Eugenics Or EGOgenics?

How CPS became the embodiment of Classism and Eugenics rather than child protection

It seems like a lifetime ago now, when I learned that Eugenics didn’t die with the Nazis of WW2. A young mother and advocate watching videos of whistleblowers and politicians weigh in(many of which you can no longer find on the sites they used to be able to be found).

That is what I have spent over a decade watching operate on real families — families dealing with poverty, disability, and the particular cruelty of a system that was designed, from its founding, to treat those things as moral failures written into the blood.

The idea goes like this: people with money are not just financially successful. They are better. Genetically. Morally. Their children deserve to be raised in “good” homes. And children born to people without money — well, those children are deemed available.

This is what I mean by EGOgenics. An entitlement that ignores its own harm. The belief that wealth confers genetic and moral superiority, and that the state exists to enforce that belief on the families who can’t fight back.

Even when it isn’t explicitly stated, that is how it is acted upon.

You’d think that CPS was founded from altruistic goals of protecting children but you’d be wrong

Nobody likes to talk about where CPS came from.

Mostly because there have always been people who wanted it to come from the best of people, and whom still attach it to animal rights movements that extended to children, rather than its more… dubious origins.

The truth is somewhere in between both but with the shape of it coming from the less helpful, more dubious, parts that don’t get talked about.

In Ye ol history the ideals we still see in CPS today actually were political tools to control what noble, or royal etc’s, children were raised what religion(or which version of a religion if you are familiar with the historical bloodbath that was Catholisism v Protistantism but even earlier than that it was a tool to erase culture the church didn’t approve of and anything deemed even remotely pagan).

CPS, as it came about here in USA, however, has a more recent history as it came about specifically during The Great Depression.

You won’t hear about it. It’s not easily found online. Nowadays, if it’s not easily found online, then it may as well not exist to far too many people. It is not a convenient truth, because the arguments made even then — even at the founding — were about eugenics and classism more than protecting children from abuse.

I know this not just from research, but knew to even ask the questions to know was from a woman named Margaret, a neighbor I interviewed for a school project when I was still a child myself.

She was in her nineties at the time. She had been a child during the Great Depression.

Margaret, through the stories she told about her mother and about scarcity and about what was edible and what wasn’t, contributed a lot to how I cook today, even how I think about cooking. But she also told me what else her family had to navigate during that time, even if some things were requested to be left out of the school assignment itself.

Rich people would drive through poor neighborhoods and simply take children they liked. They weren’t picking up orphans. They were picking up children, kidnapping them from poor communities, the way you might pick up a stray cat.

Those children had families. Those children had homes. It didn’t matter. These people felt entitled to them, and a new government agency was in the process of legitimizing exactly that entitlement.

Apparently, it was a very hot-button issue at the time with a lot of contention about it.

I suppose that historical contention is why that history is quietly shunted today.

Margaret asked me to leave out the details about CPS from my school interview explicitly, so I did. There is much I still won’t say out of respect for her, even now that she is gone.

The broad shape of what Margaret described — I have spent my adult life watching it continue. The system was built to do what it does.

It was not corrupted away from a noble purpose as most people today assume.

The purpose was always this: Protect itself while targeting families who deal with poverty, disability, and combinations of the two.

People our society deems ‘lesser’.

The real deviation from the original has always been when it manages to do what people think it does, not when it doesn’t.

The duality in the origins, between these elements and the animal rights groups extending protections to children lends complexity but only one of those fits any sanitized narrative.

I actually became aware of the eugenics-specific angle I didn’t understand as a child with time and exposure as an adult

In connection to CPS, if that wasn’t clear.

My first exposure to the idea that people still believed in eugenics — after World War 2, in the modern era — was not in a history book.

It was politicians defending CPS corruption directly.

I’d actually had this somewhat naive child’s idea that when the Nazis were defeated in WW2, one might say even naturally thought so considering our public school system presented it as if so, but regardless I thought that eugenics… went with them.

