Abused Girl Doesn't Make Good: Government Child Protective Services AWOL

Sorry about that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems to be the attitude of the government’s child protective services after Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death in New York City by her stepfather.

Of course, the signs were all out there in the wind for anyone that cared. The government had a case file on the girl. The officials at the government school had attempted to get intervention to happen. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz has a quick recap.

You see, the problem was that the caseworker Roger Moore at the child protection agency in Bedford-Stuyvesant was overwhelmed, swamped with cases. Understaffed is the word they like to use.

"I didn’t drop any balls," Moore said last week as the city reeled from the Nixzmary’s murder. The thing was, Moore just had too much on his plate. "I couldn’t cover all the cases in my area," he said.

Podhoretz goes on in the traditionally outraged tone of your average ink stained wretch.

Roger Moore is 55 years old. I hope he leads a long life so that every night, Nixzmary Brown can enter his dreams and ask him why he didn’t save her from her torture chamber of a home.

But aren’t we missing the point here? Why should anyone, least of all a conservative columnist, expect a government to do any job right except the job of extracting taxes from the citizenry?

After all, if the bureaucratic method were so great then we wouldn’t have families and churches and the little platoons that make life civilized. We would have nice bureaucratic everything, just like Plato’s tremendously succesful Republic, and Aldous Huxley’s incomparable Brave New World.

Come on folks. Let’s admit it. Government can’t protect children. Never could. Never will. What protects children is their natural married parents. And when they fail, then you hope that the little platoons, the neighbors, the church members, will feel they have the authority to intervene and stop cruelty and abuse—to do something.

But don’t ever expect the welfare state to succeed at that sort of thing.