I think every child in America should live in Pennsylvania.
There, they really have got a handle on protecting kids from adults. Considering they are right next door to the child abuse capital of America, New Jersey, it’s particularly remarkable that these folks get it SO RIGHT, so often.
You may have seen the story of Delimar, the 6 year old daughter of Luz Cuevas.
When Delimar was an infant, she was kidnapped by a family acquaintance, who covered up the crime by setting fire to the Cuevas’s residence, making it look like the baby had been burned to death.
Delimar’s mother spotted her at a birthday party, noticed a strong family resemblance, and retrieved a couple of strands of hair for a DNA test.
The Philadelphia police and DA’s office moved in, and today, this little girl has been reunited with her real family.
I daresay if this case had happened almost anywhere else in the United States, though, some idiot judge would have decided that because this child spent the first six years of her life with a kidnapper, she would be “better off” with the “mother” (choke, gag) she’d always known, criminal or not.
The most horrible example of this was, of course, the Baby Jessica case in which Anna Schmidt, aka Jessica, was eventually (and apparently successfully) reunited with her birth parents and her sister, but only after a prolonged, ugly fight with the couple who’d purchased, er, adopted her.
Anyway, more power to Philadelphia and to a judicial system that works the way it’s SUPPOSED to.