9 ms·

> Amazing that bit about child welfare organisations fighting against the science, when clearly taking children away based on false accusations is clearly far w

by tivert 3y ago

> Amazing that bit about child welfare organisations fighting against the science, when clearly taking children away based on false accusations is clearly far worse for the child’s welfare, not to mention the parents’! This is just speculation, but I bet those groups (or their members) aren't always calmly and coolly trying to find the best policies protect the welfare of children. Instead they feel themselves on a kind of righteous moral crusade, and what's more heroic than swooping in to take the child away from the clutches of the villain? The feelings of heroism could obscure understanding the harm the "heroic act" could cause.

raducu 3y ago
> and what's more heroic than swooping in to take the child away from the clutches of the villain? In a (somewhat) post-scarcity society attention from others is hard currency and narcissism is at an all time high.
heavyset_go 3y ago
I suspect that was the motivation for Apple's iPhone client-side scanning and reporting of CSAM feature and the subsequent hard push for it.
conductr 3y ago
> they feel themselves on a kind of righteous moral crusade They see a lot of bad stuff which causes them to have a difficult time admitting that sometimes bad stuff just happens on it's own Reminds me of the police/detectives that "just know he did it" because they don't understand that people grieve differently. I really empathize with the people that don't have a meltdown and cry when they hear some horrific news. I don't think I would either in many cases. I'd want the cops to do their job and go find the perp so I'd talk to them in a calm and concise manner telling them what I knew; even though that's likely highly suspicious behavior.
- rossant 3y ago
  That actually happened to me, not with the police though, but with social workers. I explained the situation in a very calm, concise, and perhaps emotionally detached manner because this is just my personality. They wrote in their report that they found it strange that "I almost did not cry during the interview", which they said was the main reason they would recommend to put David in foster care. The guilt of knowing that I, with my personality, was responsible for losing his care, was devastating. I also found this argument absurd: I was suspected of losing my temper on my child, and it's my calmness that was interpreted as a sign of danger! It reminds me the Robert Roberson Texas death penalty case that John Grisham recently wrote about [1]: "He told hospital staff that she had fallen out of bed, but they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know he was autistic and decided he didn’t show the proper emotions given the dire situation." [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-on-a-scrapped-medical-theory-death-row-autism-prison-b3c44493 https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    It's especially bizarre because even apart from things like autism, even for more neurotypical people disassociation (which as I understand in mild forms can appear as emotional detachment which could come off as being calm) is a well known symptom of acute stress responses (i.e. psychological shock). As unreproducible as a lot of psychology is, putting any merit in 'they didn't respond how I think they "should" have' seems like just utterly extraordinary nonsense...
    - conductr 3y ago
      I’m rather neurotypical but I worked in high trauma environments during my college years; ER, OR, ICU, various life and death situations on daily basis in a healthcare environment. I pretty much saw it all. That was 20+ years ago, my career was not there so I left clinical work but the ability to function during high stress and deal with the present mentally stuck with me. I also could mostly leave it at the door and it didn’t weigh on me outside work (I think most healthcare workers can do this, it all just becomes normal. Since then, I’m the one that springs into action instead of paralyzed by shock/surprise. Saved someone choking in a restaurant, pulled a pregnant woman from a burning car after an accident, just a few weeks ago someone had a stroke at a park and I had to figure out best way to help - all these had many other bystanders just watching it happen and they all just were frozen until I came over and took charge barking order about call an ambulance or telling them exactly how to help. I’ve also learned that when something really bad happens in my life, like bad diagnoses/death of loved ones, my immediate response is to help and support what ever immediate actions are needed, talk about what needs to be done, help others experiencing immediate and usually uncontrollable grief. My grief usually starts a day or two later once all the immediate concerns are addressed.
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  It gets really obvious when this becomes not just a matter of personal experience but culture. Had the fortune to watch the news about an airplane crash without survivors on a TV channel in Asia. They had a video of grieving relatives from Western Europe who looked utterly gutted and in pain. But since they werent crying and screaming the news anchor had to explain that this was cultural differences.
stephen_g 3y ago
That is a point - and also, while I'm sure many are just misguided, and I generally don't want to assume malice when ignorance is a more likely cause, it is certainly interesting that some high-profile people on these 'heroic moral crusades' do then seem to get caught up in sexual misconduct scandals of their own surprisingly frequently...
- btilly 3y ago
  It is easy to think bad things of others that you know to be true of yourself. Another example is that a lot of anti-gay crusaders turned out to be closet gays who hated themselves.
rossant 3y ago
