What should you do if child-protective services comes to your house?

You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks. She will interview you and your kids separately, so you can’t hear what she’s asking them or what they’re saying. She opens your fridge and your cabinets, checking to see if you have food, and what kind of food. She looks around for unsafe conditions, for dirt, for mess, for bugs or rats. She takes notes. You must be as calm and deferential as possible. However disrespectful and invasive she is, whatever awful things she accuses you of, you must remember that child protection has the power to remove your kids at any time if it believes them to be in danger. You can tell her the charges are not true, but she’s required to investigate them anyway. If you get angry, your anger may be taken as a sign of mental instability, especially if the caseworker herself feels threatened. She has to consider the possibility that you may be hurting your kids, that you may even kill one of them. You may never find out who reported you. If your child has been hurt, his teacher or doctor may have called the state child-abuse hotline, not wanting to assume, as she might in a richer neighborhood, that it was an accident. But it could also have been a neighbor who heard yelling, or an ex-boyfriend who wants to get back at you, or someone who thinks you drink too much or simply doesn’t like you. People know that a call to the hotline is an easy way to blow up your life. If the caseworker believes your kids are in imminent danger, she may take them. You may not be allowed to say goodbye. It is terrifying for them to be taken from their home by a stranger, but this experience has repercussions far beyond the terror of that night. Your children may hear accusations against you—you’re using drugs, your apartment is filthy, you fail to get them to school, you hit them—and even if they don’t believe these things they will remember. And, after your children see that you are powerless to protect them, this will permanently change things between you. Whatever happens later—whether the kids come back the next week, or in six months, or don’t come back at all—that moment can never be undone.

The caseworker has sixty days to investigate the charges against you. She will want you to admit to your faults as a parent, and you should, because this tells her you have insight into your problems and that you have a sincere desire to accept her help and change your life. But you should admit only so much, because she is not just there to help you: she is also there to evaluate and report on you, so anything you say may be used against you in court. The Administration for Children’s Services—A.C.S., as child-protective services is known in New York City—has to prove its allegations against you only by “preponderance of the evidence.” It can bring in virtually anything as evidence—an old drug habit, even if you’ve been clean for years; a D.U.I.; a diagnosis of depression. While the court case is proceeding, you may be asked to submit to drug testing or a mental-health evaluation, to attend parenting classes or anger-management classes or domestic-violence classes and some kind of therapy. These services are intended to help you, but, if you want to get your kids back, they are not really voluntary, even though they may be so time-consuming and inflexibly scheduled that you lose your job. The more obedient you are, the better things will go for you. Even if you are innocent and can prove it, it could be more than a year before you get a hearing, and during those crucial months your compliance and deference are the currency that buys you visits with your children.

When should you take a child from his parents?

You must start your investigation within twenty-four hours of the hotline call. Go at night—people are more likely to be home. As you look around, you have to be very, very careful, because if you miss something it will be partly your fault if a child ends up hurt, or dead. You may be shocked by the living conditions you encounter, but you’re not allowed to remove children solely because of poverty—if, for instance, there’s no food in the kitchen because the parent’s food stamps have run out—only for “imminent risk” due to abuse or neglect. But it’s often difficult to draw a line between poverty and neglect. When a child has been left alone because his mother can’t afford childcare and has to go to work, is that poverty or neglect? What if the child has been injured because there wasn’t an adult there to prevent it? Unless you’ve become desensitized through repetition, emergency removals are awful. Parents may scream at you and call you terrible names. Sometimes a parent will get violent. When you suspect in advance that a situation is going to be dicey, you can bring a colleague or a police officer, but sometimes things turn very fast and you’re on your own. If you remove the children that night, you will take them to a processing center to be assigned to a temporary foster home. Once you get there, it could take a long time for a home to be found—many hours. The children sit and wait, along with other children in the same situation. They may be crying, but it’s unlikely you will be able to comfort them, because you may never have met them before, and you have just separated them from their parents. If the children ask you where they’re going next, or when they’ll go home, or if they’ll stay together with their brothers and sisters, you can’t answer them, because you don’t know.

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After that first visit, you have sixty days to investigate the charges. You should interview the child’s teacher, his pediatrician, and anyone else you think relevant. You should seek out neighbors and relatives; they may be too wary to talk to you, or else so eager to talk that you suspect they’re trying to get the parent in trouble. You must also draw out the parent herself; this is tricky, because you must play two conflicting roles—helper and investigator. Even if you feel for the parent and believe her kids should not be taken away, that is not the end of the story, because the final decision to ask in court for the removal of children is not yours to make; your supervisor, or your supervisor’s manager, will make it. Even though this manager has likely never met the parent or her kids, she may override your recommendation and take what she believes to be the safer course of action. Many at A.C.S. believe that taking kids from their parents is the cautious thing to do. Nobody wants to end up on the front page of the Daily News. You are working to protect children, and you will remind yourself of that when your job gets really difficult. Maybe once or twice a parent will thank you, and tell you that the services you provided made a difference in her life, and you will feel that those thanks make up for all the other parents who cursed at you and called you a baby snatcher. But that’s unlikely. The turnover among A.C.S. caseworkers is very high.