The Sunday Guardian published a story in Oct 2018 –

In the USA, we have witnessed a 40-year social experiment in child protection initiated in 1974 by the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). This experiment has failed. The project of casting layers of legislation on the American public in the name of the “best interest of the child” and promoted with the belief that every family needs government oversight, has backfired.

It is hard to imagine in a first-world country like the United States, that government officials can walk into your child’s school, have them removed from their classroom, interviewed in private, taken from school, and placed in the home of a stranger; all without your knowledge. And for what reason? Maybe they feel you don’t feed your child enough, maybe your child missed a few days from school, maybe someone just lied and said you were a drug dealer, and your child could not give the right answers to exonerate you.

It is hard to imagine in a first-world country that a newborn baby could be stripped from his mother’s arms in a hospital because the mother had one positive test for opiates during pregnancy, even though there was no showing of drugs in the mother or the child at birth, and there is no other evidence of child abuse or neglect.

It is hard to imagine in a first-world country that a child could be forced by law to stay incarcerated in a hospital with a rare and untreated disease and separated from her entire family simply because her parents wanted to take her for a second medical opinion.

It is hard to imagine in a first-world country that these drastic and intrusive measures can be taken by the state on anonymous reports that might be from spiteful neighbours, hostile ex-spouses or other ill-intended persons.

Parents shudder when facing child protection agencies because at every stage of the case they know that the same agency is gathering evidence against them. The same social worker who comes to their home to inspect for safety reasons is likely to be the person who gets on the stand and testifies that the laundry was not done and the home was cluttered, preventing the return of their children.

This is the state of the child protection system in the United States.