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CPS discrimination?!CPS discrimination?!
cvalh said: "Now I'm offended. :th_angelsmiley4: "I hate to point this out to you lakelady," but I said I agreed with everything you said! I just wanted to point out the flaws, because if someone doesn't, we let ourselves believe TOO much.
And yes, protective services sucks in the condition it's in right now, but it DOES need to exist. There are kids out there who would be in HELL without it. Yes, it needs reform, but we can't just do away with it. I know plenty of people who have been placed in GOOD foster homes."
cvalh said: "I agree with everything you've said, but I do want to point out one flaw with what we see... "Reported Abuse." Foster families are already being closely watched, and the kids are already involved with social services, so they're more likely to report it.
Many, many kids in normal families never have their abuse reported. Those numbers are probably much higher that anyone realizes."
spectrachic311 said: "Foster care stories can be horrific. My sister had a teacher in 6th grade who was a single man who had 4-5 foster boys at any one time in his house. Everyone thought he was such an upstanding citizen and whatnot...until they found out that he was molesting the boys that he was caring for. They questioned all the students that he taught to ask if he ever tried anything with them. My sister said he never did anything to her, but she knew all the boys that he molested and she said they all kept absolutely silent about it.
The system is indeed VERY flawed."
spectrachic311 said: "My aunt's a social worker who deals almost exclusively with child abuse situations. She often deals with CPS and she has told me numerous times about the flaws in the system. Certain households are much more likely to be investigated than others. It's so sad that they figure overweight people can't care for their kids or something. That's SO not true. From what she's told me, minority families (especially Latino families, for whatever reason) seem to get scrutinized more harshly as well."
missred said: "CPS has many flaws. As an educator, I have had to call CPS. There was very clear evidence (nicely documented too) that the child was being abused and simply in a terrible environment with disgusting living conditions. For example, she actually had live roaches crawly in her lunchbox, which had been peed on by the family cat. That was a minor thing! Anyway, the child's stepdad was a police officer and the mom a child care provider! Long story short, the child wasn't even interviewed because of who the family was.
So, we have children who need help and don't get it, and we have children who don't need help and their families suffer.
My husband and I have longed talked about taking in foster children due to the great need, but our home is not large enough now. Once I graduate, we plan to buy a nice, large home. Hopefully, we can then take in children. I've not heard the statistics that Lakelady pointed out in regard to children being abused, and I must say that I know many foster parents (many teachers) who are wonderful caregivers."
help6363 said: "Discrimination is ugly and has horrible consequences."
lakelady said: "OK, I'm incensed!:angry: I'll tell you what started me out on this. This a.m. in the shoutbox, a member here talked about her unpleasant experience with cps (child protective services) due to a snooty neighbor. The neighbor's claim was unsubstantiated, but the couple had to endure months of intrusive home visits nonetheless. I've long thought that cps contributes more to the break-up and devastation of families in this country than all other factors combined, including substance abuse, and seeing as statistics show that children are [I][U]THREE TIMES [/U][/I]more likely to be abused in foster care, and 28 (yes, [I][U]TWENT-EIGHT!) [/U][/I]times more in group homes, I've always wondered why someone doesn't draw their teeth! I've known of several families who's cps stories would curl your hair and on reflecting on these, due to the shoutbox discussion this morning I realized that all the mothers of the one's I knew about were overweight.
One of the girls in the pool here's husband is a caseworker here for dhhs (our cps agency) he came in to bring her something from home and I took the opportunity to talk to him about this. he said, and rightly so, that they MUST check out every call made. OK, I can see that. THEN, I asked him about the perception that I had that overweight moms were more likely to come under scrutiny. he said, 'well, yeah karen, when I knock on a door and a fat, sloppy woman answers, I figure she's gotta be lazy and that might extend to not caring for her children properly or maintaining a proper environment' (I'm QUOTING here!) I said, 'Steve, 8 years ago I had two kids still at home and I weighed 100 pounds more than I do now. Does that mean I would've been investigated more vigorously than I would be now?' he said, 'Well not necessarily, you live in that nice house on the lake and clearly have resources, but if you were low income, then yeah, probably'
This is clear discrimination! I don't think I was any lazier at 235 than I am at 134 and I don't think anyone else is either. Has anyone personally experienced discrimination of this sort? Someone has got to DO something about these people! Families in difficulty need help, not persecution! Thoughts, please."
