I couldn’t find the year that Florida’s child welfare department was established. But I recall that it has had almost 44,000 children pretty much continuously in its “care” for decades. Every year they lose a few and a couple are murdered. Sometimes the kids are just administratively misplaced. Sometimes they’ve been kidnapped and nobody knows for months. They rebranded by changing the agency’s name. They reorganized by dividing it among other agencies. They’ve “privatiezed” and then reversed that. Still, about the same number each year are “lost,” kidnapped or murdered. I’ve come to the conclusion that a bureaucracy can’t actually “care” for or about people. To ask a bureaucrat to “care” for somebody is like asking them to care whether the number in column A is a one or a zero when it matters not in the least to them what it is. This is the nature of bureaucracies, not to “care” about people they are not related to and, for the most part, have never even seen. Those people are a number. It matters not what number they are. Witness the VA lying so that people die…just to improve their statistics.
Before these agencies, when the sheriff arrested somebody (where many children come from) that arrested person had the responsibility of finding somebody to take care of their child. But because a few couldn’t a huge organization was set up at massive cost so that now all children it can take under its wing, not just those who don’t have other relatives who will step up, are put into state “care.” Where, they are lost, kidnapped or murdered.
NJ a few years ago had a massive scandal with their Department of Youth and Family Services (DYFS).
Apparently they had lost track of thousands of children that were no longer in their foster homes and not yet 18.
The story has basically been scrubbed from the internet from what I can see.
I tried looking for the story, Google is about useless in finding it so far.