Exactly. I met many people like this. The notion of groupthink comes to mind: "Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions." See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  Do you ( or anyone else ) have an idea about how to deal with that? Not just on a group level but also on an individual one? The willful ignorance of the dissonance between proclaimed intention and consequences is one of the scariest phenomenons i have experienced and its among proper mob mentality turning in a charged violence prone environment. Being a bit of a smartass (OFCOURSE just as a teen :) i prodded a bit when some family friend got into some superficial moral signaling about the evils of child labor. I asked how exactly the alternative looks without social safety nets in the relevant regions. Being convinced of having the moral high ground an emotional fever set in and it went as far as a "Well maybe then they should all starve!". Pretty sure i saw the realization of what i just goaded out and if hateful stares could kill i would have been a goner. It has been almost two decades now and the relationship has never recovered. I know some seriously scary people but this is up there. edit: Sorry for the late edits, was hard to read.
gwd 3y ago
There's another factor in this, which makes it hard to change: For the people in child welfare organizations, for social workers, for doctors, for police, for judges to change their mind about current and future decisions requires them to change their mind about past decisions. The necessary implication is that many of the people they have persecuted in the past were, in fact, innocent. It requires them to admit that they personally have likely caused untold suffering to parents, caretakers, and children. This is hard for anyone; but if you've lived your life trying to be the hero, feeling good about swooping in and rescuing children from the clutches of evil villains, how can you face the fact that you are the evil villain in so many children's stories? You might call this the Paradox of Judgment: If you don't say that something is that bad, then lots of people don't think it's a big deal and don't do anything about it. But if you do say that something is really bad, then there develop all these pathologies of denialism around it.
- rossant 3y ago
  This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem. People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.
  - mabcat 3y ago
    Closest name I can think of is "commitment and consistency". People tend to behave as they have behaved in the past, doing so is both a cognitive shortcut and a source of positive emotion. We go to great lengths to maintain consistency (see also: confirmation bias), and being consistent even in the face of conflicting evidence feels better than being inconsistent but right. From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."
moffkalast 3y ago
"We need to take away your kid because um.. DEUS VULT."
pivot654 3y ago
I work in child welfare in Australia. Not sure how it compares to the models in other countries, but we desperately try not to remove child from their families. There is very little evidence to support it improves outcomes for those children, and the removing itself is highly horrific for everyone involved. Even in the instances we remove children, we actively attempt to work with the parents to address the issue. We are also beholden to the Courts to justify our decision making. The harm we cause is better explained by systematic reasons (workload, case complexity, red tape, worker burnout and apathy, racism)
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  Yeah in my dealings with child welfare workers (in America at least), they are the first to understand how "the system", and they as a key component, can cause harm.
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  What happens if the cops are called, rather than child services? This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not). But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months. It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.) What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.
- 3y ago
jvanderbot 3y ago
This is true, but not for the reasons you might expect. Well, 10% of the time this is the case, but 90% ... Mostly they are operating on priors. The prior probability of a separation being the right thing to do is very high, because they have a _long list of mitigation before they actually can take a kid away. In the case of a doctor-approved immediate physical danger, they are regulated into acting on behalf of the immediate safety of the child while the investigation is ongoing but even that is considered temporary. The goal of any foster care situation is to get the kids back with the biological parents, so time is on their side, provided they are not living in a circumstance that disallows the kind of attendance and involvement that the state would require to clear a caseworker to re-unite the family. Sadly, many are. Source: Foster parent.
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  Priors should never, ever factor into it like this. I was a foster child who was taken from my parents wrongly. A third party (not connected to child services) made a false accusation to the cops, who took me and turned me over to child services without any investigation. Even though I insisted nothing had happened and even though child services failed to produce any evidence (beyond aforesaid hearsay) over the course of their investigation, child services nonetheless fought extremely hard against letting me go home to my family. In the end, a judge had to order them to return me to my family because they refused to accept that the accusation had been a lie. In the meantime, I went through three different foster homes. I was a very difficult kid to foster (I cried and screamed a lot, demanding to go home) and so I unfortunately experienced abuse and neglect in two of the three homes. (My first foster home was particularly severe, which was strange because they were otherwise great parents to their biological kids. At least the other abusive home treated their real children equally poorly.)
  - startupsfail 3y ago
    Have you considered suing the third party that made a false accusation? It seems that they’ve caused suffering and irreparable long term harm. This sounds like something that may have a standing. Perhaps you can sue them and either get some material compensation (if they are well to do) put them through a few rounds of trials in another state or something (if they are poor, this will be a good punishment in itself). [Not a lawyer, this maybe a bad idea. But what you’re describing should have consequences for the party that had caused harm.]
taneq 3y ago
This always seems to happen to activist groups. They start mistaking their intermediate goals for ‘the cause’ and next thing you know, they’re actively fighting against solutions to their alleged issues because those solutions would impact their self-selected KPIs.

