Or to undermine the other parent with the child in some sick family dynamic that neither courts nor police are equipped to adjudicate. Or will you assert now that governmental units are omnicompetent, or merely omnipotent, over the life of the family?
That’s what we have trials for.
Have you ever been to trial and paid a lawyer up front because he demanded ten, twelve, fifteen K up front before you went to trial? A trial? For this?
But if a child’s mother is feeling the need to call police over a beating that the child’s father delivered in their home, then it’s right for the police and courts to get involved.
One welt. One single welt, and the cops are involved because Daddy took his belt off.
Seriously, the opinions you've expressed on this thread constitute about 25% of what is wrong with this country. You are seriously, seriously screwed-up on this issue.
I don’t think it’s me that’s screwed, but many of the courts that handle these cases certainly are. What was missing from this story was whether the mother approved of the removal. Since she initiated the law enforcement intervention, she probably did, since there is no allegation that she did anything wrong and thus she would have been allowed to keep the children as long as the father left the house (which presumably the court could have required).
The legal system can’t just ignore parents who contact it and allege that a crime has been committed against their child. That would only lead to more domestic violence and more parental abductions of children. What it CAN do — and should do, but often doesn’t — is require much higher standards of proof for taking action against a parent on anything longer than a short term, emergency basis. And they should get hired, adversarial lawyers out of the picture, partly due to the appalling expense which the innocent party can’t always afford, and also because it tends to further polarize an already adversarial situation, and that clearly doesn’t benefit anyone (except the lawyers who are collecting their fees).