This should be treated like a criminal matter, with the same standards of evidence. If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Or at the very least, the parents in question should have a court appointed defence lawyer.

We could start by adding Fathers back into the equation, and not automatically assuming that a child is in danger if they're not in their Mothers' sphere.

I think this is the worst thing that governments have done for families: the idea that a single-parent (Primarily the Mother) family is anything less than ideal for the children needs to attain mainstream acceptance. Dads need to stay, and Mothers need to move over and make way for it.

>According to the report, a married father spends on average 6.5 hours a week taking part in primary child care activities with his children. The married mother spends on average 12.9 hours. Since two-income households are now the norm, not the exception, the above information indicates that not only are mothers working, but they are also doing twice as much child care as fathers.

Fathers stepping in is one way it'll change. Mothers stepping out is another. To find the balance we have to make room for it.

If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt.

The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm. If you’ve seen some of the things parents are willing to do to their own kids, you would see why it’s not that simple.

Letting a criminal go free (think serial-murderer, rapist) is just as valid an argument for future harm.

I don't see why you treat these 2 cases differently.

The rights of a child to be abused and the rights of a parent to not have their child be taken away are both very important. It’s my subjective impression that the “child abused” case is much more common than the “child taken away where no abuse occurred” case. I see no reason that our laws should be biased in favor of letting that case occur.

If a child has been living with a mother that (apparently) has 18 drinks a day (getting to 18 drinks a day while still being a functional human is not something you get to overnight, it's a long process) without obviously suffering, this is cause for grave concern, it is a significant risk, but it's not an immediate risk. In this context it's also important to keep in mind that removing a child is possibly the correct answer in many cases, but it hurts the child 100% of the time. That hurt must be less, by a very significant margin, than the hurt of staying put.

Given that we’re talking about a clearly contentious divorce, it’s sadly not entirely unjustified to assume this might happen.

Best case scenario the couple wasn't married very long and doesn't have much in the way of joint possessions and no kids and they both work so you don't have alimony concerns you still need to decide who has to move out.

As such, there is necessarily a tradeoff between the rate of hits (correctly identifying "bad" parents) and false-alarms.

The question then becomes: what's an acceptable false-positive rate?

Even in other applications, you wouldn't just come up with an acceptable false-positive rate. You'd consider that as part of a larger process.

How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?

So for example in some medical tests they tell people of certain ages to just come in for tests. They review and change that age based on evidence. Some tests may give borderline results so people get asked to come back sooner than average if they only just pass. Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.

False-positive rates (of the multiple different tests available) are only one factor.

I would guess almost all of these things are already done in the current case under discussion, e.g. as mentioned before one case involved accusations from a husband. Now maybe that's just two false signals that happen to agree, but already you're talking about two false-positive rates you need to consider. Judges and social workers are probably making snap decisions based on gut instinct and rules of thumb as well that factor in. Presumably a case needs to be pretty serious before removal is even considered.

From just reading a libertarian blog that focusses on goverment intrusion into child-rearing though, you may think people are having their hair snipped randomly in the street and finding their children gone when they get home. A false-positive for that hypothetical case would obviously need to be much, much lower to be acceptable than in tests used as part of a bigger process.

I don't disagree wit you, but none of what you say gets around the fact that once you start removing children from the custody of their parents, a non-zero FA rate sets in.

>Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.

Case in point: this is also a signal-detection problem. You can certainly try to build a more sensitive detector, but the infamous tradeoff doesn't magically go away.

As such, you have to have at least some idea of what kinds of FA-odds you're wiling to tolerate, else you're just flying blind.

And I must insist on this point: the universe doesn't care how disturbing one finds the Hit/FA trade-off. It's still there, even if one doesn't want to look at it.

Then you cannot, under any circumstances, remove a child from his or her parents.

I mean this in the strictest, most mathematical sense.

Are you sure that's what you want?