Homeless Family’s Outrageous Situation Suggests Unique Remedy

A note to readers: This is an uncomfortable story, as are my conclusions about how society might best address the situation it describes. I prize individual freedom and limited government, and recognize that sanctioning government force in the application of law can be a slippery slope.

Yet, neglecting justice to avoid the risks of misapplying it is also a harmful slippery slope, and we see the destructive effects of that error in every city with permissive policies toward drug use, prostitution, and disorder.

Ultimately, I can’t ignore the fact that children have a natural right to the dutiful care of their parents. With a wise and creative application of law, it may be possible to uphold a child’s rights even as his parents are subject to justice. Many details would have to be carefully considered, but this op-ed recommends a unique path forward for family crises like the one described here.

A shocking story published Dec. 19 by Charlie Harger of KIRO News Radio tells of a 9-year-old boy living in a tent in one of Seattle’s public parks. He lives there with his parents, when they’re around. His mother is a fentanyl addict and prostitute who makes the boy wait outside in the bushes while she services clients in the tent. His father reportedly has a long criminal history.

Neighbors say the boy is filthy, has a rasping chest cough, and does not go to school. They say he is left alone in the tent long hours every day while his father works, and sometimes all night. Occasionally, his mother disappears for days at a time.

Neighbors, social workers, and law enforcement officers have offered the family help — food, clothes, rides to school, a room for the mother and her son. Both parents have refused. The boy’s father claims he’ll move the family into a motel sometime soon; he says his son is in “delayed start homeschool;” both parents, with hostile expletives, deny the boy is neglected.

Child Protective Services and Seattle police officers have visited the tent and determined there is no legal authority for removing the boy from the situation. He has “appropriate food and bedding” in the tent. He is not at “imminent risk of physical harm.”

Yet the situation outrages and distresses every decent person. It has no place in a civilized society.

What should be done?

Should the boy be forcibly taken from his parents and placed in foster care? That’s deeply traumatic — a lot like being kidnapped and imprisoned by strangers — and sometimes foster care is not safer.

In response to real abuses and failures within the child protective services system, state legislators passed the Keeping Families Together Act in 2021 with near unanimous support. The law appropriately sets a high bar for removing a child from his parents. Its goal is to keep families intact and emphasize services instead of separation.

Offering services clearly falls short in this case. Poverty is not the real issue; willful depravity, vice, and deep addiction are the issues.

Should the parents be arrested and imprisoned for the crimes of neglect, dereliction of duty, illicit drug use, prostitution, public camping? That would be just, but where does that leave the boy?

It’s hard to imagine any appropriate response to this situation that will not be traumatic. Someone must be displaced, interrupted, removed from harmful influences, and forced into a new routine. The parents should bear the brunt of that trauma; the boy should not.

There is only one remedy that could genuinely benefit every single person involved — the boy, his parents, the neighbors, and all of society — with as little trauma to the innocent as possible: This family needs to be committed, together, to a humane, court-ordered, involuntary, physically secure, family rehabilitation program.

That program should provide 1) a warm and safe place for the whole family; 2) nourishing food, adequate clothing, urgent medical care, and counseling; 3) education for the child; 4) clinical treatment and recovery support for the mother; and 5) work for the father.

Does this solution violate someone’s civil or human rights? No. A decent society recognizes that dereliction of duty, neglect of a child, illicit drug use, selling sex, and camping in a public city park are not rights; they are crimes. Rights can be forfeit when a person chooses to violate the law, yet the purpose of law is to uphold the rights of the innocent. Children have a right to the dutiful care of their own parents.

We spend billions on social services, law enforcement, prisons, rehabilitation, treatment, education, and housing. When justice demands, we apply these programs, penalties, and remedies to individuals without their consent. Perhaps it’s time to consider applying them to whole families when the circumstances merit. A wise (just, compassionate, and fitting) application of the law and services to situations like this one might just make it possible to benefit both the perpetrators and the victims equally well.

While many other children were dreaming of new toys this Christmas season, I suspect the best gift this little boy could receive is not to be saved from his parents, but to have a chance to be saved with them.

Postscript: After neighbors continued to intervene and media coverage garnered widespread attention, the family in this story left their tent and moved on. Andrea Suarez of We Heart Seattle (an organization worth knowing and supporting) was part of the clean-up crew. She provided the photos you see here, and her organization works hard every day to connect people with treatment and services, and to promote meaningful solutions to the crisis of street-level homelessness (weheartseattle.org).