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Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Children too often seen as afterthought
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We are a nation that tosses babies from three-story buildings and expects strangers to catch them.
The inability to construct or position enough nets to actually catch and save the thousands being tossed by irresponsible parents is captured in a headline from a Christmas Eve examination of what went wrong in the life of 2-year-old Nateyonna Banks of Atlanta.
“Five nets not enough to save toddler,” the headline reads, identifying them in a smaller headline as “caseworkers, supervisors, lawyers, judge, parental adviser.”
This is where we are:
More than a third of children are now born to unmarried women. As recorded by the Child Trends Data Bank, the percent has risen dramatically, from 5.3 in 1960 to 32.2 in 1995 to 35.8 percent in 2004.
For some populations, the problem is epidemic. In 2004, 69.3 percent of births of black children were to unmarried women. For Hispanics, it was 46.4 percent. For whites, 24.5 .
With a few notable exceptions —- Hollywood stars, grandparents willing and able to help raise their children’s children —- these babies brought into the world of the unmarrieds have everything going against them.
Studies repeatedly document the misery in the lives of children such as Nateyonna Banks, delivered into this world by Shandrell Banks, who is now accused of killing her. A “not in the picture” male presumably participated at conception.
Nateyonna’s story has been told repeatedly since she died of head injuries on Nov. 9 —- injuries police believe were inflicted by the troubled woman who gave her birth.
The investigation into her death has produced a string of “should’ve dones” and “might have beens,” all legitimate, all driven by a sincere desire to figure out how to design and where to place safety nets to protect children in the future.
To be honest, I am beyond blaming or firing social workers, judges or supervisors. I don’t want to fire anybody else unless there’s clear and convincing evidence of intentional dereliction of duty.
We simply cannot keep allowing adults to treat children as the inconvenient result of a night of strong perfume or too many drinks, while the government attempts to design a fail-safe system to protect them.
Considering the case strictly in retrospect, different decisions by professionals outside the home might have avoided a tragic outcome for Nateyonna.
But, as the AJC’s Craig Schneider reported, between August and November, a Division of Family and Children Services caseworker visited Nateyonna’s home half a dozen times. A private agency worker hired by DFCS to teach Shandrell Banks how to be a better parent was in the home up to three times a week.
No government system, no matter how extensive or well-funded, can be the mother and father that every child needs and deserves.
We should change our thinking and our laws. We should declare that from the moment of conception until a child is grown, government’s first obligation is to protect. Adults can do virtually anything they want with their bodies until they use them to create human life.
From that moment on, protecting the child is government’s first interest, including removing the child from endangering relationships under certain conditions. Weighing toward removal would be the absence of a mother and a father in the home, a drug conviction of either parent or an adult in the household putting the child’s life at risk.
When adults create harmful living conditions, the state should remove the children to orphanages operated by faith-based or other organizations in conditions overseen by the state.
The burden, then, would be on the adults to prove to a court that they are sufficiently rehabilitated to provide the child a safe and healthy home. It shouldn’t be up to social workers or judges to have to guess.
The law would specify, too, that adults who harm a child mentally or physically could be sterilized to prevent them from creating more lives to be damaged.
The father should not be allowed to be “out of the picture.” He should pay child support or be required to perform labor in public or minimum-wage jobs, if necessary, to provide financial support to the child or to compensate taxpayers for the support they provide.
If we say the public’s interest is in protecting the child, then it should be so from the start.
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