Paying a Price for Child Protective Services

Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help (Penguin Books, 2016) and Emma Ketteringham, managing director of the Family Defense Practice at The Bronx Defenders, discuss how cases are handled in New York City family court, where lawyers and judges must decide whether the risks to a child at home outweigh the risks of separating a family. "The vast majority of cases in family court are not cases of abuse, they're cases of neglect. The problem is that when an awful killing or an abuse case becomes publicized, that has ramifications for all the other cases in family court that have nothing to do with physical abuse, that are cases of neglect or that have to do with poverty," says MacFarquhar.