“[It] feels like a jail cell has dropped around my family”

New York’s family police agency is still harassing survivors of domestic violence and their children. (And in the rest of the country, it's probably even worse.)

In New York, it’s illegal to tear children from their homes and throw them into foster care just because they “witnessed domestic violence” – typically a husband or boyfriend beating the child’s mother.  Taking children on these grounds is illegal in New York because of a class-action lawsuit, Nicholson v. Scoppetta.  (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) 

Among the many reasons not to engage in this pernicious practice: It discourages domestic violence victims from seeking help, and it actually compounds the trauma of removal for the children.  

Removals on these grounds have been curbed in New York, but not in much of the rest of the country where the practice remains unchecked.  And in New York, the New York City family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, still considers itself free to harass domestic violence survivors and their children by putting them under constant surveillance.  

So now there’s another lawsuit.  The Daily News first reported on the suit when it was filed in December.  Now The New York Times has added a lot of additional reporting in an excellent story published today. 

I want to highlight one case discussed in the story.  In this case, the family police made 175 “visits” to the home and the children’s school over four years. And “visits” is the wrong term, since a visit is voluntary.  These were more like raids. 

According to the Times story: 

Supervision was imposed after [the mother, Ms. M.] reported that her ex-boyfriend had choked and beaten her and threatened to kill her and her five children. Caseworkers made surprise visits, including late at night, and lifted her children’s shirts to look for signs of abuse; one worker asked them “the same questions over and over when it appears that she did not get the answer she wanted,” Ms. M. said in court papers. 

She said her children were mercilessly teased and bullied after caseworkers came to interview them at school, to the point where she transferred all of them to different schools. 

The typical excuse from family police agencies is that they have to keep harassing families in case the abuser comes back – even when the survivor has done everything right and taken out an order of protection.  But that was a particularly flimsy excuse in this case. As the story explains: 

The caseworkers’ reports, which contained personal information about Ms. M., were also shared with Ms. M.’s abuser, who is in jail. [Emphasis added.]

The story documents other ways in which this kind of harassment of domestic violence survivors empowers abusers: 

 She complained in court papers that he “is able to keep tabs on us through A.C.S. reports submitted to this court.” Three years into the case, the agency agreed to end supervision, but the lawyer for Ms. M.’s ex-boyfriend blocked the move. [Emphasis added.]

 And the next time you wonder how a child in real danger was missed despite multiple “warning signs” – think of how much time and effort was wasted on those 175 "visits."

 Ms. M. summed it all up this way:

 “[It] feels like a jail cell has dropped around my family.”