Social Work Misconduct May Lead to Liability

Abstract

It is as much the duty of Government to render prompt justice against itself, in favor of its citizens, as it is to administer the same between private individuals (President Abraham Lincoln, First speech to Congress, 1861). In a recent U.S. Court of Appeals case, Currier v. Doran (2001), the court ruled that state-employed social workers can be held liable for the acts of others when those social workers the that caused the harm. To establish a proper danger creation claim, a plaintiff must demonstrate that * the state agency and the social workers created the danger or increased the plaintiff's vulnerability to the danger in some way * the plaintiff was a member of a limited and specifically definable group * the defendants' conduct put the plaintiff at substantial risk of serious, immediate, and proximate harm * the risk was obvious or * the defendant acted recklessly in conscious disregard of that risk * such conduct, when viewed in total, is shocking to the conscience. The plaintiffs in this federal civil rights lawsuit were two minor children who were abused by their father. The defendants were three social workers and a supervisor at the Children, Youth and Families Department of the State of New Mexico. The U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed the case against two of the social workers while allowing the case against one social worker and the supervisor to proceed. In this case the children alleged that their Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when state child welfare social workers removed them from their mother's custody and then placed them in the custody of their abusive father. The children also alleged that the social workers violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights by to protect them while they were in state custody and by to protect them once they were placed in the custody of their father. The social workers argued that the children's claims are barred by DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) and that they were entitled to qualified immunity. In DeShaney the Supreme Court considered the Fourteenth Amendment claims of Joshua DeShaney--a victim of severe child abuse--against the local child welfare agency. Joshua, who lived with his natural father, was removed from the home after several allegations of abuse, only to be returned when social workers and other professionals decided there was insufficient evidence of child abuse to retain Joshua in state custody. For the next six months the assigned caseworker was notified of several factors indicating that Joshua was being abused, but the child welfare agency took no action. Joshua was eventually beaten so violently that he fell into a life-threatening coma. The DeShaney court rejected Joshua's claim that the child welfare agency and its employees had violated his constitutional rights by failing to intervene to protect him against a risk of violence at his father's hands of which they knew or should have known (p. 192). The court stated that the Due Process Clause generally confer[s] no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests of which the government itself may not deprive the individual (p. 196). The court, however, also stated the following: While the State may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him any more vulnerable to them. That the State once took temporary custody of Joshua does not alter the analysis, for when it returned him to his father's custody, it placed him in no worse position than that in which he would have been had it not acted at all; the State does not become the permanent guarantor of an individual's safety by having once offered him shelter. …