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By Gregory A. Hession, J.D.
Imagine your terror and panic: you are awakened by an armed SWAT
team in the middle of the night, demanding to be let into your home to
take your children away. The grim-faced agents show you no warrant, no
court order, and no mercy. They give you no reason for their presence,
other than having received an unspecified report about child abuse.
They bark commands and menace you and your children with their weapons.
The children are taken out of your home screaming, shoved into cars,
and whisked away into the night.
This is not a Soviet-era movie script, but a reality in thousands of
homes in the United States every year, courtesy of state child
protective services agencies.
The least reported and understood social crisis of our time is the
vast new police state run by these state social services agencies,
which are generically referred to as “child protective services,” or
CPS. The states have different names for them, such as Department of
Social Services or Department of Children and Families, but they are
all operating under a federal mandate. Whatever they are called, our
next generation of children may never recover from their predatory
intrusions into families.
Some may dismiss these concerns as hyperbole, but the numbers are
appalling. In 2005 alone, over 3.3 million reports involving six
million children were made to state child-abuse hot lines, the vast
majority of which eventually proved to be untrue. Over 500,000 children
currently are in foster care. Another 300,000 or so are forcibly
removed from their homes by the system every year. Tens of billions of
dollars are expended every year on the care of these children, and on
the juvenile court systems which enable it, along with costs of
therapy, drugs, lawyers, and related services.
This system is relatively new. In response to professional agitation
to “do something” about the problem of child abuse, Congress set forth
standards for state child protection agencies in 1974, in the Child
Abuse Protection and Treatment Act, also called the Mondale Act for its
senatorial sponsor. If a state conformed their system to the federal
mandate, it could get generous reimbursement from the feds. The states
immediately complied, and modern child protection was born.
The system does not work, and never has. Thirty years, hundreds of
billions of dollars, and millions of ruined families later, the problem
of abuse is little improved.
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