Child Law Penalizes Moms for Abusive Partners
Ingrid Archie thought she was doing everything right to protect her children. She got a restraining order against her abusive partner and moved into a domestic violence shelter with her kids.
Then Archie got arrested for child endangerment. It had been only a month since she’d left the relationship and she was struggling to get back on her feet. She was stressed out and trying to run errands with her two youngest daughters. One of the kids had fallen asleep in the car, so Archie cracked open the windows and ran inside a store with just her baby. She returned to find Los Angeles police officers with her child in the car.
Archie’s daughters were taken away, including her oldest, who wasn’t with her at the time of her arrest. At the police station, Archie told a social worker about the steps she’d taken to separate from her abuser and find safety for herself and the girls. She explained that she had postpartum depression and was having trouble finding child care and a steady job. It made no difference; Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) charged Archie with “failure to protect” her children from domestic violence, on top of child endangerment.
“I thought you get a ‘failure to protect’ charge when you’re still in the relationship, not when you go to a place to protect you from the relationship,” Archie said.
Archie’s experience is an extreme example of how California’s failure-to-protect law gives social workers and courts incredible leeway to penalize domestic violence survivors with children whether they do or do not take action to stop their partners’ abuse. The law’s impacts on the lives of survivors and their kids have remained obscured behind the complexity of these cases.
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When it comes to legislative fixes, California state Senator Susan Rubio, who is herself a domestic violence survivor, told Capital & Main in an emailed statement that she “will be exploring ways to rectify this through legislation over the interim.” Rubio recently championed legislation to proclaim October Domestic Violence Awareness Month and to extend the statute of limitations for domestic violence cases.
“The system is broken and designed to protect the abusers. It’s outrageous,” said Rubio. “Victims are punished for defending themselves and their children and punished when they don’t.”