“Failure to Protect”, although dealing with California’s Child Protective Services (CPS), has wider implications than simply Californian juvenile protection. It may apply to many jurisdictions in Europe and North America.
The doc follows five parents throughout the state of California as they fight through the child protection regime in California to reunite with their state abducted children.
Best not to take sides by becoming emotionally involved with their battles. Better to walk away with why the child protective regime does not work well. As an ex-social worker in the child protective regime states there are certainly valid instances where for the protection of children they be removed from parental custody and placed in foster care but there are so many flaws in the system that it is “totally ineffective”. It is a system that confuses poverty with child neglect and abuse with young newly minted graduates trained as social workers having no idea of the reality about family life. Its governmental funding rewards child abduction as opposed to reducing the causes that may lead to state child abduction. And as one lawyer involved with CPS says the child welfare protection regime is set in a legal framework and unless you understand the rules you will be chewed up and spat out in Netanyahuesque fashion!
The CPS hotline, a quasi “Crime Stoppers” reporting line, receives approximately 220,000 calls a year. 30% of the calls result in a police and/or a social worker visit and children can be whisked off in a police car within an hour of arriving. Under California law a child can be abducted by the state if there is a negligent parent or guardian who failed to protect their child from serious harm. Note the subjective terms in italics that must be established and the social worker of today often takes the word of a child as true. Many social workers today work backwards by assuming guilt then work backwards by finding “evidence” to justify their assumption of guilt instead of assembling evidence to establish guilt or innocence.
An accused in an American criminal proceeding has constitutional rights, will not be subject to hearsay evidence and is presumed innocent unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. A parent in a child welfare state abduction may have hearsay evidence applied against them, has no constitutional rights as a parent and often with the child’s story taken as the gospel truth even if there are defiance pediatric mental health issues, such as Obsessive Defiance Disorder the parent is guilty.
Listen to aggrieved parents, social workers, former social workers, judges, support services for parents of state abducted children and the children themselves and come to your decision if child welfare laws are protective of children the way in which they are applied. Note the disproportionate number of black and brown parents in the CPS system.
“Failure to Protect” was directed and produced by Jeremy Pilon-Berlin.
Opening on digital platforms on 17October2023. You can see the trailer here https://vimeo.com/451205389
RKS 2023 Film Rating 78/100.
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