Helping children, or hunting them?

Today, a bit of news in my state, with the governor signing a bill altering its recent, and notorious safe-haven law permitting parents to drop off children that they do not want/feel-able to care for, at a hospital without being prosecuted for child abandonment. Instead of the law covering all minors, from newborn to 18, the law will now only cover babies one month old, or less.

Why the change? Well apparently most of the children that have been dropped off over the last few months have been teenagers and pre-teens, rather than the archetypal "baby in the basket".

Some scheme permitting the safe drop-off of the "baby-in-a-basket" has a long history in the Western world, with Pope Innocent III

Pope Innocent III

instituting, in the year 1198 AD, a device, the "foundling wheel" in the appropriate Catholic charitable institutions. The foundling wheel was a revolving hollow cylinder with a gap in the side, which would be set in an outside wall. A mother who wished to discard her baby (this was commonly motivated by an out-of-wedlock birth in a moralistic era) would revolve the cylinder until the gap in the side was accessible, place the child inside, and then rotate the cylinder until the opening faced the interior of the building. Since nobody could see the person on the other side of the wall, this device permitted the mother to abandon her baby anonymously, and would discourage the infanticide of unwanted infants.

Foundling wheel at the "Ospedale Santo Spirito in Rome

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Now everyone will acknowledge that parents, including of course, the parents of small babies should take care of them, and not abandon them, but even in the Middle Ages, it was acknowledged that sometimes parents are not willing or able to live up to these obligations and to some degree, the public must step in.

With the Nebraska safe-haven law adjusted to a degree that would suit 12'th century convictions (and to be quite fair, the Nebraska law is generally similar to those anywhere else in the nation) it occurs to me that though "progress" is an overused philosophical theme, social services might, and should be improved beyond medieval levels. Continuing in this vein, it was my assumption that child-protective-services, present in every state, and the very profession "social worker" were in no small part focussed on just that; the rescuing of children in completely dysfunctional families. Thus I have been astonished to see a vast amount of criticism directed at the original Nebraska law covering all minors.

Clearly the concept of state care of older children is not foreign to either Nebraska or the rest of the US. There are more than 500,000, a full half-million children in foster care in the US! Are we supposed to assume that none of the parents of these children might recognize their lack of parenting skills? Sure, dumping your kids is irresponsible, but how many people do YOU know who would actually give away their children? I can see little to celebrate in the behavior of such a parent, but frankly, if there is a parent who does not want to take care of their kids, or who does not think that they are capable of doing so, well I am inclined to agree!

None of this is to say that being given up to the state is not going to be emotionally hurtful to the children involved, but I also do not see how being with a parent who WANTS to give you up is not going to be hurtful. Moreover, if not being with their parents is the worst thing that can happen to a child, bar none, then an entirely different set of reforms need to be implemented, and the better part of the half million young Americans in foster care need to be returned to their parents immediately.

There is in fact, something of a case in the latter concept as a great many children have been taken from their families due to "inadequate housing conditions", something which not uncommonly means that a family does not enough money to afford proper quarters. Kids are effectively being taken from their families because they are poor.

There is a lot of disagreement (in the US at least) about just how much help the state should provide to poor families, but I cannot see any moral means of avoiding the point that any level of poverty that the state does not alleviate and correct is by definition, a level of poverty, with all the conditions that accompany such a state, that cannot justify depriving a person of the custody of their children.

To continue further into the question of poverty alleviation, it is worth noting that a couple of the Nebraska families (profiles of the families are here ) have as their biggest problem, poverty. Nonetheless, ending or reducing poverty should not be a substitute (it is a worthy enough goal on its own!) for a safe haven law because wealth does not eliminate catastrophic parenting, and poverty does not ensure it.

Finally, it is worth noting exactly what motivated the safe-haven dropoffs of older children and teens in the first place. As it happens, almost all of these children were mentally ill, and if you look at their profiles, they were commonly violent. Now it would seem natural for me to have listed this information first, because it is probably easier to understand why a parent would give up their child if he is a knife-wielding psychotic, or is torturing the family pets.

I did not for two reasons. First, I think that it is a vital point that effective child protection demands that social service agencies acknowledge self acknowledged parental incompetence.

Second, I am quite sure that some people will NOT sympathize, and there are other reasons that everyone should agree that the law should be retained, or care outside the family need be provided. In fact, to think so, you would even need to be very concerned about the children. Take Skylar for example.

"Lavennia Coover is a kindergarten teacher and mother of three who says her main goal in life is to get help for her youngest son, Skyler, 11. She said she used the law because Skyler is dangerous. She was worried about the danger to herself but especially to her other son, 12-year-old Colby. She says Skyler often beat up his older brother and threatened him with knives and sharp sticks."

"I mean, he threatened to kill the next-door neighbor little boy, screaming to the top of his lungs," Cynthia said. "I've tried to explain to him by doing that -- if somebody else was to do that -- they would take you to jail. That was where he was going to end up if we didn't do something."

So Cynthia walked through the emergency room doors of Immanuel hospital and there, she said, she talked to a caseworker, but, says she never used the words Safe Haven. She said she told the nurses the boy needed to see his psychiatrist and be readmitted to residential treatment.

Never mind whether or not you suppose that SOME person would be capable of dealing with this. I am fairly certain that there are some people who will NOT, and I should not want to have this fellow, if he does NOT receive parenting that is adequate to his needs, by his own mother's description, roaming the streets of our collective future.

Then there was the 11 year old who;

"had threatened to kill his mother and siblings and had tortured the family cat several times" , was prescribed medication, but refused to take it, and had (mind this is an 11 year old) already been arrested for criminal mischief.

One need not rely on obscure psychological indicators to see that he might become a threat to the public, what with the death threats, but anyone interested might note the animal torture. There are quite a few famous people who liked torturing animals; serial killers Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz (the "Son Of Sam") , Jeffrey Dahmer, and Edmund Kemper for example, or school shooters Brenda Ann Spencer ,Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Luke Woodham ,Michael Carneal ,Andrew Golden and ,Kip Kinkel. I have little doubt that more such examples could be found, but the research is stomach turning, and I think that these examples should serve to make the point!

There is something very wrong with a system, not just in Nebraska, but also around the nation, which is happy to strip children from their homes against the will of their families by the thousands, but which cannot accept a child when the parents recognize that they cannot provide proper care. That so absurd a situation could arise strongly suggests that the social services and child protection agencies have become obsessed with capture and seizure, loosing track of the children in the process.

Most likely, many troubled children and teens require mental health treatment, including inpatient or residential treatment, and would not be, and would not need to be abandoned by their parents, but the rash of safe-haven cases certainly points to a system that is not adequately helping severely troubled children. Beyond the misery of the children themselves, we cannot ignore the fact that anything from a rock, to a knife, to a car or truck can be a lethal weapon in the hands of a violently mental ill individual. To stop headline-grabbing tragedies, we need to ensure that mentally ill minors get treatment and are raised by someone who can handle them.

Links for additional child protection information

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog