CPS Being Paid to BreakUp Families? | Gather

CPS Being Paid to BreakUp Families? | Gather
by Marilyn M.
Member since:
February 14, 2007

CPS Being Paid to BreakUp Families?
February 05, 2011 06:56 PM EST (Updated: February 05, 2011 07:05 PM EST)
views: 117 | 9 people recommend this | comments: 17
Do you remember when the politician in California caught media attention talking about the corruption of CPS? He said that if he was elected, he would show how local governments were benefiting - big time - for the "legal" abduction of children.

From: The Child Abuse Laws Which Could Destroy Your Reputation

"Most people are not aware of how much profit many of these services provide the county," John Van Doorn told a San Diego newspaper. "These profits are hard to ignore and even more difficult to pass up.

Counties can bring in thousands of dollars in excess revenue for each child in foster care, Van Doorn said – which means they have more incentive to remove children from their families than to keep families intact. "As such … our county government is a major factor in the dismantling of families and/or destruction of children's lives," he said.
He then cited San Diego CPS for "egregious behaviors" that included accusing parents of child abuse without any evidence.
The ugly truth is that San Diego isn't the only community where false accusations of child abuse occur. Across the nation, the practice has become so blatant that some of the leading experts on child abuse and foster care have started to cry "foul."

Here's only part of the story:

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) is the federal law on which almost all state and local legislation and funding for child protective services are based. Enacted in 1988, CAPTA directs the U.S. Health and Human Services' Administration for Children & Families to provide grants to communities for child abuse prevention programs.

As a federal mandate, CAPTA mandates states to implement child abuse laws on their own, so they can align themselves for the massive funding and grants that go along with the law.
In theory as the years went by, if the goal for this law – to reduce child abuse in this country – had been successful, then today we should need less funding for these programs, not more. Success also should have resulted in fewer children in foster care and even fewer being put up for adoption.

But in reality, the opposite happened. Instead of less children in foster care, the numbers went up for nine years after CAPTA was passed. And, layers and layers of state and federal government programs and agencies whose funding depends solely on child abuse occurring were created.

In 1999 foster care numbers started dropping – but only because of new laws that encouraged states to move children out of foster care and into adoptive homes.

Of course, that legislation came with funding too, giving CPS a new avenue for making more money and creating more jobs and more programs. The tragedy is what Van Doorn pointed out in his campaign: the financial incentives for rooting out child abuse actually encourage agencies to make false accusations against parents, and to tear families apart for something that did not occur.

How this Law Actually has Increased Child Abuse Reports

What happened in San Diego is not an anomaly, nor is it new. In 1991, the bi-partisan National Commission on Children had already figured out that children were being taken from their families "prematurely or unnecessarily" because federal formulas give states "a strong financial incentive" to do so rather than provide services to keep families together."

As a result, the federal government and a number of states created legislation that was supposed to keep more families together. But as the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) reports, those efforts only disrupted more families, and encouraged more adoptions.

Again, the reason is financial: the new laws give "bounties to states of up to $8,000 or more per child for every adoption they finalize over a baseline number," NCCPR reports. And again, all the help goes to foster and adoptive parents. "About the only parents the federal government won't help indefinitely are birth parents," NCCPR found.

But the injustices don't stop there, because in order to get that money, states have to have children to take away and place – and therein lies the incentive to falsely accuse parents of harming their children and to forcibly remove children even when there is no evidence to do so.

"CPS nationally are doing a job they've never been trained to do," says Kim Hart, a trial strategist and facilitator who has been assisting attorneys in defending persons accused of child abuse for more than 18 years. They're investigating people who have never been charged, and calling them child abusers, and taking kids away, and they get paid to do it.
This mechanism is bigger than what most people know. It goes all the way back to the 1980s with legislation that told states they had to develop registries with mandatory child abuse reporting."
The money that follows a child abuse accusation and subsequent placement of the so-called endangered children into foster care or adoption is the real catalyst for the epidemic of child abuse accusations, Hart said.
"And there is no incentive for any physician or anybody involved to be intellectually honest about this because the law also gives them immunity if they're wrong," she said.
"So what happens is that the minute CPS is involved – or the second the EMTs are called (for example, in sudden infant death or alleged shaken baby cases), parents are already labeled as child abusers."

How are States Spending this Extra Money?

According to NCCPR, in FY 2010 the federal government is expected to spend at least $7 more on foster care and $4 more on adoption for every dollar spent to prevent foster care or speed reunification. This is based on President Obama's $4.681 billion foster care budget for FY2010 – an increase of $21 million over FY2009. The number represents a decrease of 4,300 children a month in foster care.
But this decrease is based on "placement of children in more permanent settings." In other words, states are getting more money to take care of fewer children by placing more of them in adoptive homes.
The law also increases incentives for adoption by paying out $1,000 to $8,000 extra for certain types of children who are placed for adoption.
The twist is that states are not required to put this money back in to keeping families intact or even for preventing child abuse. Instead, by law, they can use it for non-child-related things, such as delivering meals to senior citizens or for transportation services, or a range of other home-based services!

In San Diego, Van Doorn couldn't get a direct answer when he demanded that city officials tell him where their $4,000 per adopted child was going. But a look at any state's budget – from Minnesota to Florida to Connecticut and back to California – can tell you that local governments and states are cutting back or flat-lining children's services and using these extra federal dollars to balance their budgets .

Click above to read more.

This might explain how the family in New Jersey had their children taken from them.
A family needing our prayer and support

Abuse is a serious thing and when CPS takes children from their parents for no reason, they are participating in abuse themselves. Besides, while they're busy concentrating on families that don't need help, they are neglecting the children and families who do need help.
This is why the federal government needs to be reduced, not expanded. This would not be happening if there were not "rewards" being issued by the federal government.