I'm against the abuse of children and happy to use the government to accomplish that.
However, the prevalence of abuse and neglect in the foster care system - complete with cases on that order of horror - makes a very weak case for the idea that external regulation accomplishes any better.
I'm trying to make the point that the state itself abuses "protected" kids. The living conditions of "protected" kids are horrible, abusive and destructive. Watch a movie like:
Conditions for kids in state care are little better than a trailer camp. Education in "juvie" is often better than that offered to victims of child abuse (which, yes, causes some kids to commit a serious crime to get some education. Why? It's the only way they can guarantee a placement, or a new placement (because some places in youth services are horrible, EVEN by the very low standards of youth services), or the opposite: guarantee a stop to constant changes in placement). The kids are kept there by force regardless of whether it's juvie or not (which is just one more reason violence is a constant in the life of these kids).
I find it absurd that the government, abusing kids in their care, have the slightest interest in using CSAM detection to protect kids. I don't want to say it, not for all, but for the vast majority of abuse, a kid is better off abused at home. Not because that's good for them. Because youth services and state abuse is far worse than the worst they face at home.
Detection of CSAM forcibly brings more kids into this system and, frankly, it's almost always better to leave them in an abusive family (esp. because most cases are about possession of CSAM, not about abuse of their own kids. Is this ideal? Of course not! Is it better than youth services? Absolutely)
Without an extreme rise in the minimum standards of care for kids in state care, I am entirely opposed to any and all attempts to detect child abuse. It makes things far worse for more kids instead of better.
And, frankly, I question the intent of people doing the detection. Because every effort just comes down to being one more "trap" for these kids to fall into. Do X (or have it done to you), and you get thrown into the hell that is youth services.
You want to help kids? Care well for specific kids. Adopt them. Make some kids yourself with a partner. DO NOT interfere in the lives of other children unless you're willing to make the full commitment: have the kid living with you, whatever stunts they pull, whatever beliefs they have, whether they accept you or not, for AT LEAST 10 years (ie. until 25 or so).
If you're not willing to do that, there is no form of help those kids need or want from you. Go and help kids with homework in your local school. Help out at a hospital. Whatever.
The fostering system is already known to have abusive foster parents. Now you just encourage them. You encourage extremely large foster households in which children cannot get adequate nurturing. You encourage hostile custody lawsuits in which parents do their best to alienate the child against the other parent. And at the margin you encourage the murder of children.
This entire idea of granting votes from minor children to their adult caretakers would be extraordinarily bad for society.
I just want to point out that much of the things that supposedly justify sending kids to foster care, actually happen just as much (if not more) in said care of the state. There are major issues with lack of oversight of foster parents. I just didn't see this mentioned thus far and thought it relevant.
From what I've seen the biggest issue is that people do it for the money, which I think is likely the primary cause for physical abuse in the system.
I think sexual abuse in the system comes from the targeting of at risk youths, which is why Sweden disturbs me so much. Departmental reviews in England & Wales and Scotland report around 20% allegations of sexual abuse in foster homes, so Sweden having 42% suggest a severe lack of auditing of their carers for histories of abuse.
I think compounding issues are 50% of kids have a serious medical condition, 20% have mental health issues. So the stressors are significantly higher on carers, which in turn is why foster parents are paid so along with child care benefits generally a parent can be home to take care of the children.
The abolition of the orphanage system inundated the foster system, so we went from 1 person caring for 5+ kids to 1 or 2 caring for 1 kid. I don't think the orphanage system was necessarily better, but it would be much easier to eliminate abuses.
Honestly I think putting abusers through court ordered anger management and parenting classes would be far better than putting kids in foster care, because the fact is adoption rates decline with age and far too many kids graduate the system, because teenagers simply don't get adopted.
I think modernising the orphanage system would alleviate some of this issue. If teenagers aren't being adopted take the practical approach where they can be in an orphanage, make friends and have a social worker who's invested in their progress, which would mean the foster system would need lower financial incentives and thereby you would get more kind-hearted people and less people wanting the money.
