The Rotted Core of “Child Protection” in Ohio’s Courts
Many people laugh and say it is absurd that Children and Teen girls are being trafficked through Ohio's Child Protective Services. Its happening and the system is destroying families.
The Sanctimony of a Corrupt System
Under the banner of “child protection,” a profound moral decay has taken root in Ohio’s Child Protective Services (CPS) and Domestic Relations Courts. It is a decay that would appall any rational mind. Here in Lorain, Erie, Huron, and Ottawa counties, agencies ostensibly dedicated to justice operate outside the bounds of logic, trampling on constitutional liberties and the very families they claim to serve. Bureaucrats mouth platitudes about the “best interest of the child” while enforcing their personal whims as law. These institutions have abandoned objective reason and justice, replacing them with caprice and sanctimony. The result is a system in which unscrupulous officials play judge, jury, and executioner with Ohio’s families – a system rotted through with philosophical and institutional corruption.
Consider what passes for “investigation” in this skewed world. An unsubstantiated allegation, a mere whisper of wrongdoing, is enough to unleash CPS on a household like a wrecking ball. No proof needed – an anonymous phone call or a malicious lie will do. Across America, about four million calls are made to CPS hotlines each year, implicating over seven million children. Roughly half of these reports are dismissed upfront as baseless or absurd, yet the families are left scarred by the intrusion. Rampant overreporting is the norm, not the exception. In Ohio, we’ve seen children torn from loving homes based on nothing more than a caseworker’s “hunch” or a neighbor’s vendetta. Parents are treated as guilty until proven innocent – and often, they are never truly allowed to prove their innocence at all.
Injustice Disguised as Law
Walk into the Domestic Relations Courts in these counties and you enter a realm where due process and reason have been cast aside. Magistrates and judges, draped in the robes of authority, may act on bias or cronyism rather than facts or law. Decisions are handed down that defy logic and decency: children placed with abusive relatives because they have connections; good mothers or fathers relegated to supervised visits because they dared question a caseworker’s conduct. The courtroom, meant to be a shrine of justice, becomes a kangaroo court where evidence is optional and the outcomes can seem pre-ordained by favoritism. In one local petition, citizens attested that Lorain County caseworkers “file reports based on lies… and personal choices” – removing well-cared-for children while truly endangered kids are left behind. This is inverted justice: the innocent are punished and the guilty or negligent are ignored, all under the sanctimonious guise of child welfare.
Such perversions of justice do not occur by accident; they arise from a deeper philosophical rot. Truth and reason should be the foundations of any child welfare decision – yet in these Ohio agencies, truth is whatever the bureaucrat says it is, and reason is supplanted by arbitrary “gut feelings.” The constitutional rights of parents – the right to raise one’s children, to face one’s accusers, to fair adjudication – are treated as inconveniences that can be brushed aside. Have we forgotten that the 14th Amendment guarantees due process before the state can deprive us of life, liberty, or parenthood? Instead, a CPS investigator can, with a few strokes of a pen, trigger the forceful removal of a child from home. A parent wakes up to find the state at the door, taking their children with no trial, no transparency, and no accountability. It is a scene one would expect from a totalitarian nightmare, not the American Midwest.
Worse, the system then shrouds itself in secrecy. Proceedings in family court are often closed to the public “to protect the child’s privacy,” conveniently insulating judges and CPS from scrutiny. They operate in darkness, where no sunlight reaches the misconduct within. Under this cloak, absurdities thrive. I have seen cases where rational evidence was ignored entirely – where a mother’s earnest compliance with every CPS demand was hand-waved away, or a father’s clear vindication on false charges was met with deaf ears. The cult of “child protection” cannot admit it was wrong; to do so would shatter its illusion of infallibility. And so, irrational decisions pile up, and families are ground into the dirt by the very institutions meant to protect them.
Children as Commodities in a Crooked Machine
Pull back the curtain further, and an even more disturbing picture emerges. Children have become commodities in a bureaucratic machine driven by perverse incentives and outright corruption. Counties receive federal funds for every child placed in foster care and bonuses for each adoption finalized. In effect, every removal is a payday. This is the philosophical poison of collectivism in action: individual children and parents are sacrificed to feed a system’s appetite for funding and power. What incentive does such a system have to restrain itself, to admit a mistake, to reunite a family swiftly? None – on the contrary, the incentives all push toward more intervention, more control, more state intrusion into the family unit.
Thus we see families turned into battlegrounds for profit and control. Private contractors, foster agencies, court-appointed therapists, guardians ad litem – an entire cottage industry flourishes around these broken families. Each expert and administrator collects a fee, often drawn from taxpayers, as the case drags on. The longer the conflict, the more billable hours for attorneys and evaluators. The result is a cruel irony: in prolonging the “fight” supposedly to protect the child, many actors line their pockets. This is altruism as a cover for greed – the classic pattern Ayn Rand warned against, where professed concern for others becomes the license to victimize them.
