National Coalition for Child
Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va., 22314 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org
INTRODUCTION: HOW THE WAR
AGAINST CHILD ABUSE BECAME A WAR AGAINST CHILDREN
Think of "child abuse" and what comes to mind?
Probably a child brutally beaten, raped or tortured by a parent.
Think
of "foster care" and what comes to mind? Probably a safe haven for a
"crack baby" whose mother just tried to sell him on the street for
her next fix.
Think
of your local agency responsible for dealing with child abuse, Child Protective
Services, and what comes to mind? An agency that intervenes in only the most
serious cases, removes children from their homes only as a last resort, and
makes one big mistake: Returning children to dangerous homes because some
fuzzy-minded law requires it.
That
is the image of child abuse in America painted by much of the nation's child
welfare establishment.
That
image is false.
By
portraying horror stories of brutally abused children as the norm, America's
"child savers" (a term they gave themselves in the 19th Century) have
persuaded us to cede to them unprecedented power over the lives of children. We
have given untrained, inexperienced, sometimes incompetent workers the power to
enter our homes, interrogate and strip-search our children and even remove them
to foster care entirely on the workers’ own authority.
The
child savers say they need this near-absolute power in order to protect
children. They portray any challenge to their authority as a clash between the
rights of children and the rights of parents. But the trouble with the child
protective system in America is not that it hurts parents, though of course it
does. The trouble with the system is that it hurts children.
It hurts children who have never been maltreated by
disrupting their families, invading their privacy, and jeopardizing the bond of
trust that is essential for healthy parent-child relationships. Children are
victimized by false allegations of child abuse more than 1.5 million times
every year.[1]
It hurts children by making it too easy to pull them
from their homes and place them in the nation's chaotic system of foster care.
"Foster care is the garbage dump," says a woman who survived it.
"That's what they do with kids when they don't know what else to do with
them -- throw 'em in foster care."[2] The typical foster
child is not a crack baby. Far more common are children taken from their
parents because the family's poverty has been confused with neglect. (See Family Preservation Issue
Papers 5 and 6) Often,
these children bounce from home to home, emerging years later unable to love or
trust anyone. Far from a last resort, foster care often is the first and only
answer offered for every family problem.
And
foster care is no guarantee of safety. Some children wind up sleeping in child
welfare offices, others end up in institutions that would make Dickens cringe.
And the rate of abuse in foster care is higher than the rate of abuse in the
general population.
We
believe that many of the children now in foster care don't have to be there.
They could live safely in their own homes if proper services were
available.
Perhaps
worst of all, the system does terrible harm to the children who need help the
most, those who have been severely abused. False and trivial reports flood the
system, cascading down upon untrained, inexperienced workers who already have
far more than they can handle, stealing their time and attention from children
who really do need their intervention. And that is the real reason children
"known to the system" sometimes die of abuse. Contrary to the claims
of the child savers, there is no law requiring the return of a child to an
unsafe home.
This
is a system that destroys children in order to save them. But it doesn't have
to be this way. The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform supports a
series of measures to reform the child protective system from top to bottom. See
our Issue Paper on Solutions,
our series of Issue
Papers on Family Preservation and our publication, Eight Ways to do Child
Welfare Right. These measures would reduce intrusion into innocent
families, curb the needless placement of children in foster care, and free up
workers to help children who really have been abused and neglected. Contrary to
the claims of the child savers, these goals are not contradictory, they are
complimentary.
In
the pages that follow, we will document each of these assertions. We will
explain how the child protective system has gone so wrong and suggest ways to
set it right. We hope that this effort will help turn the current monologue
about child abuse into a dialogue.
1. There were 2.7 million reports alleging child
abuse in 2001 of which 68 percent were false. See Issue Papers 3
and 4. Back to text.
2. Richard Wexler, Wounded Innocents: The Real
Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Prometheus Books: 1990), p.22. Back to text.
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