Everyone failed to protect Harmony Montgomery
Harmony Montgomery is 7 years old if she is alive, but nobody has seen her since the fall of 2019.
When she went missing, Harmony was living in New Hampshire with Adam Montgomery, a man whose DNA she shares (I will not use the word father to describe him.)
Her mother lives in Massachusetts, where a judge in February 2019 made the fateful decision that forced Harmony to live with Adam.
Harmony’s mother reportedly lost the custody battle because she had a drug problem, but Adam Montgomery was a drug dealer with a long record of violence, including gun violence and violence against women. His full criminal record has not been released, so we don’t know whether he has a history of child abuse or sex crimes.
The judge who gave Adam custody, Mark Newman, made an inexplicably bad decision because it’s not exactly news that drug dealers are also involved with guns and violence. Harmony should not have been forced to live with a drug addict or a drug dealer. Foster care isn’t great, but she would have been better off living in a zoo
than living with a guy like Adam Montgomery.
Judge Newman has a reputation as a super advocate for children, yet he sent Harmony to live with Adam without waiting for a home study to be conducted to determine whether the child would be safe with Adam.
New Hampshire officials are under fire for failing to protect Harmony despite multiple reports to protective services that the child was being abused while living with Adam. Hoping to shift the blame, New Hampshire’s Gov. Chris Sununu sent a letter to Massachusetts’ Chief Justice Kimberly Budd last week, criticizing Judge Newman for sending Harmony to live with Adam despite the absence of a home study.
Both states’ governors are doing a lot of hand wringing, promising full investigations, blah, blah, blah. No doubt they will find mistakes and write reports saying hindsight is 20/20 and how they will fix a few problems to make sure it never happens again, blah, blah, blah.
We heard this same blather in 2005 when little Haleigh Poutre was beaten nearly to death by the family she was sent to live with by another Massachusetts judge. Isn’t hindsight in one case supposed to become foresight for the next one?
Officials who are supposed to protect children always promise to do better when a child dies or disappears, but then they don’t. They get away with it because kids don’t vote, and they don’t have any money. Children are easy to ignore, politically, and even easier to rape, beat and kill with impunity because they can’t protect themselves.
Five children a day die from abuse in this country, a number that keeps going up. The vast majority are killed by their own parents. Millions of children suffer nonfatal abuse. Every 10 seconds a report of child abuse is made, though very few incidents are actually reported. Most people find this data too painful to think about. Think about it anyway.
We give families too much discretion to hurt children behind closed doors. We don’t even allow children to testify in court proceedings where their well-being and safety are at stake. We say we want to protect children from the trauma of testifying but sending them to live with abusers without listening to them is far more traumatizing.
Kids are excellent witnesses because, unlike adults, they are not good at lying. Judges need to
hear directly from children and listen very carefully to what they say before deciding where they should live.
Too many children are abused while under the seemingly watchful eye of courts and protective services organizations. Part of the problem is that judges and protective service agencies face no meaningful consequences for their bad decisions. The law should be changed so that agencies, social workers, and even judges face sanctions when their decisions cause serious harm to a child.
A relatively new legal approach being used in some European countries requires government officials to demonstrate in writing that they gave “due regard” to the wellbeing of a child before making a decision. Children should be able to file lawsuits when they suffer abuse because “due regard” was not given. Nothing works better as a quality control device than the threat of an expensive lawsuit.
New Hampshire wants to blame Massachusetts but neither state effectively protects children.
A recent national study found that abusive men across the board are much more likely than women, and even nonabusive men, to win custody of children.
No amount of gubernatorial handwringing will help Harmony Montgomery, but meaningful accountability will help other children moving forward. The question is, do the governors and lawmakers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have the decency to build accountability into a system where the vulnerable and defenseless people being hurt don’t vote?