my thoughts of class and education, let me show you them

When my son was a little under a year old, me and my mom forgot him in the car for five entire seconds, or to translate this into motion, three steps from the car and the length of time it took to recognize that we could hear the sounds of nature around us and not the glorious descant of his unhappiness.

For those who know me, I considered leaving him there because of the effort required to retrieve him, but as he survived with only a few nightmares about being abandoned to die in a van, I'm pretty sure he's gotten over it, and what time does not cure, I daresay a therapist can fix. This brings me to the question that hits me every summer when children are left in cars and die. As this is not even uncommon, which in a variety of ways freaks me out and I can't talk about in any sensible fashion.

This is why I am thinking about this.

Raise your hand if you did not see that verdict coming.



Now granted, people who do social work for long periods of time tend to go either extremist or go numb; there's middle ground, but at least at the casework level, I've met very few of them. Anyone who reads here knows my virulent loathing of classism (and my own part in perpetuating it) isn't something I'm hot to hide.

So my bias is showing; my first reaction on any case is to check the job and class when something in the general family of child negligence occurs, because fairly often I can make a decent prediction based on that how the case will be handled. I usually don't need to dig for race--if they aren't white, the article will mention it, and you'd be amazed at the sudden intersection of race and class how accurate the prediction gets.

This bothered me because denying the racial aspect is kind of like denying Ike is coming down the Gulf. And it bothered me because I'm looking thoughtfully at the Dr before her name and wondering about bias when she faces her social and class peers--two lawyers, one judge, all of whom share that level of higher education. It's not like this is new--we've been not-talking about class bias forever, but I'm not sure anyone's gotten around to a crosscheck on education bias; they look a lot alike. And yet I don't think they are the same thing. And I could be convinced that they look a lot less alike than we think, simply because class and education can overlap so heavily that we can be looking at one and mistake it for the other.

Also:

In the past, Deters has said that he would have to prove that Edwards left her daughter in the minivan purposefully and that truly forgetting is not a crime.

You have got to be fucking with me.



I feel--well, I don't feel better. But I have more coffee.

Comments

[drlense.livejournal.com]

I worry that continuing to discuss this is going to make it sound like I don't think this is horrible- because I do- but I think part of the problem is that all these situations are grey area type things. Every situation is different and I don't know enough about this particular situation to be able to say whether what this woman did was criminal, which is why I'm a moron for putting my 2 cents in in the first place! :D

But see- assuming no criminal intent- I can easily see how this is possible. As someone said above- a change in routine and next thing you know you're at work and it's crazy busy and you're not thinking about your kid in the car because of course they're at day care since your husband or wife drops them off every day. Where else would they be?

It's wrong if this woman isn't charged simply because she's white. It's wrong if there are black women making the same mistake that are being criminally charged.

But how is prosecuting anyone in this situation a good thing? If it's because we, as a society, want people to be punished for their mistakes then I say that no amount of jail or probation or anything else is going to be worse for this woman than killing her own daughter. If it's because we want to deter other people from making the same mistake- then isn't the death of the child more likely to do that than an additional prison sentence for the mom? And if it's rehabilitative, then that's pointless because is this woman likely to leave another one of her children to suffocate to death in a car? Probably not.

None of this is meant to negate what Seperis said above about race and class and how our view of white women and black women are different- she's spot on there.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

No, I get what you're saying--to be honest, I'm still working through negligence ideas myself, so reading along with you and everyone else is helping me clarify where I stand on it and how I feel about it. I don't think it's murder, and I'm uncomfortable with it even being manslaughter, but I can't help but feel that there need to be consequences, even in cases like this.

And you're right--the grey areas are what makes it so hard.

[fyrdrakken]

I'm also not so much with the criminal charges for an honest mistake, and need to think a little more about the grey area between "negligence" and the kind of forgetting/carelessness that is part of human existence. The swimming pool analogy is a bit imperfect -- I'm remembering when we moved into a house with a pool, and how when the backyard fence was being resized Dad was pointing out how absolutely essential it was that the pool never ever be unfenced because of the "attractive nuisance" issue that would leave us liable if some neighbor kid snuck in while we were out and drowned. Leaving the pool or trampoline unfenced -- or the gate regularly unlocked -- would be negligence of the sort of which court cases are made. Keeping one's own children fenced away from the items, as opposed to just saying, "Stay out if there are no grownups around to keep an eye on you," and hoping they obey (or at least don't get killed disobeying)? I was about to say that it would be drifting into the grey area where race and class would affect likelihood of criminal charges, but then again who has a pool who isn't moderately-well-off? And I can't remember any stories of drowned-kid cases in the family's own pool that weren't reported as terrible tragedy rather than as criminally bad parenting.

Manslaughter is -- hmm. I don't know enough to say whether the charge is dependent on there having been a fuckup where the carelessness would have predictably bad consequences or whether sheer death-by-accident is enough to convict. Fatal car accident where the at-fault driver was under the influence or pulled a hit-and-run, probably, but fatal car accident caused by speeding or by pulling out in traffic without looking, I kind of doubt there'd be charges involved or even suggested.

