Link
OK, I think terp and I have accidentally started a JU webring. But the story he references in his article bears comment.
The foster family in the story had raised several special needs children and had the children in cages in their home, allegedly on the advice of a psychiatrist. Now, in their defense (as I have read much on this case), the cages were clean and the children were well kept and very well behaved, according to all accounts. But that doesn't change the fact that a cage is still a cage and not an appropriate place for a child to be housed (nor an animal, in my opinion, for that matter...but that is an ENTIRELY different blog, albeit with the same moral basis).
As a longtime critic of CPS, I must point to the fact that this FOSTER family; a family ENTRUSTED by the government to care for and protect these children. In other words, these were the certified "good guys", as far as the government is concerned. More on this later.
Even if the psychiatrist had directly ordered the conditions in which the family raised their children, the family should have had the common sense to know when they were given bad advice. They should have consulted mental health experts in their community and resources that they, as foster parents WITHIN the system would have HAD to have known existed. The resources they consulted would have been able to advise them of more appropriate ways to insure the safety of each child (such as, perhaps, not taking in more children than they had BEDROOMS because each child required their own private space to properly function?)
This case underscores one of the most pressing problems of our child stealing hysteria. With nearly 600,000 children nationally in foster care, with more promised by overzealous agents working to justify larger budgets and more sweeping authorities, there are simply not enough people left to house and care for all of the children within the system properly. This leads to what I have come to call "foster farms", where families take in as many children as the government allow, often earning a large percentage of their income from the monthly checks. Many are housed in substandard conditions, some far worse than the conditions in the homes from which they were cruelly removed.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that our current method of operation leads truly abusive and neglectful families to be ignored by the system. Case workers are so overworked answering calls from spiteful ex-spouses and vengeful neighbours that they cannot perform the kind of in depth investigation that is needed to protect the rights of a child that is in an abusive or neglectful home.
If we care for our children and their future, we need to move towards TRUE and EFFECTIVE child protection reform. Reform that ALWAYS works towards the restoration of the family unless CRIMINAL acts of abuse or neglect can be PROVEN to a Constitutionally acceptable standard. One where unlawful searches and seizures are NOT standard operating procedure, and which treats parents guilty of ignorance but not malice as PARTNERS in the restoration of their families, and not as enemies of the state. And one where government officials are big enough to admit they are wrong.
If this doesn't happen, and soon, we will soon see an epidemic of institutionalized children released in waves on an unprepared community. These children, once they are adults, are statistically more likely to be drug or alcohol abusers, as well as being more prone to violence and maladaptive behaviours. And homes like the one cited in the article above will be allowed to continue
As much as I disagree with CPS and its actions, we agree on one absolutely crucial component: we MUST protect our children. But as this and many other stories, some of which have been chronicled in my earlier blog articles, have shown, this is NOT the way to do it.
As to the parents; to steal an observation on an unrelated topic from one of my favorite movies, their argument didn't work at Nuremberg, and it didn't work at My Lai. It doesn't work now, either.