Building awareness of personal experiences with Child Protection Services
A week ago I put out a message to my sizeable Facebook following with a request to hear any personal stories which relate to this subject I am currently researching.
Since then four people have responded and I am now communicating with them privately to hear their stories and publish them here.
- One from the UK
- One from Australia
- One from Arizona, USA
I stated in my request that I am looking to tell as balanced a story as I can and am consequently looking for all perspectives. And I am really happy the fourth person represents this camp. They responded to my message with the following words:
Can you write a balance and fair article and not just point out the problems? CPS protected many kids in my small home town and it's surrounding villages from violence and abuse. Three foster families were kids i went to school with. Three girls of which have now been adopted by my family. One of those girls was locked in a cupboard by her mother for 4 days and her step father fed her cat food. By no means is it a perfect system and there are many failings like any organisation...every organisation! But pointing out only the faults is not a way to encourage protection of vulnerable children. Please choose the negatives VERY carefully backed up with evidence not opinion. A good friend of mine worked for CPS in inner city London for years. She poured blood, sweat and tears in. Please also think about the good people who tirelessly work to help children for shit pay. There's two sides to this story, please highlight both.
Always two sides
As stated in my intention, a balanced story will be told. Things are never as clear cut as many articles make them out to be and having been in a long term relationship with a London social worker I can testify personally to how emotionally involved they can become and how hard they work at doing what they believe to be the right thing.
An international perspective
It is my intention to start building a view of the various international laws around CPS, looking at individual cases and how the kids turned out if they were placed in care.
Motivated by my paternal instinct
I have no intention of sending my children to school. But I am conscious now of certain countries which will seek to remove my children from me if I carry out my home school syllabus. As a father of two now I feel drawn towards learning as much as I can about this subject so that I may be able to continue travelling the world freely, whilst keeping us together as a family at this most important time in the lives of my children.
I look forward to sharing more with you on this subject as soon as I have more information.
Blessings to you all from Bali.
My son Esteban, two and a half years old, but a thousand years wise!
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Of course, there are always two sides to every story. I've heard of cases like this woman mentioned too. There was a case not far from where I live now where the kids were neglected and abused in the worst way. Unfortunately, CPS was already involved and never noticed anything wrong....until one of the children got out (they'd lock them in too) and told the police...So that is a possibility too: they're involved but somehow the family keeps their secret so well that nothing is done. However, the kids missed school a lot, were malnourished, wore dirty clothes...so how can people miss such a thing? Especially when they show up unannounced. I have a personal friend who dealt with CPS in the past and she had a family care worker who told her she would advise to stop the work she was doing as everything was going great (and it did), however she left her job and was replaced by another who felt they needed to interfere for another year! In the end, my friend won her case in front of a judge, but it does show how much difference one person can make. Not all CPS workers are evil, I even believe that most of them started the job for the right reasons. However, it's the system that is flawed and with that, some of the CPS workers will be too. I mean, my friend was lucky, but if she'd had a judge in a bad mood, who knows how long that could have dragged on for no reason. People are people and some WILL judge a book by its cover...(in my friend's case, wearing a lot of black and tattoos and piercings...But she's one of the best mothers I know...
Feels like a replica of the political system. Doesn't matter which people we entrust the power to, they can't effectively do their job in the midst of a systemic failure.
Makes me feel for all those genuinely good hearted social workers who are giving so much of their energy to do what they believe to be right. I saw how it completely consumed every aspect of my old partner's life. She absolutely loved those kids and would break down in tears regularly seeing how her efforts were not always giving them the better life she wanted them to have.
And hearing your story helps me see how fragile a system this is, when as you say it all boils down to how the judge is feeling on the day and if they are able to see past black clothes and tattoos. Am glad it worked out for your friend.
Many times Foster Parents are told that the child has been abused when they have not been.
Most people would not want to be Foster Parents if they knew the truth that the children were snatched from loving families based on claims that were not true, or were minor in nature.
I know personally from a VERY good friend of mine what happened with her daughter. The girl was in foster care for almost 3 years while the parents fought desperately to get her back. At one point when mom was not even allowed to have visits despite desperate pleas to the Social Workers, the foster parent told her daughter that her mother was not visiting her because she had given up and did not love her anymore.
An extremely false allegation of the step-father sexually abusing the girl was what started everything, even though they had no proof other than a vindictive person's claim. Two years after her daughter was taken, the father finally had his day in criminal court where the judge LAMBASTED the Social Workers for making up such ridiculous claims based on ridiculous evidence. He was found completely innocent.
Despite that, the Social Workers STILL would not give back their daughter,
until the girl started to become suicidal after being told that she was never going home again. The only reason they gave back the girl was because she would have killed herself in their care, and they didn't want the bad press. So they finally returned a now very disturbed little girl to her loving family.
Many people in the little town still believe that the father is guilty, even though the child was returned. Gossip was/is really bad. My husband even had a neighbour ask him how he liked having a child molester visit our house.
It was all the most wicked of lies.
I am thinking of writing an article on Steemit highlighting part of the Judge's final statement, where he said how botched of a job the Social Workers did in deciding that he was guilty when they had no evidence.
