Unless the treatment of a child makes headlines (for example, when a child dies), Americans rarely think about the agencies charged with child protection. So, the system that handles more than 3.5 million cases a year gets little public scrutiny, in part because the people most affected are poor.
University of Pennsylvania professor Dorothy Roberts, who has written extensively about the child protection system, said, "Part of the propaganda that this system uses to convince the public that it's actually a benevolent caring system is the very terms that are used to describe it: Child welfare, foster care, child protection. I prefer the term 'family policing system,' because that really describes what the system does – to investigate, to accuse, to tear apart."