Around and Around We Go

Where it stops, only some grasping-at-straws-while-looting-state-coffers CPS worker will know.

HOW CAN IT BE that, in this great nation of ours, the news is filled with story after story documenting the failures of countless "parents," their stories often wrapped deeply within and, therefore, pointing out the inherent failures of the Child Protective Services system...

All across this country, children are abused and/or die as a result of the actions (or INACTION) of CPS workers, people voluntarily taking on a job that must be performed in an exceptionally UNAMBIGUOUS manner (is there any way to possibly misinterpret "Child Protective Services"?). HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN? Sometimes ignorance, sometimes laziness, sometimes indifference, all leading to the suffering of a child at the hands of the one who claimed to have been protecting them when it was felt their parent(s) could not.

This is not a "black" problem or a "white" problem; these are children of every color. It is not a problem isolated to "the slums" and "welfare recipients"; parents may be poor or working poor or lower-middle-class but are almost exclusively of lower income. Regardless of background, these are children that should have been OUR future but instead had their own futures stolen, in the end depriving us all.

On the other side of the coin are children needlessly ripped from the arms of their parents, lives and families destroyed - emotionally and financially - for no legitimate reason, to serve no legitimate purpose. To anyone who would insist this never happens, that those parents "deserved it," I say "Shame on you." Shame on you for not listening and learning, ignoring the truth. Shame on you for thinking that any child should suffer for someone else's mistake, regardless of who made it. Shame on you, and I hope you count your blessings every day for not having walked a mile in those shoes.

I know there are children who are neglected and abused, beat, tortured, mutilated, molested, raped, and murdered by their so-called "parents." I know there are - OFTEN - times when the system seems to work and a child in need is rescued. I know that there are, in fact, top-notch social workers in HHS/CPS agencies across the map that go above and beyond the details of their job description, for those little lives they have pledged to save, and that there are foster parents committed to the cause.

However... I also know that even the very best social workers can only be as good as the laws under which they must operate, and that far too many (federal and state) laws are inadequate, poorly constructed and misinterpreted, misapplied, subverted, ignored, and unevenly applied in practice. I know that there are times when the most inviolable and sacred rights held dear to us as American citizens, those involving due process, are thrown out like yesterday's trash.

The laws governing the CPS system and those who create them need to change. There IS a problem in this country, swept under the rug in the hopes that it will go away if no one sees it. Unfortunately for those who want it to go away, there ARE people who see it - people like me, who have LIVED it - and demand that the problems be fixed. Our Presidential candidates shout "CHANGE" from every rooftop and every mountaintop, three of whom are part of the legislative body with the power to effect that change - yet they have chosen not to do so.

In my mind, they, too, have failed the children.

What do you do when you are forced to SEE that failure,
~~~~~day after day,
~~~~~week after week,

haunting the eyes of a child destroyed in an effort to "help,"
knowing it will not be fixed,
~~~~~lives saved,
~~~~~perpetrators punished,
~~~~~families preserved,
~~~~~futures ensured?

What do you do if CPS is the agent of fear in a child's life?
What do you do if CPS is the agent of continued abuse of a child, or the abuser in its own right?