It’s just incredible the injustice that can be done in the name of protecting children. I really do wonder if it’s cultural or some kind of innate psychological irrarionality that seems stronger in some than others. I love kids and care deeply about their welfare, but people sometimes try to make me feel bad or that I’m the weird one for being able to think (I believe) fairly rationally about the risks and dangers that they face, instead of massively over-exaggerating!
Or of course the opposite, keeping an appropriate eye on relations and acquaintances when people assume they’re totally safe but it’s actually somebody with that level of relation who’s likely to be a danger than a stranger.
I think there are people drawn to the absolutes. I can maybe see how it can be comforting to have a black and white issue to try to solve / help. A good side to be a part of in a world that to some seems very bad or confusing.
Some old friends of mine are very much into these kinds of children’s issues. But when they talk to you about it it’s all emotion, it’s not even clear to me that they know much at all other than a sense that the bad guys are out there, maybe some strange legislation they support and so on. They’re not interested in justice, just this absolute sorta cause.
This is just speculation, but I bet those groups (or their members) aren't always calmly and coolly trying to find the best policies protect the welfare of children. Instead they feel themselves on a kind of righteous moral crusade, and what's more heroic than swooping in to take the child away from the clutches of the villain? The feelings of heroism could obscure understanding the harm the "heroic act" could cause.
In a (somewhat) post-scarcity society attention from others is hard currency and narcissism is at an all time high.
They see a lot of bad stuff which causes them to have a difficult time admitting that sometimes bad stuff just happens on it's own
Reminds me of the police/detectives that "just know he did it" because they don't understand that people grieve differently. I really empathize with the people that don't have a meltdown and cry when they hear some horrific news. I don't think I would either in many cases. I'd want the cops to do their job and go find the perp so I'd talk to them in a calm and concise manner telling them what I knew; even though that's likely highly suspicious behavior.
I also found this argument absurd: I was suspected of losing my temper on my child, and it's my calmness that was interpreted as a sign of danger!
It reminds me the Robert Roberson Texas death penalty case that John Grisham recently wrote about [1]: "He told hospital staff that she had fallen out of bed, but they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know he was autistic and decided he didn’t show the proper emotions given the dire situation."
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...
For the people in child welfare organizations, for social workers, for doctors, for police, for judges to change their mind about current and future decisions requires them to change their mind about past decisions. The necessary implication is that many of the people they have persecuted in the past were, in fact, innocent. It requires them to admit that they personally have likely caused untold suffering to parents, caretakers, and children.
This is hard for anyone; but if you've lived your life trying to be the hero, feeling good about swooping in and rescuing children from the clutches of evil villains, how can you face the fact that you are the evil villain in so many children's stories?
You might call this the Paradox of Judgment: If you don't say that something is that bad, then lots of people don't think it's a big deal and don't do anything about it. But if you do say that something is really bad, then there develop all these pathologies of denialism around it.
People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.
Whatever it is:
- If it's in the name of protecting the children, odds are it is not justice.
- If it is not justice, at some point the excuse will be to protect the children
That was 20+ years ago, my career was not there so I left clinical work but the ability to function during high stress and deal with the present mentally stuck with me. I also could mostly leave it at the door and it didn’t weigh on me outside work (I think most healthcare workers can do this, it all just becomes normal.
Since then, I’m the one that springs into action instead of paralyzed by shock/surprise. Saved someone choking in a restaurant, pulled a pregnant woman from a burning car after an accident, just a few weeks ago someone had a stroke at a park and I had to figure out best way to help - all these had many other bystanders just watching it happen and they all just were frozen until I came over and took charge barking order about call an ambulance or telling them exactly how to help. I’ve also learned that when something really bad happens in my life, like bad diagnoses/death of loved ones, my immediate response is to help and support what ever immediate actions are needed, talk about what needs to be done, help others experiencing immediate and usually uncontrollable grief. My grief usually starts a day or two later once all the immediate concerns are addressed.
I don't think this is a very solid maxim. It seems to imply things other than justice can only occur if protecting children is a claimed motive.
From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."
"Confirmation bias", where you tend to see what you expect to see, is narrower; but still I think doesn't capture what we're talking about. We're specifically talking about resistance to accepting the idea because accepting it would mean reclassifying actions you yourself had taken from "very good" to "very bad". It's kind of weird that it doesn't have a name -- I'm convinced it plays a pretty big part of human behavior, much more than is commonly acknowledged.
