In DeShaney v. Winnebago Cty. Soc. Servs. Dept. (1989) 489 U.S. 189, a father beat and permanently injured his son. The social services department had received complaints about the abuse and had reason to believe it to be true, but did not remove the child from the father's custody. (Id. at p. 191.) The boy sued the social services department claiming the failure to protect him deprived him of his liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court concluded that the boy could not state a cause of action for violation of constitutional due process rights. (Ibid.) The DeShaney court explained: "Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors. The Clause is phrased as a limitation on the State's power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security. It forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, or property without 'due process of law,' but its language cannot fairly be extended to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means. Nor does history support such an expansive reading of the constitutional text. Like its counterpart in the Fifth Amendment, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to prevent government 'from abusing its power, or employing it as an instrument of oppression,' Its purpose was to protect the people from the State, not to ensure that the State protected them from each other. The Framers were content to leave the extent of governmental obligation in the latter area to the democratic political processes." (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at pp. 195-196.) The court continued: "Consistent with these principles, our cases have recognized that the Due Process Clauses generally confer no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests of which the government itself may not deprive the individual. . . . If the Due Process Clause does not require the State to provide its citizens with particular protective services, it follows that the State cannot be held liable under the Clause for injuries that could have been averted had it chosen to provide them." (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at pp. 196-197.) The DeShaney court distinguished those cases in which the State has taken a person into its custody. In such cases, the Constitution imposed a duty upon the State "to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being." (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at p. 200.) The Supreme Court refused to find a due process violation where a county's department of social services failed to adequately protect four-year-old Joshua from a violent beating by his father that left the boy severely brain damaged. (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at pp. 191, 193.) Despite previous suspicious injuries for which Joshua repeatedly had to be hospitalized and the department's decision to place him back with the father after it had removed him once, the Supreme Court held "as a general matter ... a State's failure to protect an individual against private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause." (Id. at pp. 192-193, 197.) The Supreme Court also rejected Joshua's argument that a " 'special relationship' " existed between him and the state simply because the department knew that he faced the danger of abuse and intended to protect him from that danger. (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at pp. 197-198.) The court explained that the cases in which it had found a special relationship stood "only for the proposition that when the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being." (Id. at pp. 199-200.) Central to the court's holding in DeShaney was the following reasoning: "In the substantive due process analysis, it is the State's affirmative act of restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf--through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty--which is the 'deprivation of liberty' triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause, not its failure to act to protect his liberty interests against harms inflicted by other means." (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at p. 200.) Following this reasoning, the Supreme Court concluded "the State had no constitutional duty to protect Joshua." (DeShaney, supra, 489 U.S. at p. 201.) Joshua was injured while he was in his father's custody, and even though the department had taken Joshua from his father at one point, the state "placed him in no worse position than that in which he would have been had it not acted at all." (Ibid. 103 L. Ed. 2d at p. 262.) In reaching its conclusion, the court observed that "while the State may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him any more vulnerable to them." (Ibid.)