Rivers tried to explain to the caseworker that the police had overreacted, but the caseworker maintained that the parents had somehow jeopardized their kids safety. When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information—and insisted she return to therapy.
Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?
And people wonder why there is a stigma and general reluctance to get help like therapy. Even if it were completely free, it can still have a cost and be used against you.
Exactly. I think that for some folks out there who are struggling, they're not necessarily hesitating to get help they need out of shame or wounded sense of pride. But because they've correctly assessed the risks of it being weaponized against them.
I can imagine a world where culture gets better in 20, 30 years and we look back at the 2020s and say "yikes, good thing it's not like that anymore."
Unfortunately the social workers are just police without guns. They have the same law enforcement problem: the people who apply for the jobs are the ones who want to abuse people. They aren't servants of the law, they want to use the law as a weapon. The good social workers are in private clinics and schools.
Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.
The problem is that making the government responsible (and liable) creates an incentive for government employees and departments to overreact and treat every situation as harshly as possible, because if they were ever to be reasonable and lenient, and a child were to be abused later, they would then be blamed.
The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges.
The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.
Also, most of what they do is under threat of authority, not actual authority. For the most part, they need a court order to enter your home, question your children without your permission, etc. Hopefully if more people realize they have the right to say no, then the worker will be a little more reasonable. Right now they know that everyone they meet bends to their threats and nobody challenges them, so they are emboldened.
Right. I don't want to blame the parents, but all they had to do was deny the case workers entry and an interview, and say come back with a warrant or when my attorney is present. That would have saved a lot of headache and been well within their rights.
It goes one of two ways. One is that they don't have probable cause that abuse has occurred and nothing happens. Police dropping the charges seem to support this for this scenario. The other is that they do get the order and you have the same situation of visits and questions.
I had a friend who had a false report made against her by her husbands ex-wife to Florida DCF after they refused to babysit the ex-wifes' profoundly disabled child (by her new husband) while the ex-wife went out partying.
A social worker showed up demanding to enter my friends home. My friend was a paralegal and was aware of her rights and told the social worker to come back with a warrant if she wanted to enter the home. No doubt extremely offended about the false report, I'm sure she was not polite about it.
The worker contacted the sheriffs office and they got a judge to sign off on an emergency order by saying the lives of the children were at risk. The social worker returned with multiple law enforcement officers who broke down the door of the home, entered with with guns drawn, terrorizing her children, cuffed and arrested her. No charges were filed.
The worker continually harassed my friend for most of a year with numerous additional incidents before the friend was able to obtain a court order barring Florida DCF from contacting her or her family, and restraining the worker from contact specifically. You could say that eventually she "won", but it's was a hollow victory in that it came at a cost she couldn't really afford and caused harm for which there could be no compensation.
There are rights you have on paper and then there are the actual consequences in reality if you try to stand up for them. When you're facing a petty dictator with almost complete power over your life and almost no accountability for their actions it can be pragmatic to play along and not risk inspiring a vendetta.
Did the social worker lose their job? It sounds like if they had multiple issues and there was a restraining order, then they should have. If so, they removed one abusive social worker. Without that, that social worker would continue to do similar things to others. I'm guessing the emergency order was granted without supporting evidence (ie illegally by the social worker made things up).
Also, there's a big difference in how you invoke those rights. If you get aggressive, that can be a problem. Probably the best thing to do is ask for their card, say that you want to help and that you'll have your attorney contact them. If there's a claim of immediate danger, a quick show of your kids being happy and unharmed should suffice.
The main point is, if everyone just rolls over, these abuses and terrible bureaucrats will not be uncovered. The system will never improve unless people hear about these abuses. That itself is highly valuable, even if the personal cost is high.
Certainly not initially, DCF backed them up. Maybe eventually? I'd ask but the friend passed away a number of years ago. This happened just pre-internet enough that it's not well documented online.
> The main point is, if everyone just rolls over, these abuses and terrible bureaucrats will not be uncovered.
That's true but it doesn't mean that standing up works out for the betterment of you and your family.
Not everyone has the freedom to make a martyr of themselves. I'm grateful for those who do.
> Also, there's a big difference in how you invoke those rights. If you get aggressive, that can be a problem.
More precisely, if you're perceived as being aggressive it's a problem. The distinction is important because we have less control over how we're perceived than how we act-- particularly because an important characteristic (perhaps even defining) of abusive bureaucrats is perceiving anything short of complete submission as an attack.
"Not everyone has the freedom to make a martyr of themselves."
True, but without knowledge that saying no is an option, those people effectively don't have a choice, and you end up with few people volunteering to stand up.
"More precisely, if you're perceived as being aggressive it's a problem."
Also true, but with today's technology it's fairly easy to document the interaction. If the official's account is a lie, then you've got them. If it's not an outright lie, you have a record for an object 3rd party to rule on (although there are plenty of bad judges too).
Your friend saved a lot of other parents during that time.
Thankfully I have not been terrorized by DCS but having been terrorized by police, I at least knew standing up for my rights meant those police were tied up with me for hours to days on end rather than terrorizing dozens of push-overs in the same time. I had a scenario recently where two tyrants were forced to babysit me for almost a full day, which meant that probably 200 push-overs who could be worked over in 15 minutes each were saved thanks to my standing up for my rights. When everyone invokes their rights the system locks up.
I mean maybe? I had a court order served against me for something non-child related. The order was obvious bullshit. The drones involved in executing it were gnashing at the teeth to do what it said but by the time they were delayed hours getting the judge to approve it, their gusto was gone and they started pondering their own precarious legal situation when they would inevitably find what they did was bullshit and unjustified and they'd be looking at a massive lawsuit. They were smart not to too, because I'm quite certain they would have found nothing and counsel I would later invoke would uncover the warrant was not obtained in a legal manner.
It got them to back off even though they had the order in hand with the judge's signature.
Funny enough part of the Defund the police push essentially was implying social workers were the answer (granted more about mental health than child protection services). Still, the point is it seems every agency has their knee to the neck of americans so to speak.
Kinda reminds me of the song Dystopia Now by Mental Minority[1] which quotes George Orwell's 1984 "If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever"
I felt like I learned something when I saw a list of average GRE scores by fields of study and social workers were at the absolute bottom, well below others.
While I'm sure that many have genuine compassion for others, this doesn't change the fact that many are literal morons who have been given incredible authority to interfere with the lives of others. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you please at least find and link to this list before you call hundreds of thousands of low-paid highly educated essential workers "literal morons"?
Thanks. Looking at the numbers, Verbal is a bit below average but above other fields that you might not consider filled with morons, like CS and electrical engineering. Quant is indeed the lowest but also the least important for the field. Maybe that's the only one you were looking at? Writing is above average.
Going by the percentiles here https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-data-2016.p... they are indeed below the Verbal and Quant medians, Writing is unclear. Overall it does not come close to the "literal moron" bar, especially since they are presumably aware that Quant skills are unimportant for the field so they don't need to focus on it much.
I agree that "literal moron" is inflammatory. I definitely would not trust the communication skills of the average software engineer to navigate a situation where a child's life is potentially at stake either! This is supposed to be what a social worker excels at.
Social workers also score poorly on communication skills, in aggregate.
I'll happily agree that my description was extremely critical-- more than it needed to be--, but we should hold anyone whit the authority to invade our lives with minimal oversight or accountability to an extremely high standard. What what I've seen, we've often failed to do so.
We don't send our best out to become law enforcement or social workers. These are extremely difficult, even dangerous jobs, and we fantastically underpay them.
Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?