Sunday Spotlight
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a family when the system takes a child and then leaves nothing behind. No updates. No court date. No word. Just silence.
It is not the moment of removal that breaks them. It is the stretch of time that follows. The days without answers. The weeks of unanswered emails. The months of living in limbo while the people with power decide what to do next.
This is not just about the trauma of separation. This is about the trauma of stalling. When the visits stop. When the caseworkers rotate. When no one seems to know who is assigned to your child this month. When you call and get sent to voicemail. When you show up and they say someone else is handling it. When your court hearing is continued again for reasons that are never clear.
Families are living like this. Right now. This very second. Waiting for the next court date that might be postponed. Waiting for a report they were promised but never received. Waiting for a reunification plan that keeps getting redefined, reworded, redacted.
They tell you to trust the process, but the process doesn’t answer your calls. The process doesn’t hold your child when they cry at night. The process doesn’t know what your voice sounds like. And after months of silence, you start to wonder if the process ever had a plan at all.
And when you are unjustly wrapped in a system that was never meant to protect you, it feels as if you are gasping for air beneath the weight of silence. It feels like the world has moved on, while you are stuck in place, pleading with a machine that doesn’t respond.
This is not failure. This is cruelty by design. It is a system built to wait families out. To watch them wear down. To punish them quietly through silence.
We spotlight the removals, the court dates, the corruption. But this week, we are spotlighting the silence. The slow erosion. The empty inbox. The whispered “I don’t know what’s happening anymore.” The parents still fighting. The children still asking. The grandparents still hoping.
We see you. We believe you. And we will not stop speaking until the silence ends.
