Laws which provide for automatic termination of parental rights generally assume parents are guilty until proven innocent, and place the burden on parents to prove they are fit to raise their children – as opposed to the state to prove that they are not.

The problem is not unique to Southern California. In Florida, between 1997 and early 2000, child abuse investigators found evidence of abuse or neglect of at least 55 children in state-licensed psychiatric treatment centers, with many of the victims being in foster care – removed from their homes for purported abuse, only to suffer real abuse at the hands of those charged with their safety and well-being.

Even with legal consent for drugging, however, the problems are far from alleviated. Any psychiatrist, whether government-appointed or not, by nature of his training and profession is likely to lean toward prescribing children drugs — a tendency which is increasingly coming under scrutiny as unproven and highly dangerous. The very problem of overdrugging in the system stems from psychiatrists, thus any review or oversight by psychiatrists to curb the problem is unlikely to produce much result.

Information on the full extent of drugging and abuse in custody care is murky due to a lack of reporting rigor. The Federal Child Abuse and Prevention Act of 1974 was amended in 1996 to include, among other things, a provision requiring annual reports by states on certain categories of events that happen to children in custody, including abuses and deaths.

“The improvement was only on paper,” said sociologist James Roger Brown. “What I have found in trying to collect the reports that are supposed to be produced, is that no one has actually produced any of them.”

Suzanne Shell added, “When a child is abused in a foster home or in an institution while in state custody, the state investigates itself. That is something we cannot tolerate.”

continued...

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