Child “Protective” Services — Introduction To Legalized Kidnapping And Adoption Rings by Charles E. Corry, Ph.D.
Child “Protective” Services — Introduction To Legalized Kidnapping And Adoption Rings by Charles E. Corry, Ph.D.| EJF Home | Find Help | Join the EJF | Comments? | Get EJF newsletter |
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Collateral damage — the death of childhood
What is being done to correct this evil?
Child welfare systems don't work by Richard Wexlar
As usual with do-good, touchy-feely federal and state programs, the unintended consequences often, one might say always, outweigh the good such acts are supposed to accomplish.
That is particularly true with what is known in most states as “Child Protective Services,” or CPS, usually run under a Department of Human Services or similar misnomer in individual states. Phyllis Schlafly describes them as
“...a vast army of tax-salaried people who would like to expand their ranks, their pay, and their turf. The key to doing that is to have more social problems that require more care and more counseling. It is a bureaucracy that feeds on itself.”
The origin of the 21 st Century disasters associated with CPS are usually traced back to Senator Walter Mondale's Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA '74) and those interested in more history should review the Wikipedia article.
Soon after came the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (ASFA) passed to correct or alleviate problems in the foster care system introduced by the Mondale Act (CAPTA '74). Another stated goal of this second round of legislation was to promote permanency rather than multiple foster placements; and to encourage social workers to work toward reunification of the family, i.e., to promote profitable adoption rings using kids CPS had taken forcibly from their parents. Officially, as contrasted with reality, the plan was that if the child, who had been “legally” kid-napped, could not be returned to the family, another plan was to be sought: adoption, long-term foster care or some other resolution for which CPS was richly rewarded with federal funds.
ASFA required all states to establish an adoption subsidy program and remove the financial disincentives to states by providing federal dollars to be used as a portion of adoption subsidy payments for children previously eligible for the Title IV-E Foster Care Program. Since financial rewards were offered if the children could be quickly adopted, not surprisingly CPS now very frequently found that the children they had kid-napped could not safely be returned to their parents.
Well, that didn't work so well as far as citizens and parents were concerned. So then came the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (PL 105-89, ASFA) enacted in an attempt to correct problems inherent in the foster care system that deterred the adoption of children with special needs. Obviously, many of these problems stemmed from the earlier Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.
Naturally, these problems could not have been anticipated when the 1980 law was passed by anyone with an IQ above 80. But bear in mind we are talking about the Congress of the United States.
States decided to interpret AFSA as requiring biological families be kept together almost no matter what. What an idiotic idea! Keep families together! Who would have thought! How could CPS grow and control parents and children if they had to do that?
AFSA was considered the most sweeping change to the U.S. adoption and foster care system in some two decades of social disasters. And who was responsible and what were they thinking? One of AFSA's lead sponsors, Republican Senator John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, stated, “We will not continue the current system of always putting the needs and rights of the biological parents first...It's time we recognize that some families simply cannot and should not be kept together.” Naturally, Big Sister knows best as to which families the State can permit to raise their own children.
Ideas for AFSA originated with both Democrats and Republicans but all due credit should be given to then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mrs. Clinton originally voiced interest in the issue of orphaned children in an article she wrote in 1995. She then held public events to give the issue exposure, and met with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials and private foundation executives over policy questions and recommendations. Then in 1996 she published her screed It Takes A Village telling the world how wonderful communal living is if Big Sister has control of our children, or something to that effect.
AFSA began in Congress with bipartisan support but became contentious over issues of terminating birth parents' rights to children and multibillion funding levels for programs to keep children out of foster care. Hillary Clinton played a key role in finding a compromise between Republicans and Democrats on the latter issue after negotiations first broke down. So clearly we can lay much of the responsibility for the current CPS nightmare on Hillary's doorstep.
But the biggest change was how ASFA amended Title IV-E of the Social Security Act regarding funding. More money for bureaucracies has always been a favorite of the United States Congress. All it took was Hillary's intervention to convince even Republicans that more money should be spent to take children from their parents and destroy families, a course change Republicans have yet to reverse. This nightmare is now bleeding the Social Security system (the American taxpayer) for more than $7 billion a year.
Now it is obvious that some children should not be left in the care of some parents, typically single mothers, but the passage of these laws allowed, even encouraged CPS dimwits to let the exceptions define the rules. Like virtually all dogma-driven radical feminists, they cannot distinguish between possibility and probability. And the CPS empire certainly grows much faster if the rules are based on low-probability events.
Moreover, AFSA marked a fundamental change to child welfare thinking, shifting weight towards children's health and safety concerns, the now notorious “best interest of the child” standard, at the expense of reuniting children with birth parents by helping the parents. The “best interests of the child” saying in social work terms is like “abracadabra” to a magician. This phrase causes sheriffs, judges, lawyers, and professionals that deal with children to cringe and agree unreservedly with every word that child “protective” services (CPS) say like they have no will or mind of their own.
Of course helping the parents and keeping families together is much cheaper than subsidizing adoption and foster care but the destruction of families is an avowed goal of neo-Marxist radical feminists (redfems). And, from a bureaucrat's standpoint, AFSA was a godsend that allowed their empires to grow almost unchecked.
