When a Street Kills a Child, We Put the Parents on Trial

It names the DA at least. In bold.

Did we read the same NYT article?

"Gaston County’s district attorney, Travis Page"

I lived ON a four lane 55mph road that was a heavily trafficked arterial road and crossed it all the time at 7.

Roads 100% are community killers, it's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation, no wonder deaths of despair and chronic loneliness is on the rise. We've cultivated our own sad fragility.

So you want examples of developed countries going after parents, taking children away, because of what someone else did? Well, this is standard practice in developed countries when it comes to protecting the state and state employees. How about a story that is about a school teacher abusing a toddler ... and the consequences:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8535968/

The entire movie depicts what the state does to the toddler as she grows up, in Germany. You'll have to look up the case. The guilty party ... was fired from her job. Nothing more.

Note: it ends with the child taking her own life because she would be forced to go live in Africa. Needless to say, this has no consequences for anyone at all that (radically failed to) take care of the child.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7704614/

This is, in a way, about a racist cop accusing a sole immigrant father of child abuse, where then a child is left alone as the father is (eventually) forced to leave the country (he now "doesn't have a daughter", so can be deported). That part is barely mentioned. The movie follows the girl. But the problem depicted here goes further than immigrants: the dutch state is regularly accused of separating children to avoid the law. You see dutch law is very strict that families that become homeless must be given suitable accomodations where they live (not somewhere else, citizens and immigrants). To avoid actually doing this, many dutch cities use youth services to, let's just call a spade a spade: abduct the children. Because that has 2 advantages, the children get a new address, and the parents "don't live with children" anymore, (accusation? Well, if parents become homeless they "don't take good care of their children", what an argument). Of course half the reason is to use the children as hostages to force parents to take a job. But if they don't, the city can still get out from under it's financial obligations: then these are no longer families and the parents can be thrown into the street legally. Obviously this practice is illegal, and the Dutch state has been convicted by the European court of Human rights. Needless to say, EXACTLY ONE change to the law was made, and of course nobody experienced any legal consequences whatsoever. The change? When children are abducted by youth services, their address changes (so the parents can still be thrown in the street) BUT not the city (even if the children physically live somewhere else). So cities of origin are forced to pay youth services for these children. My guess is that somewhere between 30% and 50% of all children in residential care in the Netherlands fall in this category, but of course, these numbers are not tracked (this is extrapolating from numbers out of Belgium (well, half of Belgium, Flanders), who do publish the numbers on the causes of "outplacement", depending on the year it's between 30% and 50%). These regions are very close to each other and essentially identical except for the state.

You know, btw, what the #1 cause of placing children in youth services is? Not abiding by family judge's decision, usually the child ("running away", or the legal term "taking a child away from their legal guardian". Note: it is THE CHILD that is doing that is almost all cases). There isn't even any accusation that the parents aren't taking good care of the child in these cases right, it wasn't even investigated. The children are taken away to, if we're frank, use them as hostages to cheaply (without involving police effort) enforce court decisions. Oh, and then one such child was forced to sleep in a police cell for 2 weeks, which made the news. They're still doing it.

In other words: in these countries, for children in residential care for there to be even the accusation that the parents abuse a child is not even 3%. The accusation right, cases where it's legally proven, the numbers are essentially "it happened X years ago". Meaning proven abuse doesn't even happen once per year on average for a population of 5 million. The accusation of abuse (not necessarily by parents), NOT investigated but the accusation is there, is only double digit children per year (meaning less than 30). There are far more orphans (both parents died in accident, no family available), even today, than abused children.

The odds that an entire residential youth services facility has a SINGLE actually abused child (suspected, not proven) is less than 30%. All the other children in residential care are cases where the parents not cooperating (or not able to cooperate) with the state one way or another. #1 reason? Parents not willing to cooperate with courts in divorce cases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVBxvXzAIBg

Or a similar story, also Flanders. This is about a school "somehow" failing to prevent rape in school (which they are legally responsible for). Needless to say, the movie immediately moves on. Why? There never was any investigation how this happened (youth services is not allowed to investigate anyone, and certainly not schools). Given the reactions of the girls (yep, plural), obviously they were threatened, so presumably it wasn't classmates. What does the state do? Because obviously it is pretty damn critical to investigate the school, right? If not you're risking potentially a lot of repeats.

Oh here's another beautiful story illustrating how laws really work, from Antwerp. A child ("14 years old" only info given) was placed out of their home. No details on why, and placed in closed youth center after running away. The third day he broke a plastic knife in two, and stuck it into the throat of the caregiver/guard. Missed the artery, but hit the nerve. Did not fully cut it, but that must have HURT for a very long time, months. He was placed in prison for a short while (less than 2 weeks). So far so good, but what happened then is revealing. He was brought back to the same institution, at which point the personnel FOUGHT (yes, literally) with the police (one broken jaw, one broken arm) to keep the kid out. There was "no space" anywhere else (translation: one look at his file and nobody wanted the kid). He was held in a police cell for 2 days ... and sent home.

So you see even the reverse happens: the state refusing to apply law, REFUSING to taking children away, refusing to go after people, because the people that form the state refuse to do it because of violence.