Under these circumstances, the Due Process Clause did not impose upon the State an affirmative duty to provide petitioner with adequate protection. While the State may have been aware of the dangers that he faced, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him more vulnerable to them. No such duty existed here, for the harms petitioner suffered occurred not while the State was holding him in its custody, but while he was in the custody of his natural father, who was in no sense a state actor. 2452, 73 L.Ed.2d 28, the affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitations which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf, through imprisonment, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty. While certain "special relationships" created or assumed by the State with respect to particular individuals may give rise to an affirmative duty, enforceable through the Due Process Clause, to provide adequate protection, see Estelle v. (b) There is no merit to petitioner's contention that the State's knowledge of his danger and expressions of willingness to protect him against that danger established a "special relationship" giving rise to an affirmative constitutional duty to protect. 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 while it forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, and property without due process of law, its language cannot fairly be read to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means. (a) A State's failure to protect an individual against private violence generally does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause, because the Clause imposes no duty on the State to provide members of the general public with adequate protective services. Held: Respondents' failure to provide petitioner with adequate protection against his father's violence did not violate his rights under the substantive component of the Due Process Clause. The District Court granted summary judgment for respondents, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. ยง 1983, alleging that respondents had deprived petitioner of his liberty interest in bodily integrity, in violation of his rights under the substantive component of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, by failing to intervene to protect him against his father's violence. Petitioner and his mother sued respondents under 42 U.S.C. Petitioner's father finally beat him so severely that he suffered permanent brain damage and was rendered profoundly retarded. Respondents, a county department of social services and several of its social workers, received complaints that petitioner was being abused by his father and took various steps to protect him they did not, however, act to remove petitioner from his father's custody. Petitioner is a child who was subjected to a series of beatings by his father, with whom he lived.
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