When the Child Protective Services System Gets Child Removal Wrong

At a monthly rate of 300 times greater than the number of separations at the Mexican border that took place in May 2018, CPS caseworkers continually separate children from their parents. Day in and day out, these separations occur. They usually occur in secrecy and without fanfare. If the children have been taken for medical attention after an accident or medical condition, CPS caseworkers remove kids from their homes, their schools, and from hospitals. Children are sometimes segregated from parents at CPS offices and in juvenile/child protection/dependence courthouses, and often from their siblings too.

More than 7.4 million children were identified in hotline calls in 2015 alone as suspect victims of violence or neglect. 40 percent of these calls are filtered out by vast bureaucratic triage networks and send the remaining claims to field offices for prosecution or alternate group responses. Then, in nearly one-fifth of the screened-in calls, CPS investigative caseworkers generate evidence of violence or neglect, indicating that at the end of a hotline review, about 650,000 children a year are classified abused or neglected.

Based on often insufficient amounts of facts ("credible facts" in many states), these marks are then recorded in a state-administered child abuse registry. A caseworker decides this and basically never a judge.

During or as a result of this investigative process, 273,539 children were forced into foster care alone in 2016. But far less attention has been given to the untold number of children subject to involuntary "voluntary" family separations in as many as 37 states as a common consequence of CPS Hotline inquiries, and such separations may constitute an equally large number among those explicitly initiated by CPS. Sadly, data on these informal separations, never ratified in a court of law, are not kept in any credible manner by state or federal agencies.

One of the policy concerns that my book addresses are why protection plans have become so omnipresent and accepted by a nation that claims to regard family rights as sacred, and family rights as fundamental.

It is time for CPS family separation strategies to be reexamined. A significant dose of the obvious trauma that children and families undergo when they are cut by force has recently been served to the public. However, vocal displays of public sympathy have not reached children's parents brought into foster care, nor have they reached many of the children themselves. But also parents who have never been charged with a crime and whose sole fault is bad luck will lose their children to CPS and do so. Although the child welfare system works disproportionately to separate color communities, no one is exempted.

In fact, the book's primary plot, in unfolding day-to-day narrative detail, includes an unexplained fracture that was unexpectedly discovered one night in the leg of a federal judge's newborn grandson.

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