How Child Protective Services Masks Power as Protection

Across the United States, Child Protective Services agencies operate under the banner of child safety. Their mission statements speak of protection, healing, and justice.

Yet beneath the public image lies a system that often acts without meaningful accountability where families are torn apart based on suspicion rather than evidence, and where the agents tasked with safeguarding children are themselves shielded from scrutiny.

This is the great deception: a system that claims to protect but quietly destroys.

The Whisper That Follows Removal

When a family loses their children to CPS, the first public response is often silence quickly followed by suspicion.

“I wonder what they did.” “There must be more to the story.”

But what if there isn’t? What if the only thing a parent did was assert their legal rights? Request an attorney? Refuse to self-incriminate under pressure?

What if families are targeted not because of proven harm, but because they demanded due process?

Data Reveals a System Operating Without Guardrails

• 84 percent of child removals are not related to physical harm
• Only 8 percent of child maltreatment reports in New York State are substantiated
• Over 437,000 children were removed from their parents last year

That’s nearly 1,200 children per day. That’s 50 children every hour. That’s one child removed from their home every single minute.

And many times, their only “crime” was that their parents fought back, asked questions, or knew their rights.

Who Makes These Decisions?

Many of the CPS agents making life-altering decisions about families have no children of their own.

The worker who came after my family didn’t. Yet she had the unchecked authority to decide what was “best” for mine.

Even among those workers who do have families, the betrayal is deeper. You would think they would operate with greater caution and deeper care. Instead, they too contribute to the destruction removing children without real cause, signing off removals without true investigation, just to keep the machine moving.

Because in this system, having a heart is optional. And having a conscience is a liability.

Operating Without Oversight

Investigations are launched from anonymous tips with no accountability. Parents are judged before they’re heard. Children are placed in foster care before their families are even given a chance to respond.

All while CPS workers go home to their own families, unaffected by the trauma they leave behind.

The True Cost: Families and Futures

The damage is not theoretical. Children separated from their families suffer:

• Emotional trauma
• Developmental delays
• Behavioral disorders
• Disrupted schooling
• Deeper distrust in all institutions

Family separation is not just a policy decision. It is a form of state-inflicted trauma.

A Call for Awareness and Resistance

The question is no longer “What did they do?” It is “What if they did nothing?” And more urgently: “What gives any agency the right to destroy families in the name of help?”

It is time to pull back the curtain. It is time to unmask the great deception.

We will not stay silent.

Because real protection does not destroy love. Real justice does not operate in the dark. And real reform starts with truth.