Targeting the Vulnerable
Abbey Chaplin (circled) reunited with her family and friends (including parents Kitral, middle, and Butch, far right). The Chaplins’ nightmare began on June 25, 1998, when they answered a knock at the door and found themselves facing a highway patrolman, a sheriff’s deputy, a deputy juvenile officer, a Department of Family Services worker and two other, unidentified people. The troop had come to take Abbey away.
“In today’s society, many parental practices are being falsely interpreted as abuse — including home schooling, discipline, spanking, Bible reading, and even breast feeding,” Shell said. “This results in the prosecution of many innocent parents.” Shell and others point to a pattern of violations of rights of American parents, starting with the most vulnerable members of society — although the trend has been growing over the past two decades from predominantly poverty-level and minority families to middle-class families from the white majority. According to attorney Michael Humiston, who is representing parents in a class-action lawsuit against the state of Utah for the unjustified loss of custody of their children, the system counts on three factors: poverty, ignorance and isolation. “For decades, blacks, Hispanics and Indians have been victims of this system,” Humiston said. “Around 1987 the child welfare industry found that these traditional underclasses weren’t sufficient to supply the million children per year it takes to feed the machine, so Congress vastly expanded the funding and intrusive nature of the child welfare laws.”
continued...
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