I read a piece in the Washington Post last night about a couple who took their baby to the ER and subsequently had both their kids taken away by Child Protective Services. Why? Because an X-ray on the kid in the ER showed a healed fracture on his rib cage, which is taken as all but automatic evidence of abuse.
It's worth a read, and I curiously clicked on one of the links to a study of child maltreatment investigations. Here's what it found:
This is fairly remarkable. By the age of 17, the lifetime chance of an American child being investigated is 37%. The lifetime chance of verifying maltreatment is 12%.
These are wildly high numbers, but I'm not sure how to interpret them. Should we say that "only" a third of CPS investigations turn up evidence of maltreatment? Or that one-third shows an appropriate level of caution? I'm not sure. But that topline number is still striking. CPS investigations are no joke, and the idea that something like a third of all families undergo them is shocking.
This is a natural consequence of the mandated reporting laws, in which teachers, doctors, and anyone who works with children can be imprisoned and fined for failing to report any suspicion.
Anecdotal, but also have seen reporting used as a weapon in custody disputes.
I have three kids, two of whom used to enjoy rollerblading. At least until they fell and broke an arm (not at the same time, a couple of years apart). Both times, the doctor took my kids into a separate room and questioned them about abuse. Then they advised me it would be reported to CPS, regardless, although CPS never tried to contact me that I'm aware of. I did get investigated eventually though, when a teacher at my child's school made a report to CPS because she saw a bruise on my child's arm. I have also been threatened with CPS investigations by my kids' pediatrician because they were low weight in early childhood, although nothing came of it.
Child Protection agencies have a tough job. As a former state investigator tasked with evaluating complaints about Child Protection workers, I learned of lots of cases of gross parental abuse and neglect of their children, including behavior that was almost satanic. Usually alcohol and drug abuse were involved.
However, it was also common to find that a child protection worker used poor judgment in handling a report of abuse, and it was extremely common to find that the worker had way too many cases to give them adequate attention. Add to that the relatively low wages and the high burn-out rate for child protection workers, and the predictable low quality of job candidates (any Social Sciences BA will do) and you have a situation that is bound to result in mistakes and trauma.
This is high-stakes work that frequently ends up in the superior court, with the Child Protection agency facing off against the parents and their lawyer. The children are usually the ones who pay the highest price. Some of them are raised in a series of foster placements, some of which are great, and some of which are sketchy or even abusive.
All of that said, the 1 am police raid on the parents three days after the hospital visit (described in the WaPo article) seems bone-headed and abusive. I frequently heard the word "Gestapo" used to describe such events, and sometimes it was used by serious child abusers, but in this case the 1 am knock on the door seems to have been ill-advised.
My oldest child decided she wanted to live with her father because she didn't like the rules I had made for her boyfriend visiting. After failing to negotiate this with her father, she chose to make a false allegation of abuse by my second husband, which she eventually referred to in court as "playing my trump card."
The tl;dr is that I had to give up when my parents ran out of equity in their home and I couldn't pay my attorneys anymore (about $400K total). I had to divorce my husband in order to get visitation in my home. After 3 years in court I settled with an agreement that if I didn't abuse them over the next year my "supervision" by CPS would end.
Since they didn't want to "disrupt the children again," my younger children also ended up with their father, who didn't really want them, and whose second wife left him. My younger children (now in their 20's) have PTSD and anxiety disorders, and I haven't spoken to the eldest since the allegations.
The simple failure to consider a 15-year-old's motivations ruined many lives.
Well, I have a healed fracture of my wrist that I broke as a child entirely due to my own efforts at falling out of a tree.
Do children not beat the crap out of one another anymore, or fall off playground equipment? I had all kinds of bruises and scrapes from various incidents that would probably seem suspicious today.
What they'd probably say nowadays is that your falling out of a tree proved that your parents had insufficiently supervised you and were therefore neglectful: off to foster care with you.
And another report:
https://www.salon.com/2022/12/08/for-black-families-in-phoenix-child-welfare-investigations-are-a-constant_partner/
The data do not say that "something like a third of all families undergo" CPS investigation. They say that a third of all children do. Given that the fact that one child in a family is abused or neglected increases the likelihood that another child in the same family has been abused or neglected, and given that family size varies in ways which tend to correlate with conditions conducive to abuse or neglect, the pct of families that are investigated is probably much, much smaller.