Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Students Blogs -> Lag Liv

Law Students

: Lag Liv

Our Story of a Broken System

By Anonymous

A reader sent me this article from The Washington Post: "A Case of a Family Services Job Well Done, or Overdone?". The Caplans' experience is so similar to ours that it was hard to read- I could feel myself right back at October 13th, waking up in our apartment with the sick realization that Landon was in a shelter and I didn't know when we could get him home- but I'm glad to see the story is out there.

I think it's important for this side of child protective services to be publicized. Protecting children from abuse is of paramount importance, but so is protecting innocent families from abuse by a frighteningly powerful agency. I am so thankful that Landon was too young to remember any of his time in the shelter (this is sadly not true in many stories), but the aftershocks of our false accusations will reverberate through his life and the life of our future children. We're terrified of the normal bumps and bruises kids get as they progress and play. The "3-month birthday" page of his baby book is blank because he turned three months old in the shelter. I think of all the crazy things I did as a kid that could have landed me in the emergency room and I'm sad that I want to keep Landon from doing any of them.

We never protested against DCFS's initial involvement in our case. But after three different attending pediatricians asserted that Landon's injuries could have been caused by things other than child abuse, after our pediatrician contacted both DCFS and Dr. K (because neither of them contacted her) to assert that Landon had been in her office many times without a single canceled appointment, bruise, or sign of neglect, after JP and I passed polygraph tests, after the assistant state's attorney refused to take the case because there was not credible evidence to believe Landon had been abused, the investigation did not end -- it actually got worse. I will never understand the final twist in our case and how we went from "he can go home with you, JP, and your mom and this will be wrapped up in a week or two" to "he is not safe in your home, even with your mother present, and he is better off in a shelter" in one night. The investigative file has no explanation for the sudden change. I sympathize with the lack of resources, overworked investigators, and the fear of letting a child slip through the cracks, but when children are repeatedly left in obviously abusive situations and my child was put in a shelter in a situation that was far from abusive, the system is broken on both ends. I can't even comfort myself by believing the overzealousness applied to our case is saving children in others - there was an article just last week about yet another child who died from the abusive hands of his parents after DCFS declined to intervene after being called on several occasions.

I was told many times during the dark days that I was "brave" to put my story out on the internet. I really didn't see it as bravery- when I wrote that first post about Landon's doctor appointment and the start of the investigation, I never imagined it was going to turn in to such a nightmare. I just thought I'd write about a scary night in the ER and then focus on Landon's injuries and the bone disease I was certain he must have. Later, when I started reading message boards and blog posts doubting me, my story, and our care of Landon, I understood why some people felt I was being brave. But at that point, too many people were following the story and I was getting too much from the supportive (and often informative) comments to stop.

Now I wonder, should we have done more? At the time I felt so beaten down by the suspicion and fear that the last thing I wanted to do was publicize our story more. I still remember every word of the negative blog posts and message board threads I read about us, and I knew I couldn't handle any more of that. But now I regret not pushing back harder - what happened in our case was wrong. There was an article in the Chicago Tribune in November praising the CPS doctor in our case and how she's pushed to have every child admitted to the ER for a broken bone, burn, or bruise evaluated by her team. This is dangerous unless the opinions of other pediatricians and specialists are allowed to matter (they currently have no weight in child abuse investigations at the University of Chicago Children's Hospital). Interestingly, all the online comments for that article were negative- mostly from parents who had been wrongly caught up in the system (or knew people who had). One of the hardest parts about sharing my story has been reading the emails of other wrongfully accused parents who have found my blog. I do not want to discourage them from reaching out to me, I know how important that is, but it is so, so hard to read their stories. There are many times when I have to stop reading and go back later- it just takes me back to those days of waking up, hoping it was all a nightmare, and re-realizing each morning that it was real. I think their stories would be heart-rending to anyone, but to me they're physically painful. Most are far worse than ours, with their kids caught up in social services for weeks and months before a judge or third-party intervenes. These are stories that aren't being told.

I think I would like to be brave and tell mine outside the blog, but I'm not sure how to begin. Do you just draft an article or letter to the editor and start sending it around? Do you contact a newspaper and see if there's an interest? I have no idea, do you?

Full post as published by Lag Liv on February 27, 2008 (boomark / email).