AI tool may flag parents with disabilities

[Jilly_in_VA]

For the two weeks that the Hackneys’ baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room.

They stayed with their daughter around the clock when she was moved to a rehab center to regain her strength. Finally, the 8-month-old stopped batting away her bottles and started putting on weight again.

“She was doing well and we started to ask when can she go home,” Lauren Hackney said. “And then from that moment on, at the time, they completely stonewalled us and never said anything.”

The couple was stunned when child welfare officials showed up, told them they were negligent and took their daughter away.

“They had custody papers and they took her right there and then,” Lauren Hackney recalled. “And we started crying.”

More than a year later, their daughter, now 2, remains in foster care. The Hackneys, who have developmental disabilities, are struggling to understand how taking their daughter to the hospital when she refused to eat could be seen as so neglectful that she’d need to be taken from her home.

They wonder if an artificial intelligence tool that the Allegheny County Department of Human Services uses to predict which children could be at risk of harm singled them out because of their disabilities.

The U.S. Justice Department is asking the same question. The agency is investigating the county’s child welfare system to determine whether its use of the influential algorithm discriminates against people with disabilities or other protected groups, The Associated Press has learned. Later this month, federal civil rights attorneys will interview the Hackneys and Andrew Hackney’s mother, Cynde Hackney-Fierro, the grandmother said.

https://www.wate.com/news/ai-child-welfare-tool-may-flag-parents-with-disabilities/

Outrageous. They did exactly what their pediatrician TOLD them to do and were punished for it! CPS overstep when they could have been doing something else.........

[SheltieLover]

1. This is beyond ridiculous!

[thucythucy]

2. Once again people with disabilities are being targeted by the powers that be.

Reports of police brutality against PwDs: routine.
Reports of social service agencies targeting disabled parents for no other reason than their disability: routine.
Reports of people with disabilities being targeted for "assisted suicide:" also routine.
Hate crimes against disabled people: happens all the time.

Parents with disabilities have been fighting this sort of bigotry for decades, probably longer.

As long ago as the early 1980s Dr. Stanley Ducharme was arguing--based on peer reviewed psychologicsl studies--that people with disabilities--all else being equal--were as good parents as TABs. This despite the common mythology that having a disabled parent was somehow inherently harmful to their children. Irving Zola, a prominant sociologist, scholar, and a parent who was also a polio survivor, wrote extensively on the subject.

And yet, more than three decades after passage of the ADA we're still dealing with this bullshit.

I hope the parents not only get the DoJ involved, but also sue everyone involved for all they are worth, and of course regain full custody of their child, who will also have to deal with the consequences of this bigotry perhaps for the rest of their life.