Trauma by the CPS

There are two kinds of people who have the gall to forcefully take a child out of their home: kidnappers, and CPS workers. In order to do the job, the caseworker has to harness the same guiltless energy that a kidnapper does in order to enter a home and tear a child off their parents. The only difference for the adults is the rationale. The only difference for the child is that the kidnapper does it behind the the parents' back, while the CPS worker does it right in front of their faces.

Kidnappers remove children for personal, selfish reasons, for the worse, while CPS workers remove children in an attempt to provide for their welfare and well-being in ways that aren't properly being served--for better or worse. We shouldn't forget that the primary motivating factor for the kidnapper is kidnapper-focused, while it is child-focused for the CPS worker, but our attention to the "motivations" and "intentions" for the perpetrator or the public servant ought to be secondary to our concern for the child's actual welfare. However, in justifying the knee-jerk removal of a child from an otherwise loving home, for ill-defined reasons, often the caseworker's "motivation" to remove takes precedence in our minds over the child's actual well-being.

When a small child is ripped from their parent's arms by a stranger, does the child care what the "intentions" of the person doing the ripping are? Of course not. It is a traumatic event for a child to be removed from a loving home. This is not to say that such interventions don't have their place--in cases involving extreme abuse and neglect--but perhaps worse than good people failing to do the right thing is good people thinking they are doing the right thing as they do the wrong thing. This happens when children are removed from homes where no abuse or neglect is happening.

The state is slow to reverse their mistakes because admitting to a mistake jeopardizes their public legitimacy. The agency tasked to judge the legitimacy of parents, does not not like to be judged itself. Legitimacy is always more important to the state than the child's welfare. Any parent who has caused the amount of trauma that even the most "well-meaning" caseworker and court is capable of inflicting on children in a single night, wouldn't be allowed to keep the child, even by the state's own standards.

The issue is, are we more concerned about the trauma children in that situation are facing, or are we more concerned for the ill-conceived "good intentions" of the person who has caused that trauma? If we were child-focused, whether they are removed by a kidnapper or removed by a well-meaning but equally traumatic CPS worker, we'd recognize the trauma for the child either way. Instead though, we put the "well-meaning" part ahead of the trauma in the case of the CPS removal, because the caseworker carries with her the cold calculation of unquestionable authority, and the kidnapper carries the absolute opposite. We then regard what the child is feeling there, no matter how traumatic, to be a "necessary" part of their well-being. Trauma is  never necessary though, regardless of who is inflicting it.

The CPS ought to remain in operation, only so long as it can admit to its screw ups in a timely manner.