You see I did exempt you and Pippin. But Sweets for the children has become a joke. Real neglect does not require a genius to recognize and is often overlooked by the services who are there to protect them - but the viciousness of using the government to try and steal the children of decent parents to punish them for not kissing the backsides of DHS has come up time and time again.
You people as a group, are not shining examples of anything except runaway government intrusion. Of course, you do a lot of good but you also do a lot of harm. Like any other government endeavor how large a budget you can get is job one; not for the workers, but for the ones who really run the show. And you know how that is done.
I could write an essay on the reasons for this in every country, but not on this thread.
But. I did exempt you and Pippin. Gran does do not call me Sir Wimp for nothing :)
And therein lies the problem. And what you say is is sometimes true; however, keep in mind that you really only hear about the ones that go terribly wrong. I'm not going to tell you it doesn't happen. I have seen occasional avoidable negligence, incompetence and power trips in workers, but more often in mangement. It occurs with greater frequency in larger counties where there are, dare I say it, more "affirmative action" hires, but unlike what many seem to believe, the federal money flow (at least in Arkansas) is not based on the number of children in the system, but on how good workers are at getting documentation into the computer in often unrealistic time frames set by, you guessed it, the federal government.
While there are a few workers that are quick to remove kids and ask questions later, most are not out trolling for kids. Because of the sheer volume of work that goes into every new foster care case and the fact that there is most often nowhere to put them, the more common scenario is to leave kids in a "conditionally safe" environment to AVOID it. Of course, that shouldn't happen either, but most of the serious flaws (government notwithstanding) I see are a direct result of one person being expected to handle the work of 4 -10 people AND to do it as efficiently as if it were only the work of one; so the kind of thing you end up with is a worker who actually KNOWS what's going on and what the priorities should be, butting heads with an immovable bureaucracy that could care less as long as some stupid form is filled out and documented immediately.
Personally, I have NEVER removed a child from decent parents, or even less than decent for that matter, and certainly whether or not I agree with their childrearing practices doesn't even enter into it. What we see 99% of the time is parents who are not "parenting" at all. The standard for removal is "imminent danger." That may mean different things to different people, but to me it pretty much means exactly what it says. There were only 2 exceptions, and in both cases it was a direct "order" that came down from some bureaucrat who couldn't pick the kids out of a lineup...because there was a squealing wheel somewhere. In both cases I challenged it, in both cases I was the one who had to write the affidavit (not whoever actually MADE the decision) and in both cases I was proven right. In one of them, the judge refused to sign the order, and in the other, the children were returned at the first hearing.
Most of the people I work with are very caring, hardworking people who go out of their way to make the right decisions. Unfortunately, it's the sludge that rises to the top in government agencies, and in Arkansas, sludge is spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T.