When child-snatchers attack: the best way to keep children safe and to prevent the Total State from abolishing the family is to de-federalize child protection.

(Cover Story)

In the early 1990's, the National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse circulated a bumper sticker claiming that child abuse is "An American Tradition"--not an occasional tragedy, or a persistent problem, mind you, but a tradition. That glib sound bite reflects a worldview in which abuse of women and children occur inevitably because of the traditional, patriarchal home.

The wages of that worldview are on display every day as tens of thousands of American families are shredded by false accusations of child abuse. In any state of the union, a single anonymous tip on a federally mandated "hot line" is sufficient to justify agents of the child protection apparatus to invade any home. Parents thus accused are considered guilty until proven innocent--and the social workers making the accusation define the standards of proof. Invoking the "best interests of the child," state agents can seize children at home or school (an act called a "parentectomy" by many child welfare activists) and farm them out to foster homes before sundown. Or they can hold children as hostages, cynically using them as leverage to extract false confessions from innocent parents.

It seems like a nightmare vision out of Stalin's Soviet Union--and, as we will shortly see, the system responsible for such outrages owes more than a little to Soviet family law and policy.

Making It a Federal Case

Nearly 30 years ago, the Mondale Act established child abuse reporting and enforcement mechanisms in all 50 states. Failure to report suspected child abuse became a crime; in contrast, those who file a false report are immune from prosecution. Shortly after the Mondale Act was passed, recalls Kimberly Hart of the National Child Abuse Defense and Resource Center (NCADRC), zealots determined to restructure society infiltrated each state's child welfare services.

Headquartered in Holland, Ohio, Hart's organization receives between 35 and 100 telephone calls and e-mails daily from families across the country grappling with local child protection agencies. While abuse of children by parents and other custodial adults is a real problem, Hart observes, the federally created system supposedly intended to protect children actually poses a far greater threat to their welfare.

"There is no accountability in this system, no checks and balances," Hart told THE NEW AMERICAN. "It terrorizes and tortures children and families. It gives ill-equipped, ill-trained case workers the power to define 'abuse' in practically any way they see fit, and too many judges are willing to accept those definitions without question. It protects caseworkers and social workers who commit perjury, falsify documents, and engage in other forms of official corruption in the name of 'protecting the children.' And many of them assume that because their cause is just, they are entitled to use any means at their disposal."

Some people who gravitate to child abuse activism, Hart points out, "believe that they were child abuse victims themselves, and it's likely that some of them experienced genuine abuse. But we've created a society in which the word 'victim' has essentially lost its meaning; if you say you're a 'victim,' then you are one, and nobody can challenge what you do."

This isn't to say, of course, that child abuse is a nonexistent problem. "I'm the first to admit that for a long time, our society chose too often to ignore the abuse of women and children" Hart continues. During the 1960s, "many children who experienced real abuse or neglect grew up to get involved in social work and related professions, and in many cases these people were motivated by the desire to help children who suffer. But with the passage of the Mondale Act in 1974, those good intentions were used to create this mammoth, arrogant bureaucracy that is absolutely out of control, completely unaccountable, and is tearing apart millions of families every year."

The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that in 2001 (the last year for which statistics are available), there were three million cases of reported child abuse. More than two-thirds of those cases failed to meet what Hart calls a "51 percent standard" of proof, and they were quickly dismissed. "This means that each year at least two million families--and probably more--were disrupted, and their lives invaded, on the basis of false accusations," Hart observes. "If we assume that we're dealing with at least one child and one adult--since many of these accusations involve a divorce and custody struggle--then we're dealing with at least four million victims of this bureaucracy. But each case also involves grandparents and other family members as well. Many others involve intact families."

Most of the so-called verified reports of abuse do not involve physical mistreatment or sexual molestation of children. According to Douglas Besharov, director of National Center on Child Abuse from 1975 to 1979, 80 percent of the verified reports consist of "forms of emotional or developmental harm that pose no serious physical danger"--such as "educational neglect," an accusation frequently lodged against home schoolers, or the all-purpose diagnosis "failure to thrive."

Child protection bureaucrats have a remarkable gift for inventing esoteric definitions of abuse--including vague or open-ended definitions that give social workers practically unlimited discretion. "If I'm a bureaucrat who gets funding for child protection, and actually reduce the incidence of child abuse in my community, I've undermined my own position," notes Rev. William Wendler of the Family Rights Organizations National Task Force (FRONT).

