It is clear that the effort to protect children from abuse has resulted in many non-abused children being taken away from innocent parents by Child Protective Services. Less than 16% of children are taken from their families for allegations of any kind of abuse, and only 17% of allegations against parents are even substantiated.
In the name of protecting some children, many more children are traumatized and abused by the very system tasked with protecting them. Medical kidnapping and state-sanctioned seizure of children is more common than most people have realized.
Yet parents whose children are taken find that they have less rights than criminals. The right to due process is conspicuously absent from almost all CPS cases.
How is it possible that criminals who are charged with crimes such as murder, rape, and terrorism have more rights to due process of the law than parents who been accused, often anonymously, of child abuse?
Imagine if there was proposed legislation regarding terrorism with the following provisions:
Special anti-terrorism police could search any home without a warrant – and stripsearch any occupant – based solely on an anonymous telephone tip.
Any occupant of the home could be detained for 24 hours to two weeks without so much as a hearing – and they’ll probably be detained far longer because, in the special anti-terrorism court set up by this legislation, all the judges are afraid to look soft on “terrorists.”
At that first hearing the detainees may – or may not – get a lawyer just before the hearing begins, and they almost never get effective counsel.
At almost every stage, the standard of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” or even “clear and convincing” but merely “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in American jurisprudence, the same one used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender.
And in most states, all the hearings and all the records are secret.
The reality is that this isn’t fictional at all – except that it doesn’t apply to alleged terrorists; it applies to families. These injustices are the experience of hundreds of thousands of parents all across the United States of America.
