I've been writing about the corruption and profit-motive driven distortions of justice that underpin everything that happens within the so-called "Child Protective" "Services" (CPS) systems of the Western world for six months now, and the one thing I have yet to read about--among the hundreds of horror stories I've examined--is a case where a wealthy or powerful family was persecuted. Now, obviously, I haven't seen every report and read up on every case, but it sure does seem, anecdotally at least, that there is a very clear demarcation between those families that get "served" (like a 100-mph tennis ball right into the net) by CPS, and those families which are, apparently, exempt.
(Image courtesy of aclunebraska.org.)
When "The North American Free Trade Act" (NAFTA) passed back in 1993, this country was said by several conservative commentators to have crossed a line from which there would be no return. NAFTA (which despite the MAGA noise) is still in place, and what it did was essentially create a single large economic region--just like the European Union, but without the openly declared European court system, and super-state apparatus. In becoming wed at the hip with Mexico, these same commentators warned that the corruption of Mexico's bribery-based business paradigm would begin to infuse every level of American and Canadian society.
Looking back across the past quarter century at the current state of affairs in what passes as our "modern democracies" now, I would say that these commentators were right on the money. There is no question that justice is no longer "blind" and that Lady Justice not only no longer wears a blind fold, but she carries a magnifying glass to check people's bank accounts before deciding whether or not to prosecute. The most blatant examples are in the "selective enforcement" by our nations' CPS systems against families depending on their economic status (first) and the "adoptability" of the target children.
(Image courtesy of flick.com)
In preparation for today's article, I examined the available literature looking for studies comparing child seizure rates with economic indicators. Not surprisingly, there is not that much available. In fact, there is more available comparing racial difference in terms of those targeted than there is comparing differences in family income.
Hundreds of CPS critics have made the claim over the decades that CPS targets poor families because they believe that they are the "easy targets," in that they lack the economic clout to hire good legal help, and that they are likely (pardon the bluntness) simply dumber than wealthy families, and thus susceptible to CPS intimidation and misinformation. That all has become such a truism, that it is widely accepted, and even admitted by many former CPS employees.
Now, we do have articles that talk about the different standards that CPS uses when selectively enforcing their policies. Consider this article, for instance:
https://www.scarymommy.com/poor-parents-held-to-different-standard-cps/
Here is an excerpt from the above:
"Ketteringham writes about what she sees every day as a public defender, and what she feels is the real problem with child protective services: 'There is a misconception that the child-protection system is broken because child services fails to protect children from dangerous homes…The problem is not that child services fails to remove enough children. It’s that the agency has not been equipped to address the daily manifestations of economic and racial inequality. Instead, it is designed to treat structural failings as the personal flaws of low-income parents'.”
Essentially, the argument goes that CPS considers poverty itself (i.e. living in a rat infested apartment building in the inner city) as being, a priori, an indicator of abuse. If the parents simply can not afford a better, cleaner building, then--even if not codified anywhere in CPS scrawlings--they are considered "poor parents." i.e. If a rat bites a child, that is considered neglect. Now, as sad as it is that hundreds of thousands of children probably live in rat or roach-filled inner city settings, that, in and of itself, should not be an excuse for seizing children. Indeed, some States have already directly addressed this particular meme, and even federal legislation is pending to distinguish between inescapable poverty and legitimate LEGAL neglect. Fortunately, CPS is being proscribed more and more frequently from equating the two.
(Image courtesy of twitter.com.)
Here is another quote from Ketteringham:
"Ketteringham talked about this disparity, giving her wealthy Park Slope, Brooklyn neighborhood as a comparison: 'In that community, differences in parenting style get the raise of an eyebrow or a disapproving look from a neighbor or a classmate’s parent—for some of the exact same things I see my clients being brought to Child Protective Services for'."
In other words, there is an innate bias FOR wealthy families and against poor families within CPS, and there doesn't seem to be much in terms of training or policy and procedures to address this bias.
We do have a hint of academic support for this bias too, in this article about purported racial biases in terms of which families CPS targets. They admit that black families are targeted at higher rates than white families (in terms of the percentage of the general population) but that when these studies are corrected for the economic/wealth status of the data set, this obvious disparity in the "targeting of black families" either disappears, or results in the conclusions being so muddied as to be unusable.
Have a look:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439815/
This is a government study, I should point out, and here is an excerpt:
"Nonetheless, we believe that a discourse focused predominantly on caseworker bias oversimplifies an assessment and decision-making process in which individuals must weigh evidence (and the relative severity) of acts which have already occurred and contextual factors which are, at best, probabilistically indicative of future harm to a child, all in a context of incomplete information. Hence, the task of sorting out the relative weight of various pieces of information that factor into caseworkers’ decisions and disentangling the unique contribution of caseworker and family race remains especially difficult."
This is a long, very exhaustive study with even Algebra 3 level equations prominently used to make points, and though the target is, admittedly, racial biases, none were proven. While the question/point about the varying economic statuses of CPS-targeted families is alluded to throughout this article, there is no real study of THAT issue available from government sources...at least not that I could find. I am glad no racial bias has been proven, but what I want to know is "WHY IS GOVERNMENT NOT STUDYING THE TARGETING OF THE POOR AND THE "KID GLOVES" TREATMENT OF THE RICH?"
(Image courtesy of chirotexas.org.)
That is the 800-pound gorilla lying on the conference table there at The National Institutes of Health, dropping banana peals on heads of the policy wonks writing reports like the one above, collecting their $150,000+ taxpayer funded salaries, and patting themselves on the back for the thoroughness of their studies into problems at CPS.
It would seem, given the current CPS milieu that for rich parents to be pursued in the same manner as poor families by CPS that there must be horrible proven abuse--either physical or sexual. Even then, given what we've seen (and only The Good Lord knows how much we haven't seen,) for example, in the "prison sentences" given (or not given) to very wealthy pedophiles, it sure appears that the very meaning of "child abuse" depends entirely on the bank accounts and/or political connections of the perpetrators.