The Playbook of Stolen Childhoods: Inside a System Built on Terror
This post is a little different and an incredibly important topic.
Can you imagine a system where strangers can tear a child from their parents for weeks at a time without a single shred of actual evidence?
Imagine your toddler ends up in the hospital with gastro, and a week later contracts an ear infection from daycare. Imagine a worker deciding, on a whim, that this means the child isn't being fed at home.
Welcome to a world where child safety workers call you at 8:00 PM making threats to take your child away forever. When you—a terrified, grieving parent—become understandably frantic and call out their actions as malicious, they hit record on their iPhone. That recording of your raw distress is then used as evidence that you "cannot manage your regulation" and are unfit. They will call you a dozen times a day for weeks, waiting for the exact moment your spirit breaks so they can document your agony.
In this world, workers can ambush your home at any moment with police escorts. If you’ve worked exhausting double shifts and the dishes are piled up, or the floors are mucky because a normal toddler can trash a room in twenty minutes flat while playing with a sandwich, it is documented as neglect.
They stand in your living room and label you unfit, while you are forced to watch them completely violate your toddler’s bodily autonomy—tickling her on the floor and ignoring her irritated noises until she silently walks away. Then, they claim something is "wrong" with her because she has become quiet.
You are too paralyzed by fear to speak up, but your mind is screaming: She is incredibly chatty when you aren't here. Once they leave, your nervous system drops out of survival mode, and the horrifying realization hits: they didn't see their own failure to respect a child's "no." They gaslit you, walked out the door, and checked a box marking your wrongdoing.
A culture of complicity and fear has been bred; the corruption is so absolute that it paralyzes the very people paid to defend you:
Assigned solicitors are so accustomed to losing to the department's dirty tactics that they don't even bother fighting. They tell you to just roll over and agree to their 2 year order again because at least it isn’t a Long Term Order.
Community therapists know the monstrous lengths these workers will go to if angered. Even clinicians are terrified, wondering: “If I provide evidence that contradicts their case, what stops them from coming after my own kids?”
The workers entering these homes openly admit they ignore their own department’s policies because they operate entirely unchecked, stealing children from their families like a competitive sport, leaving a trail of profound intergenerational trauma.
A perpetual trauma loop has developed; the department does such a catastrophic job of raising state-care children that when those children grow up and have babies of their own, they are automatically flagged in the healthcare system for removal. Before a young mother has even left the maternity ward, a magistrate signs off on the removal. The cycle repeats.
On the rarest occasion, a family might have an advocate who fights back. Two or three or so months later, the infant is returned. The damage is done; a five-day-old baby was violently removed from the bonding and breastfeeding process and placed with a stranger. Then, the true terror sets in as the worker calls a dozen times a day, coercing the traumatized mother into signing a "voluntary IPA” if you weren’t coerced while your infant was on their way back to your care. An IPA, something they say means they can ‘provide ongoing support’ and what it really means is you are giving them permission to ambush your home, day or night, indefinitely.
Weaponized racism and moving goalposts are rampant in this system, cultural differences are explicitly weaponized as evidence of an unfit home. If an Indigenous family sleeps together in one large room according to cultural norms, or shares meals together on the floor, it is documented as neglect.
The goalposts twist you into impossible knots:
If you don't get a job, you are prioritizing your desires over your child.
They demand you complete endless parenting courses during work hours to prove you care.
But if you go to work, they turn around and say you should have stayed home to complete the courses.
If you remain calm, you don't care. If you get upset, you are dysregulated.
There is no winning. Your therapists can see the blatant racism clear as day, because there is a white family down the road living in far worse conditions with seven kids crammed into two bedrooms, facing absolutely no consequences.
The game they play with your life; once they take your child on a one-week emergency intervention, the trap snaps shut. You no longer have your child in your care to demonstrate that you are a fit parent. Before you know it, two years have crawled by. No one can really articulate what you need to change to demonstrate you are a fit parent, which honestly is likely because the department doesn’t actually know either. The department hasn't bothered to gradually increase your care time, so they use the lack of recent care time as evidence that they "don’t have the evidence that you are capable”.
Another two-year order is signed. You walk out of that courtroom feeling like your entire world has been burned to the ground. You want to scream out in raw pain, but you force yourself to choke it down. Because if you scream, a neighbour might call the police, and the department will use your heartbreak as evidence all over again.
So I make a call for immediate action because this may seem extreme but this world exists. These are the everyday, institutional realities of the families I sit with as a therapist. The sheer cruelty perpetrated against these parents elicits a visceral fear inside my own chest. I’m not talking about the parents who are genuinely abusing their children, I’m talking about those who want to learn, who want to give their child a good life and may need to learn more skills to do so. As a parent of a young child myself, the question haunts me: If I push back too hard against the department in my clinical advocacy, will they come after me? I have children, so it isn’t out of the question. I’ve already made them angry enough that they yelled at me until I asked them to speak to me with respect.
Let’s call this what it is; this system is just another government department stealing children from families, renamed and wrapped in the sanitized language of "welfare." It significantly and disproportionately ravages Indigenous families and the low socioeconomic families despite the fact research shows that child abuse is not classist, it happens in homes of all backgrounds.
We have mountains of research proving the catastrophic, permanent damage that removal inflicts on a child's nervous system. The system claims it only intervenes in cases of severe abuse, but in my clinical experience, that has simply not been the truth. In reality, the children I have worked with inside residential state care settings have more often than not been abused far worse inside those institutions than they ever were at home with repeated sexual assault being the most common horror they face under the state's ‘protection’.
The system's response? Six brief sessions with a psychologist, a pat on the back, the message reiterated once again that they aren’t worthy of real care or rights and a silent promise: When you grow up and have a baby of your own, we will be waiting.
This is a national disgrace. A Royal Commission and the immediate, total dismantling of this broken system needs to happen now.