by tivert 3y ago

raducu 3y ago

> and what's more heroic than swooping in to take the child away from the clutches of the villain? In a (somewhat) post-scarcity society attention from others is hard currency and narcissism is at an all time high.

heavyset_go 3y ago

I suspect that was the motivation for Apple's iPhone client-side scanning and reporting of CSAM feature and the subsequent hard push for it.

conductr 3y ago

> they feel themselves on a kind of righteous moral crusade They see a lot of bad stuff which causes them to have a difficult time admitting that sometimes bad stuff just happens on it's own Reminds me of the police/detectives that "just know he did it" because they don't understand that people grieve differently. I really empathize with the people that don't have a meltdown and cry when they hear some horrific news. I don't think I would either in many cases. I'd want the cops to do their job and go find the perp so I'd talk to them in a calm and concise manner telling them what I knew; even though that's likely highly suspicious behavior.

rossant 3y ago
That actually happened to me, not with the police though, but with social workers. I explained the situation in a very calm, concise, and perhaps emotionally detached manner because this is just my personality. They wrote in their report that they found it strange that "I almost did not cry during the interview", which they said was the main reason they would recommend to put David in foster care. The guilt of knowing that I, with my personality, was responsible for losing his care, was devastating. I also found this argument absurd: I was suspected of losing my temper on my child, and it's my calmness that was interpreted as a sign of danger! It reminds me the Robert Roberson Texas death penalty case that John Grisham recently wrote about [1]: "He told hospital staff that she had fallen out of bed, but they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know he was autistic and decided he didn’t show the proper emotions given the dire situation." [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-on-a-scrapped-medical-theory-death-row-autism-prison-b3c44493 https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...
- stephen_g 3y ago
  It's especially bizarre because even apart from things like autism, even for more neurotypical people disassociation (which as I understand in mild forms can appear as emotional detachment which could come off as being calm) is a well known symptom of acute stress responses (i.e. psychological shock). As unreproducible as a lot of psychology is, putting any merit in 'they didn't respond how I think they "should" have' seems like just utterly extraordinary nonsense...
  - conductr 3y ago
    I’m rather neurotypical but I worked in high trauma environments during my college years; ER, OR, ICU, various life and death situations on daily basis in a healthcare environment. I pretty much saw it all. That was 20+ years ago, my career was not there so I left clinical work but the ability to function during high stress and deal with the present mentally stuck with me. I also could mostly leave it at the door and it didn’t weigh on me outside work (I think most healthcare workers can do this, it all just becomes normal. Since then, I’m the one that springs into action instead of paralyzed by shock/surprise. Saved someone choking in a restaurant, pulled a pregnant woman from a burning car after an accident, just a few weeks ago someone had a stroke at a park and I had to figure out best way to help - all these had many other bystanders just watching it happen and they all just were frozen until I came over and took charge barking order about call an ambulance or telling them exactly how to help. I’ve also learned that when something really bad happens in my life, like bad diagnoses/death of loved ones, my immediate response is to help and support what ever immediate actions are needed, talk about what needs to be done, help others experiencing immediate and usually uncontrollable grief. My grief usually starts a day or two later once all the immediate concerns are addressed.
cf141q5325 3y ago
It gets really obvious when this becomes not just a matter of personal experience but culture. Had the fortune to watch the news about an airplane crash without survivors on a TV channel in Asia. They had a video of grieving relatives from Western Europe who looked utterly gutted and in pain. But since they werent crying and screaming the news anchor had to explain that this was cultural differences.

stephen_g 3y ago

That is a point - and also, while I'm sure many are just misguided, and I generally don't want to assume malice when ignorance is a more likely cause, it is certainly interesting that some high-profile people on these 'heroic moral crusades' do then seem to get caught up in sexual misconduct scandals of their own surprisingly frequently...

btilly 3y ago
It is easy to think bad things of others that you know to be true of yourself. Another example is that a lot of anti-gay crusaders turned out to be closet gays who hated themselves.

