What kind of society rips a 17-year-old autistic boy from his loving home and places him in a state-run mental institution, where he is given heavy doses of drugs, kept physically restrained, kept away from his family, deprived of books and other mental stimulation and is left alone to rot?
According to an opinion piece published last Sunday in California’s Orange County Register, it can be our own society. Read the rest of this entry »
Citizens across the United Kingdom are up in arms after learning that the British government has been providing “perverse economic incentives” to social service agencies that remove children from their parents in order to meet adoption quotas.
GOVERNMENT BREAK-UPS
According to British news sources, 30 English councils shared a payout of £18 million this year for meeting Government targets to increase adoptions. This latest news comes amidst new data which shows that although social services removed more than 2.5 times as many infants from their homes (citing safety risks), the number of murders in which the victim was less than a year old has actually increased, not decreased.
According to a senior lecturer in social work at London Metropolitan University, “Performance targets and the tick-box culture are undermining professional judgment.”
PERVERSE INCENTIVES
Similar “incentives” exist in U.S. law. According to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, federal rules provide “bounties to states of up to $8,000 or more per child for every adoption they finalize over a baseline number,” creating “an incentive to place a child with little concern about whether the placement will really last.”
As a result, “states and private agencies now have financial incentives to keep children in foster care and financial incentives to place them for adoption - but no financial incentives to keep them in their own homes or return them there.” Read the rest of this entry »
