Nobody Likes CPS, But Everyone Wants Them To "Do Something"

Some Things Can't be Fixed

I was recently perusing through Social Media and noticed the new outrage of the cycle. Yet again, it was Disney ruining everyone’s childhood, this time with the live action Lilo and Stitch.

For those who are unfamiliar with the original, Lilo and Stitch is the story of a crazed space alien who crash lands in Hawaii and is found by Lilo, a little girl being raised by her sister Nani. Also, child protection authorities are unimpressed by Nani’s caretaking and threaten to take Lilo away to foster care. Shenanigans ensue, with the alien captors trying to catch their escaped prisoner, Lilo and Stitch bonding in funny ways, and an obligatory romance between Lilo’s sister and a surfer guy. Through it all is the underlying theme of Ohana, which is Hawaiian for family.

The original, created at the tail end of Disney’s 2D animation renaissance, is warmly remembered. I personally consider it one of the finest animated cartoons ever made. Seamlessly integrating Hawaiian culture in vivid colors with traditional values in a non-ideal situation, it features a plethora of truly funny and unique characters in a wildly creative premise. The themes are timeless and a slam dunk for a word-for-word remake with little effort.

So, of course, Disney destroyed the central message, because reasons. Now Lilo is sent to foster care, and the sister goes to California (why California?) to become a marine biologist. This meme expresses the new message succinctly.

Source

I didn’t watch the live-action remake, as I consider every such effort cultural vandalism. What interested me was the massive disconnect between the bubble the creatives live in and the world of the rest of us. Putting aside the monstrous “going to college to become a science girlboss is better than taking care of your little sister” message, what was most disturbing is how they made the “happy” ending through the actions of one of the most terrifying institutions in the country, Child Protective Services.

While I have never had to deal with the nightmare of CPS, I’ve had many colleagues who have.

In one case, a child found a bag of what he thought was candy, but was actually his father’s Xanax, used in emergencies when he feels a panic attack coming on. They took him to urgent care and told the doctor that they weren’t sure how much, if any, of the medicine he swallowed. The doctor wanted him to drive to the hospital as a precautionary measure, which the father refused, seeing that it had been an hour and the kid was still energetic and boisterous, something that someone hopped up on Xanax most certainly is not. That and it would be a several-thousand-dollar burden on a family with crappy high-deductible health insurance. Upon refusal, the doctor reported the incident to CPS, saying the father was neglectful in not sending his son to the hospital.

Another was a similar case where a dad was wrestling with his son, who fell on his arm weirdly, dislocating it. Off to the hospital they went, where state law required any such incident to be investigated by CPS.

Then there was the dad whose psycho bitch ex-wife sicced CPS on him as revenge. Tale as old as time.

All of these had okay outcomes, outside the scare of the interview. One had a lawyer in Family Law who told him step-by-step what to say. He warned the dad that CPS case workers are the evilest people known to man. Reassuring. It was a one visit affair but even then, it planted the seeds for more aggressive action if CPS got called again. Yes, the Xanax should have been in a child-proof container. Yes, you need to be careful roughhousing with your kid. Yes, you shouldn't, well, marry crazy people I guess. Still, none of these should have amounted to a process to lose their children or even a suspicion of abuse. Not even close. All of them were decent people who gave their children stable, comfortable homes.

Still, it’s a rarity when such people are targeted, right? Surely CPS only visits extreme cases, right? One would get the impression that the vast majority of parents will never have to deal with CPS, that’s it’s only for the really abusive parents or borderline cases, right? Well, you would be wrong.

Results. We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years. Consistent with previous literature, we found a higher rate for African American children (53.0%) and the lowest rate for Asians/Pacific Islanders (10.2%).

Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among US Children

Those of you who are parents know the Sword of Damocles that this bureaucracy is. The terror is palpable, and a lot of the craze for “helicopter parenting” is the implicit fear that leaving your kids alone to adventure will put them at your door. For those in non-standard arrangements, like homeschooling, the fear is always that some ninny decides she doesn’t like what you’re doing and gives CPS a call, for the children of course.

