Child Welfare Officials Have Searched Her Home and Her Son Dozens of Times. She’s Suing Them to Stop.
Child Welfare Officials Have Searched Her Home and Her Son Dozens of Times. She’s Suing Them to Stop.
Despite no evidence a mother mistreated her child, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services continues to enter her home without a warrant. She has filed a lawsuit, citing ProPublica’s reporting, arguing her rights are being violated.
The allegations against L.B., made by an anonymous caller at 4:45 a.m. that day, were false. These included that she was a stripper (she worked at a home for people with disabilities); that she used drugs (none were found, and a drug test was negative for all substances); and that an abusive man lived with her and that she owned “machine guns” (after an exhaustive search and interrogation, both claims were deemed baseless).
In fact, L.B. has never been found to have committed any type of child maltreatment, ACS and court records show.
Yet the anonymous caller, whom L.B. believes to be a former acquaintance with a grudge, has continued to dial in to New York’s state child welfare hotline. Each time, this person or possibly people make outlandish, often already-disproven claims about her, seeming to know that doing so will automatically trigger a government intrusion into her domestic life.
And ACS obliges: Over the past three years, the agency either has inspected her home or examined and questioned her son at school more than two dozen times. Caseworkers have sought a warrant for only three of these searches, most recently in August. All of those requests have been rejected by judges, according to court records.
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It's horrible what a determined harasser can get away with due to bureaucracy and a simple lack of looking before they leap when it comes to government agencies and police.
And they almost never get caught. If they do get caught, there's often no legal recourse because the laws in this country regarding harassing others are absolute dogshit.
Canada is better in some ways ... although we have a lot of room for improvement. Provincial gov'ts set their own standards and rules, but in the province where I was a CFS investigator we had access to back files on individuals that would be checked as soon as a call came in.
We also weren't allowed to check cupboards because simply being poor is NOT a valid reason to take kids away.
It's crazy here. A bully at my daughter's middle school doxxed her on Discord and kept making prank phone calls. The school wouldn't do anything and there's basically nothing legally we could do about it either. The phone calls came from a spoofed number, meaning we couldn't prove who was making them, and apparently no one gets prosecuted for doxxing since no one knows what laws it breaks, so it's basically legal.
We pulled her out of school because of the bullying in general, and thankfully that girl stopped harassing when my daughter left school. I don't know what we would do if she had kept it up.
Ugh. I can't imagine what it's like raising kids now. I'm an angry person under the best of circumstances let alone someone threatening my child.
I'm glad you were able to find a solution, although it sucks your daughter had to be the one that changed.
Thanks. Online school will be better for her anyway. She has really bad social anxiety and being in big public school crowds and classrooms full of rowdy kids was always hard for her. The excessive bullying was the thing that broke her and made us pull her out. I had to quit my job to oversee her online schoolwork, but she's more important than my job and we've survived on a single income before.
People might say "oh that will make her anxiety worse."
I can say, without hesitation, that going to public places and staying in public school did absolutely fuck all to help my anxiety of crowds.
Exposure therapy only works if you get consistent good feedback, and school is not the place where that happens.
Her anxiety is really bad. We went to a goodbye party for a friend and there were about 20 people there, and she didn't want to stay because the kitchen had too many people in it.
Man, I've literally done that.
Christmas parties at my grandparents house usually meant spending the entire day in the basement because there were too many people. For me It's usually not a number of people thing, but how many people are in a room relative to its size.
I do want to give you some good news though. Despite my persistent anxiety, I have recently discovered that it has made me incredibly resilient to sudden stressors I wasn't anxious of prior. I would not be surprised if your daughter builds the same resilience either. It won't be easy, nor intentional, but it is a small gift from it.
You never know what strengths you will gain from childhood adversity and I hope she gains some through the hardships she's experienced. And I think it is the same with her, it's more about how many people are in a room relative to its size, which is a big problem with my wife's family gatherings because she has a huge family, but she also has a lot of trouble with noise levels and with unfamiliar people, so she has a lot of issues when it comes to social anxiety.
I'm like that too and until recently I never knew why. Most of the time I was able to control it, but now that I'm in my 60's I just don't have the strength or desire to anymore.
If you haven't already you may want to check out ADHD in girls, as that's what I was diagnosed with 2 years ago.
