WHY? What is the motivation? Part 1: Financial Gain

I am not all knowing, and am prepared to admit I do know each and every reason why these atrocities occur, but I do have information that gives a general idea, and personal experience that gives further insight into personal motives. I know if you have never experienced this before that you figure you just met a fanatic, someone who exagerates, stories that cannot possibly have a basis in fact. Thank you for enabling this terrorism with your denial and ignorance. For everyone else willing to take a deeper look, here goes.

Personal Financial Gain: Let me introduce you to CAPTA (Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act). On January 31st, 1974, President Nixon signed Public Law 93-247, The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). This act ostensibly addressed a growing awareness of the problem of child abuse (ranked by some polls as one of the three most pressing national problems in the early '70s). It resulted in effects more far-reaching and consequences more devastating than the designers could have imagined. A few articles to read on the subject are:
TWENTY YEARS OF CAPTA
The background, limitations and results of federal and state child abuse legislation
By Damon Coffman

Proposed Revision of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act - CAPTA
By Richard A. Gardner

"The monster stalking Americans is CAPTA, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974."
Paul Craig Roberts, Washington Times


Otherwise known as the Mondale act after Senator Walter Mondale
The Mondale Act (Senate Bill #1191, PL 93-274)
With Bob and Elaine Lehman

Now that you have some background on this law gone aury....here is your financial motive. You can find this article in full here: Desert Weekly Post 1 November, 2001.
Here are some excerpts.
The problem began, she (Neve Moore) opines, when the government passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) in 1974. With the act, the government began feeding massive amounts of federal funding to states to set up programs to combat child abuse and neglect. "From that came Child Protective Services, as we know it today," she wrote. After the bill passed, then Vice President Walter Mondale, who had been a big promoter of the law, "expressed concerns that it could be misused. He worried that it could lead states to create a business in dealing [trafficking in] children."

Enter Bill Clinton. In 1997 President Clinton passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASF). The ensuing public relations campaign promoted the Act as a way to help find a home for abused and neglected children who languish in foster care for years, often being shuffled among dozens of foster homes, never having a real home and family.

Instead, the Act set a whole new industry into motion. To accompany the ASF, the President requested, by executive memorandum, an initiative entitled Adoption 2002, to be implemented and managed by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). The initiative not only gives cash adoption bonuses to the states, it also provides cash adoption subsidies to adoptive parents until the children turn eighteen.

"The primary goal of CAPTA, as stated in federal law, are child safety and family reunification," they wrote. "However, it has become readily apparent that the CDSS [California Department of Social Services] takes children from families and adopts them out in order to collect more federal monies. There is no effective oversight of this system that is now out of control."

Add to that, adoption bonuses of $4,000 to $6,000 per child, and most counties find themselves with an impressive tributary to a larger revenue stream. For example, in 1999, the first year for which adoption incentive statistics under the 1997 law became available from HHS, states like California, which reported adopting 3,958 children through CPS portals in 1998, reported adopting 6,254 children, a whopping 59% increase over 1998, for a bonus of $4,377,740. Another 8,221 kids were adopted out of the state's foster care system in 2000, for another $4,030,572 in bonuses. To receive any bonuses in 2001, the state will have to adopt out more than 8,221 kids.

Other ways in which social workers can earn money is to conduct classes, such as anger management classes, which are sometimes required by the court, at the suggestion of social workers as a part of a parent's case plan.
"There is nothing at the county level that precludes social workers from moonlighting to make extra money," Assistant DPSS Director DeMers said.

This is the tip of the iceburg in financial gain not only for the governing states and counties, but personal financial gain on the part of individual social workers. I want to add that it is not just in one particular state or county that this happens or is relevant to - it is the entire United States.