Rev. Wendler pointed out to THE NEW AMERICAN that those involved in the federally mandated child protection system "have a financial investment in perpetuating the problem, and there are plenty of incentives to expand the definition of abuse. Not only do they keep expanding the definitions of abuse, but they also keep expanding the number of mandatory reporters--people required by law to report suspected child abuse. Between the broader definitions and the increased pool of mandatory reporters, the system continues to grow, despite the fact that there is much less child abuse going on than most people would assume."

While every episode of child abuse is a hideous tragedy, Rev. Wendler observes, "We are not as abusive a society as many people think we are. For three decades now the federal government has been telling the world that the United States is a horribly abusive society in which women and children suffer terribly at the hands of husbands and fathers. But the authoritative literature on domestic abuse documents that more than 97% of children will grow to adulthood without suffering physical abuse or neglect. Families and parents are far from perfect, of course, but child abuse remains very much the exception."

The State as Parent

The federal government's determination to depict the American family as an abusive institution may, at first, seem puzzling. But this vilification campaign makes perfect sense when it is understood that the family is the single most important impediment to the emergence of the Total State. British philosopher John Locke, who had tremendous influence on our Founding Fathers, pointed out that the family is an institution of divine provenance that pre-dates the state:

   God [has] made the parents instruments
   in His great design of continuing
   the race of mankind and the occasions
   of life to their children. As
   He hath laid on them an obligation
   to nourish, preserve, and bring up
   their offspring, so He has laid on the
   children a perpetual obligation of
   honouring their parents.... From this
   obligation no state ... can absolve
   children.

Where families are healthy and functioning properly, the government's role in society is minimal. The English common law tradition inherited by our Founding Fathers recognized that "a man's home is his castle," and that parents had great discretion in educating and disciplining their children. Dr. Alan Carlson of the Howard Institute has pointed out that under the common law, it was understood that "an orderly society required that parents have discretion in disciplining within the home", accordingly, "the common law held a presumption in favor of the reasonableness of parental action. In cases of severe physical abuse, the criminal law took hold. The courts also developed a general rule that a parent could not be held liable in a civil suit for the excessive punishment of his or her child."

Note that the common law system was not an outgrowth of the doctrine of patria potestas that prevailed in pagan Rome. This doctrine gave the father the power to kill--through exposure--a handicapped or otherwise unsatisfactory child. Patria potestas and the barbarous practices it inspired were abolished as Christian teachings supplanted Roman paganism. Those teachings were incorporated into English common law, and provided the moral framework for our nation's traditional family laws.

This is not to say that all of our inherited customs are praiseworthy. One particularly troublesome inheritance is the principle of parens patriae--the parenthood of the state. Notes Dr. Carlson: "The Elizabethan poor laws (1601) ... established the principle that the children of those receiving public relief should be taken away and bound as apprentices. Concern for social conformity and training in good work habits led the Virginia Burgesses in 1646 to pass a statute which noted that 'parents, either through fond indulgence or perverse obstinacy, are most averse and unwilling to part with their children' and so directed county commissioners to select and take away two children each year, aged seven or eight, to be sent to James City for employment in the public flax houses. In colonial Massachusetts, 'tithingmen' were appointed in every neighborhood to 'diligently inspect' the families under their supervision, concentrating particularly on 'all single persons that live from under family government, stubborn and disorderly children and servants, nightwalkers, tipplers, Sabbath breakers ... tending to debauchery, irreligion, profaneness, and atheism amongst us.' Violators faced fines, imprisonment, or the loss of children."

Though such troublesome practices were occasionally encountered in colonial America, they were, for the most part, abolished by the time of the Founding Era. Moreover, the Founders took care to deny the newly created central government the power to intrude into family matters. When the U.S. Constitution was created, "one of the powers specifically not delegated by the states to the Federal government was control of family law and governance," continues Dr. Carlson. "In contrast to most European constitutions, our foundational document makes no direct mention of children, families, parenthood, marriage, or the family's relationship to the state. This omission ... reflected the keen interest held by local communities in the family and an unwillingness to subject such sensitive questions to uniform, national answers."

