The CPS/juvenile court System Has Only One Significant Power, the Power to Remove Children from their Parents.

3. The CPS/juvenile court System Has Only One Significant Power, the Power to Remove Children from their Parents.

Although CPS does not have law enforcement powers, unlike most other social service agencies, CPS does have one awesome power, the power to take custody and remove children from the home. The stated purpose of this power is to protect the child from future abuse. The stated purpose is not to punish anyone, though obviously for parents and children who love each other this forced removal can be the worst punishment of all.

The lack of law enforcement powers explains why CPS does not take action against perpetrators. The power to remove children explains why CPS so quickly turns its sights on the non-offending parent.

Once CPS decides that abuse of a child or violence in the home has probably taken place, the CPS worker must then decide how best to protect the child from future abuse. Since it's usually obvious that the child should not be immediately returned to the perpetrator of the violence, CPS quickly turns to the question of whether or not the child should stay with the non-offending parent. That's how and why CPS becomes so fixated on 'investigating' the nonviolent parent. Did the mother protect the child from the abuse? Did she know, or should she have known, that the child was being molested? Did the mother protect the child from living in a home with domestic violence? Will she protect the child in the future?

No matter how you look at it, the circumstances of these situations can almost always be construed to indicate that the mother didn't protect, and that she knew or should have known. After all, goes the thinking, she's the mother and she's living in the same home.

NOTE 1: CPS does have other options than to remove the child. In fact, federal and state law governing CPS requires that CPS pursue family preservation as well as child safety, and that CPS first make "reasonable efforts" to establish a service plan for the family to follow so the child can stay in the home, or return to the home.

But even if CPS is making a good faith effort to abide by these policies, it doesn't alter the adversarial (oppositional) nature of the relationship with CPS in which the mother finds herself. Even if CPS has not taken the child and lays out a program for the mother to follow so the child can stay in the home, the mother knows full well what this means. 'You do this program or we take your child'. The mother knows this doesn't feel like help. It feels terrifying, hostile, and punitive. Especially so as her must-do-list is often hugely overwhelming since so many of the mothers are poor and acutely stressed. And even more hostile as the mother begins to see how prone the CPS exercise of power is to be arbitrary, prejudiced, and with shifting input and goals, the frequency of which is partly explained by the following.