Even CPS agencies should be extremely wary of intruding on families based on such allegations. There’s no excuse for sending in the cops.
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| The Los Angeles Police Department has wisely decided that it is not a good idea to send out latter-day Joe Fridays to investigate allegations of "emotional abuse." |
In Los
Angeles County, the Department of Children and Family Services and various law
enforcement agencies have an agreement: What are thought to be more serious
cases alleging child abuse, in particular those alleging violation of criminal
law, are automatically referred to law enforcement. In some of those cases they must do their own
investigation, in other cases it’s discretionary. In all cases, these investigations are in
addition to – not instead of – investigations by DCFS.
Last
October, based on the best information available at the time, the Chronicle of Social Change reported
that in the City of Los Angeles, from January 2018 to July 2019, the police
department had not investigated 4,000 such cases - 11 percent of the total. In contrast, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
office investigated all but three percent of these cases.
The report found
that “the department appropriately handled” 99.7 percent of the cases, and that
many of the cases noted as no investigation were clerical errors, duplicates or
had been investigated by other agencies. But it also confirmed that Los Angeles
Police routinely chose not to investigate “emotional child abuse” allegations
that are often investigated by other major law enforcement agencies in L.A.
County.
The LAPD is right. The other
agencies are wrong.
The reason for that should be
obvious. There are few things more emotionally abusive for a child than
enduring a child abuse investigation.
Imagine for a moment being a small child. Suddenly strangers come to
your home – or you’re taken from your classroom to a school office. You are questioned intently about the most
intimate aspects of your life. If you’re old enough – and poor enough –you know
that if that interrogator is from DCFS there is a risk you won’t be going home.
(You know this because it happens
so often in poor communities that everyone in those communities
knows it).
In calling for much narrower
legal definitions of child maltreatment, three of the nation’s leading scholars
of child welfare in the 20th Century, Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein and Albert
J. Solnit wrote that children
react even to temporary infringement of parental autonomy with anxiety, diminishing trust, loosening of emotional ties, or an increasing tendency to be out of control. The younger the child and the greater his own helplessness and dependence, the stronger is his need to experience his parents as his lawgivers -- safe, reliable, all-powerful and independent.
No matter how sensitively it’s
handled, it’s a trauma. And there’s no guarantee it’s going to be
sensitive. Consider this
example, cited by Prof. Vivek Sankaran in a recent column for the Chronicle:
“Your father is as worthless as your mother.” Those words – said by a caseworker to a 13-year-old child whose parents were addicted to heroin – jumped out at me as I read the case file. My heart immediately sank.
Do we really want people so willing to inflict
emotional abuse themselves investigating “emotional abuse”?
Now, imagine the trauma if, say,
the next day the same process is repeated all over again, but this time the
interrogators are carrying guns.
Even when an allegation is so
serious that law enforcement involvement is justified, there is considerable
risk that their presence will contribute to traumatizing the child, as
happened in this case, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court. There is no
legitimate reason to put children at such risk over an allegation of “emotional
abuse.”
In fact, unlike allegations of
physical and sexual abuse, when the allegation is emotional abuse, Los Angeles
County law enforcement agencies can use their discretion and decline to perform
this second, redundant investigation. As
the Chronicle story notes, the 2015
agreement setting up this system urges police to investigate these reports. The LAPD has wisely decided not to take that
advice. They’ve decided to exercise their discretion and refuse to inflict that
additional trauma. They deserve praise for that.
The usual excuses
Why in the
world would anyone even think of sending in the cops to investigate emotional
abuse?
The Chronicle story cites two studies
concluding that emotional abuse “can cause as much lasting damage as physical
or sexual abuse.” Well, yes. That’s analogous to the argument used by
those who dismiss child welfare’s widespread confusion of poverty with neglect. They
say sometimes neglect can be as bad as abuse.
That’s because neglect is such a broad, vague category that it can
encompass everything from deliberately starving a child to death to running out
of food because the SNAP benefits didn’t last the full month. But which is more likely?
Nor does it
follow that the fact that emotional abuse might, in some rare cases, be as bad
or worse than physical abuse, it requires the police to detect it. LAPD’s decision does not mean no one
investigates emotional abuse cases; DCFS still does.
It’s a gateway allegation!
The story then quotes Commander
Carlos Marquez. He oversees the Special Victims Unit in the Sheriff’s
Department, where they proudly investigate almost everything:
“A lot of times if you really understand child abuse, you understand that emotional abuse is only one aspect,” Marquez said. “There are usually other issues in the home: domestic violence, sexual abuse. Very rarely have I seen where emotional abuse is just emotional abuse without something else in the home.
In other words, it’s a gateway
allegation!
That’s always the excuse for the
exercise of untrammeled state power over the lives of impoverished families.
It’s the same reason poor mothers can lose their children for smoking marijuana
when rich mothers can
brag about it; the same reason schools can exploit "educational
neglect" allegations to
silence parents fighting for, say, a better special education plan. It’s
also much like the excuse for stop-and-frisk – well, you never know when they
might be hiding something!
There are several problems with
this. First, reports that include emotional abuse as even one category of
alleged maltreatment are relatively rare. In Los Angeles County 15
percent of reports include emotional abuse as the predominant
allegation – there is no breakdown for when it is the only allegation, but it’s
likely to be much smaller. So the chances are if there’s supposedly “something
else” that something else already is in the allegation.
Second, Commander Marquez cites
no actual evidence, only his personal impressions. If there is a study showing that allegations
of emotional abuse alone typically hide much worse, I am unaware of it. There is, however, a
study of that other gateway allegation, “educational neglect” – and
it found that educational neglect allegations almost never indicated a deeper
problem. There no reason to think emotional abuse allegations are
different.
Indeed, if police or DCFS
workers, go into emotional abuse cases with a “gateway allegation” mindset, it
can make the trauma for children even worse.
After all, if you believe that the emotional abuse allegation is just
the surface manifestation of, say, physical abuse, then it’s hard to resist a
common practice across the country in physical abuse cases: Stripsearching
the child looking for bruises.
If you think it’s hiding sexual abuse; well, the examination for that is
even more traumatic.
The
case for coercive intervention in emotional abuse cases is so weak that
Goldstein Freud and Solnit (whom, it is widely conceded, “really [knew]
something about child abuse”) argued that no one should investigate it at all –
the risk of the state inflicting emotional abuse while seeking to detect it was
simply too great.
The authors
took particular aim at a model statute first drafted in the 1970s by an
American Bar Association committee with the intent of narrowing the definition
to reduce the likelihood of abuse by government authorities. That definition allows coercive intervention
when a child suffers serious emotional damage, evidenced by severe anxiety, depression, or withdrawal or untoward aggressive behavior toward self or others, and the child’s parents are not willing to provide treatment for him/her.
Goldstein,
Freud, and Solnit spend two pages explaining why this is still too broad.
I mention
this because some of the language in question was adopted, word for word, by
the California Legislature. But they made the statute even more of a fishing
expedition by adding the catchall words “including but not limited to” the relatively
narrow list in the model law. They also eliminated the part restricting
intervention to cases where parents are not willing to provide treatment. So now, in California, emotional abuse means
whatever DCFS – or the Sherriff’s office – wants it to mean.
When I
wrote my book about child welfare, Wounded
Innocents, in 1990, I thought Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit had gone too
far, and we should give wording along the lines of the ABA model statute a try.
Thank you,
Commander Marquez, for showing me why I was wrong.