That's exactly it. I'd love to discover scientific literature about this phenomenon, and I'd also be surprised if it doesn't already have a name and an extensive literature. But if that's the case: I think there are research carriers in psychology to make here...
Edit: ChatGPT found "belief perseverance" [1] but, again, that's not exactly what we're talking about, which also relates to a personal sense of morality and "being one of the good guys".
The harm we cause is better explained by systematic reasons (workload, case complexity, red tape, worker burnout and apathy, racism)
The fact of the matter is, the article here is a brief overview describing none of the actual scientific literature at a level that should be convincing to a medical practitioner. But you read it and are apparently convinced of the author's point. So, a layperson (I assume, in your case) is presented with some well-written evidence from an authoritative perspective, alongside broad contours of the actual medical evidence but no details, and is convinced that it's true. Is it so hard to believe that a child welfare worker would be equally convinced under the same circumstances when talking to a doctor, neurologist, trauma surgeon, etc. who believes the opposite as this author?
They do a lot of mental gymnastics trying to run from the idea that their main function is to imprison and take away peoples rights, often without due process.
Medical industry is rife with abuse. They routinely kill people out of spite, torture dying people and their families, and want to be shielded from any criticism... so fuck all the patients and look for reasons they're "not righteous", etc, so you can dismiss them.
It's quite interesting (and disturbing) to see how much culture evolves around deflecting blame and victim blaming.
Anyway, it's not meant as an ad hom, but it helps to step back and think why people are involved with certain roles.
To be clear: here the author only bothered look with his well-trained eyes because he was sucked in after the law intruded into his life. It's easy to assume that everyone is highly-skilled. But... highly-skilled people don't usually choose to work for peanuts without other reasons. Fields like this are neglected.
As the warrior poet Maslow put it, "if the only tool you ever have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_avoidance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(Freud)
HN and software engineers have bias to over-focus on the cognitive, but I think the key experience here is emotional distress.
Mostly they are operating on priors. The prior probability of a separation being the right thing to do is very high, because they have a _long list of mitigation before they actually can take a kid away. In the case of a doctor-approved immediate physical danger, they are regulated into acting on behalf of the immediate safety of the child while the investigation is ongoing but even that is considered temporary.
The goal of any foster care situation is to get the kids back with the biological parents, so time is on their side, provided they are not living in a circumstance that disallows the kind of attendance and involvement that the state would require to clear a caseworker to re-unite the family. Sadly, many are.
Source: Foster parent.
This is why Max Planch (German physicist) has quipped that science advances one funeral at a time.
CPS is a human organization. There are no algorithms and the guidelines rarely perfectly fit the situation a case worker is given. Keep this in mind. CPS is horrifically under funded meaning that intelligent and competent staff readily leave the field for better paying gigs.
The biggest problem I see with foster care at large is the rampant classism, sexism, racism, and other isms. The providers tend to be solidly middle class degree bearing people who have no personal connection to primary instigating factors of foster care involvement. Namely and typically presenting cross generationally: poverty, crimes of despair or desperation, and trauma whether that be internal or external to the family unit or community such as neighborhood violence, caregiver assault, or tragic loss.
It easy for providers to casually profile incoming children and their families as poor uneducated violent predacious drug dealing junkies. Providers are given extreme control over the entire family and their extended relations and use this power to coerce whatever behavior they desire out of the people. If the provider dislikes the family they have a lot of tools to inflict suffering on them and oppositely they have a lot of tools to assist families and keep them together.
Honestly, the entire system is such a god damn mess that it should be rebuilt with the same level of distrust of staff that they can exercise against families.
Perhaps the most pressing single metric to focus may be the foster to prison pipeline.
Sorry for the meandering post, bookcases could be filled with anecdotes and descriptions of the flaws in these systems. In general, I think the failure of child protection agencies reflects the decay in America at large. I could point to stuff like broken family units or loss of religions community but I’m not dog whistling here. Stable healthy nurturing familial units of any relation are obviously better but man in the house rules and other racist/classist measures caused more harm. I’m also vehemently opposed to all major organized religions that are regularly used to justify war and protect child sex predators. Perhaps the collapse of American industry and slow erosion of social safety nets has hastened the social collapse. Perhaps the internet had instigated the collapse of communal organizations. Perhaps winner take all government enforced monopoly capitalism is the cause. Perhaps it was the theft of 50,000,000,000.00 from the bottom 99 by the 1% that lead to this. Regardless, the solution is not going to be found in rebuilding foster care when our social fabric is rotten.
