THE STATE should not hesitate to remove a newborn child from a family with a demonstrated history of abuse and neglect, but it must show its reasons fully and fairly. The Supreme Judicial Court acted appropriately this week in overruling a lower court judge and ordering the state Department of Children and Families to provide sworn evidence to back up its decision to take a baby from its mother. But social workers shouldn’t draw the wrong lesson from the ruling.
The SJC’s rebuke riled some case managers, who worry that it could make their colleagues reluctant to take action in similar situations. They shouldn’t be reluctant, merely schooled in the law and prepared to follow it.
State child protection workers had removed two older children from the unnamed mother’s home seven months before she gave birth to baby girl “Zita’’ on Dec. 18, 2008. Two days later, state workers took emergency custody of the newborn and prepared, as required by law, to defend the agency’s actions at a hearing. But the evidence was flawed, including an unsworn petition from a social worker outlining the mother’s previous child-rearing failures that led to the removal of the older children. Still, Judge Lillian Miranda of the Hampshire-Franklin Juvenile Court, who had ordered the removal of the older children, awarded temporary custody of “Zita’’ to the state. The SJC vacated the judge’s ruling and ordered a new hearing.
Common sense suggests that “Zita’’ would be better off raised by someone other than her mother, given her history. But the SJC offers a pointed reminder that the Department of Children and Families must back up its cases with solid documentation. And the state fell miserably short. The justices, in fact, could barely contain their sarcasm in a footnote to their unanimous opinion. “We are informed that in some counties in the Commonwealth it is the practice of the department - preferable in our judgment - to submit a sworn affidavit of a social worker in support of a request for emergency removal of a child,’’ it reads.
Protecting children from neglect and abuse is among the most important responsibilities of the state. Attention to detail in every regional office of the Department of Children and Families should be in direct proportion to that awesome responsibility.
Still, some child protection specialists now worry that the case could undermine future efforts to show that past parental abuse or neglect can be a predictor of future behavior. The concern is made even greater by the SJC finding that Judge Miranda gave too much weight to her prior knowledge of the mother’s parenting failures and not enough to the evidence, or lack of evidence, in the case of baby “Zita.’’
The law, however, does allow the court to take a parent’s prior behavior into consideration. But that requires judges, attorneys, case workers, and those involved in child protection to do their jobs diligently when parents don’t.
