The Vermont Citizen’s Advisory Board recently issued a report by the on the deaths of two young children in 2014 who had been in the custody of the Department for Children and Families – the DCF. Each child died of severe injuries, soon after the DCF reunited them with their families rather than seeking to terminate parental rights.
The report suggests the DCF should have done more to protect these children. It’s a reasonable conclusion that we can’t fully evaluate because the details are sealed. But the report also accuses the DCF, and the courts, of misinterpreting the Vermont Juvenile Proceedings Act to suggest that “reunification at all costs” should be the objective, even when it’s not necessarily in the best interests of the child. The Board recommends that the DCF clarify its policies and that the Legislature change the law.
But we must be very, very careful about moving in that direction. It is altogether too easy for the folks who work in the system to equate poverty with child endangerment, at least subconsciously. Pretty much all parent s who comes under DCF scrutiny lead difficult lives . It may be tempting to conclude – again, perhaps subconsciously - that nearly all of their children could potentially be better off elsewhere. F or this very reason the current law carefully limits application of the “best interests of the child” standard by encouraging reunification.
Make no mistake – our courts terminate someone’s parental rights only under the most dire of circumstances – when maintaining the parental relationship threatens grievous harm to the child in question. It rarely happens, but it does happen, and it should happen.
Still, we should not ignore the fact that to sever the bond between parent and child – to deprive both of these people the right to know and to love each other – is right up there with the death penalty in terms of what an extraordinarily powerful and irreversible action this is for the government to take.
The late justice Harry Blackman once wrote – alas, in a dissent – that “there can be few losses more grievous than the abrogation of parental rights.” It’s obvious now that the state should have terminated parental rights in the cases of the two children who died of injuries. But to invoke a long established bit of legal wisdom, reacting to bad cases without long and careful consideration can lead to bad laws. And these are bad cases indeed.
