New York City’s practice of requiring child welfare investigations of parents who are victims of domestic violence is illegal, a state appellate court ruled on Wednesday.
The decision came in an appeal filed by a Brooklyn woman who said her ex-boyfriend beat and slapped her and pulled out her dreadlocks in front of their infant daughter. The woman is identified in court documents as Sharneka W.
In a 2023 Family Court case, a judge issued an order of protection barring Ms. W.’s ex-boyfriend from the home. But he also told her that though she had not been “accused of anything,” she would have to consent to “announced and unannounced visits” from city child welfare investigators in order to keep custody of her daughter. The investigators could interrogate her, search her apartment and physically examine the child for signs of abuse.
Such supervision orders are requested by child welfare agencies and granted by judges thousands of times a year in New York State, according to advocates for families.
But on Wednesday, a four-judge panel of the appellate division of State Supreme Court ruled that nothing in the state’s Family Court law gave a judge the right to place Ms. W. under the supervision of the Administration for Children’s Services, the city’s child welfare agency.
The panel cited the fundamental principle that the government must not intrude on people’s rights to care for their children except when necessary for the children’s safety.
It noted, quoting earlier cases, that the Family Court law had been designed to strike a balance “between protecting children through ‘state intervention’ while simultaneously shielding ‘private family life’ from such intervention when it is ‘unwarranted.’” And it held that orders like the one in Ms. W.’s case “constitute precisely the type of state intervention that the Legislature sought to avoid” when it established the Family Court system.
Parents have long complained that home visits from A.C.S. cause undue stress, fear and humiliation. They can involve strip-searching children and rummaging through families’ personal belongings in front of the children. The agency has acknowledged that visits from its caseworkers can be “inherently traumatic and intrusive.”
Ms. W. told The New York Times through her lawyer that child investigators came to her home at least 10 times over less than five months.
Critics of the supervision orders say they discourage victims from reporting domestic violence in the first place.
The suit, filed on behalf of Ms. W. by the Family Justice Law Center, an organization that works to prevent unnecessary family separations, had called the investigations a form of “double abuse” inflicted on parents who have already endured domestic violence.
“This unanimous decision puts an end across the state to this decades-long practice of conducting unbounded surveillance for months or even years on end of parents charged with no wrongdoing,” said David Shalleck-Klein, executive director of the center.
The city had argued that its supervision of Ms. W. was allowed under a provision of the Family Court Act governing cases where a child is removed from the home. But the appellate judges ruled that Ms. W.’s situation was not such a case.
A.C.S. said it was reviewing the decision with the city’s Law Department.
Ms. W.’s suit was supported by friend-of-the-court briefs from across the political spectrum, including a group backed by the conservative Koch brothers called the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.
Parents who suffer domestic abuse are often told that child welfare supervision is necessary to make sure the violent parent does not return. In Ms. W.’s case, her ex-boyfriend was hiding in her apartment when the police responded to a complaint that he had hit her, but she said she was too scared to tell them he was there.
The judge in her Family Court case, Robert Hettleman, said that while he knew Ms. W. was “able to care for” her daughter, he wanted the city to watch over her because victims “sometimes change their mind” about abusers and then protective orders are violated. “I don’t want that to happen,” he said.
The city had argued that its subsequent searches were warranted, even after the stay-away order was issued, given the “abusive authority the father exerted” that had stopped Ms. W. from telling the police he was there. Ms. W.’s lawyers had countered that the city can seek a court order to enter a home if it has specific reasons to think a child is at risk.
“As a survivor of domestic violence, I thought I would be supported and heard,” Ms. W. said in a statement. “Instead, the Family Court subjected me and my baby to months of traumatic A.C.S. surveillance. I’m so glad that other families won’t have to go through what my family did.”
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