Child protection laws and flaws

Parbina Rashid

The image of 10-year-old Maya Kowalski lying in a hospital bed, enduring excruciating pain and loneliness, evokes a strong sense of anger and frustration. For, how a total stranger, Dr Sally Smith, director of child protective services, based on a 10-minute interaction, declares the Kowalskis unfit parents seems oddly familiar, even though the documentary unfolds in faraway St Petersburg, Florida.

The child protection laws of the West, too strict and too unreasonable at times, have generated enough buzz in our country too. Currently, we are witnessing the fight of a Gujarati couple (Dhara Shah and Bhavesh) with German childcare officials to get back their daughter Ariha after they were declared ‘unfit’ to raise their child in February 2021.

And not so long ago, Ashima Chibber’s ‘Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway’ made us a part of Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya’s ordeal in Norway as they fought the custody battle for their two children, who were taken away by the child welfare authority.

The Kowalskis’ predicament somehow helps us understand the Shahs’ and the Bhattacharyas’ trauma way better than news reports and the celluloid adaptation.

As for Maya’s story, the little girl starts having unbearable pain in her arms and legs, skin lesions and headaches. The year is 2015. As her condition deteriorates, her arms and legs contort, confining her to a wheelchair. Her parents, Jack and Beata, take her from one doctor to another. Beata, who is a qualified nurse, finally finds Dr Anthony Kirkpatrick, who diagnoses Maya’s disease as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), a neurological disorder that causes severe pain in the limbs. On his advice, the couple flies their daughter to Mexico for a five-day ketamine-induced coma. It works for the young girl and she resumes her normal life.

This, however, is just the start of a long nightmare.

The disease relapses in 2016 and Maya’s parents take her to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St Petersburg. Beata tells the doctors to give her daughter a high dose of ketamine as that had worked earlier. But her assertiveness makes the staff suspicious and they contact the child protective services.

Enter Dr Smith, and she gives her verdict Beata Kowalski suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental illness where a parent falsifies a child’s symptoms. Maya is removed from the custody of her parents. Beata is denied even the visitation rights. Unable to take the pain of separation from her daughter and being treated like a criminal, Beata ends her life.

The story comes out through a montage of footage, handwritten notes, bytes from doctors, lawyers, short and crisp interviews with Maya, Jack and Kyle. It also features deposition footage showing Dr Sally Smith presenting her side. An investigative journalist digs out more such aggrieved families to put out a larger picture of the sordid saga.

As ‘strict patient privacy laws’ stop Henry Roosevelt from getting the other side of the story, the director stitches it up from the Kowalskis’ perspective. How Jack and Beata meet, fall in love, get married and raise two children, Maya and Kyle. A portrait of a happy family which physically and emotionally disintegrates in the hands of an unjust system. Roosevelt uses props cleverly to evoke the desired emotions Jack browsing the picture gallery on his phone to go back to the old happy days, the dog that can sense the dejection in his master’s mood after they come back from attending a court hearing.

Cut to 2023. Maya, now a teenager, is still fighting for justice, along with her father and younger brother. In a clip, she says, “I want people to see that I wasn’t lying, and that other families who are going through similar situations, they’re not lying either. I have CRPS. My mom was not making me sick.”

Though the documentary effectively brings out the pain of a family caught in the vortex of a dispute involving a medical institute, the legal system and child welfare authorities, it raises a few questions. Like, why did Maya have to go to Mexico? What is the nexus between the hospital and the privatised child welfare company? The makers didn’t delve deep to expose it.

The Kowalskis’ fight for justice, which hinges on a courtroom trial, will finally begin this September. Hopefully, the trial will bring a closure to this painful chapter. It’s time for the legal system to take care of the Mayas and Arihas.