There are hundreds of thousands of children who have been placed into the foster care system,... I was one of them.

It's estimated that roughly 13 percent of all children in foster care will run away at least once during their time. Aside from those who run away, about 9 percent will entirely abandon the foster home to live with friends.

That means that roughly 22 percent of the foster care child population is fleeing the “solution” that the state has provided them to address what they saw as an unfit living situation.

When the majority of foster care children today spend years locked in the system, I can only be thankful that I was lucky enough to get out. Years ago, my brother and I too were taken away by the state and we were forced to go and live in a foster home. We weren't allowed to bring any of our belongings with us and our family received a verbal warning that if they attempted to come to the school to intervene in any way that they could be arrested. I remember being interviewed, alone, by a CPS worker and being peppered with questions about my relatives and the living situation, because they were trying to determine whether or not that was an unfit home to send us to. I was in elementary school at the time and had no idea of what implications my answers could have.

This is what happens to hundreds of thousands of children, who have state workers come and interview them in private and without their parents knowledge. The government has afforded these workers almost unlimited powers to go about confiscating children, breaking apart families, and potentially prosecuting parents.

It might be someone at school who anonymously places a call, possibly a neighbor, or even a doctor that you might have recently visited. A great deal of parents have fallen into a lengthy and costly battle with the state, despite never having subjected their child to any abuse or neglect. Not every call or report that gets made is going to be an honest one but the implications of such an accusation can be devastating and severe. I know far too well because I suffered them firsthand.

The homes that the children are being sent to can often be worse than the environments that the children are taken out of.

In the foster home that I was sent to, there were 2 other children living there at the time but we were soon instructed that we couldn't communicate with them (we were never told why). I remember thinking about running away many times and asking why I wasn't allowed to call home to communicate with my family. They had baby monitors set up on the floor at night, right outside our bedroom door, that would monitor our movements and conversation. They needed to be sure we weren't conspiring or trying to leave, I suppose. We couldn't visit friends, couldn't have friends over, couldn't communicate with friends or family on the phone. I won't go into all of the detail, it felt like a prison. We were placed into a home where the caretakers were only interested in receiving a paycheck and weren't concerned with our well-being one bit.

We might not have been living in an ideal situation at home, but there were other alternatives available to us and it would have been better to send us to stay with family or friends than to stay with complete strangers. Thankfully, my relatives fought and made phone calls every single day for weeks pleading with authorities to reconsider the mistake that had been made in deeming the alternative solution an 'unfit' one. Those relatives, armed with the support of neighbors, doctors, and school staff (who knew that they provided a loving home), were determined to get us back. Eventually, a few months later, we were allowed to return to live with relatives, which is where we stayed for many years until we eventually moved out on our own.

I cannot express how thankful I am for their passionate pursuit of justice.

For many parents who are facing this situation, it can easily leave you feeling hopeless. The intention should be to keep families together whenever possible, but after taking the child it doesn't seem like CPS puts much effort into trying to reunite the family. There have been various families who have previously testified to just that, insisting that CPS was likely seeking to destroy their families rather than restore them.

Money, Money, Money...

Several years ago, the federal government had established an incentive program for both foster parents who had intentions to eventually adopt and states, that would handsomely reward the parents and the state with bonus checks whenever a child was adopted to strangers. As well, counties receiving funding would only continue to receive funding if they kept the children in foster care.

Foster care is a multi-billion dollar industry.

We continue to see billions being funneled toward a system where many children are routinely subjected to abuse or they are trying to run away entirely.

Previous studies have also shown that children in foster care are more likely to suffer health problems, early pregnancy, be subjected to sex trafficking, or end up homeless. Children being sent into foster care are much more likely to commit suicide and about 8x more likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder. Most of those children are coming from poor homes; these families don't often have the means to fight back.

For some victims of abuse who had been plucked from their homes by the state and placed into foster care, they've seen multi-million dollar settlements as a result of the injustice that was perpetrated against them.

This multi-billion dollar system has been described as being overcrowded; littered with corruption and problems. Why then do we keep spending money on something that isn't working?

One former child psychologist who is a high ranking federal official in the foster care system, Wade Horn, has previously admitted that the entire foster care system is a giant mess and it's one mess that should be eradicated. Horn says that rather than spending money to try and fix problems and reunite families, it's instead spent on maintaining the status quo and supporting things as they are--keeping families apart.

The National Coalition for Child Protection has previously stated that foster care is a bad answer to the suspicion of a problem.

Why should we take a child from what is alleged to be an abusive home, only to send them to a home filled with strangers where they are more likely to suffer abuse and worse? The NCCP maintains that trying to keep the family together is the best process to take in most cases, until due process takes place. Critics of child protective organizations have called attention to their multi-billion dollar annual budgets and the financial incentive for counties to place children into foster care. A great deal of critics have questioned whether the intentions of these organizations are truly centered around family unification or if they're more about profit and endorsing "legal kidnapping”.

There have been cases where social workers have fabricated stories and suppressed evidence; children have been taken away from their loved ones as a result. The lack of apparent oversight and scrutiny is concerning, when it's for an organization that has seemingly endless power to break apart families indefinitely.

If these organizations were not funded via force then they wouldn't be able to continue for years, funneling billions of dollars toward the separation of families and destruction of people's lives.

Pics:
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