For decades children have been removed from families based on the mere suspicion of child abuse. TCFR encourages that true abusers be treated criminally but fights to protect the rights of thousands of families who have fallen prey to the oftentimes tyrannical tactics of a system that assumes all who are reported (often anonymously) are automatically guilty. Under that system children can be removed based on the mere suspicion because it is "in the best interests of the child."
What is the track record of that system? Are children better off?
Researcher and author Emerich Thoma considered those questions in his article, "If you Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now: The Business of Foster Care". This article appeared in a 1998 peer reviewed journal of the Institute of Psychological Therapies.
Consider what studies in other states have revealed. According to Thoma
poverty rather than abuse or neglect accounts for around half of all removals. He quotes the Director of Los Angeles Child Welfare, Peter Digre:
"[I]t gets down to those very specific issues about a place to live, food on the table, medical care, and things like that".
[A]bout half of the families are not physical abusers, not sexual abusers, not people with propensities to violence, but simply people who are struggling to keep ends pulled together and are eminently salvageable."
Yet the state found reasons "in the best interests of the children" to remove them and place them in foster care. To remove them and subject them to severe psychological trauma of separation from their parents, siblings, toys, relatives and friends --at the very least.
Unfortunately, the psychological trauma of removal may only be the beginning of their woes. A Los Angeles grand jury found:
"[T]he plight of children is often none the better in state care, as they are often denied basic necessities-
the lack of which ostensibly led to their placement to begin with.."
The article continued:
"The Grand Jury also found that children
were inappropriately being sedated with psychotropic medication". Moreover,
many of the groups homes visited provided a physically abusive environment. The Grand Jury explains that "some group home owners use inappropriate discipline measures such as dragging children across the floor, throwing shoes at them, slapping or hitting a child; others make children stand in a corner for hours at a time."
Los Angeles is not the only city in which the system set up to protect from abuse perpetrates abuse. Stay tuned as we continue our look at the system in other parts of the country in
Part 3.
Respectfully,
Peter Johston
President