As is the case with nearly all questions of law and order, the Constitution reserves matters of family law exclusively to the states. Each individual state has the authority, subject to the consent of its population, to carry out its duties under the common law to protect children from physical and sexual abuse by corrupt parents. The assumption undergirding our federalist system is that such police powers, 'exercised at the local level, will be more tightly restrained and more readily revoked or modified if abused.

Collectivist Revolution

The anti-Christian collectivists responsible for the French Revolution espoused an opposing view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the Revolution's intellectual mentors, insisted that the state was "the common mother of her citizens." "Families dissolve, but the State remains," declared Rousseau, maintaining that parents must instruct their children in their State-appointed duties, "to regard their individuality only in its relation to the body of the State...." Where Locke and the American Founders believed that parents received a commission from the Creator to instruct and care for their children, Rousseau taught that "government ought [not] indiscriminately to abandon to the intelligence and prejudices of fathers the education of their children, as that education is of still greater importance to the State than to the fathers...." Bertrand Barere, a member of the Committee on Public Safety--the dictatorship that administered the Revolutionary Terror--was reciting Rousseau's ideology when he brazenly declared, "Children belong to the general family, to the state, before belonging to private families."

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, intellectual descendants of the guillotine feeders in revolutionary France, called for the "Abolition of the family!" in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. With the coming of socialism, insisted Marx and Engels, "The bourgeois [middle class] family will vanish as a matter of course...." To hasten that day, they urged the replacement of "home education" with "social" education, the effective abolition of marriage, and state intervention in the home in the interests of "emancipating" children: "Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this charge we plead guilty."

This updated version of parens patriae, enhanced with a revolutionary subtext, was imported to the United States in the late 19th century. In 1882, the Illinois Supreme Court asserted in a ruling: "It is the unquestioned right and imperative duty of every enlightened government, in its character of parens patriae, to protect and provide for the comfort and well-being of its citizens.... The performance of this duty is justly regarded as one of the most important governmental functions, and all constitutional limitations must be so understood and construed so as not to interfere with its proper and legitimate exercise." (Emphasis added.)

In 1901, an Indiana Supreme Court decision extended the state's custodial authority backward, from the school to the nursery itself, holding that a parent's natural custodial rights over an infant child were subordinate to the state. Twelve years later, Dr. Arthur W. Calhoun published A Social History of The American Family: From Colonial Times to the Present, which would become an authoritative text for American social-service and welfare workers, as well as for educators and others who would work on behalf of the emerging custodial state.

According to that immensely influential study, "American history consummates the disappearance of the wider [or extended] familism and the substitution of the parentalism of society." Rebuking those who sought to restore the increasingly embattled traditional family, Calhoun explained: "The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."

Within a single generation, Calhoun's Marxist-Globalist nostrums had been thoroughly digested by the American intelligentsia. That radical worldview's triumph figured prominently in President Herbert Hoover's 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, which, in the words of Dr. Carlson, "marked the triumph of a new conception of the State's child." A pronouncement issued at that event described each American child as an individual "who belongs to the community almost as much as to the family" and a citizen of "a world predestinedly moving toward unity."

Vilifying the Father

While anti-family ideology was taking root in the U.S., it was in full malignant flower in the Soviet Union. In his 1937 work A Book for Parents, Soviet sociologist A.S. Makarenko--at the time a personal favorite of Josef Stalin--wrote that the Soviet family "is not a closed-in, collective body, like the bourgeois family. It is an organic part of Soviet society...." While "parents are not without authority" in the Soviet system, "this authority is only the reflection of social authority," insisted Makarenko.

Not surprisingly, the atheist Makarenko explicitly repudiated the biblical foundations of parental authority, stating that in the pre-socialist world "parental authority issued from the Lord's commandment. In our modern family things are different." He denounced the pre-socialist father as an "odious figure"--"Master, overseer, teacher, judge and sometimes executioner," "despotic," a monarch who exploited his children. He taught that the state--which under Stalin slaughtered tens of millions--must forbid parental physical punishment and "maternal indulgence."

The family's purpose in the Soviet system was to raise the State's children according to the State's dictates. "Morality requires general emulation of the most perfect conduct," wrote Makarenko. "Our morality must already be the morality of communist society.... We are living on the summit of the greatest pass in history, our day has seen the beginning of a new order in human relations, a new morality, a new law, the foundation of which is the victorious idea of human solidarity.... In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism."

