And it would not surprise me if this poor child had bed sores from lack of care.
Since Tuffs treated her older sister for this rare disease and she recovered well, how on earth could Boston supersede another hospital and diagnose the child with an infection as mentally ill ? And how can the State remove a child from a family when even if they do have some mental problems when the parents have the child under doctors care?
Scary when if your child is labeled as autistic or has ADD and these problems are considered as a mental problem, when do THEY come for your kid when you take them to a hospital for a belly ache or infection from an infected tooth ?
There seems to be a huge back story to this problem, one we will never know as the Judge has some Explaining to why a parent had a gag order placed on them for discussing the health of their child.
Why the child was prevented from any communication with friends and family, why the parents were prevented from whispering "We love you" on supervised visits for just 60 minutes a week. Was the child schooled for the almost year and a half she was kept from family and friends ?
So many questions here, few if any answers from the people that tortured this child and her family for all that time. Everyone was just following orders they may say, but who was ordering the Judge to make their decisions ???
What started in the 1970s with the good intentions of reducing child abuse (no lack of too-real horror stories!) and letting police handle ordinary crime while social workers with special expertise handled abuse cases has metastasized into one of the larger, too-real
Law of Unintended Consequences horror stories in the US! At least one such agency has actually argued in court that they are not subject to the US Constitution's 4th Amendment (searches and seizures)!
So, one doctor - an intern(!) - decided (s)he understood the girl's condition better than the doctor who had been treating her and worked with her and the family for years. I know, how arrogant! And the hospital people supervising what amounts to an advanced apprentice or a journeyman backed him/her up!
CPS/DSS/DCF/
other acronym social workers seem to have some sort of perverse bias against healthy and religious families. Accusations are "investigated" with a
guilty even if proven innocent presumption. Being "very religious" or "homeschooling" are viewed as serious indicators that abuse is likely. This bias affects individual social workers and the agencies as well. In this case, the social workers who should have listened to the intern for 2 or 3 minutes, called the family doctor, verified that Justina had been under care for years, and dropped the case in less than half an hour (and asked the doctor and hospital if they were insane!), instead took the case to court.
The court ... family and juvenile courts are hand-in-glove with CPS/DSS/DCF/
other acronym social workers and agencies. Judges are biased, period, and the
guilty even if proven innocent presumption gets translated into decisions.
The situation is a horrible mess. Society gave too much power and too much trust to social agencies and family courts (BTW,
doctors and school personnel are mandatory reporters of suspected child abuse, and are forbidden to investigate or use their judgment about the suspicion). Social workers are humans, and some are unworthy of trust; because promotions come from actions, abuse of authority is encouraged, and abusers of authority get promotions. Social workers and family and juvenile court judges are cozy co-workers; judges are highly unlikely to view a social worker's claims and actions objectively.
IMO, the whole system is so morally bankrupt and dysfunctional that it needs to be scrapped and the social workers forbidden to work in government social agencies for 10 years (or maybe 5 years, after retraining).
The problem with that is, police departments have not needed child abuse related skills for decades, and thus lack such skills entirely. And, of course, child abusers are probably not any fewer that 4 decades ago.
So society is stuck! The existing system is perversely dysfunctional, harming good families while neglecting supervision of known abusers. But if that system is scrapped, there's nothing ready to take it's very needed place.
