When you’re a parent, there are a lot of potential nightmares. When they’re babies, you worry that they will suddenly stop breathing. When they’re school-age, you worry about school shootings. When they’re teenagers, you worry about car crashes.
Honestly, it never stops. There is so much that’s outside of your control. It’s scary.
But one nightmare that a lot of parents don’t consider is being falsely accused of abusing your child.
The fact is, anyone can make such an accusation. They don’t even have to know you. They don’t even have to have any evidence. They can just pick up the phone and try to ruin your life.
That’s what happened recently to Pete Buttigieg when a police officer and someone from Child Protective Services knocked on the door of the Michigan home he shares with his husband and their children.
“They explained that there had been an allegation against me, that it concerned our four-year-old twins, and that a forensic interview had been arranged for the children the following day,” Buttigieg wrote on Substack. “I could not be present at the children’s interview, nor could any family member sit in. Afterwards, they would come back and interview me. And only then would they tell me anything about the nature of the allegation.”
Buttigieg was told that he could not be alone with his children until after their interviews.
Now, if you’ve spent any time with 4-year-olds you know they are not the most reliable narrators. You’ll also know that when young children are interviewed, whether by law enforcement or social workers, a lot of what they say is heavily influenced not just by the questions they are asked, but how those questions are phrased. So even if a parent is confident in their knowledge that they have done nothing to harm their children, the prospect of those children being interviewed by strangers is terrifying.
It turned out that officials were acting on an anonymous call to CPS. “The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama,” Buttigieg wrote, “where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.”
In other words, someone said that someone else told them that Buttigieg told her that he was a threat to his children.
And that was enough for authorities to separate Buttigieg from his kids.
It was determined after the children were interviewed that whatever Buttigieg had been accused of had never happened. That the person making the accusation was not at all credible. The kids returned home.
Most likely, Buttigieg was targeted not just because he is a political figure, but because he is gay. Even though it has been thoroughly debunked, there are those who still claim that LGBTQ+ people are a danger to children.
At the present moment, we see this lie being used most prominently to justify anti-trans policies. We see legislatures passing bills to keep trans people out of public bathrooms and to categorize drag performances as adult entertainment in order to shut down drag story hours. All in the name of protecting children.
The thing is, LGBTQ+ people do not pose an outsized threat to children. And acting like we do doesn’t protect children. In fact, it puts children in greater danger.
After all, there are only so many resources dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect. When things like homophobia and transphobia dictate where child welfare agencies direct those resources, children who are actually in danger fall through the cracks.
In an ideal country, keeping children safe and healthy would be a top priority. Instead, what the United States has is a patchwork system rife with holes. There are not enough foster parents or social workers. There are too many children who are homeless, hungry and without healthcare.
And yet, the very people who believe that we need to protect kids from LGBTQ+ people are either silent about these problems or they are actively against policies that would address them. For example, the Venn diagram of people who think a gay couple aren’t fit to be parents and people who are against universal free school lunches has an awful lot of overlap.
Allegations of child abuse are extremely serious and should never be ignored. But while Buttigieg’s kids were sitting in their interviews, some other kids, kids who desperately need help, weren’t getting it.
And yet I have no doubt we’ll get another anti-trans bill before any legislation that would reform our child welfare system and address the systemic problems that increase the chances a child will be abused or neglected.
Won’t someone think of the children?