The Corrupt
Business Of Child Protective Services
By Nancy Schaefer, Senator, 50th
District - November 16, 2007, Updated: September 25, 2008
|
|
My introduction into Child Protective Service
cases was due to a grandmother in an adjoining state who called me with her tragic
story. Her two granddaughters had been taken from her daughter who lived in my
district. Her daughter was told wrongly that if she wanted to see her children
again she should sign a paper and give up her children. Frightened and young,
the daughter did. I have since discovered that parents are often threatened
into cooperation of permanent separation of their children.
The children were taken to another county and
placed in foster care. The foster parents were told wrongly that they could
adopt the children. The grandmother then jumped through every hoop known to man
in order to get her granddaughters. When the case finally came to court it was
made evident by one of the foster parent’s children that the foster parents
had, at any given time, 18 foster children and that the foster mother had an
inappropriate relationship with a caseworker.
In the courtroom, the juvenile judge, acted as
though she was shocked and said the two girls would be removed quickly. They
were not removed. Finally, after much pressure being applied to the Department
of Family and Children Services of Georgia (DFCS), the children were driven to
South Georgia to meet their grandmother who gladly drove to meet them.
After being with their grandmother two or three
days, the judge, quite out of the blue, wrote up a new order to send the girls
to their father, who previously had no interest in the case and who lived on
the West Coast. The father was in “adult entertainment”. His girlfriend worked
as an “escort” and his brother, who also worked in the business, had a sexual
charge brought against him.
Within a couple of days the father was knocking
on the grandmother’s door and took the girls kicking and screaming to
California.
The father developed an unusual relationship
with the former foster parents and soon moved to the southeast. The foster
parents began driving to the father’s residence and picking up the little girls
for visits. The oldest child had told her mother and grandmother on two
different occasions that the foster father molested her.
To this day after five years, this loving,
caring blood relative grandmother does not even have visitation privileges with
the children. The little girls are, in my opinion, permanently traumatized and
the young mother of the girls was so traumatized with shock when the girls were
first removed from her that she has never completely recovered. The mother has
rights but the father still has custody of the children.
Throughout this case and through the process of
dealing with multiple other mismanaged cases of the Department of Family and
Children Services (DFCS), I have worked with other desperate parents across the
state of Georgia and in many other States because their children were taken for
no cause and they have no one to whom to turn. I have witnessed ruthless
behaviour from many caseworkers, social workers, investigators, lawyers,
judges, therapists, and others such as those who “pick up” the children. I have
been stunned by what I have seen and heard from victims all across this land.
In this report, I have focused mainly on the
Georgia Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS). However, I believe
Child Protective Services nationwide has become corrupt and that the entire
system is broken beyond repair. I am convinced parents and families should be
warned of the dangers.
The Department of Child Protective Services,
known as the Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS) in Georgia and
other titles in other states, has become a “protected empire” built on
taking children and separating families. This is not to say that there are not
those children who do need to be removed from wretched situations and need
protection. However, this report is concerned with the children and parents
caught up in “legal kidnapping,” ineffective policies, and an agency that on
certain occasions would not remove a child (or children) when the child was
enduring torment and abuse.
In one county in my District, I arranged a
meeting for thirty-seven families to speak freely and without fear. These poor
parents and grandparents spoke of their painful, heart wrenching encounters
with DFCS. Their suffering was overwhelming. They wept and cried. Some did not
know where their children were and had not seen them in years. I had witnessed
the “Gestapo” at work and I witnessed the deceitful conditions under which
children were taken in the middle of the night, out of hospitals, off of school
buses, and out of homes. In one county a private drug testing business was
operating within the agency’s department that required many, many drug tests
from parents and individuals for profit.
It has already made over $100,000.
Due to being exposed, several employees in this
particular office were fired. However, they have now been rehired either in
neighbouring counties or in the same county again. According to the calls I am
now receiving, the conditions in that county are returning to the same
practices that they had before the light was shown on their evil deeds.
Having worked with probably 300 cases state
wide, and now hundreds and hundreds across this nation and in nearly every
state, I am convinced there is no responsibility and no accountability in Child
Protective Services system.
