The vision of the anointed: the left and social policy

National Review, July 31, 1995 by Thomas Sowell

The modern Swedish welfare state has made it illegal for parents to spank their own children, and the so-called Children's Defense Fund in the United States has advocated similar government intervention, so that parents do not, in the words of Hillary Rodham (later Clinton), ``unilaterally'' make decisions about the raising of their children.

The mindset of those who view traditional families as failed institutions needing the superior wisdom of the anointed permeates laws and policies on child abuse. Children may be removed from the parental home on the basis of anonymous accusation alone -- even when both the children and the parents deny the accusations. Moreover, the protections afforded criminals are not afforded parents. As Elena Neuman reported in Insight: Somewhere between 2 million and 3 million allegations of child abuse and neglect tie up the nation's hotlines every year. Of that number, 60 per cent are deemed false and dropped. Of the remaining 40 per cent that lead to investigations, about half (involving nearly 700,000 families) eventually are dismissed, but not before children have been strip-searched, interrogated by a stream of social workers, police officers, and prosecutors, psychologically tested, and sometimes placed in foster care. Such actions usually occur without search warrants, parental consent, court hearings, or official charges -- and often solely on the basis of the anonymous telephone call. A Virginia couple, for example, came home one Friday afternoon to find their 10-year-old son missing and a note ordering them to appear in court the next Monday morning. Fearing that their son had been kidnapped, they phoned the police, only to be told that he had been taken into custody by the Department of Social Services. The son himself spent the weekend in a foster home, forbidden to phone his parents. All this was triggered by a phone call by a neighbor who did not think that a 10-year-old boy should have been left alone at home while his parents worked. The problem, however, was not the busybody neighbor but the fact that the law was armed with extraordinary powers -- far beyond what could be exercised against criminals, who are mascots. Within the framework of such extraordinary powers, zealots ready to believe the worst of fathers can plant ideas in children's minds, with disastrous consequences. When an 8-year-old girl in San Diego was sexually assaulted and stated that it was done by a man who climbed through her bedroom window, the social workers dismissed her story, named her father as the primary suspect, and removed the child from her home. After more than a year in foster custody and in therapy, the girl changed her story and named her father as the attacker. Yet the DNA evidence indicated that it could not possibly have been her father; in fact the DNA matched that of a convicted child molester who entered the bedroom window of another child within days of the first assault. But once the authorities had committed themselves to a different scenario, and had taken drastic action in response, admitting to being wrong was virtually out of the question. Only after a grand-jury investigation was the child returned to her parents -- after more than a year away and after the father had paid out more than a quarter of a million dollars in attorney's fees. Some have defended the unusual powers granted to police and social-welfare agencies in child-abuse cases by saying that if just one child's life is saved, it is worth it. However, many of the anointed take no such position when an animal on the endangered-species list kills a child. Furthermore, even when there is proven child abuse, the response is often to send the child back into the same home if the family agrees to psychological counseling and visits by social workers -- even though neither of these things guarantees the safety of the child. In short, it is only the independent and autonomous family that is sacrificed when it refuses to ``admit'' to what the anointed presuppose.