https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/02/16/prosecutors-legal-guardians-pulled-10-year-old-out-school-despite-teacher-opposition/
In this case a foster child was murdered slowly starved to death and the school, the neighborhood parents, and her biological parents where all calling and asking DHS to do a safety check.
Why are the state employees who refused to check on her not being charged with any crime? Also their names have not been released.
She was literally never checked on once she was put into foster care.
In: Other
Because they just don’t have that liability. If they did no one would take the job. The people at fault for what happened are the parents.
Horrible that happened and yes whoever ignored the please from the parents/teachers should be investigated.
but I find this part questionable.
““There needs to be more compelling, in fulsome explanations as to why you want to pull a child out of the public schools, and the child needs to be constantly monitored once they are,” said Lane.”
As a parent, if I want to homeschool my children it’s my right. They are not property of the government and lord knows many public schools are not great places. As long as my kid passes the yearly test while being homeschooled, why should the government be more involved?
The answer is a mix. First, it’s an incredibly high bar to make someone liable for something they could have done but didn’t. Just like the police aren’t criminally liable for not investigating and preventing a reported crime, not preventing a tragedy like this doesn’t make a DHS agent criminally liable unless very specific requirements are met. If the main issue is that nobody ever checked on the kid, the requirements to meet any form of criminal negligence certainly won’t be met, because you can’t be significantly negligent about an issue you were not aware of.
Second, these social services are typically incredibly underfunded and understaffed. The jobs suck, they’re mentally brutal, they pay poorly, and the case load per person is massive, to the point where it’s often impossible to adequately handle everything that is assigned. This often results in long delays in investigating reports or handing current caseloads. It’s a sad fact that if you call Child Protective Services about an issue less serious than someone being physically beaten or sexually assaulted by a guardian, it can take a very long time for them to have someone available to follow up, if it even happens.
Changing this would require significantly increasing the funding and staffing of the department in question, both to hire more agents, and add more oversight to make sure nothing gets missed.
Generally speaking, we seem to go easy on public servants when they screw up because the incentives that cause them to work hard are diminished when compared to their private sector counterparts, and the benefits of their hard work don’t go to them as much as they go to society.
If a cop is going to be sued for failing to effectively rescue a person, he might not get out of his car to help in the first place. If he does save that person, he might get recognized for his hard work, but not in the same monetary way as, say, a real estate attorney might be. And by the same token, our society is benefited tremendously when someone isn’t murdered.
So, we worry that is we make the workers too vulnerable to their failures, they will simply not do the work by leaving our by doing nothing at all.
In your example, the DHS employee might prefer to not take notes of their encounters with the kid’s family. No paper trail, no risk of being punished if the kid dies. Or, at an even higher level, why create an apparatus to protect kids in the first place if all it is going to do is expose the government to liability?
There’s not really an ELI5 answer, but it’s going to be a combination of things:
(1) They didn’t do anything legally wrong. It’s one thing to actually do these things, and another to just not stop it.
Like if you were aware your neighbor was a psycho, and then he went and killed a man, do you think you should be charged? Of course not.
(2) These reports are just one of many. These agents get communications from different people all the time and about plenty of children. They judge these threats on their merits, and decide which ones to take action on. They misjudged that in this case, but that’s not a criminal act.
(3) A variation of the “Good Samaritan” concept, qualified immunity.
It is important to have people whose job is to sift through cases and check in on kids who may be victims of abuse or neglect. But *nobody* would ever choose to do a job if they were likely to get charged criminally for making an honest mistake at work.
If you started charging DHS agents for this, well then there wouldn’t be *any* children being checked up on and saved.
About this specific case, while the article mentions that Geanna’s teachers and school staff were opposed to her being pulled out of school, there’s no mention of anyone calling child welfare services. Do you happen to have more information on this case?
But to answer your question more broadly, child welfare officers aren’t just sitting around twiddling their thumbs instead of remediating dangerous situations. Generally an insufficient response is due to one of two things:
* Insufficient resources and staff to quickly and thoroughly respond to every single case; or
* Legal barriers preventing action from being taken. Laws differ by state/locality, but generally, laws tend to favor rights of parents/legal guardians.
Getting back to Geanna, I see this:
>The state told Hawaii News Now that social workers don’t continue making visits once a foster child is under legal guardianship, which was the case with Geanna.
I don’t know why this is the case – perhaps Hawaii’s child welfare services are stretched too thin, and a child who has been adopted is considered a lower priority than children still in the welfare system? Or maybe once parents adopt a school-age child, the responsibility for the child’s welfare is passed on the the DOE? One way or another, it seems like there’s a push to change existing policies.
The “state employees” almost certainly have no legal duty to “check on” anyone.
There are not a ton of situations where one can be legally liable for not doing something. Further, imposing such a duty would likely result in the complete evaporation of these services.
I don’t see anything in that article or any of the linked articles about ignoring calls for safety checks or refusing to do anything?
>She was literally never checked on once she was put into foster care
It seems no longer doing periodic checks when a child is with a legal guardian is the policy for social workers in Hawaii.
Unfortunately there is a massive shortage of social workers and too many children to check up on. If you started charging social workers for what happens to kids you would get even less people willing to do that work.
The Supreme Court cases DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services and less specifically Castle Rock v. Gonzalez.
The police or child services have a duty to uphold the law, but they have no duty to protect any individual who is not currently in their custody or where other special relationship is not established. Failing to uphold the law only means they did their job poorly and can get fired for that. Failing to protect a general individual is not within their duty.
What is a special relationship is case by case, but this doesn’t appear to fit within any I know of. Note that this does not prevent a state from creating such a duty, but as far as I know none have.
Qualified immunity.
The court never holds government agencies or government employees responsible for their actions.
Latest Answers