Obviously, only CPS social workers know what is best for a child, particularly if they can depend on anonymous tips and define everything that ever happens to a child as abuse. God forbid that a parent discipline a child in any fashion, e.g., spanking, not approved by the latest psychobabble social “theories.” But before adopting that belief system one should note that many, if not CPS caseworkers are often young, poorly educated (one might say indoctrinated) females with no children of their own to provide real-life perspective. However, they are eminently qualified in their own minds to determine how everyone else's children should be treated in every case. And no one has yet had the fortitude to point out that CPS agencies commonly have a turnover of 100% or more a year so that desperate parents trying to get their kidnapped kids back often have to deal with a whole series of incompetent, unqualified, dimwitted do-gooders who have no idea what the previous case worker did or where the child's records are. Naturally, the indoctrination of these zealots does not allow them to consider the fact that it is most likely the mother who is abusing the children.
What quickly evolved under these misguided programs were investigations, or home evaluations conducted by CPS case workers under color of law but lacking such niceties as search warrants, court orders, warrants, and due process.
CPS “evaluations” of parents commonly involve:
• Forced intrusions into homes without a warrant or other authority,
• Taking children from their homes or schools without court order or other authority based on little or no evidence of abuse or neglect;
• Hiding or “losing” exculpatory evidence,
• Bald-faced lies in affidavits and sworn testimony in court,
• Holding kids hostage to coerce cooperation by the parents,
• Obstructing parents until 15 of the 22 months clock tolls for automatic Termination of Parental Rights (TPR).
To support this kidnapping and adoption for profit scam we have revived the Star Chamber concept, though they are now called “family courts.” Of course, the objective of these courts is anything but the preservation and assistance of marriage and families, and everyone in the court is part of the prosecution except the parents and their children. Naturally, everyone in the “family court” also has legislated immunity except those brought before the bar for child abuse or neglect.
As noted above, child abuse and neglect are now anything and everything that may happen to a child or a family. So in the Kafkaesque world of CPS every natural parent is guilty and every “approved” foster and adoptive parent is innocent.
If parents find themselves out of their home due to money, fire, or flood, under current policies CPS will abduct their children and terminate parental rights. But being poor is not a crime or abuse. Actually, under Title IV-E, CPS is supposed to pay for housing in order to ameliorate said condition, but CPS isn't likely to tell parents that. If CPS finds a condition like homelessness where children are involved, or children need food or clothing, by most state and certainly federal statute CPS has to pay for it, all of it, but they rarely do so from all reports other than those they generate themselves.
In 2009 the Congress gave even more draconian powers and poured more money into CPS. The results are reviewed in the other articles, e.g., the one below, in this chapter by a variety of authors. And if these actions towards our children don't nauseate and horrify you, may I express doubt as to your humanity.
In December 2011 the Equal Justice Foundation published the article In The Face of Great Evil describing the problems with child protective services in El Paso County, Colorado, after eleven (11) children died in just that one year.
And as the carnage and death of children continues, in December 2012 the Denver Post, in conjunction with 9News, ran an eight-part series, Failed To Death, documenting the deaths of Colorado children and the system failures and shortcomings. The articles note that since 2007, 175 children in Colorado have died of abuse and neglect after being beaten, starved, suffocated, and burned. Deepening the tragedy is that the families or caregivers of 72 of these children were known to caseworkers whose job was to protect them.
January 29, 2010 — Ever since the great “state vs. county” debate broke out [in 2009] over Colorado child welfare, I've maintained it's a sideshow wasting everyone's time and effort. Among the nation's best — and worst — systems are some run by states and some run by counties.
But if anything could get me to change my mind, it would be the self-satisfied commentary from Donald Cassata, director of the Adams County [Colorado] Human Services Department.
His claim that the system is “not broken” is at odds with everything we know about foster care in general and the Colorado systems in particular. Consider:
• The evidence keeps mounting about the enormous harm of tearing children from everyone they know and love and throwing them into foster care. A landmark study of 15,000 typical cases — not the horrors that make headlines — found that children left with their own parents fared better even than comparably maltreated children left in foster care.
That's because most parents who lose children to foster care are neither sadists nor brutes. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.”
But year after year, the county-run systems that Cassata defends tear apart families at a rate double the national average.
• This does nothing to keep children safer. It only overwhelms child welfare systems, leaving workers less time to find children in real danger. Other states know this. Illinois takes children at one-quarter the Colorado rate, but independent court-appointed monitors found that, as foster care plummeted, child safety improved.
• Still another study found abuse in one in three foster homes, a rate consistent with other independent studies, and a much higher rate than reflected in official statistics. It also found that, among foster care alumni, only 20 percent do well as young adults. How can anyone claim a system that churns out walking wounded four times out of five is “not broken”?
Despite Cassata's dismissal of all that pain, I still think the issue of state or county control is irrelevant. But I can think of one Colorado county with a child welfare system that needs new leadership.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
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| Chapter 8 — Child “Protective” Services — Who's Minding The Minders? |
| Next — Infant Discovered In Barn, Child Protective Services Launch Probe |