DISHONEST CPS AGENTS

Published by the Church of Scientology International

THE CHILD PROTECTION RACKET


More Foster Children, More Profit

As established by federal law, every state has an agency to combat child abuse. Usually located within the state's Social Services department and commonly called Child Protective Services, the network comprises an expanding, multibillion-dollar empire, with offices in every county — and with each child representing tens of thousands of taxpayer-funded dollars per year funneled to the psychiatric machine controlling the child's fate.

A major source of CPS revenue, nearly $5 billion a year, comes from the federal government through Social Security, under a provision allowing open-ended* funding. By the nature of such a system, the more children placed in foster care, the more money a state gets, producing a psychiatrically centered system that, instead of working to keep families together, strives to capture more and more kids, and to put more and more of them on drugs.

As the California Child Welfare Services (CWS) Stakeholders Group, an organization under the state Department of Social Services, explained:

"The federal system of funding child welfare services at the state and county levels creates a 'perverse incentive factor' by providing open-ended funding for children and youth who are in the CWS system vs. providing capped funds for prevention and early intervention efforts.

"This 'perverse incentive factor' results in the state and counties earning the most revenue by having more children in the system as opposed to their receiving the funding necessary to reduce the need for Child Protective Services in the first place."2

Audrey Serrano noted the incentives include bonuses for CPS employees who bring children into the system — with quotas issued to make sure they do so. New York author and psychologist Seth Farber, Ph.D., told Freedom that such abuses make him consider the CPS system a "gangster racket," with psychiatrists and psychologists at its core.

"They take children away from their mothers and bounce them around in the system," Farber explained. "It's a corrupt system, with psychiatrists and their behavioral classifications at the heart of it."


Falsely Labeling Innocent, Normal Kids

In New York, Farber said, psychiatrists and psychologists appointed by the courts to evaluate children or parents are paid at least $500 an hour. These "evaluations" all too often result in the separation of parents and children — particularly, Farber said, when there is a single mother and she happens to be African-American.

Nearly all of the victims of the CPS system in New York, he said, are poor black women.

Once a child has been removed from the family, frequently on the nebulous charge of "neglect," the systematic milking of funding streams begins. Sources include Medicaid, the Crime Victims Compensation Fund, Social Security Disability Insurance and others.

Some states automatically issue Medicaid cards to children removed from their homes, making it easier to tap into federal funds.

One social worker informed Freedom that once a child receives a psychiatric label, his or her foster home immediately becomes eligible for roughly double the amount of money for that child.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, this source noted that the system has become geared toward giving children psychiatric labels and drugs because such "treatment" brings far greater income to foster parents and those administering group homes. "It's a dishonest system that falsely labels innocent, normal kids on a wholesale basis, condemning them to a life with a phony psychiatric diagnosis," she said.



The WAR on Families

ABUSE WITHIN THE SYSTEM

Taken from his mother for "abuse" she bitterly denies, young Rafe reportedly suffered three head injuries and cuts on his leg during one week in CPS custody.

A review of state child welfare hand-books reveals that, empowered by psychiatrists, Child Protective Services (CPS) agents wield the power to label any parent "unfit" and to take away his or her children.

Based on these guides, genuine objectivity becomes difficult to impossible, leading to injustice even in the hands of well-intentioned employees. New York's manual, for example, contains a chart regarding physical and behavioral signs of abuse or neglect. It includes any type of physical injury, even though contact sports, bicycle or skateboard accidents, and so forth, could be actual causes of injury. This chart contains such catch-all terms as aggressiveness, withdrawal, low self-esteem, failure to thrive, speech disorders and fatigue.

Colorado's points for determining "abuse" and "neglect" include eating disorders, bed-wetting, early arrival or late departure from school, poor communication and PR skills, inappropriate height or weight, and parents unsupportive of school personnel or disdainful of public schools/teachers. According to this, a child who happens to be shorter and skinnier or, perhaps, taller and heavier than average and who shows up to school early may well be in need of state intervention.

According to author and foster mother Mary Callahan, birth parents are up against a stacked deck when they deal with the CPS system. "They tell the parents if they go and get a parent capacity evaluation, this will help them get their children back," she told Freedom. However, she said, "95 percent of the parents that they see end up with a psychiatric diagnosis."

Callahan said that when she challenged a doctor who enjoyed a lucrative contract with the Maine Department of Human Services to give such evaluations, he winked at her and said, "They send them to me for a reason."




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