Family Attorney Blows the Whistle on State Child Protective Services Agencies

JBS | Bill Hahn

Practicing family attorney Gregory Hession confirms child protective service agencies engage in abusive, deliberate and dirty tricks motivated by federal funding.

Every year thousands of families are forcibly separated from their children based on unsubstantiated or outright false allegations of child abuse. Gregory Hession, a practicing constitutional and family law attorney in Mass., says that for these families, the nightmare has only begun.

Children in child protective services (CPS) have been abused, wounded, brain washed, drugged, adopted out and some have even died. Hession has represented hundreds of these families and has dedicated himself to exposing CPS abuses and reuniting loving, deserving families. He documents CPS abuses in the July 23, 2007, issue of The New American magazine.

Hession’s articles highlight true stories of families who have been targeted by CPS agencies. All the families discussed are Hession’s clients.

Hession writes that state CPS agencies continually yank children out of good, loving homes based on flimsy allegations of child abuse. He asserts that the child protection business generates so much money, and employs so many social workers, therapists, lawyers and other professionals, that it needs a steady flow of cases to keep all of these workers employed. In Mass., the cost of these state services totals into the billions of dollars, which the state can leverage to obtain prodigious quantities of federal reimbursement monies.

In 2005, more than 3.3 million reports involving 6 million children were made to state child-abuse hot lines. The vast majority of these eventually proved to be untrue. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services show 40 percent of allegations are initially screened out. Of the remaining 60 percent, nearly two-thirds of child-abuse investigations are unsubstantiated. Yet, more than 500,000 children are currently in foster care and another 300,000 or so are forcibly removed from their homes by the system every year.

Hession states that genuine child abuse obviously does exist and those involved in its practice need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, he writes that most people would likely disagree with CPS in how it defines abuse or neglect. Families are attacked for home-schooling or spanking their children, for not overseeing all play activities, or for when a child has an accident. Only a small percentage of the 3.3 million reported cases annually prove to be genuine abuse, and the system does a bad job of sorting it out.

The articles conclude that millions of children are imperiled by this imperious, abusive CPS system, which works quietly without much public scrutiny. Change will likely come only when the cruelties have been exposed, and the public reaffirms that raising children is the responsibility of families, not the state.