I don't understand how you think. This is exactly the outcome you'd expect given the incentives created. And yet you blame TV. As if people are really
that stupid. They're not. They're simply incentivized to act this way by the existence of child services.
They're not so stupid as to be swayed by the idiot box.
We're stupid because we don't understand the system we've put in place and are now amazed that we're getting the outcome we want/deserve.
CPS's only reason for existence, and only reason for their funding is "investigating" child abuse. Now you might say, but there's many more serious ones they'll also investigate. Well, yes, but there's serious incentives against doing actual serious cases:
1) they'll fail very often (a sad truth is that nearly all psychiatric treatments fail, and on children, well read on ...)
2) there's a lot of risk (violent children and parents, sometimes families and friends, or the patients may organize against their "carers", read on ...)
3) there's often no solution (e.g. bad living arrangements because parents don't have money. Can't be fixed of course by psychiatric treatment. Bad attitude because teachers are racist. There is a dizzying array of problems that look psychological from a distance but aren't)
And keep in mind they can get out of nearly anything by either not finding a problem or declaring some case done.
So how you solve these problems, as an organisation ? FOR the organisation, of course, not for the children:
("after all if the organisation doesn't exist anymore people are no longer protected. Therefore the organisation's protection must come first" is the excuse used by the smarter bureaucrats)
1) You just don't take actual cases, and use threats to make up the numbers.
When there is no actual problem, it's very easy to treat kids, especially with the threat of incarceration or permanent "placement" to make kids and parents say whatever you want them to say.
Ironically you can recognize this easily. Real psychiatric treatments succeed in something like 10% of cases at most (sucks, but that's the truth. On children, it's even less and the most important factor that determines success is whether the mother is administering or at least assisting treatment). Any organisation that reports 20% effectiveness or more is abusing it's position this way, and making patients lie to escape them.
Any director that demands realistic figures from his organisation would be fired on the spot because of that unfortunate truth, that most people can't be helped.
2) Again you just don't take these cases. How do you do that ? Well, when kids or parents are violent, they are immediately declared cured (as happened in Arnhem just yesterday [2]). Because the organisation can't expect its employees to deal with violence and it never has the means to secure their employees either (besides you can't really protect against violence 24/7. Think about that for a bit, because you'll see it's obviously true and it'll raise many questions you really should be asking). So they pretty much have to.
3) They actually don't want these cases, because nothing will work. So they try to keep these people out. There's the additional problem that too many of these people have nothing to lose, so they will come out and try to expose the problems of CPS.
This has one BIG exception. The other side of CPS is of course people who want children. Foster parents. They can't, or won't, get them the regular way, and of course group 3) is a good source of children, because they're unable to defend themselves legally, and there's DAMN many of them. Problem is, this will go badly wrong with children that are above a certain very young age (because they'll understand what is being done to them and when that happens, of course a significant portion uses violence against foster parents, and anyone and anything around them. Can you blame them ?). Hence the constant effort by CPS organisations to change the laws so they can interfere sooner and sooner in the life of a child. Right into the womb [1]
The truly terrible part of foster parents is that becoming foster parents ... they may do that for criminal reasons (worst case because they're paedophiles that want access to and power over children). CPS of course, is heavily incentivized to cover this up. Unless you think it is good for a government department, whose only useful currency is making politicians look good, to admit they handed children over to paedophiles, sometimes with handcuffs around the childrens' wrists. It is equally obvious to see that this will, inevitably, happen to these services.
And of course there is a group where CPS actually help: parents are human. They may die. They may get ill to the point they can't take care of children. They may run away, for whatever reason. They may be taken away by other parts of the state, like the criminal justice system or adult psychiatry. This of course, can never be a reason to use the violence of CPS institutions against these children (which is done anyway, of course), but this is presumably a good use for foster parents. But this is a tiny minority of children in "protection" everywhere.
In most places CPS is also used as a correctional facility for criminal youth. This may or may not be separate from regular CPS, although it mostly isn't. Also, in many places, for children, acting against CPS decisions is pretty much the only possible crime a child can commit. This, of course, was instituted at the request of CPS in most cases (coincidence ? Hah !).
Obviously at a high level the CPS organisation will maximize incoming money and size of the organisation, while minimizing having it's employees in contact with the disincentives.
So anybody at the top of this organisation has only one option available to them. "Treat" as many innocent kids as possible, and stay as far away as possible from actual problems, with the exception of forms of abandonment, and provide people who want them with a source of children.
Now there's a slight issue with that. Treating those kids (past a certain level) ... means kidnapping them and locking them up against their will. Which, of course, is very traumatic, which is why the threats work. An issue is that this does of course cause long term psychological damage to those children, but ...
If there is a very public case of child abuse, they'll send someone out to "deal" with that one specifically, of course.
Last big problem for any form of CPS is of course that they lock up and take power away from children and parents. Remind you of anyone ? Right: CPS attracts, of course, child abusers and paedophiles, for reasons that are entirely obvious to anyone (they usually pay dismally, so people working there are doing it for other reasons). This goes from their own employees being more than a little bit prone to psychological or outright sexual abuse of interned children, but doesn't stop there: pimps have always found CPS institutions to be a very rich recruiting ground. And as pointed out above, foster parents don't always have good motives, or to put it another way: some portion of them are paedophiles that want to rape kids.
CPS is of course dependent on their public image, and therefore heavily disincentivized to police this, and heavily incentivized to choose the side of the paedophiles and abusers when they do get caught. The alternative is admitting that a LOT of child abuse happens within CPS itself, which of course leads to the question if they're making things better or worse in the total.
Because of the incentives for CPS, there can however be no doubt: child services makes things a LOT worse for kids. It is a necessity for a tiny, tiny minority of kids, which is the excuse used.
That's why you see this, a case combining half the problems: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_s....
a) important child services director turns out to be ... a paedophile. Has been for decades "enjoying child porn" (his words)
b) has been assigned kids into his care
c) those kids are kept with him, youth services sees no reason to change that despite child porn conviction (needless to say, they have placed kids for far less)
d) child services actually defends the person in court and doesn't extract punishment. He is politely asked to leave the child services council, nothing more
e) child services tries to buy parents' silence by offering them their kids back (a bit of conjecture, of course, but ... does anyone really believe anything else happened there ?)
And this is in Norway. I don't know for sure, but it seems to me the situation in the US is very likely to be worse.
If you look for it but a little bit, you will find that child services organisations everywhere have gotten caught in incredible scandals.
These incentives mean, of course, that you just cannot morally risk having these organisations at all. You just cannot allow non-voluntary psychological aid.
[1] http://rotherhamscb.proceduresonline.com/chapters/p_sg_babie.... (they're having an international conference about what people should call "stealing babies right from the womb")
[2] https://nos.nl/artikel/2265037-arnhemse-vader-die-zoon-ombra.... (in dutch, but ...) TLDR: parent turns violent against youth care and adult psychiatric care, is immediately declared "cured" ("uitbehandeld") and three months later grabs a sword and attempts to murder his family. Son is dead, 2 others escaped.
[2 bis] one of the stories of a kid that has some wrong friends. Mom alerts youth care, eventually the kids gets placed after getting caught stealing more than a few times. Kid organises her "group" and the group attacks the staff with makeshift knives. Declared cured within a week (without, of course, any CPS employee seeing this kid to make such a diagnosis), dumped back with mother.