LEGAL INJUSTICES
Across the country, CPS routinely exceeds its legal authority, separating children from safe parents without lawful cause. These are not isolated mistakes, but widespread violations of constitutional rights, statutory protections, and due process. A system that breaks the law cannot claim to uphold it.
Both parents and children have a constitutional right to family integrity, and to not be held accountable for the actions of another.
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
Protective parents are stripped of their most fundamental rights when seeking safety results in surveillance, punishment, and family separation.
Every child has the right to remain with a safe caregiver, and every parent has the right to defend their family from harm without fear of retaliation by the state. When these rights are denied, the system perpetuates trauma instead of preventing it.
BIAS & DISCRIMINATION
Outdated failure-to-protect laws are rooted in discrimination and applied with internal biases: sexism that assumes women are inherently responsible for children, racism that frames minorities as neglectful, classism that treats poverty as moral failure, ableism that casts disability as incapacity, and ageism that equates youth with incompetence.
CONTRAVENTION OF STATUTE
Contravention of statute refers to the enforcement of a law in a manner that directly conflicts with the law’s own requirements and purpose. Child protection laws require parents to protect their children from exposure to abuse or danger, and reporting violence to authorities is widely recognized as a reasonable protective action. Charging a parent with “failure to protect” — a legal allegation that a parent did not take reasonable action to prevent harm — when they have taken the protective action of reporting abuse is enforcement in direct conflict with the statute.
LEGAL VOID
A legal void occurs when the law imposes duties or risks but does not provide protections for the people affected. In child protection cases, parents are expected—and in many states legally required—to report domestic violence when children are present in the home. However, there is no legal protection preventing child welfare agencies from removing children or taking legal action against those same parents when they fulfill these obligations, leaving victims who are parents with no reasonable options.
SYSTEMIC NON-COMPLIANCE
Our child welfare system is legally bound by federal and state regulations that require government agencies to follow their own operational policies. When an agency acts contrary to its own required procedures, those actions are unlawful and an abuse of the authority granted to it by the law. Despite these requirements, child welfare agencies frequently make decisions and take actions without meaningful oversight or accountability that contradict their governing statutes, federal mandates, and internal procedures.