0. https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sop2.10
1. https://www.crimlawpractitioner.org/post/the-foster-care-to-....
3. https://nlihc.org/resource/study-examines-man-house-rules-vo...
4. https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
In cases like this, in the moment, it may be impossible to tell what is actually best for the child. Since removing the child is a form of remediation, it can easily seem to be less harmful than leaving them in a situation that might be actively harming them.
"Honey, I doubled the salt in the pasta this time, how does it taste?" "Oh, it's really salty". "Ha-HA! I didn't actually add ANY salt!"
(do not actually do this to people you like or who like you)
MANY social workers feel this way. They got into the field out of a genuine concern for the well-being of the most vulnerable members of our society, and instead found themselves dealing with politics (both real and office).
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but in my region, they actually appoint a lawyer for the child. This is great, but it also tells you a lot about what everyone else's priorities are that children need their own lawyers:
(1) Parents want their kids back, of course. Not all parents are fit to get them back. But their lawyers fight for the return of their kids regardless of circumstances or reasons for their removal.
(2) Child protection agencies are under constant attack, so at the executive level, they lose sight of the individual kids and are instead worried about the needs of the organization and public relations.
(3) The social workers themselves are handcuffed to do anything about it and have to follow procedure, even if they can see it plainly that the procedure is not in the best interests of the child.
(4) Police want nothing to do with any of it and are quick to wash their hands of these situations.
(5) The children's lawyer somehow has to represent the needs of the child, which may place them at odds with their own clients (the kids).
(6) Activist groups will generally support the parents blindly, because by law, for the privacy of the children, the only parties listed above who can publicly speak about any given case are the parents themselves. So you can only ever hear one side of the argument. That's right: If a father, for example, sexually abuses his kids and as a result has them removed, he's free to say just about anything he likes about the matter, without ever acknowledging that he's a child molester. The other parties can't say a thing about this.
As a result, it's impossible, as a member of the public, to ever know whether it was appropriate or not that the children were removed from the care of their parents. I happen to know, from first-hand experience, that it's a mixed bag: Some parents shouldn't be allowed anywhere near any child ever, much less their own. Others are victims of a system gone haywire. And we, the concerned public, can't have an informed discussion about any of it.
All in all, it transforms child protection into a game of who-has-the-best-lawyers rather than trying to do what's right for the kids. Is it any wonder so many kids end up traumatized by this system?
He experienced 3rd degree burns on his feet and my mother rushed him to the hospital. My stepfather at the time was basically freaking out, my mother was very calm. After it was over the thing she told us is that panicking in an emergency helps no one.
It's a lesson I've kept with me my entire life. Most of the time, for me to truly process things, I need to be alone. I have no doubt I would come across as detached and not caring if something tramautic were to happen to me.
OTOH, I had to put a pet down once and I was crying like a baby so maybe not. I've never been in a situation where I haven't had time to process before really speaking about it to others so I really am not sure what my response would be.
Here's one among thousands of examples, from a really terrible paper by one such powerful SBS proponent here in France [1] (another of his papers was actually retracted this year [2]).
"Fake news 11: the caretakers’ denial is sincere
Clinicians and defenders can become intoxicated by the denials of parents suffering the agony of having their child in dire condition, and at the same time being grilled for their possible responsibility. The mental mechanisms of self-denial are well-known to psychiatrists. A perpetrator, after a violent burst, and faced with its terrible consequences, can experience a dissociation mechanism similar to witnesses of catastrophes, dissociation being understood as “a break between the memory, the perception, the consciousness and the identity…when faced with unbearable feelings”. Sincere denial easily elicits compassion from the medical staff as well as defenders, a natural response which is enhanced by professional training. Some authors have documented with functional imaging the sincerity of denial in a case of convicted child abuse and concluded that the sincerity of denial is not a criterion for innocence."
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-021-05357-8
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-023-05889-1
Still, there are different types and sources of denial, just as there are different sources of emotional bias. "Self-image maintenance bias" and "self-image maintenance denial" can both be about general ways in which we try to maintain our self image (as strong, talented, attractive, whatever). "Moral self-image maintenance bias" or "moral self-image maintenance denial" can be about ways in which we try to maintain our self-image as good, decent people.
