Regarding: (SS's name)
Son of: (BF's name)

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this letter to express my sadness. I am sad because the child of the man I love is living in a home that is unstable, unkempt, and unhealthy. Hoping to find aid for his son from the only people he has been told could help him, he reached out to your agency. Last week, he called you and requested that you visit the home and see what you thought. The letter he received was disheartening to say the least.

First, you pointed out that as he has not personally been in the home, he could not possibly know the real state that it was in. Not only do I find this inane, but also a very large leap in logic. It is appropriate to point out that not only did the father previously live in this home, but his child does still live there. It is not against the bounds of possibility for us to be informed of the state of the home through the child. As the child has told us that “it looks like someone took ten garbage bags with holes in them and slung them everywhere”, I would say that that in itself is cause for at least some concern. The last time that the father stepped foot in the home was over a year ago, but from the account of the child it hasn’t improved, and in fact has only gotten worse since then. If the father knew how bad it was over a year ago from personal experience, and it has only gotten worse since then, I think it would be safe to assume that he could come to an educated conclusion on the present state of the home.

Secondly, the letter intoned that he was just a father in the midst of a custody battle and that was why he made the report. While I do not doubt that your agency often receives calls from parents reporting each other out of vindication, I do not feel that that is just cause to disregard his report without investigation. Not every recently divorced individual operates out of spite for their estranged spouse. I feel that it is unfair to the children that you strive to protect to force them to be exposed to continual neglect and abuse because you assume the person who reported said abuse is doing so out of spite. Regardless of the situation of the parents, or the presumed reason for the report, it’s the children that matter most. I am disheartened to think that you would knowingly disregard a report of such circumstances without so much as visiting the home to see if the claims may be substantiated, only on the premise that the mother and father are recently divorced. I use the term “recently” loosely, as it has been over a year since they were divorced. In my opinion, if he was filing a false report out of vindication, I think he would have done so much sooner.

He did not contact you out of spite. Much to the contrary – he contacted you out of growing concern for his son. The child’s accounts of his living environment and what happens at home are getting more vivid and disturbing as time goes on, and I believe there are still many things that he is not telling. I personally have never seen the inside of the home that this child resides in. However, based on the accounts of people whom I trust that have been inside, I can say that I believe a visit at the very least is warranted. The father told me months ago that once when he was searching for something in the living room, amidst the piles of garbage in the floor he found one of his son’s dirty diapers. His son was 6 years old at the time. The child’s grandmother has not been inside the home for over a year. When she was allowed inside, she said there was so much garbage on the floor that you had to shuffle a path for yourself to get through it. Now, she’s not allowed inside because the mother claims “it’s too messy for company”. I have a picture saved on my computer from December, during the son’s first overnight visit with his father. It was at that visit that we discovered the son did not know how to wash his own hair, and his scalp was crusted with dirt from months of neglect. We also discovered on that visit that he didn’t know how to brush his own teeth, and that his mother gave him vitamins to keep his teeth strong in lieu of brushing them.

Two legal professionals in our county have come to the father recently to express their concern that the mother will soon commit suicide. One has intoned that she may be so unstable as to do something to harm the child so as to keep him from being taken from her, or even kill the child before she kills herself. The mother has frequent contact with all legal professionals which provide their services to the father, and they have all recently begun to become concerned for the well being of the child and the mother’s emotional integrity. It seems a pretty strong case when two well-educated people come voluntarily to the father to confide in him their concerns; both individually, both having contacted him directly, and both with no knowledge that their colleague had done the same.

I am not telling you these things to try to make the case look any more important, and I am not fabricating any of this. I am only giving you an account of what I have witnessed and been privy to in the time that I’ve been exposed to the situation. I am not writing you on behalf of the father - or even with his knowledge, much less at his request. I am writing this as a concerned human being who is capable of making their own observations, and knows abuse and neglect when they see it.