Child Abuse Laws: Legally Abducting Children by Broadening the Definition of “Child Abuse”

September 5, 2012
by Dr. Mercola
Child abuse is a horrific act, no matter how you define it.

That’s why we have so many laws, and public and private agencies, set up specifically with the charge to protect children and maintain their safety. It’s exactly why so much funding is directed toward this goal.

But did you know that the money funneled to states and child protective services actually encourages them to accuse you of child abuse and even murder, and to take your children, even if you’re not guilty, and even though they have absolutely no proof that you harmed your child?

The Legal Abduction of Children

Horrendous as it sounds, it’s true: child abuse has become a business – an industry of sorts – that actually pays states to legally abduct your children and put them up for adoption!

Even more unbelievable is that, instead of pumping the money back into child protective service programs, some states actually are putting it into their general funds to help balance their budgets.

A number of groups have tried to reform this shady practice, but it was a California politician who caught media attention this past summer, when he said that, if elected, he would expose how local governments were amassing billions of dollars in annual reimbursements, in exchange for what amounted to legal abduction of children.
“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.”

About the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA)

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 encouragedmore 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 moremoney 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 .

Not Enough Abused Children? Change the Definition of Child Abuse

This certainly is a convoluted way to stop child abuse, if for no other reason than it’s a form of child abuse to tear families apart and take children away from parents who are accused of doing something they didn’t do. It also doesn’t explain one of the newer definitions of child abuse that came along after CAPTA was enacted, Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).

Reliable statistics on SBS do not exist, but according to the National Shaken Baby Coalition (NSBC), as many as 1,500 babies a year are shaken by their parents, and either severely injured or killed.

While the numbers may not seem exceedingly large, they still add another arena in which CPS can seize children from their parents, and place them in adoptive homes – and claim the booty that the federal government gives them for doing this.

On the Backs of Children, an Industry Based on Child Abuse has Arisen

In San Diego, CPS proudly announced that due to their efforts, child abuse reports had gone down. But again, Van Doorn busted them – the numbers went down, he said, because the public had begun to catch on to the county’s recent court casesthey’d lost in conjunction with false child abuse allegations.

When you apply this same thinking to the national statistics, it makes you wonder how many other states and local municipalities are dealing with false allegations.

The truth is staggering, according to Hart, and is so prevalent that countless blogs have popped up addressing the problem, as well asentire websites devoted to helping people who’ve been falsely accused of child abuse.

Shaken Baby Syndrome – A Convenient Catch-All to Steal Babies Away?

Shaken Baby Syndrome has become an industry in itself, according to Dr. Edward Yazbak, a physician who has devoted the past 10 years to studying the issue and testifying as an expert witness on behalf of parents he believes are innocent of this crime.
“This is an inverted pyramid,” Yazbak says. “It’s an idea that has been added to and added to, but does not stand to science.

This shaken baby business has come out of nowhere and become an epidemic, and it’s the other side that’s making money – the child protective services, the funding, the grants that all these people get.

It’s obviously a very popular and passionate thing with them. But they’re literally convicting people before they’re even accused. It’s the only crime in the world like this, and many of these parents are perfectly innocent.”

A short Internet search can show you what Dr. Yazbak is talking about. Hundreds of private adoption agencies around the nation are totally dependent on public welfare services supplying them with children – and funds – to keep their “businesses” going.

Likewise, hundreds of state, county and community agencies and governmental jobs are dependent on the same thing – legally abducting children to pay for the programs that have sprung up in the name of protecting children.

Again, the numbers tell the story:

In 1990, two years after CAPTA was created, nearly 2.6 million children nationwide were reported as abused and/or neglected, and referred for investigation.  Despite the law, six years later, in 1996, 3 million children were reportedly abused, and under CPS “investigations.” Today the number varies, depending on how federal authorities define child abuse. Under one definition, statistics show that the numbers have dropped by nearly a third.

But with a “more inclusive” definition, the numbers have stayed the same at about 3 million – or about 1 in every 25 children. In a 2010 report to Congress, the Administration on Children & Families explained how the numbers figure in the face of other data showing a decline in child abuse.