She's already been diagnosed with it, so that is also a problem. That's why I would have quit my job to monitor her online school even if the school didn't require it. To keep her focused. She's on some (non-scheduled) medication for it and it helps, but not so much that she doesn't need help in school.
Incidentally, I just read this very interesting article about women with ADHD that someone posted on another Lemmy community- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/02/the-lost-girls-chaotic-and-curious-women-with-adhd-all-have-missed-red-flags-that-haunt-us
My daughter is a perfectionist when it comes to things she loves. She keeps throwing out her drawings because she thinks they're never good enough and she's a really good artist. That article sort of gives perspective on that. I'm going to read it to my daughter later and see if it makes her less likely to throw them out. She's thrown out whole sketchbooks that I've had to rescue from the trash.
You got this in hand then. She sounds like she's smart as a whip, and with parents who are devoted to her. She will do well I think.
Thanks. I sure hope so. It's been a rough ride.
Reading this makes me so fucking angry. It baffles me how often bullies get away with shit, and even more how their own parents completely lack any form of empathy towards their kid's victim and will simply refuse to believe their "little angel" is a fucking gremlin. But the bully gets hit back just once, and suddenly the victim gets demonised. Blegh. I hate it so much.
I hope your kid is doing better now.
She's healing, but it will be a long time before she's better.
I wish her, and you as well, the best.
Thank you!
I hate to say it but… you hit the bully back. I was bullied in school, and that was the only thing that made a bully stop. Of course, don’t pound them into the ground, and do it when the teachers aren’t looking.
That was advice I got from a teacher, and it changed my life. Before, I’d gone to a teacher when I was bullied. I tried to ignore the bully (he hit me in the head with a rock for ignoring him). I tried asking the bully to stop.
Then one day my science teacher said, ‘sometimes, you have to hit back’.
She's really not confrontational. And this is all mental bullying rather than physical bullying. Punching the kid who doxxed you would just get you in trouble.
Only if you get caught.
Punching the kid would get both kids in trouble actually. Punch the bully in the face and take the detention every time, they will stop.
She's a kid who never, ever wants to get in trouble. She will cry if she gets any sort of school punishment and she's even cried when I've done very minor things like raise my voice a little when she did something she shouldn't have done. She's just extremely sensitive. I can't imagine her punching anyone. Also, she has no upper body strength. None. She can barely push open doors in stores and restaurants. And trying to get her to exercise is a fool's errand.
And this may lead to all sorts of bad stuff. Adults, and I mean school officials and teachers, should do something with a bully, not that they always do and some even don't want to admit that they should.
As someone who was bullied as a kid, I can say with confidence that they don’t. The best I ever got was the teacher asking them nicely to stop.
Drugs were also reported which would be reason to search cupboards. Though a 911 report alone shouldn't be enough to get a warrant .
CFS workers shouldn't be looking for drugs. That's the cop's job.
Is simply having/taking drugs even child endangerment? Sure, the stereotype of a drug addict is someone wildly neglecting their kids, but I can totally imagine ways that someone could use drugs while still being a good parent. It's not like every drug user is an addict. Drugs aren't all the "pass out while your kids go hungry" type either (stimulants like cocaine are basically the exact opposite of that).
The mere existence of drugs shouldn't mean anything.
Each state has it's own rules, but the general rule is misusing alcohol or drugs that causes neglect of the child's needs.
The fact is just about every parent could be accused of that just by having a family BBQ with crazy Uncle Bill who likes to have a few too many. Technically that falls under neglect.
how is this due to bureaucracy? you think even less oversight and regulation is the answer? bureaucracy is the exact thing that would prevent things like this.
I guess by 'bureaucracy,' I meant a government that is so bogged down with these cases that they cut corners and don't pay attention to case histories. Probably hiring more people rather than more regulation and oversight would be the best thing to do.
sometimes you get killed in your sleep
I had an Internet stalker for a time who was determined to report me to the police for crimes I committed against children. Her proof? God told her. Yes, she literally thought that God spoke to her and told her who was abusing kids.
It was very stressful, but thankfully, apart from harassing me online, she never successfully convinced any police department to arrest me. I guess the police file their "God told me he's a criminal" reports in "the special filing location" (aka the trash).
Still, it's scary to think what grief she could use caused me had she been able to hide her crazy a bit better. (I've greatly summarized this tale for this post. The full tale takes place over years, involves multiple people including Boy George and the CEO of Firefox, a "worldwide hacking organization," and more.)