The first time I had an interaction with the Department of Children and Family Services I was 5. But the first time they became heavily involved in my life came when I was 8. I was sitting on the rug of my third-grade teacher Mrs. Bushy’s classroom in Agawam, a suburb of Springfield that was completely transformed by the opiate epidemic. We were doing a read-aloud of “Harry Potter,” with the class was deeply enthralled, when the school counselor, a soft-spoken middle-aged blonde woman, quietly said, “Maxwell, can I grab you for a moment.”
A walk down the hall later, I was sitting next to her behind a desk, with a DCF social worker on the other side of the table. He asked me questions, and I answered, with the popular narrative of DCF child-snatchers turning kids into orphans constantly in the back of my mind.
The experience of being investigated by DCF is not rare. In 2023, approximately 40,000 51B investigations were conducted across the Commonwealth, drawn from a pool of over 90,000 reports. Every one of those investigations is the result of credibly suspected child abuse or neglect. But what even is child abuse? It seems like an easy question, one that can be found with a Google search. In Massachusetts, however, the answer to that question is complicated, evasive and spread over a network of laws and agencies.
To demonstrate this, let’s go back to those 90,000 odd reports. It is fairly common in other areas of the world and the country, for child abuse and neglect to be a crime that if identified by the relevant authorities, would result in criminal charges against parents and the removal of the child from the home.
In Massachusetts, this is not the case. In my case, almost every teacher I’ve ever had has filed a 51A on me but due to coaching, the fact that children do not know any other environment than the one they’ve lived in and adults knowing how to lie, action is sparse.
In the Commonwealth, for a case to be opened, an initial investigation must show evidence of abuse, which the state defines as “The non-accidental commission of any act by a caregiver which causes or creates a substantial risk of physical or emotional injury or sexual abuse of a child” or “The victimization of a child through sexual exploitation or human trafficking, regardless if the person responsible is a caregiver,” or neglect, which the state defines as, “Failure by a caregiver, either deliberately or through negligence or inability, to take those actions necessary to provide a child with minimally adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care, supervision, emotional stability and growth, or other essential care, including malnutrition or failure to thrive; provided, however, that such inability is not due solely to inadequate economic resources or solely to the existence of a handicapping condition.”
Despite this, over 80 percent of these cases will never lead to the removal of a child from their current conditions and placement with either kin (other relatives, frequently aunts, uncles, and grandparents) or in a foster home. The consequences for the parents in the vast majority of cases are essentially nonexistent. Despite there being evidence pointing to their abuse and neglect, essentially none of these parents will ever be charged with a crime. DCF makes every effort, often at the expense of the child, to keep the family together, often referring them to services like family therapy. In cases of poverty-related neglect, they help families access services from the Department of Transitional Assistance (MassDTA), the agency responsible for administering programs like food stamps, emergency cash assistance and unemployment benefits.
And of course, some of these efforts are well informed and useful, like helping families access resources to increase their quality of life. However, in many cases of abuse and neglect, the Commonwealth ends up creating monstrous scenarios for victims. In my experience, this looks like sitting in a Zoom therapy session listening to a sexually abusive family member talk about how their goal for the week is “to communicate when they need alone time.”
In a system where stories like this are commonplace and the threshold for removal so high, children often must engage in risky behavior like running away to escape their situations. Therapists, in the context of abusive situations, often discourage minors from contemplating taking those actions. This helps minors avoid the risks associated with those actions but can lead to worse outcomes for the child, as their experiences typically aren’t taken seriously in the absence of extreme action. This extended medium-level of abuse and neglect that DCF deems completely acceptable can have serious consequences throughout a child’s life, such as increasing their risk of long-term consequences like CPTSD.
And for the 20 percent of children who are removed, there’s still very little potential for their parents to suffer any legal penalties for their abuse. These children are typically removed because DCF suspects a high risk of them sustaining a substantial physical injury, or of facing sexual violence. This means that only in the worst of the worst cases are children removed from their environment and consequences for the abusers or would-be abusers are even then a rarity.
So is child abuse a crime? Morally, yes. But in a legal sense, child abuse and neglect is effectively only ever put before a judge in four circumstances: When a child dies, when a child is sexually abused or exploited, when a child is severely injured (placed on life support, bone broken, severe burn or the “impairment of any organ”) and when a child is trafficked.
There are many consequences to this, but it is important to emphasize that what we have is a system in which a child can be the victim of anything below those four criteria, or not able to effectively communicate what is happening at the hands of someone who’s supposed to love you, and no adult will ever be held accountable for the actions. If we are to project the standards of the legal system for children onto the legal system for adults, we would have a justice system where assault and battery are legal as long as there are no permanent repercussions; a legal system where you could destroy the property of others; one in which only blatant and immediate violent crimes would be criminalized.
The fact is that the reason child abuse can run so rampant is that in the United States of America and in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is that children possess essentially no rights. There exist no real standards for what children are entitled to beyond minimal food and clothes and not being murdered. While defining these standards and rights will require intense thinking, debate and research, the alternative is letting battered and neglected children continue on as they live now. Our only option as a society is to undertake that task.
Maxwell Austin can be reached at [email protected]