But no matter how you interpret them, or whether the numbers have the stayed the same or dropped, the Congressional report doesn’t explain why the President and Congress have continued to inflate budgets with more money to take children away from their families.

So what can you or I do about it?

According to Hart, this is an issue that can’t be fixed with a single article or a few phone calls. It’s a national problem that’s gone on for decades, that needs local and federal pushes to change the laws that made these injustices possible.

Coincidentally, CAPTA is up for renewal in 2011, with billions more of your money proposed for the kinds of child abuse “prevention” that I’ve talked about here.

In an effort to change this, I encourage you to study the links I’ve included in this article, and then contact your legislators and ask them to take a closer look at the monster that CAPTA has created.

While sunsetting the law or stopping its funding is probably only a dream, Hart believes it’s possible that with enough pressure, you can lobby to have the “immunity” clause removed from this, so that at the very least, agencies who falsely accuse parents of child abuse can’t do so without being held responsible.

References:

National Commission on Children, Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda for Children and Families, (Washington, DC: May, 1991) p.290.

Read the entire article here: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/02/05/legal-child-abduction.aspx

Copyright Dr. Joseph Mercola, 2011. All Rights Reserved.

http://healthimpactnews.com/2011/child-abuse-laws-legally-abducting-children-by-broadening-the-definition-of-child-abuse/

Child Protective Services Truth ( Shocking )

Donations?

Hello,

I'm writing to clear a few things up for people. There are certain people who clearly just don't understand. My wife and I aren't making money off of donations. The Causes donation to the Right --> is a charity donation to the Vitamin D Council. The picture is my facebook profile image. So for those who wish to throw accusations that We're "exploiting" my daughter for money... Do some research. We aren't taking money, we are just supporting the donation of money to an important cause. Next time do some RESEARCH before you throw out fraudulent accusations. Thank you.

For the rest of you who actually care about family values and the importance of bonding, I urge you to support the "Cause" to the right. As you can see, the government even likes to twist donations and charities against families that support them. Again, I urge you to at least look at our cause and think for yourself. Best of luck to you.

The 'experts' who break up families:

The terrifying story of the prospective MP branded an unfit mother by experts who'd never met her - a nightmare shared by many other families

By SUE REID

PUBLISHED: 17:45 EST, 28 March 2012 | UPDATED: 20:52 EST, 28 March 2012

Ordeal: Lucy Allan with her adored son, whose identity we are protecting

A little over a year ago, Lucy Allan led what most people would regard as an eminently respectable life. The middle-class mother, a Tory councillor, was happily married to her stockbroker husband, Robin, and doted on their ten-year-old son, who loved going to school and was a passionate cricketer.

Indeed, such was Mrs Allan’s standing in the community that this accountant and former investment banker was on David Cameron’s A-list of potential MPs and a prospective Conservative candidate at the last election. She devoted her spare time to her council duties. Twice a month, she sat on the local fostering panel, which oversaw the removal of children from their parents and placed them with new families.

It was heart-rending work, as she recalls. ‘At each fostering meeting we were presented with horrifying cases of abusive parents, almost always depicted as “substance abusers”, mentally unstable or “unable to put the needs of their children over their own needs”.

‘Often, this portrayal was supported by an expert report from a psychiatrist, psychologist or medical doctor,’ says Lucy.

‘It never occured to me, or any member of the panel, that the information we were presented with might be a distorted, twisted fiction — or that the reports were anything other than independent.’

Now, her view has changed. She suspects that many of the damning reports were written by experts who had never met the families in question, to suit the wishes of social workers under pressure from the Government to increase the number of children adopted.

As a result of this process, more and more children are being taken into state foster care.

So why has her faith in the system she once facilitated been shattered? Because, thanks to a bewildering chain of events, this eloquent, educated woman found herself under attack from social workers and fighting to stop her own son being taken into care.

More...

• Social workers took away our baby for nine months: With no evidence against them, couple were banned from looking after their son

Hers is a Kafkaesque story involving family experts who passed judgment on her fitness as a mother without, in some cases, even meeting her.

