Advocates for families in New York State report that thousands of times a year, parents, typically women, who have been victims of abuse by their partners are subsequently monitored by child-welfare authorities, The New York Times reports. When one parent abuses the other in front of their children, it is considered child neglect. Often, after a victim reports abuse, the Administration for Children’s Services or A.C.S. files a child neglect case against the accused parent and a judge bars that person from the home and grants the agency “supervision” over the parent who was abused. A lawsuit filed on behalf of a Brooklyn woman in the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in December seeks to change that. The suit argues that the practice amounts to “double abuse”: punishing parents who have endured domestic violence by putting their families through further stress, fear and humiliation.
A.C.S. itself acknowledges that visits from its caseworkers can be “inherently traumatic and intrusive.” The agency said in a statement on Friday that, since 2019, it has been seeking supervision of domestic abuse victims much less often, though it did not provide specific numbers. The suit says that these supervision orders, which can last for years, violate parents’ constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and their rights to due process. “ One reason typically offered for requiring an abuse victim to accept A.C.S. supervision is that it is necessary to make sure the violent parent does not return. But the appeal argues that such concerns do not meet the Fourth Amendment threshold for a legal search, which would require that authorities have “probable cause” to believe a child is in danger before entering a home. Critics of the supervision orders say they discourage victims from reporting domestic violence in the first place. “Random searches of homes where children do not live with suspected abusers do not meaningfully further the state’s interest in preventing child abuse,” the suit says.
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