Dude. Where have you been? If DSS is talking, you put on a healthy dose of skepticism.
They lie. They cover up. They do not play by the rules you innocently think they do (my dad was for years a supervising social worker for the state of California):

We have given the full power of the state with all that implies to an agency that does not have to follow the same laws and rules of evidence that any other state agency must (CPS), and we have let these people decide what they believe is good parenting or bad, and people have *lost* their kids because the people in this agency have enshrined their middle and upper class post-industrial standards as *the* standards for the rest of us, or because they are in a bad mood, or because they are power mad and parents did not grovel enough, or because the case workers themselves grew up in abusive homes and they don’t have a clue what normal looks like and they are out to rescue the world whether it needs it or not.

Lawyers will tell accused parents there is nothing they can do but roll over and cave to whatever CPS demands of them.

In spite of this, at least four different studies by four different organizations found that CPS gets it wrong about four out of five times- and they get it wrong *both* ways- misjudging the worst homes as decent homes 80 percent of the time, and misjudging decent, safe homes as dangerous and wrongfully removing them about 80 percent of the time.

A friend of mine once told me about friends of hers who had CPS called on them. The children were not abused, nobody made that claim. They were fed and clothed and educated- CPS did not find otherwise. But their house was pretty dirty. They did not lose their children permanently, just for a few days. But then CPS stayed in their lives for the next two years- telling them to do things like clean up the yard, plant grass, paint the fence- in other words- CPS acted as enforcers of a strict suburban housing covenant even when no such covenant existed, and they did this with the constant threat of taking the children always in the background.

There was the kid recently removed for a few days because his professor dad didn’t know that Mike’s Lemonade had alcohol in it- the boy was injured but the dad had to leave the home, hire a lawyer, and call in the press before the judge returned the kid.

There are the 31 pregnant and under-aged minor girls in the FLDS who turned out- every one of them, to be adult women- one 37 years old, and the so-called many cases of broken bones which CPS dropped almost as soon as they said it because the number of broken bones in the FLDS kids was lower than the population (they have ended up with 12 alleged teen brides (not pregnant) out of a population of several hundred in a state with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, a far cry from CPS earlier claims which have all turned out to be lies).

There’s the Wenatchee Witch Hunts, where a rogue cop/foster father abused his foster daughter and got her and her friends to concoct all kinds of outrageous stories against people, and when a minister stood up for them, CPS took his kids, too.

Here’s a Reader’s Digest story about an innocent couple who lost their kid for two years and were totally railroaded by CPS because she had a bone disease.

There’s the Stuths in Washington, loving grandparents who lost their grand-daughter for two years to a substandard foster mother because CPS said they were ‘bossy’ and had given the girl a pacifier against her teen mother’s wishes (the teen wanted her grandparents to have the child)- the state wanted the foster mom to adopt her and told the judge she was a loving, wonderful woman- 24 hours after they’d revoked her license when the woman took her foster kids to ER for the third time in two months and the hospital turned her in for being under the influence. The Stuths just got their grand-daughter back this week, but it might only be temporary. A good Senator got involved in their case and was told by her colleagues it was a career killer, there was no fighting CPS.

There’s so many more cases. Google Richard Wexler and see what his organization has to say. Read The Child Abuse Industry.
Look at the stories here. There’s some links here.

CPS removes kids with no good reason all the time. They call it ‘erring on the side of the child,’ because, of course, it’s always doing a kid a favor to yank him from his home and put him with strangers and not let him know why or when or if he’ll see his parents again.

The dad who has clammed up? He’s probably been threatened by CPS that if he talks, he hurts his case and may never see the boy again. If you read up on CPS cases, that’s a standard approach. They hate it when people publicize what they do.

DeputyHeadmistress on January 14, 2009 at 10:36 PM