The Opioid Crisis and the Overburdened Child Protective Service Agencies
Time and again I see articles in family protection about how children are removed from their homes just to fill quota demands on social workers to keep funding coming in to pay for the bureaucracy that has been created known as child protective services. They want us to believe that social workers are kidnapping people's kids to keep their jobs funded and the jobs created out of support services. That flies in direct opposition to the statistics that show there is severe funding lapse going on because of the current opioid crisis.
It took three months for Baby Dylan to be weaned off the drugs she was born addicted to. THE GARRETT FAMILY
The call that they are seeing younger children especially babies in the foster system to meet demands for adoptable children is absurd given that it is new federal laws that require hospitals to report to child protective agencies any child born with drugs in their system. Six to seven years ago there was a decline in the number of children entering foster care, since 2014, the last year to which data was available the number of children had gone up 3.5 percent. Some states have seen a even greater increase, Georgia is up twenty five percent, Vermont 16.4 percent, in Ohio where nearly ten thousand kids are in foster care nearly half of those are due to the opioid crisis and for the very first time ever in child protective service history younger children, six and under are becoming the fastest growing population in the foster care system. The demand to service calls for infants coming out of neonatal intensive care after being born addicted to drugs to picking up infants strapped in the back of their parents cars after their parents overdosed on drugs with the children seated in the backseat have fueled a demand for workers to equip their cars with car seats. There is no denying the validity of that claim because the epidemic is so severe that there isn't many of us who haven't seen those stories make national headlines.
An Ohio police department says it made the decision to release a set of graphic photos to drive home the devastating effects of heroin addiction and the toll it takes on families. (Credit: East Liverpool Police Department)
The crisis has become so bad that the shortage of foster homes sometimes requires placing children hours away from the cities that their parents live in because there are no other foster homes available closer, which further burdens the process of reunification processes between the parent and child. In some areas children are sleeping in the offices of protective service workers because there is no place to put them. Finding placement with family members and other relatives has become hard, at this point most family members, if not prohibited by other restraints in their lives have become estranged from the addict and don't want to deal or can't overcome past grievances of having already tried to deal with their family members addiction and/or some of those family members have addictions of their own.
Despite President Trumps declaration of a national emergency there was no additional funding added to service the overflow of children into the system. Departments have looked to churches to fill needs to foster parents for donations of goods that foster parents need. The recidivist rate for addicts is close to seventy percent which further strains the resources, they return the children to their families after recovery only to have them relapse, remove the children and start the process all over. This process frustrates workers in that they see this as the parents having more rights then the child. When a child has to continually be disrupted by being thrown back and forth it can be traumatizing and lead to life long problems of creating stability in their lives.
In the next few days I am going to work on another article that highlights a even further strain on the system, one that shows and justifies why we need such systems in place. I am not saying that every bureaucracy doesn't have it's abuses, I would be out right lying if I made such a claim. The problem I see here is the constant labeling of the agencies in charge of protecting lambasted repeatedly for kidnapping and claims of job protecting guarantees through resource funding when we are in the middle of one of the worse crisis to ever hit the states. There isn't enough funding even to cover the astronomical rising cost of this epidemic, there is no benefit(s) streaming out of a financially overburden system that is drowning in children and no need to kidnap children when your already drowning in them.
I think that the issue familyprotection are trying to raise is that there seems to be no recourse for families when the CPS system is abused and when people try to raise the issue it is often hidden.
As you say, no system is perfect which is why there should be a balancing side to step in when things go wrong. If we can accept that there will always be faults then we can deal with them, but trying to hide them only allows for other victims.
Thank you for your insight. In can be easy to be swayed to one extreme side or the other so we need to find a middle ground.
and that's not to mention the horrible abuse that kids whose parents are addicted to meth face and the strain on the system that causes in places where it is popular.
That's just the half of it, I will be writing another story showing a even further strain and addressing why child protection systems get built in the first place....not that most of us don't understand why but I guess some need to see how dire circumstances become for the need.