Jury finds Children's not negligent in Pelletier lawsuit

Why was a woman arrested after an Amber alert because she took the kid to Childrens rather than be ignored at a local ER?

I am a court evaluator for child welfare cases. I don't know much about the Pelletier case other than things I've heard in passing from colleagues who've been involved. I can absolutely comment on Children's in general though.

Children's is well-known among child welfare attorneys and clinicians for filing reports with DCF in which they portray any disagreement with their providers or any anxious/frustrated parent as having factitious disorder imposed on another/Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. Most of the parents and children on whom I perform extensive psychological evaluations do not meet any such profile, and I find various combinations of complicated kids, anxious kids, anxious parents, but usually nothing that warranted a child welfare issue. An attorney in my network has a file of cases in which MSBP was alleged by Children's. These are just cases that either that attorney encountered or that were mentioned by other attorneys or clinicians. The number of cases this attorney has in this file is much greater than what experts state the prevalence of MSBP would be in the entire country over that time period. And this clearly isn't anywhere near even the total number of cases coming out of Children's. Their child protection team is seriously out of control. I have psychology and social work colleagues in various departments there who tell me it's well-known within the organization, and who tell me they have to constantly push back against the pathologizing and parent-blaming culture of the organization. Children's really likes to push this narrative that they know better than the family what's best, and it's harmful.

There has been some good reporting lately, particularly by Mike Hixenbaugh, around the problem with the so-called "child abuse pediatricians." Children's currently employs and previously has employed some scary folks who have deemed conditions to be abuse in complete ignorance of the science around these conditions.

The other thing most members of the public don't know is that DCF does not do a thorough investigation involving skilled clinicians. Their investigation response workers and ongoing social workers are usually bachelor's-level. Very very few have an LICSW/LMHC (the full master's-level independent clinician licenses) and I've yet to encounter anyone there with a doctorate. The decision that something is abuse or neglect and the decision to remove children are made by people with usually a bachelor's degree and sometimes a non-clinical master's. A lot of the investigators are good and thorough, but laws and policies don't require this and literally state that the say-so of an employee of the department equals a fact that something happened, met the legal threshold of abuse or neglect, etc. Removal decisions are eventually heard by a judge (supposed to be within 72 hours, often is several weeks), but the family is not allowed to present a defense, and the laws state that whatever the DCF worker said is a fact. Even if families are wealthy and able to get into appeals court, statements from DCF workers are still facts and the court decides they are not in a position to question fact-finding. Oh, and any action against DCF first starts in DCF's "Fair Hearings" division, which is a hearing run by a DCF worker. The courts view the decisions of the DCF worker in terms of how s/he admits and views evidence to be legally settled. If the bachelor's-level DCF worker said in the hearing that they decided the parent is delusional, then this is generally viewed as a fact all the way up through the SJC. I've seen ones where the DCF worker makes horrendously bogus claims, like where the family doesn't even own such a thing or do such a thing remotely resembling what was claimed, I don't know whether out of malice or by mixing up families or what, but it's gone to court as an established fact.

I have worked on cases where records and interviews with specialists at various places show that they've diagnosed children with various conditions (asthma, allergies, Ehlers-Danlos, autism, developmental delays, Crohn's, etc.) based on extensive evaluation. I then interview the person at Children's who says, "no, they don't have that," but didn't do any evaluation, and is focused on how the parents are crazy. There seems to be a mistaken idea there that a child can't both have a crazy parent and have a medical condition. Many of the providers will file a report with DCF over this, stating as fact that the parent states the child has X but they don't. DCF comes rushing in, because, yes, true MSBP is dangerous, and usually will align with Children's. DCF has this huge reverence for any MD, without looking at the actual training and evaluation behind something. A child can have spent hours per week for months with a speech-language pathologist who performed standardized testing and diagnosed the child with a condition that the SLP is licensed to diagnose. Then a random ER doctor who saw the child once for a sports injury files a report that the parent stated the child has a language disability but the ER doctor saw them and they don't. This is literally an example I've seen. And the system is clogged up with these bullshit cases where parents are criminalized and children are traumatized because a parent pushed back on a cocky doctor. Meanwhile, families who are actually in need of intervention can barely see their worker because there are so many families in the system.

That person is named Justina. She's an adult now.