Kids in danger

The upshot of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s column is quite obvious: Young children keep winding up dead because they are rapidly returned by the Administration for Children’s Services to their abusers. (“Dead Toddlers,” Nov. 22).

However, Schaefer Riley makes a more interesting, but equally depressing, observation when she quotes a Children’s Bureau associate commissioner who describes “child welfare” as an endless “dark tunnel.”

If our child-protection agencies don’t protect young children from murderous parents and similar so-called caregivers, responsible family members and significant others will eventually take matters into their own hands by doing whatever it takes to keep those kids safe, such as fleeing with them to undisclosed locations.

The instinct to protect a child is powerful and primitive, and it does not worship at the altar of bureaucratic niceties. Mark Stuart Ellison, Brooklyn