Child Protectors or Child Predators?

A recent story headlined "Child Protective Services Supervisor Accused of Child Molestation"1 started me on a web search for more information on the “child welfare system.” The story reported that David Wigton, 58 was arrested and booked into Maricopa County Jail after being accused of “sexually molesting a 4-year-old girl and two teenage boys.” I had been meaning to do some research on this subject for quite some time. I’ve heard horror stories about social workers ruining families’ lives on more than one occasion, but hadn’t gotten around to doing any investigating until just recently. I didn’t have to scratch very deep to uncover a world of corruption.

The concept of the “state” or “governing-class” breaking up the family and raising children away from their biological parents dates back at least to somewhere around 300 B.C. in Plato’s The Republic. In Plato’s ideal society, women and children would be held in common. Infants would be snatched away at birth and raised by other members of the ruling-class so no one would ever know who their child was. The idea behind all of this was to force the people to embrace everyone as their family.

Today we have a similar system of breaking up the family and raising children away from their biological parents. It goes by many names: DSS, CPS, DCFS, DFPS. The idea behind these agencies is to “protect” young children from “neglectful” or “abusive” parents. But what do you do when the agencies sent to “protect” young children are even more abusive than the parents from whom they are taken?

In 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a study conducted by CPS Watch found that children “are 5 times more likely to die from physical abuse and 11 times more likely to be sexually abused in the child protection system than in their own homes.”2 If that isn’t enough, the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) admitted in a 2003 Los Angeles Daily News series that “half of the children in the system had been unnecessarily taken from their families and placed in a more dangerous environment because of financial incentives in state and federal laws.”3

As I dug deeper, the words “financial incentive” kept appearing in report after report. And this certainly was not an isolated problem, with Texas Comptroller Carole Strayhorn alleging that the DPRS “offers caregivers a perverse financial incentive to keep children in restrictive environments by paying them more money to provide children with expensive and restrictive placements”4, to California’s Linda Wallace Pate, a veteran attorney in foster cases, stating that “its scandalous that the California foster care system has been reduced to a ‘kids for cash’ system.”5

It appears that Plato was well aware of the potential corruption that money would bring if the “governing-class” of individuals were ever paid for their services. In Plato’s ideal society, the “Rulers” were not allowed to own private property and were only paid in food. It seems this kind of idea would solve a lot of problems in our society today if applied to politicians. Unfortunately, a change as drastic as that, if possible at all, would be a long way off. It is obvious then that the next best solution would be at least to eliminate the financial incentives to keep kids in the system. This would most certainly reduce the amount of children being unnecessarily removed from their homes, but I don’t believe it would solve everything.

What I think Plato failed to remember is that some people simply enjoy being in power and love the ability to dominate other people, wealthy or not. Lord Acton said it best when he proclaimed “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For this reason, “due process” is extremely important in keeping corrupt bureaucrats from wrongfully terrorizing innocent families. But as Massachusetts State Representative Marie Parente explained in a 2003 Massachusetts News article about the Department of Social Services, “…there really isn’t any for families.”6

Child welfare cases are handled in kangaroo courts. The argument for this is that these child “protective” agencies should be granted the ability to remove a child from a dangerous environment immediately, rather than having to wait and go to trial. This sounds like a reasonable argument, until you find incident after incident of children being torn from their families over such absurd reasons as missing school7, to a father unwittingly giving his son a bottle of lemonade that contained alcohol8. A former CPS worker said that retaliation is also a "common" reason for taking a parent's child and that CPS "can take anyone's kids away on a moment's notice - and get away with it," in a Kentucky Target 32 report. The same report mentioned Vanessa Shanks who "had her kids taken away and, when she fought back, her relatives had their children taken away. Then, after she won in court, her attorney's child was taken away."9

Further proving my point that the “take-kids-now, ask-questions-later” principle these agencies operate on is a bad idea is the fact that “on average, a foster child will spend at least three years in the system and live in three different homes during their stay in foster care” according to CPS Watch in the San Francisco Chronicle, and that “nearly half of the children in California’s foster system should never have been removed from their families” according to The Little Hoover Commission, a California state government oversight organization.10

Worse than all of this is the fact that “thousands of foster children are missing across America.”11 Rilya Wilson, a 5-year-old Florida foster child, went missing for “15 months” before anyone even noticed and is still missing today, according to the New York Times.12 Many children even turn up dead while in foster care, like Alfredo Montez, a 2-year-old that was murdered while in Florida care. Kathleen Kearney, the head of the DCF admitted that “something we could have done may have averted this tragedy.” The caseworker, Erica Jones, was “charged with falsifying records -- paperwork that said she had checked on the child the same day the boy was killed, saying he was fine -- even though she never made such a visit according to authorities,” reported CNN.13

Knowing all of this, how can we as citizens allow these agencies to continue to take children away from their families? I assume that many social workers mean well, but the system itself is inherently flawed. Not a single child more should be taken until the system can be trusted, and if the system can never be trusted, then no child should ever be taken again.

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Endnotes

1. CBS News Channel 5 KPHO, "Child Protective Services Supervisor Accused of Child Molestation," http://www.kpho.com/news/16121583/detail.html. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

2. Christine Borders, Ariel Coyote, "Foster Care is un-American," San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/EDGC76DA4O1.DTL. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

3. Troy Anderson, "Reuniting families turning into success story for county," Los Angeles Daily News (June 19, 2004), Copy available on pg. 6 of PDF file from http://www.fightcps.com/pdf/expose4.pdf. (Last visited May 29, 2008).

4. Carole Keeton Strayhorn, "Forgotten Children: A Special Report on the Texas Foster Care System," April 2004, http://www.window.state.tx.us/forgottenchildren/. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

5. Christine Borders, Ariel Coyote, "Foster Care is un-American," San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/EDGC76DA4O1.DTL. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

6. Edward G. Oliver, "Committee Chair Is Troubled By DSS," Massachusetts News (December 1, 2003), http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2000/12_Dec/parente.htm. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

7. Target 32 WLKY, "Kentucky's Child Protective System Investigated," July 6, 2006, http://www.wlky.com/target32/9478131/detail.html. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

8. Brian Dickerson, "Hard lemonade, hard price," Detroit Free Press (April 28, 2008), http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080428/COL04/804280375/1081. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

9. Target 32 WLKY, "Social Workers Allege Child Protection Service Abuses", November 14, 2007, http://www.wlky.com/target32/14596226/detail.html. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

10. Christine Borders, Ariel Coyote, "Foster Care is un-American," San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/EDGC76DA4O1.DTL. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

11. Carole Keeton Strayhorn, "Forgotten Children: A Special Report on the Texas Foster Care System," April 2004, http://www.window.state.tx.us/forgottenchildren/. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

12. Dana Canedy, "Miami 5-Year-Old Missing For Year Before Fact Noted," New York Times (May 1, 2002), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E1D91431F932A35756C0A9649C8B63. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

13. CNN, "Boy's death another scandal for Florida child welfare agency," CNN (July 13, 2002), http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/07/12/florida.murdered.toddler/. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

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Websites of interest

Fight CPS.com
American Family Rights Association
Legally Kidnapped (added 5/30/08)

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