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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 lot of incompatible cultural trends and forces, brought into ever-increasing contact, with ever-increasing tensions.
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