Good experiences with CFS? How to help children in need?

[Blue Mountain]

Around here they were trying to get some support in place so that kids aging out get a hand with finding an apartment & job & the essentials of life instead of just being shown the door at 18. Of course, that was before the recession, so I doubt it still exists.

I've noticed CPS seems to be funded in waves. A child dies, the media clamors, the legislature throws money at CPS to hire more workers and effect more programs. As the hoopla settles, the budget for CPS is cut, and cut, and cut again, until everything is back where it started. Rinse & repeat, ad nauseam.

I've called CPS once, on a mother who belted her kid hard enough to leave a cut under his eye, in the middle of the toy store where I worked. She then demanded we call the police on the kid, who was pale, teary, and shaking with fear, and refused to let him get in the car (in a Canadian winter). My managers refused to get involved and told me I wasn't allowed to call them either.

So I copied her address off her cheque, and phoned from a pay phone on my lunch break, asking if someone could contact me that evening at home. I know nothing about what happened from there, but the worker did tell me she was well-known to them.

*That* is the sort of time I think they should definitely be involved.

Interesting that she was well-known to them, but still involved in raising her son.

On the other hand, my kids and I ended up in the system because one kid's counselor decided I was neglecting his autism - because I refused to take him to a Body Talk practitioner that she recommended. So I jumped through everyone's hoops, did parenting evaluations and all the other things they wanted to prove I was a fit parent, and we went back to court to get back out of the system, with the caseworker saying everything was peachy. But the judge disagreed.

Because the caseworker's notes mentioned that my teenage son hadn't showered that day and had armpit odor, the judge refused to close the case and we had to spend another 3 months in the system. The caseworker, who was actually a pretty decent woman, was appalled and apologetic. At least since everything had already been done, we all just sat quietly for 3 months with token visits, my son scrubbed himself half-raw before the next evaluation, and we were set free, so to speak.

While it's nice to hear it turned out all right, what I find strange about this anecdote is the judge refusing the return back to normalcy over the caseworker's advice. And a teen-aged boy with some body odour? Yikes! What would they think if he was really out there, with long hair, the unshaved start of a beard, and baggy clothes?

But what a huge mess that was, and what a waste of money when there were kids in the system who actually *needed* the time and money. Perhaps they could have gotten around to the woman who was found in a drunken stupor with one of her children dead of starvation & dehydration, and the other close to death.

And all because I wouldn't accept the woo.

Again, another tale of interference in an otherwise normal family siphoning resources away from a family that really needed it.

 

[deadrose]

Her reasoning was that if I were actually managing the family well, I would have forced him to shower. Apparently she never had a 13-year-old boy in the house.

 

[DragonLady]

Okay; I've read most of the enquiry report. I haven't finished; there's been a lot of family stuff going on here, and so I took a break from it before reading about all the changes that have been made to the CFS agency, so some of what I'm saying here may not be applicable now.

I think.... CFS (CPS, or whatever it is in your area) is necessary, because I think prevention of child abuse and neglect is better than prosecuting it after it happens. To that end, I believe that should be a primary goal of the agency.

I wonder if it wouldn't be better if the agency was split into separate branches.... One to prevent child abuse, one to investigate claims, and one devoted to deciding what happens to children while parents are investigated -or prosecuted. Unfortunately, the agency as it is already fails on so many levels so often breaking it up may only make the situation worse.

I do believe that before children can be permanently removed from a home, a parent should be prosecuted. If CFS investigates a claim and finds probable cause, they should call the police. If a parent can be arrested on the spot, that should happen -then the children can be removed to a safe place. If the parents haven't broken any laws, the most CFS should be able to do is remove the children for a short period of time while working with the parents to prevent any potential harm.

As it is, they remove children from parents they suspect might be guilty of abuse, and/or parents they know to be guilty -but they don't take any further steps to prevent any further abuse in the first case, nor any steps to prevent a guilty person from doing more harm in the future.

