Connie Reguli:
Breaking up families in the name of child protectionIn the United States, child-protection agencies have been given unlimited powers to confiscate children and prosecute parents without due process and in contravention of basic human rights.Sunday Guardian, 13 October 2018
"In the USA, we have witnessed a 40-year social experiment in child protection initiated in 1974 by the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). This experiment has failed. The project of casting layers of legislation on the American public in the name of the “best interest of the child” and promoted with the belief that every family needs government oversight, has backfired.""Parents shudder when facing child protection agencies because at every stage of the case they know that the same agency is gathering evidence against them. The same social worker who comes to their home to inspect for safety reasons is likely to be the person who gets on the stand and testifies that the laundry was not done and the home was cluttered, preventing the return of their children.
This is the state of the child protection system in the United States.""There are, after all, 114 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for “foster care”. The corporations are huge, such as Providence, Omni, Eckerd, Youth Villages, and the multiple “church-based” foster-care companies. They are in the business of getting contracts for the provision of foster care and now they will be contracting to provide the “services” for family reunification. This is a serious and intolerable conflict of interest. Why would you seek to restore a family and return a child to his home, when it means you lose a stable monthly income while the child is in foster care?"Editor of the Global Child Rights & Wrongs in the Sunday Guardian, Suranya Aiyar, writes of this article:
"This week in the Sunday Guardian's Global Child Rights and Wrongs column, we are proud to present US Attorney Connie Reguli who is one of the finest advocates in the world for a stop to the tragedy of the wrongful confiscation of children from innocent families by overzealous child protection agencies in the US and elsewhere. Connie Reguli runs one of the biggest advocacy groups in the world, the Family Forward Project, for reform of the child protection services and assistance to families victimized by child protection agencies.
In this article, Reguli takes us through the history of foster care in the US, explaining how it has gone wrong leading to wrongful child confiscations on a massive scale. She walks us through every iteration of child protection laws since the 1970s, showing us how each time reforms that were intended to respond to the system's failures only created new problems without solving the old ones. Sadly, we in India are adopting the same doomed system and no one from the child rights field is speaking up. Like the US corporations that have created a USD 18 billion foster industry in which children are the commodity, the bread and butter of Indian child rights groups and "advocates" comes from the implementation of this system. This is where civil society has totally betrayed us. So it's up to ordinary people to speak up or suffer the consequences."Regarding the legislation and development in the times of Clinton's presidency, cf the articles from the Chicago Tribune linked to in the very first posting in this thread:
Many articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India