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How often does this actually happen ?
I didn't grow up here, but knee-jerk CPS reporting and HOA Karens are 2 of the most fascinating Americanisms. I have no calibration on how ubiquitous these types of people are. Are they real or one off bogeywomen ?
The main example I keep coming bact was a post I read by a mother complaining online (Anecdotal, I know, and not something I bookmarked, either).
The story was basically that they live several blocks from the elementary school their kid (like 10-11 years old, IIRC) attends, such that, weather permitting it was actually faster (and definitely healthier) for the kid to walk straight home from school than take the bus, the kid preferred to walk home, and so she let them do just that…
…until some busybody neighbor — she's not allowed to know who — saw the kid walking home alone, decided that this constitutes child neglect, and called CFS to report it as such. Mandatory investigation rules meant CFS had to send someone out, subject the whole family to a week-long inquisition, with the threat of removing the kids hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles the whole time. They get through it… and then the next month, the same CFS investigator is back, to put them through the same process again. Because the same neighbor (again, CFS clearly isn't allowed to say who) kept reporting it, and while multiple reports in the same month as a "everything's fine" finding can be dismissed, once a new month rolls around, they have to investigate the report again.
And then a third time. And so on for several months in a row, until the CPS investigator basically laid it out — they all know she's not neglecting the kids, but it doesn't matter. The neighbor is going to keep reporting it, and they're going to have to keep doing the mandatory investigations, with full "due diligence." So either she and her family can try to live with having to go through this whole ordeal every single month, or they can just cave in to the busybody's idea of "proper parenting" and make the kid ride the bus home every day.
So, of course, they caved.
As for how often CFS investigations happen, again anecdotal, but my family was subjected to one once, thanks to me. I was in kindergarten, and my school had an after-school-hours Halloween event we went to… where I, being (then-undiagnosed) on the spectrum, suffered sensory overload which, combined with the stars coming off my "the constellation Orion" costume, caused me to have a crying autistic meltdown right in the middle of everything. So my mom had to hustle us all out of there, and try to get my screaming autistic ass loaded into the car. Well, apparently somebody saw this, and decided to report possible abuse.
So the whole family — me, my two younger brothers, both our parents — all spent a week going through the whole grueling inquisition, the whole time in terror that I was about to be taken away from my family forever, that we'd all be broken up, and I was never going to see my loved ones — my parents or my brothers, ever, ever, ever again, and it was going to be ALL MY FAULT, AND…
Well, as you can see, decades later and I still have Feelings about it all.
(And in contrast, just a little later in my childhood? Our neighbors out at Kinney Lake — the ones whose idea of "disciplining" their children was making them sit bare-assed on a hot wood stove? They never had any problems with CFS.)
oof.
America is confusing. A society that emphasizes individual freedom and nuclear families suffers from strange Karens in the form of CFS and HOA abuse. These laws allow Karens to ruin your life through asymmetrical warfare, with zero repercussions or risk of de-anonymization. You'd think the loopholes would be addressed by now.
As an aside, I'm surprised that it the word 'Karen' is so new. This individual is so ubiquitous, yet a term only showed up in the late 2010s.
Well, see, that's the thing. America isn't a society. We're big and diverse (a continent-spanning empire, really). There's still enough remnants of federalism, for now, that we are still in some ways "50 smaller countries in a trench coat," as a Tumblr mutual puts it when explaining the US to Europeans. Albion's Seed may be over-referenced around these parts, but it's still quite relevant here. The American "founding stock" included both irascible, fiercely-independent Borderers, and stern, moralizing, hyper-conformist Puritans. Many of our oldest and most powerful institutions were built by the latter — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all began as Calvinist seminaries (the first two by Congregationalist Puritans, the third by "New Light" Presbyterians). There's a lot of diversity, a lost of incompatible cultural trends and forces, brought into ever-increasing contact, with ever-increasing tensions.
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About 1 in 3 children will be the subject of a CPS investigation at some point: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283534
I'm only a few paragraphs in and already getting strong "we wrote the conclusion first" vibes.
The repeated refences to disparate impacts and constant waffling between "children referred to CPS as infants", "children referred to CPS multiple times", and "all children referred" strike me as massive red-flags.
Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives. For most of kids who get referred it happens only once and it ends up going nowhere. However If MeeMaw is callin' cause no-good baby-daddy just got released from prison, or her daughter's off the wagon, and she's worried about the baby. The odds say that MeeMaw has called CPS before, and the probability of this referral going somewhere is much higher.
The conclusion of course is that CPS is racist and should stop trying to protect underclass children
We have now been referred to social services twice, both routine and in one case leading to a 15-minute home visit and a no-action letter, and in the other case to literally nothing at all. Plenty of mandatory reporters consider "Toddler with head injury of unclear origin" to be a mandatory report. It wouldn't surprise me if 30% of all kids get this kind of routine referral - and apart from the waste of CPS resources I don't see it as a problem.
The problem is where CPS see "free range 7-year old" as the kind of referral that needs more than a no-action letter.
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It also doesn't matter; my experience with parents (who actually love their kids) is that they'll do anything to avoid the risk of losing them.
Having it happen just once is enough for parents to rule out the risk forever.
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Every HOA will have at least one HOA Karen. Big HOAs (and the US has some with over 100,000 residents) will have a certain density of them, sufficient to file complaints if you don't cut your grass or paint your mailbox the wrong color or whatever.
Not sure about the CPS people.
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