“My name is Carlos Morales. I was a research worker for Child Protective Services (CPS). I’m guilty.”
That’s how Morales introduces his Liberty.me page.
“I’m culpable of what other Americans are doing. I believed CPS has a child’s best interest at heart,” Morales continued.
Morales, author of Abolish Child Protective Services, reveals what is inside the mind and heart of a grown-man whose conscience has started to ride him hard. What should have been a rewarding career, turned into a nightmare. A nightmare that wouldn’t stop, but would be repeated each day he went into work.
Morales followed political hope. He believed he could be the guy in the white hat working for the state and making a difference. Morales wanted to be the hero in the story, but he wasn’t.
Now, retired, Morales’ faith is gone and he feels the state is a religion and political reformers are tasked only with keeping the faith strong.
With almost a half-million kids in Child Protective Services in America, fully 80% of those are not linked to the agency for physical or sexual abuse. Instead, parental negligence is the culprit. And there’s the problem.
“Parental negligence” can mean a child is playing outside, is too fat, doesn’t like school or their parent smokes pot. Because of the rigid system, these kids are taken out of their home, placed with foster parents, and that’s when the children’s worst nightmares settle in to live.
Foster children are eight times more apt to be abused, and almost 50% will end up homeless. Foster kids are three-times more likely to be medicated with psychotropic drugs and are seven-times more apt to develop an eating disorder. They are more liable to become pregnant and twenty-percent more likely to be arrested.
Homeland
Any fan of the show remembers the episodes when Carrie’s daughter was taken away. Carrie had fallen asleep — with a gun on her lap — next to her daughter’s bed. Why did she have a gun? She was afraid for her life. If she was so afraid, why didn’t she call law enforcement?
Sounds like a couple of reasonable questions any child protective service worker would ask. But it’s television. Instead of answering the questions in some believable manner, Carrie, aka, Claire Danes, went into a long answer about being sacrificed in a plot to install a CIA agent at the top of the yadda, yadda, yadda.
It’s television.
The reality, as Morales shows, is a different story. For Grace, Rose and Rodney’s oldest child, everything got a lot worse.
Rose and Rodney
Rose and Rodney struggled with New York City child welfare workers for three years to keep their children. They wanted to maintain custody of their three children.
The social workers in New York were aggressive in trying to remove the children. They alleged abuse by the couple as well as others in the home.In the end, child protective services in New York convinced the court of the ‘rightness’ of their actions. The children were taken from the home and placed with a foster parent and her boyfriend.
Sara Packer, a supervisor with the child welfare agency, adopted Grace, the oldest of the three. She also, along with her boyfriend, Jacob, killed Grace.
Attorney David Tornee said, “I can’t imagine what Grace went through. I guarantee if that child had been with Rose and Rodney, she wouldn’t be dead.