The allegations against L.B., made by an anonymous caller at 4:45 a.m. that day, were false. These included that she was a stripper (she worked at a home for people with disabilities); that she used drugs (none were found, and a drug test was negative for all substances); and that an abusive man lived with her and that she owned “machine guns” (after an exhaustive search and interrogation, both claims were deemed baseless).
In fact, L.B. has never been found to have committed any type of child maltreatment, ACS and court records show.
Yet the anonymous caller, whom L.B. believes to be a former acquaintance with a grudge, has continued to dial in to New York’s state child welfare hotline. Each time, this person or possibly people make outlandish, often already-disproven claims about her, seeming to know that doing so will automatically trigger a government intrusion into her domestic life.
And ACS obliges: Over the past three years, the agency either has inspected her home or examined and questioned her son at school more than two dozen times. Caseworkers have sought a warrant for only three of these searches, most recently in August. All of those requests have been rejected by judges, according to court records.
It’s horrible what a determined harasser can get away with due to bureaucracy and a simple lack of looking before they leap when it comes to government agencies and police.
And they almost never get caught. If they do get caught, there’s often no legal recourse because the laws in this country regarding harassing others are absolute dogshit.
Canada is better in some ways … although we have a lot of room for improvement. Provincial gov’ts set their own standards and rules, but in the province where I was a CFS investigator we had access to back files on individuals that would be checked as soon as a call came in.
We also weren’t allowed to check cupboards because simply being poor is NOT a valid reason to take kids away.
It’s crazy here. A bully at my daughter’s middle school doxxed her on Discord and kept making prank phone calls. The school wouldn’t do anything and there’s basically nothing legally we could do about it either. The phone calls came from a spoofed number, meaning we couldn’t prove who was making them, and apparently no one gets prosecuted for doxxing since no one knows what laws it breaks, so it’s basically legal.
We pulled her out of school because of the bullying in general, and thankfully that girl stopped harassing when my daughter left school. I don’t know what we would do if she had kept it up.
Ugh. I can’t imagine what it’s like raising kids now. I’m an angry person under the best of circumstances let alone someone threatening my child.
I’m glad you were able to find a solution, although it sucks your daughter had to be the one that changed.
Thanks. Online school will be better for her anyway. She has really bad social anxiety and being in big public school crowds and classrooms full of rowdy kids was always hard for her. The excessive bullying was the thing that broke her and made us pull her out. I had to quit my job to oversee her online schoolwork, but she’s more important than my job and we’ve survived on a single income before.
Reading this makes me so fucking angry. It baffles me how often bullies get away with shit, and even more how their own parents completely lack any form of empathy towards their kid’s victim and will simply refuse to believe their “little angel” is a fucking gremlin. But the bully gets hit back just once, and suddenly the victim gets demonised. Blegh. I hate it so much.
I hope your kid is doing better now.
She’s healing, but it will be a long time before she’s better.
I wish her, and you as well, the best.
Thank you!
I hate to say it but… you hit the bully back. I was bullied in school, and that was the only thing that made a bully stop. Of course, don’t pound them into the ground, and do it when the teachers aren’t looking.
That was advice I got from a teacher, and it changed my life. Before, I’d gone to a teacher when I was bullied. I tried to ignore the bully (he hit me in the head with a rock for ignoring him). I tried asking the bully to stop.
Then one day my science teacher said, ‘sometimes, you have to hit back’.
And this may lead to all sorts of bad stuff. Adults, and I mean school officials and teachers, should do something with a bully, not that they always do and some even don’t want to admit that they should.
As someone who was bullied as a kid, I can say with confidence that they don’t. The best I ever got was the teacher asking them nicely to stop.
Drugs were also reported which would be reason to search cupboards. Though a 911 report alone shouldn’t be enough to get a warrant .
how is this due to bureaucracy? you think even less oversight and regulation is the answer? bureaucracy is the exact thing that would prevent things like this.
I guess by ‘bureaucracy,’ I meant a government that is so bogged down with these cases that they cut corners and don’t pay attention to case histories. Probably hiring more people rather than more regulation and oversight would be the best thing to do.
sometimes you get killed in your sleep