By Linda Martin

In response to a recent letter and an op-ed column in your paper about the local child protective service agency, I would like to point out that this is a nation-wide problem, not just a local thing.

The problems arise from bad legislation on the federal level that gives the states incentive payments and funding for taking children from their families, holding them hostage in foster homes and group homes while the traumatized, grieving parents are forced through unwanted "service plans", and often the eventual adopting out of the children. All this benefits the county, state, local "service" providers, social service employees, fosterers, and adopters.

While some of the children are eventually reunited with their families, many of the cases result in termination of parental rights (TPR). The younger and cuter the child is, the more at risk they are of being held in state custody and adopted out - often to their fosterer. Since the passage of the Adoptions and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA), there has been additional pressure on the states to terminate more of these cases in adoptions. A reward system was set up to give states bounty payments for increasing adoptions each year. Earlier bad legislation includes the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA) and the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.

In addition, "snitch laws" (mandatory reporting laws) were passed in all states, forcing people who work with children to report any 'suspicion' of child abuse or neglect. These mandatory reporting laws make it possible for people who don't report their suspicions to be prosecuted. The "snitch laws" also make it possible for anyone with a grudge to make an anonymous call to CPS to harass family members. The problem of false and unsubstantiated allegations in California, as in other states, is considerable. In 1999, the most recent year for which statistics are available at the federal website, there were 377,475 total referrals to CPS in California. Only 73,188 of the cases were substantiated as some form of child abuse or neglect, in other words, about 19%. This means that over 80% of the referrals were either immediately screened out or eventually found to be unsubstantiated. 42,670 children were removed from their homes by California CPS agents that year. Of those children, 11,308 children were removed from their homes though charges were found to be unsubstantiated. All these statistics can be found on the Federal Health and Human Services website.

All of the laws I mentioned must be repealed to make the nation safe for families again. My belief is that the laws started as a socialist-agenda jobs-creation program, to provide jobs for unemployed college graduates at the expense of the solidarity of American families. In particular, low-income families or those with "special needs" children were made primary targets for federal funding purposes, however families with a good income can quickly be financially devastated by having CPS bring charges against them. Before these laws, true child abuse was handled by law-enforcement agencies. I advocate a return to that policy, without all the funding that encourages CPS snatching of children from families without criminal charges ever being warranted or filed.

Parents who claim to be falsely accused and family-rights activists state that many of the court-ordered separations of families at the urging of social workers are done on trivial charges that often don't include actual abuse or neglect. These cases are heard behind the closed doors of juvenile court, where press and public are not allowed in to see if justice is truly being done. United States Constitutional rights to a jury and open courtroom are not honored. Parents are often not adequately represented by counsel and most of them are encouraged by overworked court-appointed attorneys to sign their rights away without an actual trial. Most of the cases do not go to criminal courts because there's not enough evidence to prosecute them "beyond a reasonable doubt"; the standard of proof used in juvenile court is much lower - a "preponderance of the evidence" - sometimes consisting of social worker opinions, or the opinions of psychologists hired by the social welfare agency.

The fallout from all this is that children, horribly traumatized by the separation from their parents at too young an age, are often put on strong psychotropic medications to control their "attachment disorders". By medicating them, the state, county, fosterers and adopters benefit because the children are then classified as "special needs" (worth more money).

Children held in state custody situations are actually more at risk of abuse - studies have shown that children in state custody, including those in foster homes, are 8 to 10 times more at risk of abuse than children in their natural family homes. Many children in foster homes ended up dead or permanently injured, and the state of California has been ordered to pay out millions of dollars in settlements for this over the last few years to children and their families. In a growing trend, Americans are fleeing to Canada as refugees from this nation's abuse of families, and complaints are being filed with the United Nations Human Rights Commission because our lawmakers have not listened to us.

I don't wish this to sound like a criticism of our local Siskiyou County child protection agency. The problem, of which local 'child-savers' are a very small part, is nationwide. The solution is to contact federal level legislators and request a change in child protection laws so that problems in natural families can be worked out without separating the children from their homes of origin.