Even more alarming are the underreported dark alliances lurking at the fringes of this system. Across the country, foster care and child welfare agencies have become targets of exploitation by organized crime. Yes, even Mexican drug cartels have learned to exploit our legal frameworks to traffic children under the cloak of legality. They know that a child taken by CPS, or arriving as an “unaccompanied minor” at the border, can disappear into a poorly monitored pipeline. Once a child is swept into the system, who tracks them? Where do they all end up? The uncomfortable truth is that thousands simply vanish. Federal reports and whistleblowers have revealed that our government lost track of tens of thousands of migrant children in recent years, with no assurance that these children are safe from trafficking or exploitation. In fact, criminal cartels are “routinely” trafficking children for sex and slave labor, taking full advantage of bureaucratic lapses.
Do not imagine that Ohio is immune because it is far from the southern border. The web of corruption spans nationwide. Foster homes in any state can be the terminus of this grim pipeline. Informal relationships and secretive memorandums of understanding between certain “non-profit” organizations and state agencies allow children to be shuffled around with lax oversight. In the chaos, predators insert themselves as foster parents or shelter providers. Under the cloak of legality, unspeakable crimes occur – children entrusted to the “system” end up in the hands of those who see them as products to be sold. This is the ultimate inversion of justice: a system created to save children delivers them to the worst of evils. And all the while, the officials in charge either look the other way or remain willfully blind, issuing self-congratulatory reports as the tragedies multiply in silence.
Fear and Silence: The Chilling of Free Speech
One might expect that in a free society, such egregious abuses would be loudly condemned by the citizenry. But here we confront another pernicious effect of this system: the chilling of free speech through fear. Parents who have suffered at the hands of CPS or biased courts often dare not speak out. They live under an implicit gag order – not one imposed by law, but by terror. If you criticize the judge’s ruling, if you expose the caseworker’s lies on social media, will your children be returned at the next hearing? Or will you find yourself punished for your outspokenness, perhaps through reduced visitation or additional scrutiny? Everyone knows the unwritten rule: do not offend those who hold the fate of your family in their hands.
This is how tyranny survives in the shadows, without need for overt censorship. Mothers and fathers, supposedly free American citizens, bite their tongues and self-censor their cries for help, lest the wrath of the system come down on them again. It is a climate of fear more at home in a dictatorship than a democracy. The First Amendment wilts when a vengeful caseworker or judge can retaliate by taking what you cherish most – your children. Many good parents thus suffer in silence. Our society loses the benefit of their testimony, their warnings, their demands for reform. The very people who know the system’s rot from the inside are effectively gagged by fear. Meanwhile, the system’s architects continue touting their righteousness unchallenged. This is how injustice festered so long: behind a wall of frightened silence.
When “Father’s Rights” Become Family Wrongs
No critique of this broken apparatus is complete without examining how even well-intentioned movements can be twisted to evil ends. Take the father’s rights movement – born from legitimate grievances about biased custody decisions, it has sought to ensure loving fathers aren’t shut out of their children’s lives. A worthy goal, to be sure. But just as any noble ideal can be perverted by scoundrels, so too has this movement been manipulated by narcissists and abusers in some cases. Under the banner of “father’s rights,” men who once terrorized their families now march into court proclaiming themselves victims. They exploit the system’s flaws to continue their abuse by other means.
Imagine a violent ex-husband, well-versed in manipulation, discovering that he can use the courts to wage perpetual war on his ex-wife. He files motion after motion, drags her into court at every turn, accuses her of alienating the children, and demands full custody not out of love, but out of a desire to win and to punish. Unfortunately, such dark strategies sometimes succeed. In the tangle of biases and backlogs, a charismatic abuser can convince authorities that he is the responsible parent and that the true victim – the mother who raised her voice about abuse – is unstable or malicious. The courts, ever susceptible to catchy narratives and implicit biases, may buy these lies. Children are then court-ordered to live with an abuser, a scenario that would defy belief if it weren’t happening in courtrooms across this nation. This is the corrupted underside of the father’s rights crusade: when rights become a weapon to hurt rather than a shield to protect.
The philosophical failure here is the same: a failure to discern truth from lies, to see through the pretense to the reality underneath. Just as CPS workers may take children from safe homes while ignoring true abuse, family courts may hand children to a charismatic tyrant while punishing the protective parent. Reason and justice are abandoned, and raw power rushes to fill the void. The manipulator – whether it’s a rogue caseworker or a vengeful ex – knows how to game a system devoid of accountability. And those who suffer are, as always, the innocent ones: the children, caught in a war they cannot understand, and the honest parent, bewildered at how the institutions of liberty became instruments of oppression.