Clearly, it did not.

Politicians. On record. Using “bad genes” as an argument for why CPS exists. Even for justifying its wrongdoings through demeaning the people those wrongdoings most affect.

Not in 1935. During my own lifetime.

While I myself was a young mother existing in this country — Someone who’d also survived that very system, only to be thrown to the last person on the planet who should have been anywhere near me unsupervised — Listening to someone claim that if I and others were or are harmed in said system then we deserved it for ‘bad genes’.

(The particular irony of being told I deserved what happened to me due to ‘bad genes’ is that I’ve been medically tested and told otherwise — not that it matters, because eugenics was never actually about science. — feel free to read about what abuse does to the body)

“Bad genes’’ isn’t even a scientific argument let alone one any politician should ever feel the sheer entitlement and ego to even begin conceptualizing, let alone actually have exit mouth.

Lawmakers in Arizona, specifically, made the argument that caseworkers need the ability to lie in order to do their jobs when someone attempted to reassert laws already on the books, in line with a Supreme Court ruling(which also specifically lambasted cps in Arizona for lying to remove children and lying to keep them both and specifically ordered they stop doing that — the response, by the way, was to make it damn near impossible to get to any higher court by completely obstructing the entire process on the state court end of things. Not to actually do as ordered), specifically because Arizona CPS was already in documented hot water for lying to take and keep children from their families.

And in defending those practices, some of the arguments made slid directly into eugenics territory: that certain families, by nature, produce children who need to be removed.

The idea that ‘certain people’, not based on actions but on arbitrary opinion-based notions with no solid basis in anything ‘shouldn’t have children’.

This is EGOgenics in practice. Not “we must protect children from harm.” But rather “Some people should not have children, and we are the mechanism for ensuring that.”

That’s part of eugenics. Not anything that should be happening in this country but certainly something that does.

What we end up with —

Is an ideal that literally punishes people whom some deem ‘shouldn’t have children’ for having children. Not for any actual abuse or neglect, but for simply having children while being looked down upon.

Meanwhile the children who genuinely need help, who desperately do, go unheard because those cases are harder and require actual work rather than a hand-wave. They take actual work, resources, and care. All things the system, as it exists presently, is not for giving.

And no, the arbitrary nature of the system itself, allowing for individual and groups of social workers to actually enforce such toxic personal opinions and inflict them upon ‘the public’ and the families involved… does not change how wide spread it is nor how it culturally permeates.

CPS simply encourages it by design even when those in that design do not always realize it. Even when they’d otherwise wish nothing more than to deny it.

We know, not only from those like me, but because many a whistle blower, many an ex social worker who worked for CPS, left specifically because of these very problems.

Attempts to redirect CPS into something more helpful and less harmful, less child trafficking of poor children to financially better off (usually christian) families… is like changing the purpose of a building, re labeling the rooms, but not knocking down the walls etc…

And in this case you’d have trap doors and many other features literally designed to avoid ‘the rules as written’ where the only way to truly even hope to be rid of them would be to knock it all down and rebuild from absolute scratch, which is obviously what needs to happen because the corruption that goes on should be acceptable/excusable to absolutely no one.

Cost Witnessed

I have seen too many cases as an advocate, that should have gone any way but how they did.

And that doesn’t even get into the horrors that got me into it in the first place.

I’ve lost both people who have been through it as children and as parents to suicide as a direct result of interventions, and as a direct result of the lack of them both. I don’t just mean the grown ups who used to be the children either. I mean children who just want to go home and get to a point they see no way out of the things happening to them but death.

The parents who remove themselves from the census due to these things are something you might hear about but not the children. No one wants to talk about when children are driven, by these things, to take their own lives.

That doesn’t even touch on the people I lost more personally, to the unhealthy coping mechanisms because they’d lived things within this system themselves, as children, those outside of the system cannot imagine. They didn’t cope well but if you have not lived it then you cannot judge them for their ability or lack of ability to cope.