Lucy’s story is particularly disturbing in the light of a report released this month which found that decisions about the futures of thousands of children are being based on flawed evidence from well-paid ‘experts’, some of whom are unqualified and, time and again, never meet the families concerned.

The damning study by Professor Jane Ireland, a forensic psychologist, examined more than 127 expert witness reports used in family court cases in three areas of England. She found that 90 per cent were produced by clinicians who no longer practise, but instead earn their living entirely as ‘professional expert witnesses’ paid for by council social work departments. Sixty-five per cent of the reports were poorly or very poorly carried out.

This has led to accusations from MPs, lawyers and families that many of the experts are on a gravy train — ‘hired guns’ paid to write precisely what social workers want to read.

This month the Mail reported how just such an accusation has been levelled against one leading psychiatrist, Dr George Hibbert — who faces allegations that he deliberately misdiagnosed parents as having mental disorders, which led to them having their children taken by social services.

John Hemming, a Lib Dem MP who is calling for a national inquiry into the use of expert testimonies in family court hearings, says this dubious system has resulted in families being torn apart and hundreds of children being wrongly taken for adoption from innocent parents.

It is a scenario Lucy Allan feared could happen with her own son. Her nightmare began last March when, aged 46, and having begun to feel depressed for no apparent reason, she decided to go to see a doctor.

‘I am close to my son, so I was worried that he knew I was feeling sad. I went to my local GP surgery expecting to be given a course of anti-depressants and then feel better,’ she recalls.

She was seen by a young female locum, who listened to what Lucy had to say, and then told her she wanted to refer her to social services to ‘see if the family needed support’.

The locum turned to Dr Peter Green, a consultant forensic physician and head of child safeguarding in Wandsworth, South London, where Lucy lives. A flamboyant figure with flowing grey hair and a penchant for bow ties, he has written thousands of reports for the family courts.

According to documents seen by the Allan family, Dr Green told the locum his view was that Lucy was ‘very self-centred’ — this despite the fact he had never set eyes on Lucy or spoken to her. (When she later complained about the conclusions he had drawn without even having seen her, the doctor is alleged to have told her he had relied on a ‘gut feel’).

Families torn apart: Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has called for a nationwide inquiry into the use of expert testimonies in family court hearings

To Lucy’s horror, following Dr Green’s assessment, the locum informed social services that Lucy’s son was at significant risk of harm from his mother.

Thus it was that a woman whose job it had been to make decisions on the fostering panel about which children should be removed from their families suddenly found herself under the most intense scrutiny.

‘Instead of reading reports on another mother’s “emotionally abused” child or her “chaotic” home life, I was reading the same accusations in reports about me and my family,’ she says.

Social services insisted they interview her son, but as the inquiry unfolded, the evidence from his teachers suggested he was happy and thriving. An independent report from a NHS psychiatrist also said Lucy was ‘no risk to anyone, including her son’.

But social services hired their own psychiatrist from the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, south-west London — at taxpayers’ expense naturally.

‘Instead of reading reports on another mother’s “emotionally abused” child or her “chaotic” home life, I was reading the same accusations in reports about me and my family’

 Lucy Allan

Without meeting Lucy or her son, and based only on information provided by social services, the private psychiatrist stated in an ‘expert’ report that there was an ‘urgent need’ for the assessment and treatment of Lucy.

The psychiatrist added that there was ‘no way’ her depression would not have a ‘significant impact on her parenting’.

As the investigation dragged on, Lucy underwent a series of interviews by social services and by experts paid by them to examine her and her family. Many of their subsequent reports, says Lucy, were inaccurate, biased and took her family’s words out of context.

For example, her son had mentioned that when he got off the school bus, he always asked Lucy how she was, but this was described in one report as: ‘Her son demonstrates inappropriate anxiety for the wellbeing of his mother on a daily basis.’

When Lucy admitted taking sleeping pills for insomnia and diazepam for anxiety, another report on her said such ‘drug abuse would make her barely conscious on a daily basis’.