Reclaiming Reason: A Call for Reform and Justice
It is not enough to enumerate the failures; we must demand solutions that correspond to the gravity of this injustice. The situation in Ohio – and indeed across America – cries out for structural reform grounded in our founding principles of reason, rights, and limited government. To begin with, we need a Judicial Inspector General – an independent watchdog with teeth – to root out ethical violations and bias in the courts. No longer can we allow magistrates and judges to operate as unassailable fief-lords in family court. Those who favor friends, trade favors, or rule by personal whim must be exposed and removed. The judiciary earns the public’s respect only when it deserves it, and that means cleaning house of any who twist the law for their own ends.
Next, the Guardian ad Litem (GAL) system needs a top-to-bottom overhaul. GALs – the court-appointed “voice of the child” – should be the best among us: well-trained, truly impartial, and held to exacting standards. Instead, too often they are undertrained or embedded in the local good-ol’ boy network, rubber-stamping whatever narrative the favored side presents. We must demand higher training standards and rigorous oversight for GALs. They should be licensed, monitored, and subject to review. If a GAL exhibits bias or incompetence, they should be removed from the roster. The power to influence a child’s fate is an awesome responsibility; it must be entrusted only to those who will exercise reason, not prejudice.
Crucially, we must impose stricter oversight on CPS itself. Sunshine is the best disinfectant: CPS operations should be transparent wherever privacy is not absolutely necessary. Let county agencies publish anonymized records of their performance – how many cases were unsubstantiated, how many children were removed without solid evidence, how many were returned home versus adopted out. We must end the era of CPS policing itself. Whistleblowers within the system should be protected and encouraged to come forward without fear of retaliation. An independent review board or ombudsman could be established in Ohio to audit CPS decisions and defend the rights of families. When an agency has the power to dissolve families, it is our duty to ensure that power is checked and balanced at every turn.
Finally, it is time to get serious about the nightmare scenario of trafficking and corruption. We propose the creation of a special Internal Affairs unit – or better yet, an interstate task force – devoted solely to investigating child trafficking and corruption within child welfare systems. This unit must have the authority to follow the money and the children: to scrutinize the links between state agencies and private contractors, to track children who cross state lines, and to prosecute any official or foster provider complicit in exploitation. When reports indicate that 85,000 children are “missing” and potentially in the hands of criminals, alarm bells should be ringing in every law enforcement office from Columbus to Washington. We cannot afford half-measures; the full force of the law must be brought to bear on those who would use the shield of the state to facilitate the abuse of children.
In calling for these reforms, we affirm a fundamental truth: the purpose of government is to protect individual rights, not violate them. When a government office – be it a child services agency or a court – betrays that purpose, it loses its moral legitimacy. The abuses in Ohio’s child protection apparatus are not only a local issue; they strike at the heart of what it means to live in a free society. If any official can, on a whim, destroy a family and face no consequence, then none of us is truly free. As Ayn Rand might say, this is the ultimate inversion: the state that exists by the sanction of its citizens turning its full coercive power against those very citizens, all while claiming to act for their good.
The Moral Imperative for Action
Our outrage must be harnessed into action. Let every voter, every conservative activist, every honest policymaker take note: the family is the fundamental unit of a free civilization, and it must be protected from tyranny as fervently as any other liberty. This is not a call for anarchy or to shield genuine abusers – it is a call for rationality and justice. It is a call to reassert that false allegations, secret courts, and unchecked bureaucrats have no place in Ohio or America. It is a call to recognize that a system which can sever the sacred bond between parent and child as casually as one might swat a fly is a system in dire need of reform.
We, the people, must demand that our leaders shine light into every dark corner of CPS and the domestic courts. We must insist on rational standards of evidence and real accountability. And we must do so with the fierceness of a mother defending her young – for that is precisely the stake here. The time for whispered horror stories is over; the time for bold action has arrived. In the spirit of moral righteousness and individual rights, let us rip out this philosophical rot root and branch. No more stolen children. No more shattered families without cause. We seek a future where the phrase “child protection” is not a bitter irony, but a cherished principle upheld by institutions worthy of the name. It is our duty to demand nothing less.
In the end, this struggle is about more than policy; it is about the soul of our justice system. Will we allow cynicism, cruelty, and corruption to masquerade as compassion? Or will we, guided by reason and moral clarity, reclaim these institutions for truth and justice? The answer must come from us. As citizens of a free nation, we cannot avert our eyes from the plight of those families devastated by state malfeasance. We must confront it, condemn it, and correct it. This is the only moral choice. Anything less would mean complicity in the very evil that now wears the mask of “protecting children.” Let us cast off that mask and expose the faces of those responsible, so that no child – in Ohio or anywhere in America – will ever again be sacrificed at the altar of such rot. The time to act is now. Justice and reason demand it.