Child Abuse and Neglect: Where Do We Draw the Line?
What type of behavior is child neglect and what is not? It’s a question of where we draw the line as a society.
Lack of supervision is one of the legal definitions of child neglect. However, we are left to decide for ourselves to what degree someone must fail to supervise a child before we say they broke the law.
WESH TV2.com is reporting that two children in Volusia County called 911 after their mother left them home alone.
The headline described the 6 and 4-year-old children as “panicked” but the 911 call transcript does not lead me to the same conclusion. It reveals the 6-year-old boy saying, “when we were freaked out, I told my sister, ‘You need to go to sleep and stay calm until tomorrow. I think she’s coming back.”
That seems pretty level-headed and calm to me. Is that headline another example of media sensationalism to drum up their audience? I digress.
The topic of this post is to discuss legal line drawing. The boy in this story called 911 at about 2 a.m. and said he was home alone with his 4-year-old sister.
The operator talked to the boy after asking him to turn on the TV to entertain his younger sister. Volusia County Sheriff’s Deputies arrived to supervise the children until their 23-year-old mother, Megan Hester, returned home 30 minutes later.
She said she went to a convenience store to fill up her car with gas and that when she left, the children were sleeping. Deputies reported that she did not seem drunk or otherwise intoxicated, the house was clean and the children were fine.
She was arrested and charged with felony child neglect.
In this post I will not take one side or the other but encourage you to comment on where you would draw the line between behavior that is imprudent versus behavior that is criminal. Where would you draw the line?
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