I have spoken to whistleblowers, parents, advocates, survivors — people whose situations went differently from mine and people whose situations did not.

I’ve lost dear friends. Loved ones.

I’ve had to take breaks from it because the toll it takes is heavy even before considering my own personally hellish history involving that very system.

What the corruption illuminates is not a system failing to live up to its ideals.

It is a system operating exactly as originally intended despite attempts to steer it away from that by those who recognize that as wrong.

Consider what can be found publicly, on the internet

A video that used to be hosted on an Arizona state website — now circulating on YouTube and in advocacy circles — shows a male and a female judge admitting openly to making decisions based on funding rather than the merits of a case.

They project bias and advocate for making decisions on grounds that should have them disbarred — without fear of consequence.

The female judge, specifically, was later promoted to the state Supreme Court, receiving rewards rather than consequences.

A senator lost her senate seat — and many suspect more than that — for standing against CPS corruption.

California CPS has argued, as Arizona does(as too many state’s cps have), for caseworker immunity from consequences for lying — because lying, in their framing, is part of the job.

And CPS was mentioned, with notable frequency, in the Epstein files —

Fewer people would be surprised by that if they’d been paying attention and listening when people have been pointing the problems with it out longer than I have even been alive, in the first place.

No one has better PR than CPS. No one.

Its wrongdoing is talked about in whispers. Much like the crimes, laws broken, committed under the banner of CPS, happen behind closed doors, so too does the sharing about CPS corruption.

It’s the most open ‘secret’ to ever ‘secret’.

Pro cps propaganda even gets slipped into children’s movies recently, as some realized with the most recent addition to the lilo and stitch franchise.

Over time people have become far too quick and too comfortable with ‘Wow, I disagree with this person. Call cps.’

(No I don’t mean times people are genuinely abusive. I mean there are people who use CPS as a means of retaliation and far too often where CPS itself goes with it).

Because cps overreach is so baked into society that they don’t even realize what cps is and is not actually supposed to be getting involved for, by the actual rules as they are on paper even by it’s own standards as written.

Rather people respond, slowly and over time, to the idea they will do so regardless because in practice that is often what actually happens.

That should scare you more than the propaganda itself.

The very real cultural shifts around it.

It’s to the point I’ve even had to field attempts to get them involved ‘for the resources’ by someone comfortable not only suggesting that but with asking more times than a sales person is even supposed to, even attempting to bypass me for kiddo’s dad, who was similarly horrified.

How did we even get to the point people are not only comfortable ‘suggesting’ that but also pressuring and attempting to trick ‘agreement’ out of parents?

Ideas simmer and culture shifts. Nothing is truly stagnant.

If it does not move in a positive direction then it slides back into negative.

Culture does not merely sit still.

People are retaliated against for speaking out

I’ve experienced retaliation for speaking out myself before.

I used to do so publicly. I was shadow banned on YouTube until I shuttered every single solitary mention of it. For over a decade.

Even people I knew personally who followed in support, had to ask me directly because it YouTube didn’t even notify people who actually followed me.

I wish I could say it ended with that but it did not.

I’ve taken the stance that if you have something worth saying then you should say it and if someone in this world finds it so threatening as to try to shut you up then you best be louder for those in the back.

Journalists covering this subject have confirmed that coverage restrictions exist in some states, and I don’t mean the ones like in Utah, that specify not to identify the children and to avoid framing that would blame the survivors of abuse.

The mainstream press rarely covers the cases where families are destroyed by intervention — only the cases where children are harmed without it, which creates a permanently skewed public understanding of what the agency actually does most often.

We Need More Than Reform

I do not think CPS can be saved and I am far from alone.

Why would I? And why would I be alone in that?

I have thought about this for a long time, and I do not believe an institution built on this ideology can be reformed from within. It’s rotten from top to bottom, to the point even good people who go in and stay, become terrible.

