Funding

Every year the Ontario legislature, in common with many other jurisdictions throughout the western world, appropriates money for the protection of children. Some reasons for their generosity are:

• Legislators may have the same naive view as others not involved with social services, that appropriating money for the protection of children does what it says.
• The social services industry that lives on the appropriations is well aware that it exists only on account of political beneficence. Consequently, they are inclined to political activity and lobbying to get the appropriations increased. Parents who believe children are theirs by natural right see no need to lobby.
• The social service bureaucracy can threaten elected officers. This is the most subtle, and invisible influence, absent even from some of the scholarly works on the subject. Should a cabinet officer decline to provide funding or support legislation desired by the social services industry, they threaten to issue a press release branding the officer as a defender of child abusers (or wife batterers or deadbeat dads). Normally, a politician's career cannot survive such an attack.

Agencies

In child protection, the funded agencies identify children in need of protection, take them into what they euphemistically call `care', and fight any legal battles necessary to sever their connection with their parents. The children may be adopted, or kept in foster care indefinitely. The largest single item of expense is usually foster care.

Child Protection

Child protectors use terminology extending that of George Orwell. Kidnapping a child is `apprehension', the plaintiff is the `applicant', the accused family is the `respondent', the institutions of forcible confinement are called `care', a contractor who houses a child for money is a `foster parent', parents and foster parents alike are `caregivers', permanent legal separation between parent and child is `crown wardship'.

In Ontario the agency that does the child protection work is called the Children's Aid Society, so I will call them CAS from here on. A large part of the story comes from my interviews with other parents in Dufferin County Ontario, where I have been organizing opposition since my own son was snatched in 1999 at the age of three years.

What does CAS do when they have to get so many kids into foster care? They cast their net far and wide for tips. The laws of Ontario require anyone in a child care profession, such as teachers, doctors and day-care workers, to report any incident that may be construed as child-abuse. A few cases of non-reporting have been criminally prosecuted, and made known to the child care professions. The February 20, 2001 minutes of Dufferin CAS show their efforts to expand the net:

Kim Evans, Program Manager of Intake and After Hours, attended meetings re guidelines that police departments are to follow to report to CAS. These guidelines will result in a significant increase in calls to CAS, ie if there are any children present upon investigating a domestic situation, the police are to call CAS; if a child is not in an approved restraining system (car seat), the police will contact CAS, if police go into a house and don't see appropriate fire detectors they must report to CAS. This means more investigations and follow-ups.

And anyone with a grudge may use a phone call to sic CAS on a personal enemy. This system gives CAS a rich stream of leads while making parents wary of using professional services, or even public schools, for their children.

Once tipped off, social workers routinely enter homes of parents, approaching with smiles. If smiles won't get them into a home, they go through the inconvenience of getting a warrant and make an armed entry under police escort. When the children are of school age, they usually take the short-cut of picking them up at school and placing them in foster care. Parents only find out when they frantically call police after the children fail to come home. Social workers can then enter the home under the pretense of evaluation for reunification.

To get a child into long-term foster care, it is necessary to get a court order. This is usually a formality since CAS targets families that cannot afford legal representation. Even for those who do hire counsel, the process is a sham. There is no testimony, no cross-examination, no discovery, no jury, no rules of evidence. The material comes on competing affidavits, and no one can be asked a question that he is required to answer. There is no record made of the proceedings in the courtroom. Formally, the rules do provide for all of these things, but in practice the lawyers abridge the process so that they do not occur. In over a hundred families interviewed, I have found only one that had a chance to testify, and they wound up in bankruptcy and lost their children anyway. Here are some of the standard techinques:

• Social workers misrepresent themselves as friends of the family. Parents unaccustomed to hostility from agents of the crown often make the mistake of cooperating with social workers until it is too late.

• Broken promises. Common promises are to leave the family alone in exchange for cooperation in the investigation, then the information gathered becomes the legal basis for apprehension.

• Twisting statements. In an American case, a father told the social worker that he gave his daughter a shower. This got to court as: The father admitted to holding his daughter's head under water.

• Faeces in the home. Sounds terrible. To find faeces in a home, first check the diaper change room. For older children, the catbox will reveal the dreaded faeces.

• Assessments. Social workers fill out risk assessment forms on the family, using them to justify foster care for children when the assessments pass a threshold. A statistical analysis of several filled-out assessments shows proof of bias.

• Home renovations. If any part of a home is under renovation CAS will claim it is a safety hazard.

• Coaching young children. A three-year-old Dufferin girl was coached (through methods not recorded), then induced to say on video-tape that her mother hit her with a frying pan. Mother later found that the girl did not know what a frying pan was.

• In almost all cases social workers will threaten to remove children unless the parents immediately take some action, often as trivial as cleaning the fridge. Aside from power-tripping, I have not found any purpose to these threats.