I have come to the conclusion:
- that poor parents very often are targeted to lose their children
because they do not have the where-with-all to hire lawyers and fight the
system. Being poor does not mean you are not a good parent or that you do
not love your child, or that your child should be removed and placed with
strangers;
- that all parents are capable of making mistakes and that making a
mistake does not mean your children are to be removed from the home. Even
if the home is not perfect, it is home; and that’s where a child is the
safest and where he or she wants to be, with family;
- that
parenting classes, anger management classes, counselling referrals,
therapy classes and on and on are demanded of parents with no compassion
by the system even while the parents are at work and while their children
are separated from them. (some times parents are required to pay for the
programs) This can take months or even years and it emotionally devastates
both children and parents. Parents are victimized by “the system” that
makes a profit for holding children longer and “bonuses” for not returning
children to their parents;
- that caseworkers and social workers are very often guilty of fraud.
They withhold and destroy evidence. They fabricate evidence and they seek
to terminate parental rights unnecessarily. However, when charges are made
against Child Protective Services, the charges are ignored;
- that the separation of families and the “snatching of children” is
growing as a business because local governments have grown accustomed to
having these taxpayer dollars to balance their ever-expanding budgets;
- that Child Protective Services and Juvenile Court can always hide
behind a confidentiality clause in order to protect their decisions and
keep the funds flowing. There should be open records and “court watches”!
Look who is being paid!
There are state employees, lawyers, court
investigators, guardian ad litems, court personnel, and judges. There are
psychologists, and psychiatrists, counsellors, caseworkers, therapists, foster
parents, adoptive parents, and on and on. All are looking to the children in
state custody to provide job security. Parents do not realize that the social
workers are the glue that hold “the system” together that funds the court,
funds the court appointed attorneys, and the multiple other jobs including the
“system’s” psychiatrists, therapists, their own attorneys and others.
- that The Adoption and the Safe Families Act, set in motion first in
1974 by Walter Mondale and later in 1997 by President Bill Clinton,
offered cash “bonuses” to the states for every child they adopted out of
foster care. In order to receive the “adoption incentive bonuses” local
child protective services need more children. They must have merchandise
(children) that sells and you must have plenty so the buyer can
choose. Some counties are known to give a $4,000 to $6,000 bonus for each
child adopted out to strangers and an additional $2,000 for a “special
needs” child. Employees work to keep the federal dollars flowing;
- State Departments of Human Resources (DHR) and affiliates are given
a baseline number of expected adoptions based on population. For every
child DHR and CPS can get adopted, there is the bonus of $4,000 or maybe
$6,000. But that is only the beginning figure in the formula in which each
bonus is multiplied by the percentage that the State has managed to exceed
its baseline adoption number. Therefore States and local communities work
hard to reach their goals for increased numbers of adoptions for children
in foster care.
- that there is double dipping. The funding continues as long as the
child is out of the home. There is funding for foster care then when a
child is placed with a new family, then “adoption bonus funds” are
available. When a child is placed in a mental health facility and is on 16
drugs per day, like two children of a constituent of mine, more funds are
involved and so is Medicaid;
- As you can see this program is ordered from the very top and run by
Health and Human Resources. This is why victims of CPS get no help from
their legislators. It explains why my bill, SB 415 suffered such defeat in
the Judicial Committee, why I was cut off at every juncture. Legislators
and Governors must remember who funds their pay-checks.
- that
there are no financial resources and no real drive to unite a family and
help keep them together or provide effective care;
- that the incentive for social workers to return children to their
parents quickly after taking them has disappeared and who in protective
services will step up to the plate and say, “This must end! No one,
because they are all in the system together and a system with no leader
and no clear policies will always fail the children. Just look at the
waste in government that is forced upon the tax payer;
- that the “Policy Manuel” is considered “the last word” for
CPS/DFCS. However, it is too long, too confusing, poorly written and does
not take the law into consideration;
- that if the lives of children were improved by removing them from their
homes, there might be a greater need for protective services, but today
children are not safer. Children, of whom I am aware, have been raped and
impregnated in foster care;
- It is a known fact that children are in much more danger in foster
care than they are in their own home even though home may not be perfect.
- that some parents are even told if they want to see their children
or grandchildren, they must divorce their spouse. Many, who are under
privileged, feeling they have no option, will divorce and then just
continue to live together. This is an anti-family policy, but parents will
do anything to get their children home with them. However, when the
parents cooperate with Child Protective Services, their behaviour is
interpreted as guilt when nothing could be further from the truth.
