Ya think?
Bolding mine.Linky.
Why the hell would you tie a dead chicken to his neck…
What does it say about us that that was my most pressing question, too?
So the cats will play with him. :eek:
So the dog would play with him?
ETA: Prof got me!!
Wow, and they were both nurses. Although she had surrendered her license for unprofessional conduct.
And they had adopted six kids. They’re like child hoarders.
We don’t know that it was dead when they tied it there.
They were confused. You’re supposed to use a dead cat to get rid of warts.
There is just so much going wrong here, and a lot of it is, I believe, suggestive of systemic problems with the way that fostercare/Children’s Services/what-have-you, are run in the nation as whole, not simply in Union County, nor North Carolina.
While I don’t want to imply anything about the people working in such bureaucracies - I believe that most of the people doing that work are dedicated and caring people doing their best for a vulnerable population, with little recognition, and often few resources - there’s not nearly enough attention paid to the fact that a bureaucracy, like a corporation, or any other large organization, will often come to behave as if it were an end to itself, whatever the individual thoughts of the people within the bureaucracy.
In short, for most bureaucracies, the first rubric used to judge cases is not going to be necessarily the best good of the individual being serviced, but the best good for the bureaucracy. This isn’t even necessarily an abandonment of the people being served - most bureaucratic rules exist for a reason, and serve to minimize wasted effort and resources. But it also will lead to cases where it becomes expedient for the bureaucracy to first act to protect itself, and its reputation, above caring for the people it nominally exists to serve.
All of this seems to me to be fairly self-evident.
The problem when dealing with caring for children, especially at-risk children such as those who have been put into the care of the family services bureaucracy, is that while I don’t believe that there are huge numbers of would-be abusers out there, if one were inclined that way, and could get past a probationary period with family services, the natural inclination of the bureaucracy to protect those within it, or at least approved by it, against outside attacks as part of protecting the bureaucracy itself, would have the effect of making such abusers more secure. Furthermore, in cases where a child gets a reputation for making unsubstantiated claims, their ability to advocate for themselves becomes nil.
I’ve met people who were guests of the fostercare system here locally, while involved with the various mental health treatment and support groups I’ve been in. Now, it’s fair to say that anyone I would have met through those situations would be self-selected to be representative of failures of the system, not their successes. I try to keep from extrapolating too much from what I’ve heard there.
However, when resources for family services, or whatever each state chooses to call them, are constantly being attacked as part of the budget process and the electorate’s desire to make sure that no freeloaders are getting by on the system - it means that policing of such arrangements is going to be one of the first things to be cut. Which is part of how such situations as the one in this article can come about.
Add in to that the growing mood for home-schooling and I get very concerned. Again, I’m not about to try to imply that many, let alone most, home-schoolers are making that choice for nefarious reasons. (Many make the choice for what I consider to be short-sighted, or even wrong-headed reasons, but as much as I fear the consequences of such choices on the children involved, those are not nefarious nor abusive reasons.) But, by taking a child such as those in this household out of schools, where the children would be regularly interacting with other children and adults, an abuser would also be able to remove the best (and faint) hope such children might have to reach out for help when they find that the people who are supposed to be protecting them have turned into abusers themselves.
Invariably, the public reaction to scandals such as this seems to be that since the bureaucracy involved has proven unable to adequately police it’s ranks, the public calls for, and often gets, a reduction in funding levels for such services. Which just makes such situations even more likely to repeat - and confirms the bureaucracy’s own institutional prejudice for keeping things hidden or handled internally. Since if the public gets word of it, their already limited resources and ability to police themselves will get even further degraded.
This is a horrifying situation. And one I think that is representative of scenarios that take place far more often than anyone wants to admit.
The solution is not to cut funding. Nor is it to legislate away portions of the mandate that such agencies face in an effort to reduce the load on their resources. Rather the most effective solution would be to increase funding such that self-policing becomes a workable expense for the bureaucracy, as well as trying to meet the minimum needs of all the individuals that it is called upon to serve. And in this day and age where any kind of public assistance is given with so many strings to prevent potential freeloading, I don’t see that sort of sensible reaction as likely.
Having killed this thread dead, I might as well throw this here to further emphasize that there are other problems nationwide.
In short it’s been recently announced that Arizona’s CPS has failed to investigate some 6000 suspected child abuse cases, allegedly because of a lack of resources.
I have questions about the chicken, too. But I think that’s because outrage over the handcuffing and abuse allegations are self-evident and it’s the addition of the chicken to the equation that makes it WTF?
It’s like the ‘10 million jews and 1 clown’ joke.
Since OtakuLoki has taken this thread in the direction of a massive rant about bureaucracies in general, I’ll toss in my screed about that.
My biggest gripe, from all the horror stories we read about bureaucracies, is that they have no adequate and functional mechanism for fixing their mistakes.
For any massive bureau like any state DMV or Social Security or IRS or private insurance company or whatever, if they handle bazillions of people, it’s inevitable that some mistakes happen.
But a great proportion of the various horror stories we always read seem to have one thing in common: That once some error, even a simple clerical error happens, people’s lives get fucked up and people have to go through Hell or worse to get it fixed. We’ve all read stories about, e.g., the bogus red-light-camera ticket that took 200 phone calls to fix, or the bank mortgage screw-up that took 200 phone calls and then they foreclosed on the wrong house anyway; stuff like that.
Bureaucracies tend to be rigid and inflexible, and they have fixed and established and immutable forms and procedures for every activity and interaction that they can engage in, and those established procedures tend to NOT include well-debugged processes for fixing mistakes. Bureaucracies simply tend to assume that they are infallible and never err, and don’t provide procedures to fix errors.
We could all live better with the occasional inevitable bureaucratic error, if only they didn’t so regularly turn into total SNAFU’s as so often happens.
ETA: P.S. Let me acknowledge, BTW, that my rant is largely based simply on the RO I get from reading all the kinds of bureaucratic horror stories that are so common. I don’t recall that I’ve ever myself suffered any major bureaucratic catastrophe like that. But that’s also, in part at least, because I carefully keep records of everything. In one case, that saved my ass from the IRS.