Richard Wexler describes how well-meaning efforts to help children have gone terribly wrong and then explains what needs to be done to set the chaotic foster-care system right.
Wounded
Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse
by Richard
Wexler
Richard Wexler describes how well-meaning efforts to help children have gone terribly wrong and then explains what needs to be done to set the chaotic foster-care system right.
He says: The problem with our child-protective system is not that it hurts parents, though of course it does. The problem with our child protective system is that it hurts children.
It hurts children who have never been maltreated, by disrupting their families, invading their privacy, and jeopardizing the bond of trust that is essential for healthy parent-child relationships.
It hurts children . . . by making it too easy to pull them from their homes and place them in the nation's chaotic system of foster care . . . "Foster care is the garbage dump," says a woman who survived it. "That's what they do with kids when they don't know what else to do with them --- throw 'em in foster care."
Perhaps worst of all, the system does terrible harm to the children who need help the most, those who have been severely abused. False and trivial reports flood the system, cascading down upon untrained, inexperienced workers who already have far more than they can handle, stealing their time and attention from children who really do need their intervention . . .
In the name of "child protection," children have been beaten. In the name of "children's rights," children have been raped. In the name of "erring on the side of the child," children have been murdered.
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