On Thursday, reason.com published a genuinely outrageous report about two parents who had been arrested, strip-searched, jailed overnight, and charged with felony child neglect simply because their 11-year-old son had been left alone to play basketball for 90 minutes in his own backyard.
The author of the piece, Lenore Skenazy, writes the blog Free-Range Kids, where she has drawn attention to other outrageous cases in which parents have been charged with child neglect for letting their children walk home unsupervised from a park or school.
Skenazy’s latest story has gone viral–it’s been shared more than 50,000 times on Facebook (and by most of my favorite people on Twitter). What’s concerning about the report, however, is that it that it is based entirely upon the claims of “Cindy,” the mother in the story who is granted anonymity by the author because of concerns that going public could anger prosecutors in an ongoing case.
“I have spoken to the mom three or four times and to a lawyer familiar with her case. I have not seen any documents,” Skenazy told me in an email Thursday evening after I asked if she had seen an arrest report. Skenazy said during a follow-up phone call that she knows Cindy’s real name, but that Cindy refused to give her husband’s name or phone number. Skenazy said she hadn’t sought court records or an arrest report because Cindy provided a very detailed account.
I spoke Thursday evening by phone with David DeLugas of the National Association of Parents, the lawyer who has been in touch with Skenazy and Cindy’s lawyer about the case. While we were talking, DeLugas looked up Cindy’s case for the first time in the clerk of courts website. He said that records confirmed that a woman with Cindy’s real name had been charged with child neglect and was represented by the lawyer he’d spoken to.
While asking that I not reveal her profession or the jurisdiction of the case, DeLugas gave a plausible explanation why “because of a union contract, [Cindy] can be terminated simply because of the arrest because the charge is ‘child neglect.'”
Do we know if Cindy or her husband had a history of trouble with Child Protective Services? DeLugas said he didn’t specifically ask Cindy’s lawyer that question, but assumed her lawyer would have shared that information with him. “I did not see any other case with the same name as the mother,” DeLugas told me in a follow-up email.
If true, this story deserves to be Exhibit A in the case against government terrorizing parents for making reasonable decisions about how to raise their own children. But here’s a note of caution: This story was published based on the claims of a person who was granted anonymity and that person’s lawyer.
Cindy’s account could end up being 100 percent accurate, but we still haven’t seen an arrest report. After we spoke last night, Skenazy requested documents from Cindy and says that later today she’ll be “putting up a post with a page of the deprivation case with all the identifying info blacked out.”*
Right now it doesn’t seem like “Cindy” is going to end up being another “Jackie,” the source of the bogus UVA/Rolling Stone rape story. But the editors of Skenazy’s story had no way of knowing that prior to publication. The point remains that journalists shouldn’t publish bombshell stories based upon the unverified claims of an alleged pseudonymous victim. Confirmation bias is not exclusively a problem of the left.
*Update: Lenore Skenazy posts a redacted page of the court document she requested and obtained after we spoke last night. A Reason editor tells me that the full document corroborates key details in Cindy’s story, including the claim that her 11-year-old son was only outside in his backyard for 90 minutes.
