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Comment by ameister14 | Hacker News Reader

So you err on the 'some children are abused and die' side of things, and other people err on the 'some parents get separated from their children' side.

I don't think the line is at doctors reporting, and I'll tell you why.

There are many cases of MD's having patients where they know the whole family and can't believe that abuse would be going on, so they don't report things like spiral fractures and pattern bruising in a five year old. Those are markers of serious domestic violence and abuse, but since the doc knows the parent, and the parent has a sorta reasonable explanation, fine.

No. The doctor reports, then the parents get investigated. Sorry it sucks, but the point to fix is the people interacting with the family at the point of investigation, not the report by an MD, because unfortunately the MD is going to lean towards not reporting until it is too late.

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That would be fine if the investigations were fair and followed basic principles of jurisprudence like "innocent until proven guilty", but it's plain to see that kids are being separated based on very flimsy evidence.

In my book, a doctor doesn't get to absolve themselves of responsibility by saying "just following orders" and that it's the investigative system that needs to be fixed. If they know the system is broken, it's both immoral and a deep betrayal of trust for them to report people without strong evidence.

Almost any injury can be framed as possible evidence of abuse. Parents shouldn't have to be afraid that taking their kids to the hospital after an injury will get them taken away. The vast majority of injuries are not from abuse, so a system with a low bar for evidence is going to end up with more false positives than cases of abuse. This is exacerbated by the fact that abusers, for obvious reasons, are often going to avoid getting medical care for the kids they abuse.

If your reasoning were applied more broadly, we'd put anyone accused of a crime, or of even planning a crime, in prison immediately, since otherwise crimes will occur (with people hurt/killed) that could have been prevented. There's a reason the legal system doesn't work this way.

I think the point is that the blame lies with DCF, not the doctors. Doctors should report, and DCF should competently investigate. In this scenario, the doctor did their job and DCF did not.

With something as serious as child abduction, there's plenty of blame to distribute among all involved parties.

In most dysfunctional systems its functionally impossible for individual actors to fix any part of the overarching system and MUST necessarily choose between dysfunctional options with an eye on least bad outcomes.

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