Speaking to the mother of the boy, who requested that all their names be withheld, said that the child’s injury occurred on February 6 this year, when he was playfully trying to climb upon his father’s back and may have slipped off and landed hard. The District Attorney's Office in Oregon had not yet replied to a request for comment on the issue.
When the mother took her son to the doctor’s office he found a hairline fracture in the child’s left tibia.
When she mentioned that her husband may have “dropped” him,without caring them the child was rushed to Randall Children's Hospital at Legacy Emanuel in Portland, which has a specialist Child Abuse Assessment Team on call.
At that point social service workers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) arrived on the scene and later that night a police officer too, who asked the child’s mother to sign a number of papers, some of which she said she could not understand.
The woman was then informed that her husband, who works with a major tech firm here, would no longer be allowed to enter their home or have contact with the children, as he posed a risk to their safety.
An HHS worker called Gina then began regularly visiting the mother and her children, while the husband had to stay in the home of colleagues and friends, and she grilled the mother on how they disciplined their children, whether the husband used to beat them and so forth.
The woman said that she had in all honesty told Gina that they followed a strict parenting style that many Indian couples do, and occasionally her husband would spank the children and sometimes they would have “time outs” in their well-lit, clean garage.
The HHS worker appeared to take close note of this and also asked the mother it was true that, as her husband allegedly admitted, he “made fists and banged his head against the wall in a rage.”
This allegation was “rubbish,” the woman said.
After the mother struggled for ten days to manage her children – she had a younger son too – on her own, the father was finally permitted to return, however not for long.
After several months of compelling the couple to attend parental counselling sessions in their home, including “family skill-building” sessions and “anger management” therapy for the father, and psychological counselling for the mother, HHS officials finally indicated in mid-June that they may be willing to close the case file on them.
Yet, apparently at the insistence of the District Attorney’s Office, the case against the Indian couple suddenly escalated in July, with the mother being subpoenaed on July 13 to attend court as a witness against her husband for an alleged felony he committed against his son.
On July 22 there was a hearing in a Juvenile Court, where the judge actually ruled that the father could have contact with the children and it was the mother who was “mentally sick.”
Yet the following day a grand jury, which reportedly did not have a single Indian-American on it, heard the case and found the husband guilty on charges of assault in the third degree and criminal mistreatment in the first degree, “based on an allegation of abuse occurring in Feb 2015.”
The very next day the father was arrested, although he managed to post bail for $1,000.
He is once again disallowed all contact with the family and the mother has been left to manage the children alone, amidst continuing monitoring by HHS workers and the prospect of their children facing assessments in August, to determine whether they have been mentally incapacitated by their upbringing.
While the woman has reportedly had difficulty obtaining consular assistance from the Indian consulate in San Francisco, officials there said to The Hindu that they would be able to extend assistance to her, possibly in the next few days.
She is seeking to obtain legal representation, which she does not have, since the couple has invested a large sum in a retainer for a lawyer for the man, and is also hoping to obtain a visa for her mother in Kolkatta who could help her with childcare in the U.S. if she could travel here.
The case has echoes of the Saha case of 2012 where, on August 9 of that year, Debashish Saha, a New Jersey-based Indian employee of IBM Corporation, and his wife Pamela, rushed their eleven-month-old son Indrashish into the emergency ward of Morristown Memorial Hospital after he reportedly fell off his bed and suffered a subdural hematoma and retinal bleeding.
In that case authorities obtained a court order to place the child in the custody of the state and allow Mr. and Mrs. Saha only two hours of supervised visitation rights per week.
Similarly in the well-known Norwegian case of Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya, their two young children were placed in foster care after questions were raised about their parenting abilities.
Although the Bhattacharya case generated an enormous amount of public interest and even saw the Indian and Norwegian governments involved, matters took an unexpected turn when, at a late stage in the case, Mr. Bhattacharya was quoted in some newspapers as saying “he was planning to separate from his wife who is physically abusive.”
However in other situations where children have been removed by the government from their parents, questions have been raised about a clash of cultures on parenting styles and the fine line between abuse and discipline.
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