It's a supply and demand issue essentially, and subsidizing demand always inevitably leads to problems.
This seems weird to me because they mainly just argue that abusing kids is bad, which I think is an extremely uncontroversial opinion. The critical discussion is how to reduce/prevent abuse without the government becoming overly authoritarian and/or false positives ruining otherwise healthy families. Because the government taking kids away from their parents, even with the best of intentions, probably also can be seen as abuse.
At no point am I advocating for not removing abused children from their abusive circumstances and placing them in foster care
However the bar for that decision making needs to be very high
There is no room for false positives in this system. If that requirement leads to paralyzing the system, then the system is broken and needs to be changed
Do you have some data to support the position that foster care is at best inadequate? Do you have data to support the position that mistaken child removal is as widespread as even e.g. child abuse within the foster system? Finally, do you have data that illustrates how often children are relocated to strangers' houses, vs. with family members?
I absolutely agree that every time a child is abused in foster care, that's a damning failure of the system. But I do not share your belief that children who experience sufficient abuse to be removed from the home are permanently broken. Nor do I share your belief that the foster system is at best soul-crushing.
Kind of disgusting that states see a problem with this, but the constant stream of abuses of children within state care doesn't seem to be a problem. In those cases, the state is fighting ... to protect the perpetrators.
Nobody in this game is in it to actually improve living conditions for children, either in or outside of state care. Not the porn industry, obviously (though you regularly see arguments that they provide "a way out" for some youngsters, some of it is bound to be true). But also definitely not the state. If they wanted to improve children's living conditions, the youth services residential facilities need SERIOUS upgrades, all of them, to the point that children are often better off at home, abused, than in state care. They are regularly denied necessary medical care. It seriously looks like state legislators are in this fight exclusively to look good while making things worse.
Yet this is supposedly the reason we're having a discussion about it at all.
So... a program where near to 100% of input kids are neglected or abused that ends up with a significantly lower proportion of those kids neglected or abused is a "very weak" argument that anything has become "any better"?
If you had a drug that could save 50% of terminally ill patients, would you say "we have a very weak case that this drug saves lives"?
In order for your statement to make sense, the failure rate of foster care would have to approach 100%. Again, talk to an actual social worker about how they see foster care and whether or not they choose to use it. It's an opinion that will most likely come with caveats, but foster care is also a service they use frequently.
This statement seems to be based on a false premise that foster care is bad care (it is often very good care where I originate from, UK) and ignores the fact that sometimes parents kill their children and that there are many children in desperate need of help.
The greater problem with the CPS or similar agencies is underfunding. This leads to families only having dealings with them when the circumstances are suspected of being dire, rather than CPS having the resources to support parents in a meaningful way over a meaningful period of time. Such meaningful support helps to reduce the need for more drastic interventions and allows social workers to have much more knowledge of the families they are helping and of when interventions are needed.
I knew a guy who was a surgeon at a big children's hospital. He said that, if a kid came in with damage from abuse, and they didn't detect it and intervene, the odds were 50% that the next time they saw the child, it would be dead.
I'm not sure that taking a loved child and putting it in the foster system is worse than missing an abused child and leaving it with the abusing family.
So I categorically dispute that "taking a loved child away from an innocent family is way worse and it's not even close".
I have absolutely no idea why your comment is being downvoted, I guess people incorrectly read your comment that any kind of self-described child service (or caretaker) is necessarily abusive. The problem is when people blindly assume good faith without any provable and verifiable system to ensure this is so.
Or perhaps they think you hold this opinion because they blindly suspect you don't think kids (or peoole in general) in trouble deserve care.
Under such criticism, how is it possible to demand publically verifiable care, if the moment one demands it you are branded as cheaping out on poor souls???