Thirty years after publication of Makarenko's book in the Soviet Union, it was published in the United States as The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents. The introduction in the English-language edition was written by Russian expatriate Urie Bronfenbrenner, who at the time (1967) was a member of the Planning Committee for the Head Start program. According to Bronfenbrenner, the wisdom offered in Makarenko's Soviet handbook should help shape American social policy:

   The Collective Family ... has something
   to say to the Western world....
   Soviet leaders and educators have
   emphasized that effective character
   training requires imposing on the
   child challenging responsibilities for
   service and self-discipline not only
   within the family but, equally importantly,
   in his collective or peer group
   both within and outside the school.

At a Communist Party Congress held shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet educators were told: "We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists." The social welfare revolution of the past four decades has followed precisely the same course. As the late social commentator Christopher Lasch (himself a former Marxist) observed in his book The True and Only Heaven, "The family did not simply evolve in response to social and economic influences; it was deliberately transformed by the intervention of planners and policy makers.... Reformers [have] sought to remove children from the influence of their families ... and to place them under the benign influence of state and school."

But this ambitious collectivist design also requires that the traditional family be broken to the saddle of the State. Perhaps the most effective way to accomplish that would be to borrow the Soviet caricature of the traditional family as hopelessly dysfunctional, and the father as an odious, abusive figure. Passage of the Mondale Act in 1974 created the modern child abuse industry--a large, growing, and self-sustaining national apparatus devoted to treating parents as the primary threat to the health and well-being of their children, and prepared to snatch those children from their homes on practically any pretext.

A Way Out?

"Many of the ignorant fools who voted for the Mondale Act believed it was a good thing at the time" commented NCADRC's Kimberly Hart to THE NEW AMERICAN. "I call those people 'ignorant fools' because they eagerly jumped on the child protection bandwagon without considering the inevitable consequences of creating this monstrous bureaucracy and giving it this kind of power without accountability. And now politicians have discovered that they can't backpedal without being accused of supporting 'abusers.'"

According to Hart, no progress will be made in addressing the depredations of the child abuse industry as long as Washington "has the power to dictate mandates to the states and shovel out money. There's not a single state in the country that can resist the lure of federal money, and even if one did, its 'victim movement' lobby would tear it apart."

While Hart perceptively describes the problem, her proposed solution is flawed. Hart maintains that Congress should pass "a 'Mondale Act' with teeth. We need a standardized set of rules defining abuse and governing abuse investigations. Child protection workers must be required to make full disclosure of their findings and methods--they aren't, right now--and to videotape all of their interviews with alleged victims. And Washington should threaten to take away funding from any state CPS [Child Protection Service] that 'doesn't comply with those standards."

Rev. Wendler agrees with Hart that rogue state CPS agencies are a problem requiring tighter federal supervision. However, he correctly underscores the fact that "this shouldn't be a federal issue at all. It should be dealt with at the state and local level, rather than managed out of Washington." Nevertheless, the reverend reluctantly concludes, "We're dealing with a hodge-podge of state laws and a national epidemic of false accusations that will resist resolution at anything other than the federal level."

The problem with this approach is that it would consummate the revolution intended to make every American child the federal government's custodial property. Our existing system in which ideologues and opportunists in state CPS agencies have a federal license to destroy families is bad enough. But creating a centralized system controlled by Washington would be immeasurably worse. Washington, after all, created this crisis as a way to destroy the family; how would our situation improve if we gave Washington even greater power for the supposed purpose of saving the family?

Rev. Wendler offers one ironically hopeful observation that points to a much better solution. "As bad as things are right now in terms of false accusations of child abuse, there has been modest but noticeable improvement," he told THE NEW AMERICAN. "Things were quite a bit worse until the mid-1990s, when the Wenatchee scandal broke [see "Victims of the Fury" on page 17]. By instigating this artificial national crisis, [the feds] actually created a large and growing constituency of people whose families have been harmed by' false accusations. It's difficult at best to find a single community unaffected by this. Tragic as this is, it also means that there is a huge and growing number of skeptics who understand what's really going on."

That vast constituency can be educated and mobilized to beat back the child-snatchers. This would require repealing the Mondale Act, de-federalizing child protection, and subjecting any remaining state CPS agencies to intense and pitiless scrutiny.