• Examinations. CAS has a staff of professionals they can depend on to give reports unfavorable to parents. Once children are in custody, CAS takes them to a pediatrician, therapist, psychiatrist or social workers for reports. If there was little case to begin with, there will be a large stack of documents against the parents within a few days.

• As a last resort, CAS looks for bad housekeeping. Socks on the floor, dirty dishes piled in the kitchen, laundry not stacked neatly.

• Opposite accusations. If you examine enough cases you will eventually find instances such as this: One family lost its children for having locks on the interior doors, the same CAS intervened in another family for not having locks on the interior doors.

If you don't have kids, or have not had one of your children kidnapped, you don't know what this stage is like. Seizure of children at the hands of the crown produces a distress unlike any other. I encountered the writing of a tragic mother who experienced both the seizure of a child, and the death of a child. The seizure was the far worse experience. Marriages often survive a child death, but rarely survive child seizure. The desperation of parents allows for unbounded abuse by social workers from that point on.

Administration

Covering up

A network of laws and policies keeps the operation of social services secret. A simple tool is the law making it an offense to disclose the name of a child involved in a child protection case. This is construed broadly to apply to any name from which the child's name could be derived, such as the parent's name. In practice, the parents rarely object to publication of their names, most objections come from CAS. Parents who wish to get relief by publicizing their plight are subject to a banning order similar to South Africa under apartheid. In a case in which I put a family's story on the internet, CAS threatened not me, but the mother, with jail if it stayed there. It was removed.

The social service industry feeds the press with favorable stories. Here are some of the ones you may have encountered:

• Social workers are overworked. Of course, when a small agency attempts to keep tabs on nearly every family in its jurisdiction, it is overworked. They make no attempt to confine their efforts to cases where they are truly needed.

• The greatest danger to women is from their husbands. Actually, a marriage is the safest institution for a woman to live in.

• Parents are the greatest danger to children. A similar reversal of reality. Anyone with common sense knows knows the terrible damage to a child (or even an animal) caused by removing him from his parents.

• A death occurred in a family already known to social services. If we only had more money and power, say the agencies, we could prevent these tragedies. In various jurisdictions this has produced what Richard Wexler calls a foster care panic. New policies cause social services to take far more children than ever into custody, but this only elevates abuse. What about the opposite situation, where a baby is harmed while in custody of CAS? Ontario held an inquest into the case of Jordan Heikamp, who starved to death in CAS custody. Remarkably, even in this case, a coroners jury returned 44 recommendations all suggesting more money and power for CAS.

Outrages and scandals

In Orangeville, courts handle only one kind of case on any day of the week. On criminal and civil court days, the courthouse is nearly empty. On family court days, the parking lot is full, requiring a two block walk from the nearest space. The corridors are packed with people, and lawyers mill around incessantly making deals. Family court has become a principal means of state control over the lives of the people.

I have personally spoken to four women who took shelter in the local women's shelter, Family Transition Place, and then lost their children to foster care. Reports from elsewhere suggest this is a widespread practice, and in New York City it is the subject of a class-action lawsuit, Nicholson v Scopetta.

One of the most extreme developments in social services is the shotgun divorce: a divorce imposed against the will of both husband and wife. A common technique is to apprehend children and tell one parent, usually the mother, that a divorce is required before she can see her children again. Another starting point is a domestic disturbance call. In these cases, police are encouraged, and in some jurisdictions required, to make an arrest, no matter what the circumstances. Once one parent, usually the father, is in jail, he is required to sign a document forbidding contact with his own family. Children's Aid will then intervene further, ensuring that the marriage is destroyed.

In October 2001 Philadelphia social worker Brandon Ware entered the home of a 28-year-old single mother and threatened to remove her children unless she submitted to sexual intercourse with him. He got what he wanted.

In 1999 Massachusetts DSS removed two children, Kyle and Damien, from their mother Diana Ross. In June 2001 Kyle Ross was killed by the foster family's rottweiler. DSS shamelessly took her next child, Aaron, born two months later, into their custody.

Opposition

An examination of the law and the actions of social workers convinced me quickly that there was no remedy through the courts, only through political action. Membership in CAS is open to any adult in the jurisdiction upon payment of a nominal fee. I organized a membership drive and ran candidates opposed to the incumbents. The result two years later was the adoption of a new bylaw restricting candidates for director to those nominated by the nominating committee, composed of incumbent directors. Elections are now like those in the Soviet Union under communism, with only approved names on the ballot. A website at www.freespeech.org/herod has a record of this effort.

In addition to Dufferin, there are three other opposition groups dealing with a specific CAS, in Halton, Durham and St Thomas/Elgin. These may be the four worst agencies in Ontario. So far, there is no province-wide opposition group.

Disrespect for CAS is widespread in the child care industry. I have encountered many people who freely acknowledge that it is a harmful institution, yet none will take action to oppose it, since CAS is in a position to destroy the career of any child care professional who raises his voice in opposition. The situation brings to mind a line by Martin Luther King, history will not remember what bad people do, but what good people fail to do.