It's much, much harder again to understand something if it makes your life's work ignoble.
I was a foster child who was taken from my parents wrongly. A third party (not connected to child services) made a false accusation to the cops, who took me and turned me over to child services without any investigation. Even though I insisted nothing had happened and even though child services failed to produce any evidence (beyond aforesaid hearsay) over the course of their investigation, child services nonetheless fought extremely hard against letting me go home to my family.
In the end, a judge had to order them to return me to my family because they refused to accept that the accusation had been a lie.
In the meantime, I went through three different foster homes. I was a very difficult kid to foster (I cried and screamed a lot, demanding to go home) and so I unfortunately experienced abuse and neglect in two of the three homes. (My first foster home was particularly severe, which was strange because they were otherwise great parents to their biological kids. At least the other abusive home treated their real children equally poorly.)
I relate with much of your comment but this was something I actually considered writing before. The most drastic emotional response I've ever experienced was putting a pet down. I knew it was the right choice, planned it out, to be done at home in the back yard, his favorite place and final resting place, and even made time for one last outing to his favorite lake a little while before.
But with all the planning and forethought, it's like I started grieving before the event happened. So when it did happen, I just cried and cried. Like, sobbing on the floor for an hour type thing. Also, the fact he was mentally still 100% but his body was failing made it a wrenching decision that I was questioning even though I felt like it was the humane choice.
I was really in a funk for about a year after. The first couple months, I'd just randomly cry as some old memory would pop in my head. I was really close to this dog though, was like a child to me and it hit really hard. I got him in my early 20s, then later married but hadn't had kids yet. For some reason, the saddest thought in my head was "he'll never get to meet my kids". I've had 2 dogs since, that have been more like pets than children and I have real children too which changes the dynamic entirely.
This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not).
But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months.
It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.)
What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.
Part of the issue is they exist in several systems simultaneously: medical system, child-welfare system, and criminal justice system.
Are they there to cure disease, ensure the child had a safe home environment, or put an abuser in prison. Answer: all of the above.
Here’s a good example:
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2022/01/alaska-couple-loses-custo...
Our inability to judge extends to others.
It certainly deserves a better name.
Another example is that a lot of anti-gay crusaders turned out to be closet gays who hated themselves.
I took her to emergency surgery, spent about $2k until the vet basically told me there was no point. They put me in a room, wrapped her in a towel, and brought her in for me to spend time with before we put her to sleep. I just remember after they put her in my arms she looked up at me and started purring and I couldn't have stopped the tears if I had wanted to. I'm not a fan of anthropomorphizing animals, but I like to think she felt safe in that last moment.
Even just thinking about it now gets me upset. What makes it worse is that the actions of my neighbor contributed to her death. I had to chalk it up to stupidity, the alternative would be an impotent rage that would do none of us any good.
That was probably 8 years ago, and even now if I talk much about her my girlfriend will start crying. They're just pets, and yet...
On an ontological level, psychiatry made a huge leap forward in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III. One of the core goals of the DSM-III was to address the concerns raised in the Rosenhan experiment, making diagnostic criteria more robust and reliable. While there are still many controversies and shortcomings - most prominently regarding the over-diagnosis of less severe conditions - we now have a suite of reliable, validated diagnostic instruments for most serious conditions. For the most part, we aren't diagnosing or treating patients based on the gut instinct of an individual practitioner; we're using objective criteria with proven inter-relater reliability, guided by the over-arching principle that, regardless of symptomatology, no-one is mentally ill unless a) they're experiencing distress and/or b) they're causing significant harm to others. There are many shortcomings in how psychiatric medicine is practised today, but the era of locking people up just because they behave strangely is definitively over.
[Not a lawyer, this maybe a bad idea. But what you’re describing should have consequences for the party that had caused harm.]
In the US we have strict laws regarding how social services interact with native populations.
This can go quite far, with some experts stating that the histories reported by parents and caregivers bringing a child to the hospital with some injuries are always falsified. This can surely happen, but a foundational tenet of medicine is to listen to the patient/parents.
I've seen experts concluding to abuse in 100% of their cases, including those where children hah obvious, DNA-proven genetic conditions causing the observed injuries. Fortunately, some judges remain reasonable and act as "gatekeepers" by exculpating parents and caregivers despite affirmative opinions by reputable experts. But many don't.
