They Took the Kids Last Night: How the Child Protection System Puts Families at Risk
By (Author) Diane L. Redleaf
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Praeger Publishers Inc
2nd November 2018
United States
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Legal skills: advocacy
362.760973
Hardback
304
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
680g
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. They Took the Kids Last Night shows a rarely exposed side of America's contemporary struggle to address child abuse, telling the stories of loving families who were almost destroyed by false allegationsreadily accepted by caseworkers, doctors, the media, and, too often, the courts. Each of the six wrongly accused families profiled in this book faced an epic and life-changing battle when child protection caseworkers came to their homes to take their kids. In each case, a child had an injury whose cause was unknown; it could have been due to an accident, a medical condition, or abuse. Each family ultimately exonerated itself and restored its family life, but still bears scars from the experience that will never disappear. The book tells why and how the child protection system failed these families. It also examines the larger flaws in our country's child protection safety net that is supposed to sort out the innocent from the guilty in order to protect children.
Redleaf's work is a worthy resource for families going through child welfare intrusions, and for the lawyers, doctors, and counselors who would advocate for them. * Parental Rights Foundation *
Diane L. Redleaf has been a leading family defense attorney and policy advocate for over three decades. Since she graduated from Stanford Law School in 1979, she has led dozens of successful class action suits, appeals and policy reform initiatives on behalf of families.