This is presented here in three parts due to its length. But you can see the full article all at once in its entirety with pictures and links to the videos here:
entire story as it appears on Medical Kidnap
first installment of full story:
Foster Care: “Best Interest of the Child” or “Child Abuse”?
Theoretically, foster care provides a temporary loving, nurturing and safe home for children who are removed from their own families due to heinous neglect or abuse. This theory helps those involved in the system sleep good at night and feel like heroes.
Molly McGrath Tierney, the former Director of the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, gave one of the most insightful TEDx talks about the problems with the “Foster Care Industry” – an industry where children become a commodity that profits doctors, lawyers, judges, social workers, advocates, and other organizations, an industry that can only exist by taking other people’s children, an industry that damages the very children it purports to be helping. She goes on to explain the trauma inflicted on children by the foster care industry, saying:
we’re digging a wound so deep, I don’t believe we have a way of measuring it. This dismantling of families – it has enormous consequences. Kids that grow up outside of families – they don’t master the things that can only be learned in that context, like who to trust, how to love, and how to take care of yourself, and that frankly does more damage than the abuse and neglect that brought the kid to my attention in the first place.
Currently there are over 415,000 children in foster care in the U.S. today, according to the 2014 Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS).
What if you accepted that foster care was not a decision made “in the best interest of the child” but rather a financial decision made in the best interest of the state? What if you realized that the majority (75%) of children being removed from their home and placed into foster care was not due to imminent danger of abuse, but rather due to poverty, and are now being abused by the foster care system?
What if you acknowledged that many of the foster homes these children are being placed into are worse than the one from which they are removed? What if you learned about some of the stories of children who were abused in foster care, children who suffered emotional trauma from being “kidnapped” from their home, forced to take psychotropic drugs for the resulting emotional traumas they endured, physically, emotionally and sexually abused, or even used in sex-trafficking rings?
What would you do with this information?
Poverty Creates a Commodity of Children
Seventy-five percent of children being removed from their homes is due to “neglect.” But are children really being neglected, or is it the “opinions” of social workers that these children were being deprived intentionally of necessities of “adequate” food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or supervision, when in fact, the family was just poor?
The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR), writes in Who is in “The System” – and Why
Out of every 100 children investigated as possible victims of abuse, three are ‘substantiated’ victims of all forms of physical abuse, from the most minor to the most severe, about two more are victims of sexual abuse. Many of the rest are false allegations or cases in which a family’s poverty has been confused with neglect. Source.
Regarding poverty as a reason for child placements, Mary Callahan, former foster parent and author of Memoirs of a Baby Stealer: Lessons I’ve Learned as a Foster Mother, said in a recent article, Poverty’s Link to Foster Care Removals? It’s in The Eyes Of The Workers:
I didn’t get it. I started asking the workers why they were removed over things so minor.
One worker said, ‘There’s a difference between them and us,’ as if that explained anything. Another said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Those parents are the dregs of humanity.’ As I started meeting the parents, I actually liked most of them. I didn’t find them to be the dregs of humanity.
The biggest difference I found between them and me was that they were poor. So, it seemed to me, the children were taken because of poverty. Source.
Orphan Trains, the Forerunner to Foster Care
History repeats itself, especially if money can be made. Charles Loring Brace, founder of the New York Children’s Aid Society, conceived the “orphan trains” as a way to “salvage poor immigrant children,” moving them off the streets of the city and into “loving” homes in the country, sending them by trains to live with families who were complete strangers.
Modern-day foster care got its origins from the “orphan trains” of the mid-1800’s, the concept of moving “poor children” into “more worthy” homes. One of the main differences between the recipients of orphan train children and foster care today is that now these “loving foster families” get paid to take in these “poor children” by way of federal tax dollars.
Between 1854 and 1929, as many as 250,000 children from New York and other Eastern cities were sent by train to towns in Midwestern and western states, as well as Canada and Mexico. Families interested in the orphans showed up to look them over when they were placed on display in local train stations, and placements were frequently made with little or no investigation or oversight.
Reformers like Brace were determined to salvage the civic potential of poor immigrant children by placing them in culturally ‘worthy’ families while simultaneously reducing urban poverty and crime and supplying some of the workers that western development required. Source.
Although the children were supposed to be “treated as family members,” many of these children ended up as indentured servants. Some families could even pre-order children with certain traits. (Watch short video below.) You Tube Video: The Oprhan Trains
(end of first installment–second installment to follow tomorrow)
Once again, the source for this story which is completely presented here but in installments is Medical Kidnap.
Pick up a copy of all my works here: By Peter Weiss
