Criticism
Despite the benefits of the services of the CPS, in the last two decades, the CPS has come under intense private and public scrutiny as an institution than can and has caused great harm in the name of protection. Although child welfare agencies are generally viewed positively, there has been an increase in the amount of cases where critics believe CPS have reacted out of their bounds.
A notable recent case is the family of Gary and Melissa Gates in Texas. The school called the local CPS and requested the Child Protective Services forcibly remove all thirteen of the Gates children and take them to foster homes under a court order which allowed an Emergency Removal, when there is clear evidence of danger to the physical health & safety of the child. The local CPS gave the explanation that they felt, quote, "Mr. Gates was uncooperative and his uncooperativeness with us put the children at risk." Even though the court ordered the children to be returned, CPS continues to classify the Gates as child abusers. Some have accused the CPS of having too much immediate power leaving the parents feeling lost and aggravated. The CPS has been accused of prejudging parents before proper investigations were done.
An ongoing case about Nastic family living in U.S. has received an intervention from the Serbia government. Children were taken away from their parents after their naked photos were found on the father's computer. Such photos are common in Serbia culture. Furthermore, parents claim that their ethnic and religious rights have been violated - children are not permitted to speak Serbian, nor to meet with their parents for orthodox Christmas. They can meet only mother once a week. Children have suffered psychological traumas due to their separation from parents. Polygraph showed that father did not abuse children. Trial is set for January 26. Psychologists from Serbia stated that few hours of conversation with children are enough to see whether they have been abused. Children were taken from their family 7 months ago. FBI started an investigation against the CPS.
Brenda Scott, in her study of CPS concluded, "Child Protective Services is out of control. The system, as it operates today, should be scrapped. If children are to be protected in their homes and in the system, radical new guidelines must be adopted. At the core of the problem is the anti-family mindset of CPS. Removal is the first resort, not the last. With insufficient checks and balances, the system that was designed to protect children has become the greatest perpetrator of harm." Further to that information, several former CPS workers retired from the service, due to increasing circumstances and practices carried out by the organization.
Read more about this topic: Child Protection
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)