Two weeks ago, police discovered 16 “almost feral” children between the ages of 1 and 18 living in a rural Ohio home. The conditions have shocked the family’s relatives, neighbors and the rest of the country. The children were reportedly kept in a room approximately 12 feet by 12 feet with human waste everywhere. Many of them didn’t even know how to speak. Four adults — their parents and their paternal grandparents — have been arrested in connection with the case.
It is not uncommon these days to hear people claim that child welfare agencies are too intrusive, that they are just harassing families for no good reason, that the government should get out of people’s business. In the wake of the false allegations that Pete Buttigieg and his husband were abusing their 4-year-old twins, for instance, New York University law professor Christine Gottlieb wrote that “the child protection system is the largest, most invasive arm of government that systematically flouts constitutional protections without challenge.”
Gottlieb argued that “a reporting system that was originally designed to address intentional physical abuse now encourages people to report any perceived shortcoming in the care of children.” She says that Child Protective Services now routinely receives reports about “a parent’s lack of resources instead of any intentional misconduct.”
But cases in which parents only lack resources are the exception, rather than the rule. Most families involved in the child welfare system are suffering from a deep level of dysfunction — drug use, mental illness, domestic violence — and the people reporting them are generally legitimately concerned for the children’s safety.
Gottlieb presents a false dichotomy between “lack of resources” and “intentional misconduct.” As we can see from the Siders family in Ohio, it is true that they “lacked resources,” but it’s possible to be poor and not living in rooms with human waste everywhere.
Would you accuse these parents of intentional misconduct? The children’s mother was 15 when she got married and had the first of these children two months later. The children came to the attention of authorities not because they were being beaten — though that may have also been the case. One of the men in the house was repeatedly exposing himself to neighbors. Most likely the adults in this family are mentally ill, using illicit substances or suffering from intellectual disabilities. Whether or not their misconduct was “intentional” misses the point — the children were in danger.
What about 7-year-old Casper O’Brien, the Michigan boy who died of cardiomyopathy last November? His parents, arrested in June, fed him a steady diet of snack food and he was a little over 4 feet tall and 255 pounds when paramedics responded to a 911 call and found him not breathing. His parents had “resources” — including health insurance — but failed to seek medical care for him. His younger sister has been removed to foster care and was also apparently being abused in some way.
Authorities noted that the house was “absolutely disgusting” and “deplorable,” with trash piled everywhere. Casper had never been enrolled in school. Again, we don’t know exactly what is wrong with these parents. Are they drug addicts? Mentally ill? Or just terrible people?
It’s not the job of people reporting child maltreatment to figure it out. It’s not even the main job of child welfare agencies. Perhaps it’s the job of courts. But the goal of child welfare is primarily to protect children, not to diagnose why parents are neglecting their children. Maybe sometimes there is a simple fix for a family’s problems, but most of the time there is not.
In the wake of these two horrific discoveries, community members and the media are asking whether there was anything that could have been done. Most people didn’t seem to know there were any kids living at the Siders’ home, let alone 16 of them. The family moved around. The kids didn’t go to school.
Similarly, Casper O’Brien’s family kept him from public view. But there were opportunities to intervene. Casper’s parents did bring him to a doctor a year before, but they never followed up and neither, so far as we know, did the healthcare workers.
Each of the Siders’ children has a legal birth certificate, with many being born in a local hospital. The same midwife delivered six of the children, including two born when the mother was under the age of 18. Does it seem too intrusive to report this to child protective services? Is it not statutory rape because the mother was legally married at the time? It is the job of the reporter — the medical professional in this case — to report their concerns, and then let CPS investigate what is really going on and whether the children are safe.
Once the shock of these cases wears off and the details are forgotten, many observers will conveniently lose sight of the importance of reporting concerns about child welfare and the vital role CPS plays in responding to those reports. But before that happens, it is worth noting that child maltreatment is not going away, that our communities expect a certain level of protection for children and that while these agencies can sometimes seem intrusive, we need their help.