Meanwhile, a week or three back when I was catching the news at my grandmother's (the only time I ever see the local news, and that because I'm stuck watching her choice of shows) there was a spiel about how many deaths there've been in the area this summer due to hyperthermia and reminding parents to please not forget the kids in the car for even a few minutes.

[fanaddict.livejournal.com]

Just to stick my 2 cents in - here in NY/NYC area there are laws that absolutely require people with pools to fence their backyards off and keep the gates locked so as not to endanger neighboring kids. I'm pretty sure on Long Island they've started requiring sensors on pools and the fences surrounding them that go off if the gates are opened. This is all to protect children.

Now, along those lines, there's a $35 sensor that can be attached to a car seat that goes on when the car seat is locked and the alarm goes off if the driver door is opened and a certain amount of time passes without the baby seat being unlocked.

If people can be required by law to have fences, locks, and sensors around pools to protect children, then I'm not sure why the law couldn't do the same for people with children who are still in car seats. I mean, in both cases there is a financial burden put on people that in the vast majority of cases is unnecessary, so I do understand that this isn't a popular suggestion. I just guess as a mother I'd rather pay the money and have the safety warning (and I will when my next child is born). What parent would say that the $35 isn't worth it just in case?

So that's all to say that there are options that parents have that they chose not to take whenever a child is left in a car. And yeah, I get it that the parent who did it will be psychologically scarred for life and that's probably worse than any prison time they could serve. And I don't know what the stats are for charging parents who accidentally back over their child, or the child drowns or any other sort of accidental death. Accidents and children unfortunately will always happen. I'm not sure charging a parent is the right thing to do (for any race or gender - btw mothers are usually treated more harshly than fathers [or is it the reverse? I know I read there was a gender discrepancy.]). Of course, maybe neglect charges would do... something...

Is the law supposed to punish people or take people dangerous to society off the street or to warn others of the consequences? And if it's the last two, then I'm not sure what is accomplished by sending a grieving parent to jail for an accident, since no parent truly thinks I'd better not accidentally leave my kid in the car because I might go to jail...

[fyrdrakken]

See, I'd never even heard of the sensor to make sure a car seat isn't forgotten in the car (let alone the pool-fence alarms) -- whether that's because it's better-known in NY than in TX, or because I'm not a parent and not entirely up-to-date on the latest baby accessories, I don't know. I can't say I'm that much in favor of giving parents yet another child-related expense that as you note will be unnecessary in the vast majority of cases -- especially since, unlike swimming pools, car and car seats are likely to be owned even by lower income parents for whom $35 can be a bit of a hardship. (However, I'm also prone to vicious Darwinian tendencies, like being against motorcycle helmet and seatbelt laws. Except for seatbelts on children, because despite my interest in seeing the stupid culled from the species I don't want their children to directly pay for it. I'm inconsistent like that.)

That's a big question, yes, how much of the criminal justice system is meant to be punishment, how much to protect society and how much to serve as a deterrent. As is noted, the majority of parents wouldn't need any further punishment than the loss of their child, our social setup is to protect the careless and stupid rather than necessarily to protect others from them, and most parents don't need any more deterrence than warnings when it comes to child safety issues. For the minority of parents who deliberately injure their children, we have abuse and murder charges to satisfy society's need for vengeance and deterrence -- we don't need to lump genuine accidents in with them, except for so long as it takes to determine whether said accidents were in fact staged or encouraged to occur.

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Good point. I didn't actually touch on the issue of whether negligence should be charged because it's really kind of a tough issue. I think that maybe a fine or a misdemeanor charge can do something to deter someone from leaving children unattended. I don't know if this is true, but I think it's possible that it would be more effective than the idea of a possible death - after all, the really bad things in life only ever happen to other people, at least until they do happen to us.

[sholio]

I'm totally with you on this, both the general points and being torn about it, too. I generally don't feel that these sorts of cases should be prosecuted as murder, and I'm not unhappy to see the mother get off, but there's no doubt in my mind that a working-class mother who had to leave her children alone out of necessity would be prosecuted under similar circumstances, and that's a horrible, unjust double standard.

But as far as the criminality of it ... I mean, I look back on a lot of the things that my parents and grandparents did with their little kids -- not abusive things, but just the general kinds of things that a poor family, and especially a poor single parent (my mom) had to do in a rural situation where childcare wasn't available ... There but for the grace go we, really. I'm not a parent, so I have no idea what it's like, but I can totally believe myself capable of forgetting my (hypothetical) child under all sorts of circumstances; most people I know, including me, seem to have at least one story of their parents accidentally leaving them in malls, gas stations, carnivals, parks, etc. for one reason or another. Yes, it's careless and negligent, but it's a human sort of carelessness that we all seem to be capable of, and most of us just get lucky.