Murphy founded the first GABI center at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in 2010. In 2017, ACS partnered with her to expand the program and open centers in every borough, in areas with frequent reports of child abuse or neglect—terms that can encompass a wide range of circumstances, from bruising and other visible signs of mistreatment to things like frequent absence from school, excessive fatigue or hunger, or simply walking home alone. Many calls to the city’s child abuse hotline come from teachers and hospital staff, who are required by law to report signs of abuse or neglect. In Staten Island, most of the reports come from St. George and neighboring Stapleton.

The goal of the GABI program is to provide support to parents and keep problems from escalating to the point where children need to be removed from their homes and placed in foster care. It is guided by the fact that, while serious child abuse does occur, it’s rare, and many issues that fall under the broad umbrella of “neglect”—which alone accounts for 73 percent of all allegations of child maltreatment made to ACS—are simply the everyday struggles of low-income families. In New York, the ten neighborhoods with the highest number of ACS cases, mostly in the Bronx, also represent the lowest incomes, highest unemployment, and greatest income-to-rent disparities in the city. Eight of those neighborhoods are the top places from which families enter homeless shelters. They’re also neighborhoods inhabited predominantly by people of color. “It’s not neglect,” said Jeanette Vega, the training director at Rise, a New York nonprofit that advocates for parents with open ACS cases. “We’re poor—this is poverty.”

This recognition that poor parents need help, not suspicion and condemnation, represents a substantial departure from the understanding many families have of ACS. All too often, family defense advocates say, ACS caseworkers visit families in the middle of the night—a tactic that is supposed to be reserved for emergencies in which children are in imminent danger—demanding that parents wake their children so they can inspect their bodies for bruises, interview them alone, check their bedrooms, and take stock of the food in the kitchen cupboards. Preventive services like parenting classes or counseling sessions for mental health, substance abuse, or domestic violence—technically voluntary, but refused at parents’ risk—are often preventive in name only and do little to address at-risk families’ greatest needs, only increasing the burdens on parents who are already stretched thin, making it more likely that they will be forced to relinquish their children to foster care. “With some cases, I almost struggle to use the word ‘services,’ because I think most families wouldn’t describe them as services,” said Chris Gottlieb, the co-director of the Family Defense Clinic at the New York University School of Law. “People call me all the time, saying, ‘I reached out to ACS for help, and it destroyed my family.’”

At the GABI center in St. George, one woman with a quiet voice and long, dark hair described her terror when ACS banged on her door in the middle of the night, demanding to speak to her children. “I was so scared,” she said. “I thought they were going to take my kids.” Another mother nodded her agreement. “They want to put you in that state of fear,” she said. A third spoke of how she’d been taken from her own mother at age eleven, separated from her younger brother, and shuffled through nine foster and group homes, some of which were abusive. She emerged traumatized and struggled to rekindle her relationships with her siblings. And now, as a parent, she said ACS continued to hound her, showing up at her door or at her daughters’ school in response to what she said were false reports of domestic violence, waiting for her to slip up. “For people like me, who’ve been in the system,” she said, “ACS is a place I hate.”