When I describe people who misrepresented information and refused to take accountability in a child abuse investigation, you might assume I am describing the suspects. Instead, I’m describing the police officer and Child Protective Services (CPS) workers who investigated me when a child I provided care for was discovered to have a spiral fracture in her arm.

We tend to assume that professionals always hold the moral high ground, and this can blind us to the ways in which their behavior mirrors the people they serve. I know this is true not only because I was investigated, but also because I was a CPS social worker for ten years prior to my investigation. It’s easy for us to recognize that criminals are held captive by their bad choices but harder for us to understand when professionals working in the system are imprisoned within the walls of their own faulty decision making. 

Officers and social workers aren’t always wrong but sometimes they are. The people who pay the ultimate price for this are often the most vulnerable among us.

***

It wasn’t until I quit CPS and re-entered the reality of normal life that I realized working in constant dysfunction had made me dysfunctional. 

I was once assigned a report regarding a mother leaving a child in her car while it was running so that she could walk her older child into school. Even though I knew that stranger reports are rare, I immediately went into worst-case-scenario mode. In this instance, that was Jake Robel, a child dragged to death down a highway by a carjacker when his mother left him in the car to run into a sandwich shop. 

I handed the mother a newspaper clipping and said, “You can’t ever leave your kid in the car because you could be carjacked, and he could be dragged to death like this poor child in the news.” The mother looked at me like I was both unstable and overreacting for comparing Jake’s situation with her own. At the time of the investigation, my interpretation of the mother’s response was, “She doesn’t get how serious this is, but I do because I’m a social worker and I know the way the world really works.”

It wasn’t until I quit CPS and was separated from the chaos of the job that I realized how that conversation actually happened. I understood that my client looked at me like I was overreacting because I was overreacting. The mother had a realistic understanding of her situation that I did not share.

Who is crazier: (a) The mother who leaves her child in her vehicle in a school drop-off lane so the child isn’t exposed to winter elements while she walks her older child into school, or (b) the social worker who draws a line between that action and the child in the car being dragged to death down an interstate?

If an average citizen had an overreaction like mine, they would be labeled “hysterical” or “histrionic,” but nobody would have identified me that same way. Instead, they would have described me as doing my job thoroughly.

Luckily for the mother I investigated, my illogical thought process didn’t result in any lasting repercussions or life-altering decisions.  I said some nutty stuff and probably scared her a little, but then I went on my way and never talked to her again. Some people receiving services from the State aren’t always that lucky, and I turned out to be one of them.

                                                            ***

It’s common to come up with a working theory at the very beginning of an investigation based on the limited facts you have available to you. The goal is that your theory changes when you obtain more information, but it doesn’t always work like this.

When I was employed, a co-worker was convinced that a man was abusing his daughter but had very limited facts to back this up. She approached me once with a drawing of a stop sign that the child had created and stated that she believed the child had drawn the stop sign to indicate that she wanted her father to stop abusing her. I told her that I didn’t think she could draw such a huge conclusion from a child’s drawing of a stop sign and added that her own bias had led to this interpretation.

When I was investigated, the lead detective’s initial theory was that I broke the child’s arm in a crowd full of people at a fundraiser for a children’s shelter, but nobody saw this or intervened. I was given access to the case file, and there are no facts or statements to back this up. He conjured it from his own imagination and conducted an entire investigation around it.

When an officer or social worker uses their imagination to create a narrative not based in reality, we call them “intuitive.” When a suspect tells a hare-brained story not based in reality, we call them unreliable.

                                                            ***

As a CPS social worker, I was, at times, extremely cavalier about the horrible things people endured because I had shut down the empathetic parts of myself just to be able to show up every day. Police officers and social workers cannot be emotionally invested in every case or they would never survive the work. They detach to do their job, but a by-product of this detachment is routinely moving from case to case with little consideration for the lasting negative impact their involvement has in the lives of those they serve.

Arriving at school to interview children was a routine part of my job because we believed it allowed us to get the best answers from the children unfiltered by their parents. I once pulled a child out of an elementary classroom to ask him about significant trauma he had experienced in a foster home. When I had obtained the information I needed, I ushered him back to the secretary’s desk before I left the school.

As I started my car, I realized that I had just asked a young child about horrible abuse, and then thanked him for his cooperation and told him to “have a great day!” before he went back to his classroom. I didn’t have time to remedy my behavior because I had to move on to the next thing. I have no idea how I impacted him.

I doubt the lead investigator on my case thought about me after his actions wrecked my life unnecessarily. I imagine that he moved on to the next one and never thought about me again.

When the police or case workers move from case to case with little regard for the emotional wreckage they have witnessed or caused, we call them “seasoned.”  But when a suspect hurts somebody and doesn’t empathize with the person they hurt, we call them a sociopath. 

                                                            ***

We think people are inherently different from each other depending on the position they hold. I don’t believe this to be true. All of my varied experiences have shown that instead of comparing apples and oranges, we are sometimes two sides of the same coin. 

Abnormal situations become normalized when we’re around them constantly.  We don’t want citizens to have chaotic and violent experiences because we recognize that it impacts them negatively, but we expect people to work within chaos and violence every day for years and never be changed.  We want case workers to work in dysfunctional environments but never become dysfunctional. We want police officers to work in toxic environments but never become toxic.

We are set up for failure when we don’t even consider the possibility that professionals working in a troubled system with troubled people will sometimes exhibit the same troubling patterns as the people they serve. How would things change if we did?