It’s rare for anyone to say anything positive about CPS. They are seen as powerful, scary, and intrusive, with the quality of case workers being all over the place. This is exacerbated by massive turn-over and burnout. One would think with such a system, the public would want to error on the side of keeping the family together. Obviously with such a byzantine, broken system, outcomes can’t always be trusted and the less damage they do, the better. The public doesn’t think this way though. Paradoxically, a large percentage are in support of fare more aggressive measures to protect children in perceived “abusive” households than what CPS advocates for.

1. Balancing Act in Child Welfare Decisions: Americans lean towards erring on the side of caution, with 61% supporting investigations into reports of child neglect and abuse, even when there is uncertainty. Following an investigation, 53% favor keeping the child in the home even if the perceived risk of future harm is unclear; 39% say the child should be removed. At the same time, majorities of the public are concerned that decisions to intervene may sometimes reflect socioeconomic (73%) and racial (60%) biases.

The American Public Weighs in on Our Nation’s Child Welfare System

The 61% who support an investigation even under uncertainty is vague enough that it could mean many things. The second part, with an incredible 37% being okay with removing children from families even if perceived future harm can’t be quantified, is terrifying. To them, erroring on the side of caution means removing the child from the family, with all the chaos it brings, as opposed to keeping the family intact unless crystal-clear evidence of criminal abuse or neglect is found.

This isn’t to say there aren’t occasions where taking the children away is always negative. A most harrowing examples was when I did Juvy Ministry and talked to a fidgeting, stuttering, 8-year-old boy there, a total psychological mess. He showed me a picture of his family and explained how his dad beat and sexually abused him, all the while telling me how much he loved him even when he was taken away. If there ever was a dad who deserved a bullet to the head, it was him. Oftentimes when people think of CPS, they are thinking of those extreme cases.

When you have percentages of almost 40% of children getting a case, those horrifying cases are clearly not the norm. Much of this has to do with required disclosure in doctor’s offices and therapy sessions, often from a misunderstanding or even a child embellishing his treatment to get leverage against his parents. You also have nosy neighbors, teachers, and school counselors who don’t understand a situation and expect the worst. They may simply want to avoid liability by notifying CPS, regardless of how dubious the accusation. There’s no penalty for putting a family through hell on spurious grounds, but the penalty for failing to report and something awful happening is career death.

This isn’t even going into malicious actors. Like much of the United States legal system, the process is the punishment even if you are exonerated. A family’s behavior will likely be irrevocably changed for the worse by the encounter in order to avoid the sentinel eyes of the case workers.

Worst of all, when dealing with Family Law, they don’t need to prove your guilt to a jury but only make their case to a judge who has an incredible amount of power and discretion. Even if most social workers are honest, and most judges are reasonable people, the sheer number of cases ensures that some good parents get a social worker with an axe to grind and a judge with poor judgement, escalating a misunderstanding to a hellish nightmare.

Maybe this could be accepted if they were ensured of getting into a kind and loving household, but now we’re delving into the horrific world of Foster Care.

however, in 2019 there were an estimated 400,000 children in foster care, leaving the system overwhelmed and at its peak capacity. Of those children, it is estimated that up to 40% of them had experienced some type of abuse within the system.

Sexual Abuse of Children in the United States Foster Care System

In way too many cases, children are moved from a lousy family unit that at least had blood ties to a horrific family unit that upends their life, relationships, and identity, creating a perfect storm for social dysfunction.

In short, we had a well-intentioned system that was designed to fix the problem of childhood neglect, abuse, and exploitation. Originally set up only for the worst of the worst, it quickly snowballed until there was mandatory reporting using increasingly opaque standards, leading to snowballing caseloads that brings to question whether all this effort is doing any good. Yet as terrifying and draconian CPS has become, there’s next to no possibility of returning to before 1974 when the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) was established.

