Is it child protection or legal kidnapping?

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Children being taken from their homes, based on tips from anonymous telephone callers alleging abuse or neglect, has been cast in a harsh spotlight in the Texas polygamy case, and there’s growing evidence that more than a few of the 510,000 children placed in foster care annually don’t belong there.

In February, Georgia state Sen. Nancy Schaefer released a blistering assessment of the bureaucrats entrusted to protect children there: “I believe Child Protective Services (CPS) nationwide has become corrupt and that the entire system is broken almost beyond repair. I am convinced parents and families should be warned of the dangers.”

Armed with court orders and protected by confidentiality statutes that function as bureaucratic shield laws, CPS workers need just one anonymous phone call to a hotline to swoop in and remove children, regardless of the facts.

Such calls can be legitimate, coming from a legally mandated reporter such as a doctor or teacher. But it could also be a fabrication from a vindictive ex-spouse, a nosy neighbor, or a disgruntled relative.

Since no laws clearly define child abuse and neglect, parents have been accused of these serious crimes when what they actually did was yell, withhold TV privileges, or “repressing” their children by supervising them too much.

Dr. Steven Krason, professor of political science and legal studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville, is writing a book on CPS wrongdoing based on two decades of research.

Krason says CPS itself now poses “a grave threat” because “it is almost impossible to fully insulate one’s family from...a system that on very little pretense can simply reach into the home and take away one’s offspring.”

He’s convinced the number of real child abuse cases has remained fairly steady over the last three decades; what has been growing is an unprecedented government assault on innocent parents.

And if it doesn’t take much to have your children placed in foster care, getting them back can be another story. An anonymous call about a 10-ounce weight loss by their then 3-week-old daughter triggered a legal avalanche that buried Arlington residents Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor.

Their parental rights were terminated last year by Arlington Judge James Almand even though Hey and Slitor had been exonerated by of all neglect charges nine months earlier.

In another local case, Georgetown residents Greg and Juliana Caplan had to spend $75,000 on lawyers and wait two weeks before their children were returned, even after five doctors confirmed that an injury sustained by one of their twin daughters was not caused by abuse.

The Caplans are still listed as possible child abusers in D.C., however, because they refused to submit to psychological counseling. Despite the stigma, that might have been a wise decision.

The psychological evaluation trap is one of the least expected obstacles facing parents snared unfairly in the CPS system. Most panicked parents promise to do anything to get their children back, often agreeing to a battery of psychological tests they naively believe will prove their parental competence and end the nightmare. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

Arlington social workers told Hey that she had to undergo psychological testing before she could get her baby back, so the longtime Federal Communications Commission employee readily agreed.

She was diagnosed with two clinical disorders by Dr. Giselle Hass at the Multicultural Clinical Center in Springfield. This psychological evaluation was cited in the court ruling terminating Hey’s parental rights.

But an independent, expert analysis of the report obtained by The Examiner included scathing critique of the methodology used to evaluate Hey, saying it “...reads more like advocacy than a professional psychological assessment... clear and frequent evidence of error... Any graduate student who turned in as poorly scored and interpreted a test as did this evaluator would probably have failed the first semester.”

Besides violations of standard practice and professional rules of ethics, the analysis noted numerous illustrations of bias in the psychological profile and “a consistent failure to include data that would be favorable to Mrs. Hey,”including 17 computer-generated scores on the Parental Stress Index that were all in the normal range.

This was a significant omission, given that Judge Almand cited Hey’s tendency of “freezing...in times of stress” as one of the main reasons she could not be trusted to raise her own child.

Hey – who has never been convicted of either abuse or neglect – has had no contact with three-year-old Sabrina since Judge Almand allowed her to be adopted by the same foster family Arlington CPS workers originally selected to care for her baby.

Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.

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101 days ago: Bureaucrats running down the clock against parents

101 days ago: Victims claim CPS officials guilty of ‘ruthless behavior’

» 101 days ago: Is it child protection or legal kidnapping? «