Her confession of sharing a bottle of wine with husband Robin most nights was written up as ‘alcohol abuse’, and the risk of Lucy harming her son was deemed to be ‘substantiated’.

All this begs the question of how often such judgments are passed down by ‘experts’ and social workers on those less well equipped than Lucy to defend themselves.

She has spent the past year trying to clear her name, paid out £10,000 on legal fees and has had to pull herself off the A-list of David Cameron’s potential Tory candidates, quit as a school governor, and, of course, resign from the fostering panel. ‘I am now ineligible for the Criminal Record Bureau check required for working with children or young people,’ she says sadly. Her son’s social services records state that she was once considered a ‘risk’ to him, and it will remain on his file till he is 18.

Finally, at Christmas, the council’s social services said officially no action was required concerning Lucy. She is trying to rebuild her life with the help of husband Robin — who, incredibly, was never interviewed by social services — but still fears she could come under scrutiny again.

'Alcohol abuse': Social Services' verdict on Lucy's confession that she and her husband shared a bottle most evenings

‘The system is designed to silence people,’ she says. ‘I have been prescribed anti-depressants and I am better. But at the back of my mind is the fear that if I complain too loudly about the child protection system they will be back at my door.’

No doubt she would agree with Nigel Priestley, a lawyer involved in family law, who said recently: ‘Just about the most draconian act the state can carry out is to remove a family’s child. What is at stake is the loss of their children, and on the basis of a report which might, or might not be, questionable.’

Those who write these reports — often psychologists or psychiatrists, but also medical doctors and consultants — do not face the glare of public scrutiny precisely because of the secrecy of the family court system. Lucy can describe her ordeal only because her case never got as far as those closed courts — no parent who appears at one of these hearings, which operate in every town and city in the land, is allowed to speak to anyone later about what has happened there, even to their own MP.

Every year, 200 mothers or fathers are jailed for ‘contempt of court’ for breaking this silence — while the same family courts request the removal of 225 children each week, 97 per cent of whom are never returned to their families.

Now, there are demands for an American-style ‘class’ legal action against the Government by parents who have had dubious or even bogus reports written about them. Paul Grant, a legal adviser at Bernard Chill & Axtell Solicitors in Southampton, says devastated parents have contacted him after his firm took on the case of a mother, known only as Miss A, who claims she was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder by psychiatrist Dr George Hibbert because social workers wanted her baby adopted.

Now, Hibbert could be struck off by the General Medical Council, which is investigating extraordinary suggestions that he deliberately misdiagnosed ‘caring’ mothers as having ‘personality disorders’ in order to help social workers take away children.

When he was confronted with the allegation about Miss A, Hibbert offered to surrender his licence to practise as a doctor.

This week, his spokesman said he is ‘unable to comment due to his professional duty of confidentiality’. But I have learned that Porsche-driving Dr Hibbert amassed up to half-a-million pounds a year from his work as an expert witness, and from his reports on parents and children for social services departments.

Accounts for his company, Assessment in Care Ltd, show that profits soared from £23,000 in 2001 to a peak of £468,000 in 2007. It is now worth £2.7million, according to Companies’ House records.

Paul Grant says that Miss A’s distressing case ‘may be the tip of a very large iceberg’. He adds: ‘We contend that when a practising clinician becomes a professional expert witness with a private company, there is no registration process, and no machinery to vet what they do.

‘By failing to put in a regulatory framework, we would argue that the state is failing to protect families under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which says everyone has the right to a private and family life.’

As Dr Hibbert’s professional conduct comes under scrutiny, it is emerging that he is not the only one whose actions are being questioned.

The Mail has been contacted by scores of parents who believe they have been mistreated on the word of these ‘experts’. We have been told by lawyers about clinicians charging £1,800 a day to appear at family courts, on top of the thousands of pounds a time they receive for writing the reports, which often contain lies, ambiguities and insinuations.

One mother said she had her children taken away because an ‘expert’ said she ‘liked shopping’; another was criticised as mentally unfit for ‘burning the toast’, and lost her child, too.

