I’m missing something here. Exactly why are the babies and toddlers being removed?
I can understand removing those in dangerous situations but not the little ones. Wouldn’t it be better to leave them with their mothers until the case has been tried?
Can someone enlighten me?
I can understand removing those in dangerous situations but not the little ones. Wouldn’t it be better to leave them with their mothers until the case has been tried?”
When the state comes in and removes a child due to possible neglect or abuse, they take ALL the children in the household, not just the possibly abused ones. That is standard operating procedure for any case, not just this one. It's just the scale of this is larger than seen before, and since the kids don't know their biological parents, and the adults won't tell, it gets even harder.
Since they believe that the girls are groomed to be plural wives and have babies at a very young age, and that they abandon their boys, it is very important to take the young children BEFORE they are groomed and abused.
These kind of compounds and cults are well known in that area of the country. I lived their for years. I am glad Texas is finally doing something about it.
It may not be the best solution in all cases. It may not be the best solution in this case, though I don't know if there might also be allegations of abuse to infants and toddlers in this case as well.
I suspect the policy stems from some past bad experiences with removing an abused child, and then having other children become the new target of abuse. I suspect that children's services would get sued by non-custodial parents if they left other children in an environment that they had already ruled was unsafe in many cases.
It might make for a reasonable argument by the parents lawyers that those children aren't at risk from the alleged abuse, but the way family court works, if the judge rules that foster care poses less risk to the infants and toddlers than being with their parents, they don't have much legal recourse.
In some cases, that might be a good thing, in others it's a bad thing. It puts an incredible amount of power in the hands of family court judges, and if that power is abused can have serious implications for some of our most vulnerable citizens. However, there really is no good way to deal with these kinds of issues, so for lack of a better solution to dealing with the reality of abusive parents, this is what we've got.
I think the issue is the fact that the mothers are refusing to say who is the natural mother of which child. I think the issue is also the women do not know who is the natural mother of which child.
People who abuse one child will often abuse all. If you wait until the child is abused before removing them, they aren’t being protected.
Plus, there’s a big mess about knowing who the mothers really are, which is the doings of the cult itself. The state cannot give custody to a non-custodial adult.
So that they don't disappear.