All of the children from the entire community were taken on the basis of an anonymous telephone report, and the fact that 5 of the underage girls were pregnant. While there is no doubt that these facts are a sufficient basis for investigating what is happening there, it's not enough reason to remove every child, including prepubescent girls and all the boys.
I admit that I haven't read the cases, yet, but I will. For now I would like to state that suspicion of abuse in a family merits the removal of any and all children from that family, no matter if the charge is against a particular sex or age or even if only one child is being abused. In this case, the familial relationships are ambiguous and it has been previously established (RE:Warren Jeffs trial) that the "abuse" does not necessarily come from the parents (although they seem to be complicit). I don't think that returning the children without a more thorough investigation was the right thing to do.
For starters, the investigation into the parents of the underage pregnant girls wasn't complete and, therefore, we don't know who their parents or who the parents of any of the remaining children are (please correct me if I am wrong here).
Therefore, it is impossible to know which parents were/are complicit in the abuse (putting aside the cult abuse argument).
This is why the child protective services had to act the way they did, IMO. Because they had no way to establish maternity/paternity or even parental responsibility off the bat. In regular abuse cases, all children are removed from the home while an investigation is completed. In this case, there was no clear way to tell which kid was whose, so the safest bet was to remove them all and investigate.
But besides the biological argument, they live in "group" homes. They operate as a group, therefore, they should be treated as a group.
If I have a group of 10 foster kids and one of them accuses me of abuse, I expect to have all of the kids removed from me while an investigation goes on. I should not be able to influence or further abuse any of my charges while the investigation is going on.
In this case you have (hypothetically) 5 women and one man. One 12 year old girl is pregnant. There are 18 other kids ranging in age from 0-14. They are all one family. They (the adults) are all responsible for what happens to that 12 year old girl. They (the adults) should not be able to influence or further abuse any of the children in their charge while the investigation is going on.
Barring actual knowledge as to the parentage and household situation of each child, I fail to see the difference between every day abuse cases and this one.
"You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong--to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration." -
The Iron Heel by Jack London
"Hazards exist that are not marked" - some bar in Chelsea
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