
You also don’t mention the critical role of family court in all of this. CPS is to law enforcement as family court is to criminal court, i.e., not the same thing. Family court is more reparative and restorative than it is punitive, and part of its role is to reign in CPS excesses, which, at minimum, are rarer than, e.g., SWAT team excesses.
Regardless of the stated goals, I think that both are a mixture of both. Criminal courts certainly go more for the punitive, but it’s in part under the idea of making society better (“Department of Corrections”) and satisfying the victims and potential victims. Likewise, a family court might think that they are doing the right thing by taking kids away from parents because the kid told a friend in school that he saw his mother’s boyfriend smoking pot in the car and the CPS visited their house and didn’t like what they saw, but it’s a punishment to the mother who lost the kid.
“You’re asking me to choose between two social problems.”
One imagined, one real.
CPS and family courts can already intervene in cases of medical neglect so we don’t need to add obesity, per se, since it can already be considered in extreme cases. Having worked with family where one parent very likely had Münchhausen by proxy which led to the baby being diagnosed with Failure to Thrive at 15 months, this is real issue. CPS agencies around the country are always prisoner to the last big candle. If that scandal was letting a kid stay in a home then they died, they tend to take kids quicker. If the last scandal was taking a kid to quickly then they tend to avoid taking kids.
While CPS will , for reasons you noted, be more involved with poor people one of the best things CPS workers often do is get people hooked up with services. They set up therapists for kids with behavior problems, give parents rides, help them get RO’s against abusive ex’s, and provide general support. CPS ends up acting as a safety net for many parents since there isn’t one for many people. I’ve worked with many many people who have had CPS involvement and i’ve heard plenty of them say CPS helped them a ton even while they hated their involvement.
I can, and do, vouch for every word of that. I am friends with her in meatworld as well as online. Ms. Tone may be guilty of something we call “cynicism” about CPS, and perhaps her attitude about how the system handles issues of this nature can be assessed as “jaded,” but it’s been very well-earned.
Exc post & discussion. After hearing all the arguments, I still dunno. I hate the state exercising control over families, but Dr. Saunders draws a line in the sand it’s tough to argue with, and M. Mastermix states the case plainly:
Why do libertarians run away from causistry? Why don’t they look at cases, acknowledge some role of the state, and talk about the proper limitation of that role? In real-world politics, that’s the discussion we have. Because, as you point out with this comment:
“On the other hand… 400 pounds? Seriously?”
There’s a role for the state here.
Of course, the line in the sand is only drawn in sand:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/28/christian-couple-lose-care-case
The URL says one thing, but lefty Guardian headline actually says another:
Anti-gay Christian couple lose foster care case
Court rules against Christian couple who claimed their beliefs on homosexuality should not prevent them becoming foster carers
It’s worth noting that Britain’s rules are heavily stacked against the parents. I wanted to work this into the post, but I found it distracting to my central point, since we’re looking at the American system, which has different processes. But thanks for giving me the opportunity to put it forward.