What Happened in Texas
Was an abomination. Sorry to get all political on you folks but the articles I’ve been (to be honest) mostly trying to avoid are having a cumulative effect, until this one set me off weeping:
Shelly Greco, a court-appointed lawyer for a 14-month-old girl removed from the ranch, says the child had been up crying uncontrollably many nights because she was so abruptly weaned.
Tearing nursing children from their mother’s arms is reprehensible. Child Protective Services is an out-of-control juggernaut of bureaucratic evil and must be reined in. Child abuse should be investigated, yes, but the state should never have the power to take children from their families without very solid proof that abuse is occurring.
If you want to donate to help the mothers in their fight, the website is here.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Bizzy has a creepy and plausible take on why they’ve not been able to find Sarah, the 16-year-old rape victim whose call started this:
“Sure Sarah exists, and it happened like she said. But Sarah’s 40 now.”
CPS was overzealous in this situation. So often they don’t do enough, and they choose this to go all out? If they need more to do they should come to downtown Baltimore. There’s plenty of other stuff to keep them occupied. Having said that, I don’t envy them their jobs atall atall atall.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I think the whole structure of CPS is fundamentally flawed, specifically in the presumption of guilt rather than innocence, the general lack of recourse or oversight, and the fact that foster care often represents a *worsening* of the situation for the children. From the article linked above:
“In one study, Joseph J. Doyle, an economist with the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., found that children removed from their parents and taken into foster care, even for a relatively short period, were three times as likely to grow up to be juvenile offenders or have a teenage pregnancy than were children from similarly troubled homes who had been left with their parents.
“Professor Doyle said Texas was far from alone in erring on the side of removal. ‘From the caseworker’s point of view, the incentive is to take the kid,’ he said. ‘That’s the safer choice, because it is unlikely that if something terrible happens in foster care they would be blamed. Whereas if something were to happen at home, the caseworker would be blamed.'”