What you don't know about foster care
- Details
- Category: About Foster Care
- Created: Sunday, 25 June 2017 18:46
- Written by Citizens against CPS
According to a 2011 AFCARS (the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System) “Yearly, referrals to state child protective services involve 6.3 million children and approximately 3 million of those children are subject to an investigated report.”
According to this report, in 2012, CPS took an estimated 650,000 to one million children from their homes, playground hospitals and parents. The same report suggests that only 6 percent or less (39,000 out of the 650,000 to million) were in any real danger or “high-risk” environments.
The more children in foster care, the more money a local CPS agency receives from the federal government, with the funds distributed throughout the community. Funding recipients include: teachers, attorneys, doctors, judges, therapists, caseworkers, foster parents, coaches, sub-agencies such as Family First and Head Start, insurance companies, consultants, outside contractors, and watchdog agencies, to name but a few. There is a profound conflict of interest between those in an authoritative position to protect children (CPS caseworkers and the earlier named affiliates) and the fact that those same people (and their associates) can financially benefit from the act of placing children in foster care.
Ninety-six percent of foster parents are on disability, unemployment, or workers’ comp, or have low-income jobs, resulting in children getting placed with unqualified, and often times, abusive recipients. Many foster parents are emotionally unstable or mentally incompetent, and a large majority have criminal records. Ninety-three percent of foster parents use the system for perverted and/or financial gain, using children as currency, to pay rent, place food on the table, pay the cable bill, etc. These financial incentives have led to unintended consequences, attracting pedophiles, predators, drug addicts, and sadists.
The National Child Abuse & Neglect Data System (NCANDS) reported that, in 2012, 1,545 U.S. children died from child abuse. For many years, the Children’s Bureau (a department within DHS/CPS) reported 1,000 deaths a year within the CPS system. The Children’s Bureau also rounds off to the nearest thousand – so if the real tally of children dying in state custody is 1,499, only 1,000 will be reported.
Shockingly, this leaves only 46 children, nationwide, killed outside of Child Protective Services, a government program designed to protect children.
The majority of the fatalities and severely abused children are under four years old.
In 2008, 3,292 children went missing (presumed dead) after entering the CPS system, a statistic only representing three states (Ohio, Washington, and Colorado). Only 33 states report foster children who become “lost in the system” as it is not mandatory.
Inappropriate relationships have been found to exist between CPS caseworkers and foster parents – they commonly work together for additional financial gain. For example, a caseworker can help a partner, friend, neighbor, or an acquaintance with becoming a foster parent, and then place 12 foster children in one home, despite the CPS Policy Manual’s suggestion of no more than 4 children to one home. There are no penalties when a caseworker does not follow the Policy Manual. (See Senator Nancy Schaefer’s “The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services, http://fightcps.com/pdf/thecorruptbusinessofchildprotectiveservices.pdf, Senator’s Schaefer’s “Kids for Cash” video, and federal investigator Bill Bowen’s “Innocence Destroyed” video, revealing the horrors of Child Protective Services).
REFORM is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, I believe any attempts to “reform” the legislation and procedures currently on the books would result in further bureaucratic failure.
However, I will offer a list of Reform initiatives by late April or early May 2016.
We could borrow courage and logistics from the late Dr. Robert Felix (former director of the National Institute of Mental Health), who radically decided to close every state hospital in the country, beginning in 1973. Rampant abuse of our most defenseless citizens in those institutions became the cultural norm. State hospital reform had been attempted for 80 years, yet the cruelty within them had become institutionalized. As Felix said, “we saw too many people who shouldn’t have been in there, homosexuals, disabled, pregnant and outspoken women, patients were being experimented on, the brutality and rapes were hourly events, closing the doors to the state hospitals became the singular solution.” (The mental health industry is not perfect, but it is more humane.)
Currently, billions of dollars are used to support the barbaric treatment of our most vulnerable citizens, our children. We should consider shutting down Child Protective Services as we know it, saving the federal government billions of dollars every year. These funds could be reallocated to construct safe and healthy learning environments as state-of-the-art orphanages, where employees and supervisors would be required to have Master’s and Doctorate Degrees in child development. Closely monitored, but warm and home-like atmospheres, not unlike the Montessori model (i.e., raising small animals, learning how to grow gardens, etc.), creating thousands of high-paying jobs. These funds also could be distributed to the public school systems.
Perhaps we could start by eliminating the ‘Children-as-Currency’ epidemic. This would help reign in the corruption and intrusive culture of Child Protective Services, therefore ensuring a more prosperous future for the children that truly need our help.
Source : https://citizensagainstcps.com/
*** Don't think for a minute that Australia is any different because it's not.