rossant 3y ago

Exactly. I met many people like this. The notion of groupthink comes to mind: "Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions." See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

cf141q5325 3y ago
Do you ( or anyone else ) have an idea about how to deal with that? Not just on a group level but also on an individual one? The willful ignorance of the dissonance between proclaimed intention and consequences is one of the scariest phenomenons i have experienced and its among proper mob mentality turning in a charged violence prone environment. Being a bit of a smartass (OFCOURSE just as a teen :) i prodded a bit when some family friend got into some superficial moral signaling about the evils of child labor. I asked how exactly the alternative looks without social safety nets in the relevant regions. Being convinced of having the moral high ground an emotional fever set in and it went as far as a "Well maybe then they should all starve!". Pretty sure i saw the realization of what i just goaded out and if hateful stares could kill i would have been a goner. It has been almost two decades now and the relationship has never recovered. I know some seriously scary people but this is up there. edit: Sorry for the late edits, was hard to read.

gwd 3y ago

There's another factor in this, which makes it hard to change: For the people in child welfare organizations, for social workers, for doctors, for police, for judges to change their mind about current and future decisions requires them to change their mind about past decisions. The necessary implication is that many of the people they have persecuted in the past were, in fact, innocent. It requires them to admit that they personally have likely caused untold suffering to parents, caretakers, and children. This is hard for anyone; but if you've lived your life trying to be the hero, feeling good about swooping in and rescuing children from the clutches of evil villains, how can you face the fact that you are the evil villain in so many children's stories? You might call this the Paradox of Judgment: If you don't say that something is that bad, then lots of people don't think it's a big deal and don't do anything about it. But if you do say that something is really bad, then there develop all these pathologies of denialism around it.

rossant 3y ago
This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem. People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.
- mabcat 3y ago
  Closest name I can think of is "commitment and consistency". People tend to behave as they have behaved in the past, doing so is both a cognitive shortcut and a source of positive emotion. We go to great lengths to maintain consistency (see also: confirmation bias), and being consistent even in the face of conflicting evidence feels better than being inconsistent but right. From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."

moffkalast 3y ago

"We need to take away your kid because um.. DEUS VULT."

pivot654 3y ago

I work in child welfare in Australia. Not sure how it compares to the models in other countries, but we desperately try not to remove child from their families. There is very little evidence to support it improves outcomes for those children, and the removing itself is highly horrific for everyone involved. Even in the instances we remove children, we actively attempt to work with the parents to address the issue. We are also beholden to the Courts to justify our decision making. The harm we cause is better explained by systematic reasons (workload, case complexity, red tape, worker burnout and apathy, racism)

cool_dude85 3y ago
Yeah in my dealings with child welfare workers (in America at least), they are the first to understand how "the system", and they as a key component, can cause harm.
RoyalHenOil 3y ago
What happens if the cops are called, rather than child services? This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not). But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months. It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.) What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.
3y ago

jvanderbot 3y ago

This is true, but not for the reasons you might expect. Well, 10% of the time this is the case, but 90% ... Mostly they are operating on priors. The prior probability of a separation being the right thing to do is very high, because they have a _long list of mitigation before they actually can take a kid away. In the case of a doctor-approved immediate physical danger, they are regulated into acting on behalf of the immediate safety of the child while the investigation is ongoing but even that is considered temporary. The goal of any foster care situation is to get the kids back with the biological parents, so time is on their side, provided they are not living in a circumstance that disallows the kind of attendance and involvement that the state would require to clear a caseworker to re-unite the family. Sadly, many are. Source: Foster parent.

RoyalHenOil 3y ago
Priors should never, ever factor into it like this. I was a foster child who was taken from my parents wrongly. A third party (not connected to child services) made a false accusation to the cops, who took me and turned me over to child services without any investigation. Even though I insisted nothing had happened and even though child services failed to produce any evidence (beyond aforesaid hearsay) over the course of their investigation, child services nonetheless fought extremely hard against letting me go home to my family. In the end, a judge had to order them to return me to my family because they refused to accept that the accusation had been a lie. In the meantime, I went through three different foster homes. I was a very difficult kid to foster (I cried and screamed a lot, demanding to go home) and so I unfortunately experienced abuse and neglect in two of the three homes. (My first foster home was particularly severe, which was strange because they were otherwise great parents to their biological kids. At least the other abusive home treated their real children equally poorly.)
- startupsfail 3y ago
  Have you considered suing the third party that made a false accusation? It seems that they’ve caused suffering and irreparable long term harm. This sounds like something that may have a standing. Perhaps you can sue them and either get some material compensation (if they are well to do) put them through a few rounds of trials in another state or something (if they are poor, this will be a good punishment in itself). [Not a lawyer, this maybe a bad idea. But what you’re describing should have consequences for the party that had caused harm.]

taneq 3y ago

This always seems to happen to activist groups. They start mistaking their intermediate goals for ‘the cause’ and next thing you know, they’re actively fighting against solutions to their alleged issues because those solutions would impact their self-selected KPIs.