lakelady said: "Awwww, Don't be offended! You're one of my favorite people on this forum. Between you and spectra, I've gotten enough good solid advice and tips to get back to within two pounds of my goal. I KNOW that we can't do away cps, but I do think we've been way to complacent in just giving them their head. Nobody watches them! They go on their merry way, leaving devastation in their path, all under the banner of 'saving children', and who doesn't want to help children? it's difficult for our politicians to hobble them in anyway because they don't want to look like they don't care about kids. I just think that we need the 'grassroots' to start speaking out against their abuses and insist on reform. The foster parent's association's logo has flowers and smiling children on it. They don't show the tears and coffins and the bleak futures of disenfranchised kids. Most foster homes are good ones. Most foster children are, nonetheless, miserably unhappy in them!"
lakelady said: "I almost hate to point this out Cvalh, but one of those statistics is, [B]3 times more likely to DIE! [/B]Death is pretty hard to cover up, even in the general population homes that are not closely watched. SOMEBODY eventually notices the kid missing, ya know? We need, as the silent majority, to voice our views that family re-unification MUST be the goal in removal cases, and encourage our politicians to do something to see that removals for frivolous reasons are stopped! Our governor is following Indiana, and Illinois in starting a program aimed at lowering foster care placements and vastly increasing the speed that re-unification is achieved in cases of removal. I mentored girls in this state from when I was 25 up until two years ago. (25 years). Out of 56 girls, all but 11 were in foster care. EVERY ONE of those girls wanted nothing more intensely, than to go home. The stories got so sad, and broke my heart so completely, that I finally had to give it up for the sake of my own mental health! But I'll STILL speak up against these so-called child protective workers whenever given half a chance!!! They're DESTROYING families, and HURTING children, and we're LETTING them!"
lakelady said: "The System is frought with abuses. If I didn't know better, ( at least I HOPE I do!) I'd think it was a conspiracy to re-apportion children of low income families to families in a higher income bracket. Only 55% of children removed EVER return home! Spectra's right. Hispanic children account for 39% of ALL removals. Missred, here are just a FEW statistics for you from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform:
At the heart of the criticism of family preservation is one overriding assumption: If you remove a child from the home, the child will be safe. If you leave a child at home the child is at risk. In fact, there is risk in either direction, but intensive family preservation programs have a better record of safety than foster care.
To understand why, one must first understand one fundamental fact about foster care: It's not safe. Here's how we know:
National data on child abuse fatalities show that a child is nearly [B]three times[/B] as likely to die of abuse in foster care as in the general population.
A study of reported abuse in Baltimore, found the rate of "substantiated" [B]cases of sexual abuse in foster care more than four times higher than the rate in the general population[/B]. Using the same methodology, an Indiana study found [B[B]]three times more physical abuse and twice the rate of sexual abuse in foster homes [/B]than in the general population. In group homes there was more than ten times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse as in the general population, in part because so many children in the homes abused each other.
Even what is said to be a model foster care program, where caseloads are kept low and workers and foster parents get special training, is not immune. When alumni of the Casey Family Program were interviewed, 24 percent of the girls said they were victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse in their foster homes. Furthermore, this study asked only about abuse in the one foster home the children had been in the longest. A child who had been moved from a foster home precisely because she had been abused there after only a short stay would not even be counted. Officials at the program say they have since lowered the rate of all forms of abuse to "only" 12 percent, but this is based on an in-house survey of the program's own caseworkers, not outside interviews with the children themselves."