See below:
BBM. This is the party line about gag orders or confidentiality in juvenile cases. I understand that children have (or should have) privacy rights and that many would be upset to have personal details of their lives made public. I've fought on other threads about respecting the children's rights to privacy over the public's desire to know.
But this is a different case because it is about government action that threatens a family. So I think we have to balance the privacy rights of the children with the public need for transparency and for those subject to serious government actions which take away or threaten constitutional rights, like the rights to one's children, to be able to speak out and criticize that government action. Otherwise, what are we, Iran? North Korea?
As I said, I support children's rights to privacy but when their rights to their parents or vice versa are threatened, gagging the parents does not seem warranted.
And surely the PARENTS aren't going to be divulging abuse they inflicted on their kids. Further, the details of many kid's abuse is publicized in criminal cases. So, I really feel gag orders in these cases serve to protect government interests and not societal ones.
And that worries me greatly. And caveat, I think there is a lot of evidence that the Stanley abused their kids and I do not believe this family has been persecuted. It's not logical. But that is unimportant. Whether guilty or not, American citizens should all have the right to confront and call out the government. That's a key way of keeping the government in check.
Gitana--I think this is very difficult. Based on a few cases I have followed elsewhere, I am not certain that greater transparency as to specifics of cases necessarily leads to greater accountability on the part of government agencies, even though I share your concern. I would tend to move in the direction of greater transparency at the level of reporting data (# of reports taken, # of reports resulting in investigation, # of investigations resulting in removals, # of months spent in foster care prior to reunification or adoptive placement, etc), and particularly open reporting on details of children injured or dying while in care, etc.
However, I followed a couple of Florida cases (one actually a family case--that of Rifqa Bary; and the other the Trayvon Martin murder case), where there is an astonishingly (to my mind) open set of public records law, and I don't know that the end result is a good one. In the Bary case, the openness of the family court process, combined with their particular organization (Protective services are organized at a statewide, rather than county, level--making it easy to put political pressure on the Governor) really contributed to a circus. If you are not familiar with the Bary case, a teen from a Muslim family in Ohio ran away from home--allegedly to be able to practice Christianity. She was actually hidden from both her family and the authorities by a Florida minister until the FBI caught up with him. Multiple groups jumped on the bandwagon, including some cult-like Christian factions, some Muslim-hating organizations and individuals and some religio-political lobbying groups. Although legally a simple case--Florida had no jurisdiction and without the political pressure would have simply returned the teen to authorities in Ohio, where CPS agencies handle similar situations frequently. In that case, some of the very same people and organizations who are chanting about the persecution of Christians and supportive of the right of parents to determine their childrens' religious upbringing were absolutely opposed to the notion that a Muslim family should be upset about their daughter's baptism and frankly kidnapping by Christians.
Once the case did get to Ohio (after the state of Florida actually sent someone up to investigate whether Ohio was capable of providing adequate protection for this teen), the lobbying groups were very disappointed to discover that under Ohio's county-based system that throwing political dirt at the Governor got them nowhere. They were also disappointed that they did not have the same level of access to the courtroom as they had previously. Nonetheless, the teen in question completed high school online (in a foster family), and probably was exceedingly limited in her ability to have ongoing social contact due to her noteriety. Several years later, I hope she has changed her name and is able to live an anonymous life.
The Martin case was similar. All kinds of information was either available through legal means, or leaked. As a result, a minor homicide victim had school and other juvenile records published online, and to my mind it will always be an open question whether justice was available in the environment that was engendered as a result. It was frequently the case that the victim was the one on trial--in the public mind--and questions remain as to what the jury knew prior to trial and what they understood about their conviction options.
So--while I am far from a cheerleader when it comes to the actions of CPS, and particularly so in an environment of growing privatization of government services, I am not so certain that opening up case records is the way to go in building greater accountability.