The other thing that is atrocious, is that even though the father moved out of the home, like Social Services requested, the mother was still NOT allowed to keep her daughter with her. NOTHING satisfied them.
So yes, sometimes children are taken from horrible situations.
But many times the parents are innocent and the public is believing complete and utter lies about them, that the Social Workers spread around the community.
What strikes me as odd about this situation is the power given to the social workers. How is it that they have the power to remove children from families based on hearsay with no actual evidence? When dealing with the tender impressionable lives of little ones, surely no one should be taking children away from anyone until the highest order of 'law' has looked at the evidence and declared the person to be guilty? It is pure madness to approach the system any other way.
If policemen had the power to remove us from our homes and force us into a completely different life away from our natural family because someone said something about us we would be up in arms about this! Hmmmm, perhaps they already do? I seem to recall that terrorism accusations mean that the usual legal system can be bypassed.
This really is quite a shocking subject. My approach to reach out to friends and see what comes back felt like the most natural way to get raw information and build a picture from there. I have met a lot of people (and been kind to them!) over the years and believe my FB group are a good representation of society. More to come on where I am at with that...
Thank you for your sterling work uncovering this most important of subjects.
I agree, the social workers are often believed because they are 'respected' by many, when in reality they are just people like you and me, that make mistakes. In their case, often horrific mistakes. I know from my own experiences with them and that of others close to me, that they can and are often times blind and have very one sided views on things. They often go by their first impression and no explanation will satisfy them even if the person in question proves over and over that they were wrong judging a situation the way they did. A very close friend of mine was judged by them purely by her appearance (as mentioned above) and that was in Holland. Here in Ireland, it could have been even worse, as they tend to associate everyone with tattoos and black clothing with satanism....It hasn't been very long since the Catholic church was very involved in their work, and I am sure that they still are a great influence here. I see this every day. It was only in the late '90's that they closed the last Magdalene laundry here, and most people know what kind of horrific practices they had there. A single mother was less than nothing and babies were sold off to the highest bidder. And just because we don't hear about it now, doesn't mean it's not happening. I mean, we never heard it then either, until they uncovered all those mass graves all over the country. People can be strange and naive when it comes to whom they believe and what. Stories tend to get out of hand quickly too. Especially here in Ireland this is very apparent. Only last year, we had a father who first killed his wife and three kids and then himself. He left a note that said he took their lives because they wouldn't be able to live without him...All we heard on the news was how much of a valuable member of the community he was and how many times he went to church in a week. Nothing else. Nothing about the poor children and woman who's lives he took and their grandparents/family and friends who were left to deal with this. It was all about him, how great he was and that they couldn't believe he had done such a thing. When in fact, he was nothing more than a narcissistic serial killer. That story was one of the reasons I stopped listening to news altogether...it turned my stomach having to hear such crap. It just shows: it's the system, its evil workers and the media that are keeping this thing going, nothing more and nothing less...
我同意，社工往往相信是因为他们受到很多人的尊重，实际上他们只是像你我这样的人犯错误。在他们的情况下，往往可怕的错误。我从自己和他亲近的经历中知道，他们可以而且常常是盲目的，对事物有非常单方面的看法。他们经常会以他们的第一印象出现，即使有关人士反复证明他们错误地判断他们所做的事情，也不会有任何解释。我的一个非常亲密的朋友纯粹由她的外表（如上所述）来评判，那是在荷兰。在爱尔兰，情况可能会更糟，因为他们倾向于用纹身和黑色的衣服把所有人都联系在一起。......天主教会的工作非常繁忙，而且我确信他们在这里仍然是一个很大的影响力。我每天都看到这个直到90年代末，他们才把这里的最后抹大拉的洗衣店关了起来，大多数人都知道他们在那里有什么可怕的做法。一个单身母亲是没有什么，婴儿出售给出价最高的人。因为我们现在还没有听到这个消息，所以并不意味着它不会发生。我的意思是，我们也从来没有听说过，直到他们揭开了全国所有的那些万人坑。当他们相信谁，什么时候，人们会变得陌生而幼稚。故事也往往很快失控。特别是在爱尔兰，这非常明显。就在去年，我们有一个父亲先是杀了他的妻子和三个孩子，然后他自己。他留下了一张纸条，说他过生活是因为没有他就无法生活......我们听到的消息是他有多少有价值的社区成员，有多少次去教堂一周之内。没有其他的。他生活中的可怜的孩子和女人以及他们的祖父母/家人和朋友都没有处理这件事。这一切都是关于他，他是多么伟大，他们不相信他做了这样的事情。事实上，他只不过是一个自恋的连环杀手。那个故事是我停止听新闻的原因之一...它使我的胃不得不听到这样的废话。它只是表明：这是制度，邪恶的工作人员和媒体，保持这个事情，没有更多，也没有少...
I would think there are good people also working in this field, who really have the children's best interest at heart. Maybe they are a little harder to find.
Agreed. I KNOW there are. But it is not them at fault. It is the broken system. And just like our political system, it doesn't matter how much good will a politician may have, they will always be confined to the limitations of the system in which they work.
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STOPvery good post..