In another case, an expert was paid handsomely to write a report based on the observations of a social worker who said a five-year-old girl was ‘monosyllabic’.

‘By failing to put in a regulatory framework, we would argue that the state is failing to protect families under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which says everyone has the right to a private and family life’

Paul Grant, legal adviser at Bernard Chill & Axtell Solicitors

Yet we are told a secret tape recording of the social worker’s interview showed the child chatting away about school, her family and her home. The little girl has since been removed from her mother.

We have also been told about a gregarious 47-year-old business adviser in the north of England who had to fight to keep her five-year-old daughter after being labelled a ‘totally isolated schizoid’ by a psychologist, who we understand is trained only to treat children, and should never have been involved in the analysis of adult behaviour.

The psychologist in question (who writes up to 100 expert reports a year) charged £6,000 for his written opinion on the mother, her husband and child. Yet the mother says she was given no chance to deny the ‘schizoid’ report — and kept her girl by the skin of her teeth only after the child’s nanny vouched for her parenting skills.

In another extraordinary case, after a woman was found by a psychologist to be a ‘competent mother’, the social workers are said to have insisted on commissioning a second expert’s report. It agreed with the first.

They then commissioned a third, which finally found that the mother had a ‘borderline personality disorder’. All three of her children were taken away for adoption.

So how have such apparent travesties been allowed to go on virtually unchecked in child protection?

Knee-jerk reaction? Since the harrowing case of baby Peter Connelly more youngsters than ever before in British history are being removed from families every week

No other country in Western Europe removes so many children from their parents. The numbers taken into care — the first step towards adoption — have doubled in a decade to more than 10,000 a year.

The last Labour government set adoption targets and rewarded local councils with hundreds of thousands of pounds if they reached them.

The targets have been scrapped after protests from MPs and lawyers, but the dangerous legacy persists. Social workers now get praise and promotion if they raise adoption numbers. David Cameron is also demanding more adoptions — and that they are fast-tracked.

Since the case of 17-month-old Baby P, more youngsters than ever before in British history are being removed from families every week. Many say this is a knee-jerk reaction, which is probably true. But it’s not the whole story.

‘It’s time the criminal rules of justice applied in the family courts. We need parents to be considered innocent until proven guilty’

 Ian Joseph, author and expert on forced adoption

It is the 1989 Children Act — which introduced a blanket secrecy in the family courts — that is the real culprit. It encouraged a lack of public scrutiny in the child protection system and what MP John Hemming calls the ‘twaddle and psychobabble’ peddled there, which has caused dreadful miscarriages of justice.

Ian Joseph, who has written a book on forced adoption, told me this week: ‘It’s time the criminal rules of justice applied in the family courts. We need parents to be considered innocent until proven guilty and also be free to talk about what is happening in those courts without being thrown into jail.’

Until that happens, hundreds more children may be seized from their families on the word of experts — many of whom are either not qualified or are receiving huge sums of money to play God.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121886/The-experts-break-families-The-terrifying-story-prospective-MP-branded-unfit-mother-experts-whod-met--nightmare-shared-families.html#ixzz1qUBeSM3t

The Child Abuse Laws Which Could Destroy Your Reputation

By Dr. Mercola

Child abuse is a horrific act, no matter how you define it.

That's why we have so many laws, and public and private agencies, set up specifically with the charge to protect children and maintain their safety. It's exactly why so much funding is directed toward this goal.

But did you know that the money funneled to states and child protective services actually encourages them to accuse you of child abuse and even murder, and to take your children, even if you're not guilty, and even though they have absolutely no proof that you harmed your child?

The Legal Abduction of Children

Horrendous as it sounds, it's true: child abuse has become a business - an industry of sorts - that actually pays states to legally abduct your children and put them up for adoption!

Even more unbelievable is that, instead of pumping the money back into child protective service programs, some states actually are putting it into their general funds to help balance their budgets.

A number of groups have tried to reform this shady practice, but it was a California politician who caught media attention this past summer, when he said that, if elected, he would expose how local governments were amassing billions of dollars in annual reimbursements, in exchange for what amounted to legal abduction of children.