Norman Guthkelch himself (the first to hypothesize a causal link between shaking and subdural/retinal hemorrhage) wrote in 2012 [1]:
"While controversy is a normal and necessary part of scientific discourse, there has arisen a level of emotion and divisiveness on shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma that has interfered with our commitment to pursue the truth."
A French neuropediatrician wrote a medical book in French a few years ago about this issue. When interrogated by a lawyer in a symposium a couple of years ago, the author of the papers linked in my comment above said: "I haven't read this book because I absolutely can't agree with it, since it's written by one of the leaders of a denialist and revisionist school of thought".
How can you even start a discussion in a context where a Godwin point is reached with the very term they use to call you?
The willful ignorance of the dissonance between proclaimed intention and consequences is one of the scariest phenomenons i have experienced and its among proper mob mentality turning in a charged violence prone environment.
Being a bit of a smartass (OFCOURSE just as a teen :) i prodded a bit when some family friend got into some superficial moral signaling about the evils of child labor. I asked how exactly the alternative looks without social safety nets in the relevant regions. Being convinced of having the moral high ground an emotional fever set in and it went as far as a "Well maybe then they should all starve!". Pretty sure i saw the realization of what i just goaded out and if hateful stares could kill i would have been a goner. It has been almost two decades now and the relationship has never recovered. I know some seriously scary people but this is up there.
edit: Sorry for the late edits, was hard to read.
But on the same note, I would also consider suing child services for failing to act according to their own principles and mainly for ignoring evidence.
1. Premise: Organizations always try to stay alive. 2. To stay alive you have to be active and doing things which is rewarded by future money. 3. If your organizational role is "protect children" but who's functional mechanism is to take them away will look for ways to do that.
Similar things happen when policing seems to go awry, if they confuse "protect the public" (goal) with "arrest people for stuff" (doing something)
1. These anti-SBS people are evil sophists trying to help child abusers
2. These views of these anti-SBS people irrational; but they're not evil, just misguided and/or misled.
3. The views of these anti-SBS people are wrong, but they are actually reasonable views for someone to hold, given the evidence they have available to hem.
4. The views of these anti-SBS people are correct.
You're never going to jump from 1->4 directly; you need to start with going 1->2.
So if you're serious about it, then I guess I would start with actually trying to get face-time with some people. Look at the various people in this community, and find someone who seems either more reasonable, or more friendly / sociable: someone who is unlikely to turn down an invitation to coffee / lunch, and unlikely to hate a decent person right in front of them. If there's someone who's has a lot of influence, or is in the "core", that's best; but anyone within one or two steps of the "core" could be a good start.
My goals going into the meeting would be:
* Establish a human connection; see them as a person, help them see you as a person
* Make sure they feel heard and understood. Try to understand how they got into the work they're doing now; and not only the evidence they've seen, but also the personal experiences they've had. Try to mostly listen; and if possible repeat back to them what you've heard them say.
* Share your story, and some of the key stories you've seen or heard. If you can, stick to your observations and opinions; i.e., don't say "my nanny was innocent", but rather, "it didn't really seem possible that the nanny did it; it would have been really out of character" (and explain more about the nanny's character).
I'd call it by ear whether to ask "would you want to know if you were wrong" and "how would you know if you were wrong".
Remember the goal for the first meeting is to get them from 1 to 2: That maybe you're way off base and misguided, but that you're not evil. Getting to 3 would be a bonus if it goes well, but don't count on it; and there's no way 4 will happen over the course of lunch.
That's a lot of work, but you seem pretty motivated. Whatever you end up doing, good luck!
Everyone cares about kids, so THINK OF THE CHILDREN is an easy way to both create false urgency to cover totalitarianism and also an excellent shame-generator to suppress protest. C.f. "Drag shows"; "digital privacy"
But we do have an example of another righteous institution misbehaving - churches are now paying back for years of children abuse (Catholic priests abusing children). I don’t see why cases like the one above that forcefully separating children can’t go the same way.
It doesn’t really matter that “most reports are good faith”. Most priests are also good faith…
We don't even know if it was an intentional lie or if they genuinely thought I had been hurt. We never found out what they told the cops.
It's even harder to understand something if your self-conception as honorable depends on your mistunderstanding?