Introduction: NCCPR Supplemental Issue Paper #1
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 child of a hopeless addict 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, usually called Child Protective Services, and what comes to mind? Probably an agency that supposedly 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.
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. Some misled us on purpose, engaging in what they themselves call “health terrorism.” [1]
As a result, 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 problem with the child protective system in America or, as it should be called, the family policing system, is not that it hurts parents, though of course it does. The problem 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. More than 2.4 million children are victimized by false allegations of child abuse every year.[2]
The child welfare surveillance state has become so massive that one study estimates that one-third of all children and more than half of all Black children will be forced to endure a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.[3]
Almost always, the accusation leading to this trauma is false.
- It hurts children by making it too easy to pull them from their homes and consign them to the chaos of foster care, often because the family’s poverty has been confused with neglect. (See Family Preservation Issue Papers 5 and 6). Many of 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 far higher than generally realized. See Family Preservation Issue Paper 1 for details and citations.
Many of the children now in foster care don’t have to be there. Most never needed to be taken in the first place. Others could live safely in their own homes if proper services were provided.
- Perhaps worst of all, the system does terrible harm to children who need help the most, those very few who have been severely abused. False and trivial reports flood the system, cascading down upon workers who already have far more than they can handle, stealing their time and attention from children who really do need their intervention. That’s almost always the real reason children “known to the system” sometimes die.
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 transform the system. See our series of Issue Papers on family preservation and our publications, Civil Liberties Without Exception and Doing 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.
On this website we document each of these assertions. We explain how the family policing system has gone so wrong and suggest ways to set it right.
Updated November 17, 2024
- See generally, NCCPR’s presentation at the Kempe Center 2021 International Conference for full details and citations.
- More than 3.1 million children were subjected to child abuse investigations in 2022, and about 78% of the reports leading to those investigations were false. See U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Child Maltreatment 2022, and see Supplemental Issue Papers 2 and 3 for details and citations.
- Hyunil Kim, et. al., “Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among US Children,” American Journal of Public Health, February, 2017.