I worked with the largest county children’s welfare services in America for more than a quarter century. For several decades as a licensed therapist in Los Angeles County, I provided mandated therapy to both children as well as young adults were aging out of the child welfare system. Over the years I made countless trips to LA County Children’s Court representing dozens of children and families as my clients.
My decades of firsthand mental health experience saw the destructive inside machinations of a corrupt, overloaded, thoroughly broken foster care system do more damage than good to children and families with whom I closely worked. Like all institutions in America, the child welfare system is just another corrosive, morally bankrupt, oppressive mechanism by which to control the poorest people in this country, acting as a national conduit pipeline to prison, substance abuse, human trafficking, homelessness, mental illness and early death.
Though each county child protective services department in the United States operates under a separate budget funded by individual county, state and federal mental health source dollars, the child welfare system in this country is so overburdened and systemically flawed, it has been failing our kids miserably for a long time now. We all hear about the horror stories of murdered children in the foster care system who fell through the cracks. High profile cases exposing the tragic fate of young people trapped in a system that fails to protect them are far too common. They are written about extensively in newspapers all the time. But the American public rarely is privy to the inner workings of a system gone bad from the firsthand perspective of an insider who worked within that failed system for decades. (more...)
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