The problem is that making the government responsible (and liable) creates an incentive for government employees and departments to overreact and treat every si

The problem is that making the government responsible (and liable) creates an incentive for government employees and departments to overreact and treat every situation as harshly as possible, because if they were ever to be reasonable and lenient, and a child were to be abused later, they would then be blamed. The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges. The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.