"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."

About the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA)

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."¹

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 toFlorida 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 .

Not Enough Abused Children? Change the Definition of Child Abuse

This certainly is a convoluted way to stop child abuse, if for no other reason than it's a form of child abuse to tear families apart and take children away from parents who are accused of doing something they didn't do. It also doesn't explain one of the newer definitions of child abuse that came along after CAPTA was enacted, Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).

Reliable statistics on SBS do not exist, but according to the National Shaken Baby Coalition (NSBC), as many as 1,500 babies a year are shaken by their parents, and either severely injured or killed.

While the numbers may not seem exceedingly large, they still add another arena in which CPS can seize children from their parents, and place them in adoptive homes - and claim the booty that the federal government gives them for doing this.

On the Backs of Children, an Industry Based on Child Abuse has Arisen

In San Diego, CPS proudly announced that due to their efforts, child abuse reports had gone down. But again, Van Doorn busted them - the numbers went down, he said, because the public had begun to catch on to the county's recent court cases they'd lost in conjunction with false child abuse allegations.

When you apply this same thinking to the national statistics, it makes you wonder how many other states and local municipalities are dealing with false allegations.

The truth is staggering, according to Hart, and is so prevalent that countless blogs have popped upaddressing the problem, as well as entire websites devoted to helping people who've been falsely accused of child abuse.

Shaken Baby Syndrome - A Convenient Catch-All to Steal Babies Away?

Shaken Baby Syndrome has become an industry in itself, according to Dr. Edward Yazbak, a physician who has devoted the past 10 years to studying the issue and testifying as an expert witness on behalf of parents he believes are innocent of this crime.

"This is an inverted pyramid," Yazbak says. "It's an idea that has been added to and added to, but does not stand to science.

This shaken baby business has come out of nowhere and become an epidemic, and it's the other side that's making money - the child protective services, the funding, the grants that all these people get.

It's obviously a very popular and passionate thing with them. But they're literally convicting people before they're even accused. It's the only crime in the world like this, and many of these parents are perfectly innocent."

A short Internet search can show you what Dr. Yazbak is talking about. Hundreds of private adoption agencies around the nation are totally dependent on public welfare services supplying them with children - and funds - to keep their "businesses" going.

Likewise, hundreds of state, county and community agencies and governmental jobs are dependent on the same thing - legally abducting children to pay for the programs that have sprung up in the name of protecting children.

Again, the numbers tell the story:

In 1990, two years after CAPTA was created, nearly 2.6 million children nationwide were reported as abused and/or neglected, and referred for investigation.  Despite the law, six years later, in 1996, 3 million children were reportedly abused, and under CPS "investigations." Today the number varies,depending on how federal authorities define child abuse. Under one definition, statistics show that the numbers have dropped by nearly a third.

But with a "more inclusive" definition, the numbers have stayed the same at about 3 million - or about 1 in every 25 children. In a 2010 report to Congress, the Administration on Children & Families explained how the numbers figure in the face of other data showing a decline in child abuse.

But no matter how you interpret them, or whether the numbers have the stayed the same or dropped, the Congressional report doesn't explain why the President and Congress have continued to inflate budgets with more money to take children away from their families.

So what can you or I do about it?

According to Hart, this is an issue that can't be fixed with a single article or a few phone calls. It's a national problem that's gone on for decades, that needs local and federal pushes to change the laws that made these injustices possible.

Coincidentally, CAPTA is up for renewal in 2011, with billions more of your money proposed for the kinds of child abuse "prevention" that I've talked about here.

In an effort to change this, I encourage you to study the links I've included in this article, and then contact your legislators and ask them to take a closer look at the monster that CAPTA has created.

While sunsetting the law or stopping its funding is probably only a dream, Hart believes it's possible that with enough pressure, you can lobby to have the "immunity" clause removed from this, so that at the very least, agencies who falsely accuse parents of child abuse can't do so without being held responsible.

References:

1 National Commission on Children, Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda for Children and Families, (Washington, DC: May, 1991) p.290.