CPS Legal Kidnap for Profit

CPS Legal Kidnap for Profit

Child Protective Services (CPS) may go by differing names in various states, but they all practice the fine art of Government Overreach and Bullying.

They have criminalized parents that want nothing more than to raise their children according to their beliefs.

Do you remember the Maryland couple, Alexander and Danielle Meitiv, self described “free-range” parents, who made international news after two run-ins with Child Protective Services? They had decided to let their children, ages 10 and 6, walk to neighborhood parks by themselves. (What a horrible crime!)

The Family Defense Center tells the story of a family put through the ringer for 15 weeks, where the DCFS (another name for CPS) admitted that they did not have evidence of abuse, yet were attempting to take custody of two children. One child had a broken leg, yet without talking to anyone involved, including the hospital’s child abuse pediatrician, the family pediatrician, other family members, friends, or the children’s teachers, DCFS filed a petition to take custody of both children in the Juvenile Court. Due to the help of the Family Defense Center, that case had a happy conclusion when the State’s Attorney voluntarily withdrew the petition.

In 2013, Anna and Alex Nikolayev‘s baby Sammy was seized by Child Protection Services, with the help of local law enforcement, simply because they took their baby to a different hospital to get a second opinion about heart surgery.

In 2011, Maryanne Godboldo, a Detroit homeschooling mother refused to give her child powerful anti-psychotic drugs after she was developmentally disabled due to vaccines. She refused to give up her daughter to Child Protection Services, so they called in a SWAT team and had Maryanne arrested, and seized her daughter.

We do understand that there are many children that need advocates to allow them a normal, happy, healthy life. Yet, the old adage “Absolute Power corrupts absolutely” seems to take on a life of it’s own when it comes to CPS.

Consider the case of Corey Chaney, 25, and April Rogers, 23, of Elizabethtown, KY. They were investigated for child abuse six times before the anonymous calls against them were investigated. A rogue social worker who lived downstairs from Chaney and Rogers knew exactly how CPS works and had it in for her upstairs neighbors. Police finally charged the social worker with six misdemeanor offenses involving the false reports. But, they were only misdemeanors!

And sometimes, there’s no misdemeanor at all. Anyone with a grudge can call the CPS hotline and open an investigation on an ex-girlfriend, a despised relative, an annoying neighbor, and suddenly that target is guilty until proven innocent. The reports, no matter how foolish they sound, are required to be investigated. Yet, in the rare case that someone is found to be using the system for revenge, it is barely a slap on the wrist. The family’s life is in turmoil, sometimes irreparably, yet they have no recourse.

Deanna Fogarty won a $4.9 million judgment against Orange County, after a 6 ½ year battle to regain custody of her children. The case, which went all the way to the US Supreme Court, showed that two county social workers lied to a juvenile court commissioner in order to take away the woman’s two daughters. One of these social workers was later promoted to a supervisor, county officials confirmed. She now trains other social workers.

Then there is the current case of Anthony and Maria Bosworth, of Yakima, Washington. Their teenage daughter was seduced by a 29 year old man. There is ample cause to investigate the boyfriend, and his other adult girlfriends, for illegally giving the teenager prescription medications, convincing the child to run away, and for filing false reports. Instead, CPS, and the over reaching case worker, took custody of the child and is now helping the “boyfriend” to spend nights with the girl. The parents have no recourse. When they tried to stop the abuse, the father was placed in hand cuffs and arrested.

Why is this such a problem? Child Protective Service is big business – to the tune of billions of dollars.

Departmental income has become more important to CPS and their offices than actually finding abused children and protecting them. CPS has a financial incentive to take children into custody and adopt them out rather than return them. Why? They get money from the Federal government for every child in custody, and they get more money if the child is adopted.

So what do you think they do? For one, they are more likely to take children into custody in the first place. And second, they are more interested in taking children they can easily adopt out.

The largest targeted type of families are folks with low incomes, children on SSI and minorities. If you even have one of those three issues, you are a target for CPS to illegally investigate you.

Listen to the testimony of John Van Doorn, who ran for San Diego Supervisor in 2010. The biggest plank of his platform was reforming Child Protective Services:

The single greatest threat to the people of San Diego County is our county’s (as well as the state’s) abuse of Title IV-D programs (Child Protective Services, Child Support Services, foster care and adoptions, VAWA, etc.).

Mandated by federal government, these programs are intended to provide a social safety net for our children and the elderly and a deterrent to domestic violence but instead, they have become a means by which our local governments extract great profits. In exchange for providing these services, the federal government reimburses local governments for the cost of providing these services—at times, greatly in excess of the cost of that service

For instance, in the case of foster care, the present reimbursement to state and local government for each child taken into foster care is approximately $6000/month. Yet the foster care provider (the foster parent) receives only somewhere around $600/month. Allowing about the same for administrative costs, each child in foster care is worth about $5000/month; that’s pure profit on the bottom line!

According to a 2011 AFCARS (the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System) “Yearly, referrals to state child protective services involve 6.3 million children and approximately 3 million of those children are subject to an investigated report.”

According to this report, in 2012, CPS took an estimated 650,000 to one million children from their homes, playground hospitals and parents. The same report suggests that only 6 percent or less (39,000 out of the 650,000 to one million) were in any real danger or “high-risk” environments.

The more children in foster care, the more money a local CPS agency receives from the federal government, with the funds distributed throughout the community. Funding recipients include: teachers, attorneys, doctors, judges, therapists, caseworkers, foster parents, coaches, sub-agencies such as Family First and Head Start, insurance companies, consultants, outside contractors, and watchdog agencies, to name but a few.

There is a profound conflict of interest between those in an authoritative position to protect children (CPS caseworkers and the earlier named affiliates) and the fact that those same people (and their associates) can financially benefit from the act of placing children in foster care.

CPS is a nightmare, and has been since Walter Mondale promoted the Child Abuse and Prevention Act in 1974, that started the money machine called Child Protective Service.

It has little to do with protecting children, and everything to do with lining their pockets. The more families they break up, the more money they make.

ALWAYS Follow the money….

by Shari Dovale