The problem is that the oversight itself is almost always the cause of the abuse. In the case of parents, obviously. But of course this was the case in the past, where the church and the state (the social agency referred in the article and it's management, which is the government) were the problem.
Any kind of oversight necessarily puts people in power over others' children, as does the very concept of an institution or orphanage, including of course schools. It is that power, not which geometric shapes the organizing power insists get put on the wall that attracts child predators.
Giving people power over children is the problem. Attempts to "make sure these things don't happen again" so far have massively increased child abuse. The numbers I checked for the Netherlands are staggering: 1 out of every 3 children in child care gets sexually assaulted in the sense that they report it to the police. Roughly half of those gets abused by foster parents or government employees, half by other children (they just put babies with teenagers, then leave them alone due to lack of manpower or outright unwillingness of employees). Suicide rates are almost 10x what they are outside of child care.
And the incredibly sad part is ... once in child care 1 in 3 gets sexually assaulted, but barely 1 in 10 is put in child care because of allegations (usually not even a complaint) of sexual abuse. Mostly it's because of ... hygiene problems.
The problem is that without giving institutions power over children, nothing happens: children will refuse to leave their parents in all but the most extreme cases of abuse, until they are at least halfway through their teens. And the huge problem is that statistics clearly show that that is the right decision to make for the children: outcomes for children with their parents, even when abused, are far superior to outcomes in child care. In terms of education, in terms of living independent as an adult.
Who turned out to be pedophiles in the past 20 years or so ?
* The social services chief for a large British city. Note: AFTER he was convicted of sexually assaulting children Graham Bould was still put in charge of child services, as well as other social services (no worries: I'm sure he behaved himself much better around adults ...)
* an unspecified number of North Wales psychiatric child care workers at 18 different government facilities for child care (and some foster parents), who sexually abused at least 140 children
* The local councilor of that same city. These 2 worked together to, firstly, allow the local vicar to abuse children, and all 3 worked together to threaten abused children into silence.
* The child psychiatrist in charge of the "Child Expert Commission" for the entire country of Norway, who decide whether children get taken from their parents or not
* a dozen French government psychologists, in charge of diagnosing children in psychiatric care
* hundreds of Spanish government doctors, nurses, and also nuns and priests
* US public school employees, hundreds, from janitors to administrators and social workers
* Sebastian Edathy, a very high level German politician, and a senior cabinet minister in the government of Angela Merkel, Agriculture Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, was fired for protecting him and tipping him off
* Dutch Jehova's witnesses employees and members cooperated to commit and hide child sexual abuse, for decades
* Government day care employees in the Netherlands
* Red Cross and Doctors without Borders aid workers (who did it, with the knowledge of the top of the organizations, for over a decade)
* Public school employees in Holland exploited the children entrusted to them on a large scale (specifically these were promising athletes sent to a special school)
* UN peacekeepers sexually abusing indigenous children in Western Sahara, Mali and other places
* Oxfam rescue workers (who were protected by the board of Oxfam)
* The leadership of an islamic school in the UK, and local politicians
Not pedophiles, but at the very least encouraging child abuse:
* A majority of the British parliament (who voted that private companies would be allowed to pay social workers to give them children they "offer up" for adoption (meaning they sell them))
Quote: "A foster agency receives £20.000 for every single child they sell, adoption agencies £36.000 for every child sold, all with tax payer’s money, most of the agencies are owned by ex social workers. So, are the agencies working with the social services?"
(Needless to say "somehow" these sold children have a disturbing habit to end up in prostitution. I wonder how that happens)
I have got bad news about that, the majority of abusive households send the kids to school and scare them into silence. Regulations against abusive households do exist but enforcing them completely would require a degree of inescapable surveillance that cannot exist.
Those old systems were full of abuse. There are bad foster parents, but overall it is better. Until someone thinks up something better the current system is what we have.
However, the prevalence of abuse and neglect in the foster care system - complete with cases on that order of horror - makes a very weak case for the idea that external regulation accomplishes any better.
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