I had to look up "come a cropper". I kinda like that one. Lol.
Now that I'm on my way to work, let me add some nuance.
As a mom who had an in to the internal dynamics of my daughters friends and classmates through school, church (sadly, where we lived the only childcare available was through churches), Mom groups.centeree around our kids activities, etc, I do realize I had many more opportunities to observe unguarded behaviors your average aocial worker is not going to get. No doubt, abused kids are going to be threatened into "acting right" before the social worker gets there.
So I'm not being flippant here. I do understand what you're saying and you're not wrong.
It is one-sided itself from that administrative place of power (govt) perspective though.
Many of the problems in spotting abuse are structural, theyre baked in. I already spoke about time and more intimate, unguarded opportunities vs being a stranger coming in the kids have been put on high alert about. Here's an example of a structural problem.
In Alabama, where we living at the time, the mandate if DCS (Dept of Children's Services) was to start a file and do an investigation on every complaint made against any parent.
Sounds good, right?
Turns out, not so much. What ended up happening was that DCS became a weapon for adults to attack each other through their children. There is no criminal liability to making false claims. And since your identity as a complaintant is kept secret (so you won't be threatened, intimidated, or subject to revenge) that means you also can't be sued for damages for the chaos you caused in people's lives.
When I was managing the local Dairy Queen when Urchling was a toddler, Dairy Queen had an indoor playground so it was a meeting place for visitation for kids in the system. In other words, I got to know one of your American counterparts (or near it) very well.
He said half or more of their time was spent on bogus complaints. Ex-husbands and wives at war with each other. New boyfriends/girlfriends acting on behest of a lover, church/religious animosities, neighbor grievances, jockeying for position in Mom group, just anything and everything under the sun.
Staff are being run ragged because adults cannot get their shit together, handle conflict, and act like adults. Not even for their own children.
A lotta lotta folks have no business being parents. Fight me on this. They don't have the fortitude or right outlook, or frame of mind for it. Parenting is not for the weak minded or weak hearted.
It seems to me if you want to correctly identify or intervene to help abused children, particularly emotionally abused children, a better avenue would be similar to the one I found myself in ad a Mom.
Station trained social workers as helpers in classroom, ball fields, scouts, churches, parks and playgrounds, etc. All the places kids and their parents are and are behaving unguarded. They won't be as hard to spot. And while you're there, maybe keep an eye out for potential pedophiles too. Shore up some kind of consensus on what the threshold for intervention is and what that's going to look like. In Alabama, that was a big part of the problem according to my friend in regards to addressing emotional abuse.
For him too, it wasn't that he couldn't spot it, especially during those Dairy Queen visitations. It was that there were no real guidelines about it. It was all subjective, which means the kid had to have been avused to the point of running away, getting on drugs, cutting themselves, or trying to kill themselves before anything would be done to help them. Even then, they were the ones seen as the problem more often than not.
That's far too late and often too little too late.
