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Monday, December 11, 2006
Who’s at fault in child’s death?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The lead story in the Sunday paper returned to the tragic life of Nateyonna Banks, the two-year-old handed back to the woman who gave her life — and who now is accused of taking it. The story, by Craig Schneider, is an effort to find out how the child wound up back with the woman who birthed her, despite ample evidence that she was unfit.
As usual, the attention is on focused on the Division of Family and Children Services of the Georgia Department of Human Resources. It’s misdirected. Truth is, no government agency can function as God or the loving mother and father a child deserves. In this instance, and in every instance where harm comes to a child, an investigation is necessary to find what when wrong so that procedures can be improved. But until we change the culture that treats children as objects of adult amusement or has adults with no more interest in each other than the clerk and customer at the dollar store creating life carelessly and recklessly, no amount of social worker ingenuity, compassion or diligence can protect children from the fate of Nateyonna Banks. We’re kidding ourselves in our outrage, pretending that the answer is better pay or smarter, wiser social workers, supervisors and judges.
As with public education, the model has to be reinvented to serve a nation where out-of-wedlock births in some populations now approach 70 percent. It is sad, but telling, that the lengthy story about what went wrong for Nateyonna Banks contained only one passing reference to the male at her conception. “The father is not in the picture.” That’s it. The father is not in the picture. The sky is blue. Sugar is sweet. The father is not in the picture. Not in the picture. Nor, evidentally, does anybody expect it or care, or anticipate that at some point he might have been an option for baby. He’s not in the picture. Truth is, the man should be tracked to the ends of the earth for child support. A government agent should be at his funeral rummaging through the corpse’s pockets to make certain he’s not taking a dime with him that should have gone to fulfill his obligation to the child he caused.
So we have a woman who never should have delivered a single child with three, two allegedly abused sexually and one dead. The key man is not in the picture. And we expect government to protect the children. How silly of us.
OK. Let’s form ourselves as the Georgia Child Protection Study Group. How do we redesign the sytem to protect the children? My answer is that we declare that from the moment of conception until adulthood, government’s first interest in the two adults and child is in protecting the child. When adults are charged with drug abuse or with abusing children, the children are taken and put in orphanages overseen by the state. They aren’t returned to the adults until the woman and man who conceived them offer proof in court that they’re sufficiently rehabilitated to have the children back. Adults who harm a child mentally or physically should be sterilized so they don’t create more lives to be damaged.
To the extent that two-parent families are not being formed to nurture children, government should assume protective authority, with all judgments favoring the interest of the child until he or she reaches 18. A child, once conceived, has a right to life — and a right to grow to adulthood without being harmed by adults in the household.
The Georgia Child Protection Study Group is open for suggestions.