That doesn't work in any other scenario. Can you imagine:

Adam 12 to dispatch: We have a creepy lookin' dude here. We think he might have robbed a convenience store.
Dispatch: Why do you believe that?
Adam 12: Well, he's creepy looking. And he has Skittles in his pocket.
Dispatch: Right. Do you have any reports of stolen Skittles?
Adam 12: No; but we have plenty of complaints about his creepy looks.
Dispatch: Right. Take the Skittles.

or

Adam 12 to dispatch: We have two guys here just robbed a convenience store. We have video evidence, and the Skittles are in their pockets.
Dispatch: Roger. Take the Skittles, then drive the pair to Hicksville and drop them off.
Adam 12: Excuse me???
Dispatch: That's correct. There are no convenience stores in Hicksville, and no one needs Skittles. Just drop 'em off and go find someone really creepy.

But that's how CFS operates. They're always off the rails one direction or the other -usually the wrong direction.

Instead of preventing child abuse, they piss off parents, alienate the kids, traumatize everyone involved, and then just disappear into the sunset the day the kids come of age or a parent moves out or a file gets closed. There's no recognition of the fact that pissed off parents are no less likely to be abusive (or if they are, I've seen no evidence of it; correct me if I'm wrong), no acknowledgement that kids need both parents and protecting them includes services that help keep families together, and no follow-up for those who have been damaged by their ineptness, so the whole cycle starts over again with the next generation.

 

[luchog]

Instead of preventing child abuse, they piss off parents, alienate the kids, traumatize everyone involved, and then just disappear into the sunset the day the kids come of age or a parent moves out or a file gets closed. There's no recognition of the fact that pissed off parents are no less likely to be abusive (or if they are, I've seen no evidence of it; correct me if I'm wrong), no acknowledgement that kids need both parents and protecting them includes services that help keep families together, and no follow-up for those who have been damaged by their ineptness, so the whole cycle starts over again with the next generation.

My experiences have been similarly bad; since I was around when deadrose had the run-in with the woo nutcases who took her kids. What she failed to mention was that the counselor who reported her for refusing to have her son's autism "cured" (and who her son was required to see because he was receiving assistance for his disability) had a friend in the CPS department who was also a fan of the pseudo-science woo; and effectively engineered the whole fiasco. He was actually a department supervisor, and my personal observation of him was that he was a typical power-tripping pompous bureaucrat.

That's a big part of the problem. Not the budgets, but that it's a big bloated government bureaucracy with little oversight, lots of waste, and the powers that be are there because they like the power, not because they're good at their jobs. The people who are good at their jobs are farther down the food chain, and the turnover is very high because they don't get anything like decent support from their superiors. They either leave for a more lucrative private practice; or they burn out due to the high levels of stress coming at them from both sides, and get bitter and resentful.

Because of all that, there's a great deal of impetus to only deal with the low-hanging fruit. The parents who are in bad situations, who are overwhelmed but not necessarily bad parents; or who are are mentally ill, and having difficulty coping with it (there is increasing evidence that one of the biggest drivers of drug addiction is self-medicating for undiagnosed mental illness). Parents they know are going to be compliant with a minimal amount of oversight, who are easily cowed, who aren't going to violently resist, who aren't going to require a lot of time and resources to deal with.

Before I met deadrose; a girl I was dating live a few houses down from a classic example of the need for CPS, and a classic exampleof their failure to be useful. The woman who lived there had a number of children who were effectively feral. People would see the toddler sitting in the yard for hours crusted with feces and crying; the other children running around with sores and looking badly malnourished. The woman herself was abusive and violent, and could be heard screaming at the children constantly. CPS was called about the house repeatedly, showed up occasionally, but nothing ever changed. No police ever came to remove the children from the home the way they did with deadrose's autistic son.

As for a solution, I have no idea. I know anytime the government gets involved, it's going to go straight downhill eventually, because anything the government does always ends up mired in bloated, ineffectual bureaucracies rife with waste, demagoguery, and internecine politics.