It is cancer set up as cancer but dressed as the cure.

The backroom deals, the judicial corruption, the legislative protection of lying as job function — these are not outliers. They are features of a system designed to operate without accountability and when they come out in those proceedings they do, it is because they’ve already been doing it in the first place to ‘be confused’ when told ‘no’.

I am one of many who is of the express ideal that CPS needs to be entirely scrapped and rebuilt from the ashes with entirely different ideals at the helm, an entirely different system that focuses on informing families, supporting families, with removals as the actual last resort they are supposed to be — and with something CPS now doesn’t have — genuine community oversight.

(CPS, in all it’s state name variants here in USA, investigates itself — and of course sees ‘nothing wrong’ with anything it does, which if you’ve seen this in more visible issues… you know is bad. Obviously this is a gargantuan problem. CPS has no actual functional oversight because CPS literally ‘oversees’ itself)

We need to put a stop to any government agency, least of all cps, watching itself.

We need a community watch — for CPS and any program that would then replace it.

More than that: we need to stop following along without question

That is how things like this become normalized.

That is how a eugenicist founding ideology persists for nearly a century while everyone politely agrees that the agency exists to protect children.

Think.

The whole system depends, as it works currently, on people not doing that.

People like to think the best of the intentions —

Of the system, of the workers, and of people in general, but I’m telling you now it was founded on everything wrong with it today.

Children need protection from people who would harm and exploit them. Considering that number literally includes CPS, why in the world would anyone trust them?

The answer is simple.

Because it’s easier than asking the hard questions.

If you believe in protecting children then first we must make sure the systems that are supposed to facilitate that protection are, themselves, not dangerous to those same children.

At present the failures to do so have been ongoing and egregious.

Resources If you want to look further:

(I spent most of my time doing volunteer advocacy in Arizona specifically so most, but not all, of these were pulled from Arizona because I knew where to pull them from already — be sure to search your locale. I’ve been in it long enough to know there will be something. Not all the groups I networked with were state specific after all)

California CPS — arguing for lying and immunity https://youtu.be/llXqlKB_AME?si=mSQmlOG8kMilsWwB

Arizona whistleblower interview — mainstream news coverage of CPS corruption — https://youtu.be/6XrVUROe2Hs?si=FFDT3NdYPojC7-kJ

The senator who lost her seat standing against CPS corruption — https://youtu.be/4nkgezojsgo?si=gcLg9VE6L92FSzWw

The judge video — decisions made on funding, not merit of the case — https://youtu.be/KJjWyAZbUj0?si=7dfoRMtMwM77Ca7q

Antler, J. & Antler, S. (1979). FROM CHILD RESCUE TO FAMILY PROTECTION — THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHILD PROTECTIVE MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. Children and Youth Services Review 1(2), pp. 177–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/0190-7409(79)90003-3

https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2017/04/18/republican-lawmakers-block-townsend-amendment-to-protect-parents-from-dishonest-dcs-workers/ — this wasn’t the first time this happened but it is one of them, and worth noting. It’s worth mentioning that there ARE still people trying to obtain accountability for when it happens. There has been and still is an ongoing effort.

https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2015/09/01/dcs-audit-damaging-children-removed-without-guidance/ This admits cps takes kids they shouldn’t and blames it on lack of training, which, is indeed at least part of the problem.

A CPS employee tells a fourteen year old to become a prostitute covered by a mainstream outlet, which again, rarely happens. The coverage not the saying of egregious things by even CPS workers themselves. — https://youtu.be/dzFFUsNKFM4?si=FywpfKazM0tgiNAq

The author spent over a decade as a volunteer family advocate, helping families navigating the child welfare system to know their and their children’s rights within a system that often likes to pretend those rights don’t exist.

You made it! Cat Pic!

From author’s personal collection: It’s a Shaq in a box! Black can named Shaq, floofy girl extraordinaire, in a box on a shelf. In all her floofy glory.