- Fathers, (non-custodial parents) I must add, are oftentimes treated
as criminals without access to visit or even see their own children and
have child support payments strangling the very life out of them;
- that the Foster Parents Bill of Rights does not stress that a
foster parent is there temporarily to care for a child until the child can
be returned home. Many foster parents today use the Foster Parent Bill of
Rights as a means to hire a lawyer and seek to adopt the child placed in
their care from the real parents, who are desperately trying to get their
child home and out of the system. Recently in Atlanta, a young couple
learning to be new parents and loving it, were told that because of an
anonymous complaint, their daughter would be taken into custody by the
State DFCS. The couple was devastated and then was required by DFCS to
take parenting classes, alcohol counselling and psychological evaluations
if they wanted to get their child back. All of the courses cost money for
which most parents are required to pay. While in their anxiety and turmoil
to get their child home, the baby was left for hours in a car to die in
the heat in her car seat by a foster parent who forgot about the child.
This should never have happened. It is tragic. In many cases after the
parents have jumped through all the hoops, they still do not get their
child. As long as the child is not returned, there is money for the
agency, for foster parents, for adoptive parents, and for the State.
- that
tax dollars are being used to keep this gigantic system afloat, yet the
victims, parents, grandparents, guardians and especially the children, are
charged for the system’s services.
- that grandparents have called from all over the State of Georgia
and from other states trying to get custody of their grandchildren. CPS
claims relatives are contacted, but there are many, many cases that prove
differently. Grandparents who lose their grandchildren to strangers have
lost their own flesh and blood. The children lose their family heritage
and grandparents, and parents too, lose all connections to their heirs.
- that The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect in 1998
reported that six times as many children died in foster care than in the
general public and that once removed to official “safety”, these children
are far more likely to suffer abuse, including sexual molestation than in
the general population. Think what that number is today ten years later!
- That according to the California Little Hoover Commission Report in
2003, 30% to 70% of the children in California group homes do not belong
there and should not have been removed from their homes.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- Call for an independent audit of all State Child Protective
Services (CPS) and for a Federal Congressional hearing on Child Protective
Services nationwide.
- Activate immediate change. Every day that passes means more
families and children are subject to being held hostage and their lives
destroyed.
- Abolish the Federal and State financial incentives that have turned
Child Protective Services into a business that separate families for
money.
- Grant to parents their rights verbally and in writing.
- Mandate a search for family members to be given the opportunity to adopt
their own relatives if children need to be removed permanently.
- Mandate a jury trial where every piece of evidence is presented
before permanently removing a child from his or her parents. Open family
court. Remove the secrecy. Allow the press and family members access. Give
parents the opportunity in court to speak and be a part of their
children’s future.
- Require a warrant or a positive emergency circumstance before
removing children from their parents. (Judge Arthur G. Christean, Utah Bar
Journal, January, 1997 reported that “except in emergency circumstances,
including the need for immediate medical care, require warrants upon
affidavits of probable cause before entry upon private property is
permitted for the forcible removal of children from their parents.”)
- Uphold the laws when someone fabricates or presents false evidence.
If a parent alleges fraud, hold a hearing with the right to discovery of
all evidence made available to parents.
FINAL REMARKS
On my desk are scores of cases of exhausted
families and terrified children. It has been beyond me to turn my back on these
suffering, crying, and beaten down individuals.
We are mistreating the most innocent. Child
Protective Services have become an adult centered business to the detriment of
children. No longer is judgment based on what the child needs or who the child
wants to be or with whom, or what is really best for the whole family; it is
some adult or bureaucrat who makes the decisions, based often on just hearsay,
without ever consulting a family member, or just what is convenient,
profitable, or less troublesome for the social workers.
I have witnessed such injustice and harm
brought to so many families that I am not sure if I even believe reform of the
system is possible! The system cannot be trusted. It does not serve the people.
It obliterates families and children simply because it has the power to do so.
Children deserve better. Families deserve
better. It’s time to pull back the curtain and set our children and families
free.
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for
themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and the needy” Proverbs 31:8-9
The Corrupt Business of Child Protective
Services
By: Nancy Schaefer, Senator, 50th District
Nancy
Schaefer on CPS - YouTube
The NCHR Symposium,
August 22, 2009