The Terrible Secondary Effects of “Fixing” Things

Few people would balk at a program that actually found wretched, heavily abusive households and rescued the children in an effective, non-invasive way. Unfortunately, when dealing with a bureaucracy hopelessly separated from the communities they are supposed to serve, that’s not possible. The case worker in charge likely has no connection to the extended family or church the family attends, and at best is familiar with the child’s school. This, justifiably, creates distrust at the outsider who wields enormous power.

The majority of cases where children are taken away are cases of neglect, at over 60 percent. Shockingly, only 13 percent of children are removed because of abuse. The case worker often has a very different idea of what such a very nebulous term as neglect means. To some case workers the house might be a mess and they let the child run feral, but as long as he is fed and safe they’ll overlook it. Others will consider a six-year-old riding around the neighborhood by himself as neglect. There are countless cultural assumptions being imposed on the family being investigated. While some behaviors would be frowned upon in an upper-class neighborhood, a lower-class area might have a different take. This doesn’t mean some norms in poorer areas are not often neglectful, but it has to be seen in the light of the reality that while their home life isn’t great, breaking those bonds would be even worse. Let’s not forget that children throughout the ages have survived in grotesque poverty the likes of which no American will ever see.

The most malignant aspect of any bureaucracy is the need to justify its own existence. Justifying the existence of CPS means breaking apart families. This also means they always need more oversight over schools, more interventions, and more power to fulfill their goals. Once they got their roots planted, there’s been the insatiable need to keep growing, often with the full support of the same public terrified of crossing them.

Yet somehow this country survived through most of its history without the mass CPS bureaucracy looking over children’s well-being. This doesn’t mean abuse did not exist, and maybe abuse did go down thanks to CPS. What is never talked about are the secondary effects. We have parents terrified of letting their kids go to the park or the store alone. We have created a distrustful atmosphere where a snooping neighbor can make a phone call and upend a family’s world. There’s an air of distrust upon what should be normal neighborhood interactions. The constant drumbeat of mandatory reporting has created an atmosphere not unlike the fear of informers in previous Soviet satellites. This doesn’t even get into the budgetary issues, now into the tens of billions of dollars.

A mom who gets high every night isn’t going to be Mother of the Year, nor is a dad who slaps around his kid in a rage going to be Father of the Year. Can somebody else do better? Probably, but the foster care system is just as likely to create the same abuse environment, and the disconnection with his own familiar family will create all sorts of behavioral issues.

What’s been forgotten is a core tenet of medicine: “First, do no harm”. Case Workers don’t have to reasonably prove that taking the child away will improve his outcome, only that the parents weren’t doing their job to their expected standards. A bedrock of American legal rights has also been forgotten: “Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. Instead of using one’s legal rights to protect oneself from intrusive home searches, it’s seen as questionable behavior. While technically you don’t have to let a case worker into the house, it’s going to look really bad in the report. While you can technically refuse to answer a case worker’s questions, it’s not going to help your cause. Then you are at the mercy of a single judge and not a jury of your peers.

Professional discretion also needs to return instead of mandatory reporting. You have to trust professionals to be able to use their judgement in assessing a situation. There can never be a bullet-proof procedure that can catch every instance of abuse, no matter how many case workers and how much power they are given. Some kids are going to be born into a lousy family. It sucks, but it’s life. Of course we want to prevent the most tragic situation of all, the death of a child, but you also have to ask how much of society you are willing to upend and how much power you are willing to delegate to reach this goal, and decide when you reach diminishing returns.

Lilo and Stitch, for example, was a clear example of bureaucratic overreach. Nothing beneficial happened by getting Child Protective Services involved, regardless of the messy house, unpaid bills, and chaotic life. Family can be messed up, but it’s still family. Every home life can’t be “fixed” to match the idyllic idea in one’s head, and any attempt to do so will cause all sorts of horrifying outcomes. Just as important as fixing things is the foresight to accept the unfixable.

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