“ACS’s highly intrusive tactics retraumatize survivors of domestic violence or abuse—aggravating these individuals’ emotional distress, undermining their sense of safety and control, disrupting their jobs, and perpetuating biases about survivors like them.”
Surveillance of Survivors of Domestic Violence
Cases
-
Two landmark wins in the New York Appellate First and Second Departments ending the longstanding and illegal practice of placing survivors of domestic violence under surveillance pre-fact finding when they have been accused of no wrongdoing. Learn more.
-
Challenging post-disposition surveillance orders in the First Department. Ms. C., a survivor of domestic violence, was not alleged or found to be an unfit parent. Nevertheless, ACS sought, and the family court granted, a dispositional order authorizing unlimited ACS supervision of Ms. C. and her home. This surveillance lasted for well over a year and included traumatic police searches.
Parent-survivors of domestic violence often face systematic “double abuse”: having first experienced violence at home, they are then subjected to unnecessary state surveillance that hurts rather than helps. Parent-survivors encounter the child welfare system at every turn: abusers routinely make false reports of child maltreatment as a way to continue harassing their victims; the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) treats survivor-parents as incapable of protecting their children; and courts adjudicating claims of child maltreatment against abusers regularly rule that survivor-parents can keep custody of their children only if they allow ACS caseworkers to enter and search their homes.
These parent-survivors, called “nonrespondents,” are not accused of any wrongdoing toward their children. Yet family courts routinely order the nonrespondent parent to comply with unannounced home searches, strip searches of their children, and other invasive demands. This surveillance causes significant harm to families and does not make children safer, and disproportionately impacts Black, Hispanic, and low-income parents.