jmartinez1895 wrote:This is so sad, but my hubby is a police officer and he said it makes him so mad when he calls CPS they don;t do anything.
The law in most states removes child abusers (particularly if family) from the regular courts and puts them into a totally different court systems with totally different rules, where there's no presumption of innocence and the kids can be removed without the parents being criminally charged. What often happens is that the parents who're willing to admit their guilt but also jump through the hoops the court sets get their kids back, while the parents who insist they are innocent never get "their day in court" (because they haven't been criminally charged), and don't get their kids back. There also tends to be a huge turnover among social workers, because the people who really want to help realize they aren't helping and move on, meaning most of the "old timers" are people who like having that power to abuse and don't mind the fact that they really aren't doing a lot of good. :mad:
The system is less abusive if there's someone at the top who really insists on justice, but since the whole structure is kinda corrupt, often as not you end up with abusive people in charge and naive kids right out of college in the front lines. Since many abusers are highly skilled manipulators, and many parents who've been framed or are being manipulated by an abuser in the family are NOT skilled at that sort of thing, the odds are really good that kids with non-abusive parents will be removed, while kids whose parents are clearly abusive will stay in the home. :(
Not that removing the kids is a particularly good idea -- often, when the number of kids in foster care goes up, so does the death rate. Kids in one US foster care system had a death rate four times higher than kids outside the system, and that's not counting the more common rape and other abuse rates foster kids deal with. The really sad thing is that most of the kids in the foster care system were not in danger at home -- most of the kids in the system (up to 95% some places) are there for "neglect," which in practice can mean anything from two parents struggling to survive not providing baby sitting services the state considers adequate to parents limiting the kids TV time to parents dealing with a landlord who isn't providing heat.
Many if not most "neglect" cases could be resolved by giving the parents resources instead of putting them through parenting classes or otherwise adding to their stress without dealing with the actual problems they're struggling against. Back when my mom was a school nurse, I read an article in one of her magazines and pointed out that my parents were abusers according to the state definition of abuse, and so were the parents of every person I'd ever known. My mom agreed that I was technically correct, but she trusted the social workers to only accuse people who were truly neglectful. I'm not so trusting, myself.
