I know several people who have worked for DHS who practically and do have Post Traumatic Stress from the experience. It is very traumatic for them to deal with so many extremely severe situations, and in order to cope with it some workers become extremely cynical, hardened and reactive. They profile people based on information they get from any source at all, some of which is absolutely garbage. My personal experience with this has been absolutely tragic, with devastating consequences that will affect me for the rest of my life. How a judge can allow some of the things that a DHS worker says, does, or appears to believe and enters as fact into a legal document and court hearing is beyond me. Why don’t they put the state’s money, our money, and federal funds into more prevention programs, and work with the parents to keep the kids in the home? It is much less expensive over the course of a child’s life to help maintain the child in his or her original family than to pull the kid out, assume abuse has taken place, and spend thousands and thousands of tax dollars trying to prove it, including paying for state care for the child through their entire life span in some cases. With the money they invest in law suits to terminate parents rights, they could have paid for programs for the next 20 years. For the thousands of dollars spent in court, they could buy in home mentors, therapists, respite providers and skills trainers to keep a child in the home so that abuse and out of home placement never occurs in the first place. However, instead they want to spend their dollars being an enforcement agency that punishes parents and tears family structures apart and throws hundreds of kids into foster care year after year. Once a child is removed from the home, their chances of being placed back in the home are extremely slim at best. The average child in a DHS foster home is moved at least 5 times between the time they are placed and the time they are emancipated at the age of 18. In contrast to DHS’s wonderful foster care system, a child in an orphanage in Europe remains in that orphanage until they are returned to parents, adopted or emancipated. They attend the local public school while living in the community Understandably there is alot of poverty in an orphanage. However, keeping a child in the home and working with the family to maintain stability and facilitate change in a positive direction doesn’t seem to be a priority for DHS. IF there are kids in foster care, then there is a need for more dhs workers to monitor the foster homes, and more court workers to handle the cases, and more lawyers to handle the cases, and so it goes like a ball of yarn that gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it can’t possibly be unraveled.
