Parents Under Siege in Global Battle Against State Control of Children

by Dave Bohon
Monday, 07 March 2011

Two recent cases, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, demonstrate the extent to which government is aggressively militating to control and regulate children and families.

In a case that goes all the way back to 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court will listen to arguments to decide whether an Oregon social worker and a deputy sheriff violated the rights of a nine-year-old girl (known in the case as “S.G.”) when they removed her from her elementary school classroom, without a court order or the consent of her mother, and spent the next two hours grilling her about allegations of sexual abuse on the part of her father.

While the girl originally denied that her father had sexually abused her, “she later testified that she was coerced into telling the investigators he had abused her because she thought it was the only way they would allow her to leave,” explained John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, a pro-family legal advocacy group that has taken an interest in the case. “The encounter reportedly so scared S.G. that she was physically sick that night and could not eat.”

The girl’s mother subsequently sued the sheriff and social worker, charging that the pair had violated her daughter’s 14th Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. In 2009 the case made its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that the government tag-team had indeed violated the girl’s constitutional guarantees, and further, that their actions at the school had “constituted an unauthorized seizure of S.G., which is not exempt from the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement,” noted Whitehead. the rest