They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families at Risk

This account of six families whose children were wrongly seized by child protection services vividly illustrates the constitutional balancing act where medicine, family interests, and child safety can clash.

• Illustrates how the mantra "best interests of the child" masks errors, assumptions, and stereotypes that hide the real harm child protection policies are doing to children and families

• Reveals how families are wrongly separated when overworked and underskilled caseworkers jump to conclusions of guilt, ignoring evidence of innocence

• Focuses on the child protection system from the moment of intervention―starting with the child abuse hotline call that targets a specific child as a victim and his or her parents as suspects

• Highlights the many decision points, attitudes, policies, and practices that operate to make even innocent parents vulnerable to having their children taken from them

• Explains why basic due process principles ordered by federal and state courts would go a long way to help families, but cautions that just results depend on effective family defense counsel