Hacker Cinema
Short Term 12
2013 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
Grace, a compassionate young supervisor at a foster care facility, helps at-risk teens. But when a new charge dredges up memories of her own troubled past, Grace's tough exterior begins eroding.
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Folks who believe in "protecting children". Who believe in CPS, while they are perfectly aware what a monstrous system CPS really is, but want to see others hurt and punished. Who actually believe something like CPS protects children. Who feel children need to be saved from, oh, lots of things, from sex to satan, drugs to iphones, saved from not getting vaccinated ... to saved from getting vaccinated, or are just after revenge, but while they want to intervene in children's lives, "if necessary" with violence, they absolutely DO NOT want to take care of any children. They also see NO need whatsoever to pay for either education or care, not even for the physical facilities, but they won't let them stay at "bad"/suboptimal homes, ESPECIALLY not if the kids want to (resulting in regular research pointing out that even outright abusive parents are producing much better results in children than even good CPS homes)
Note that the comic says this place was "full of children from group homes". That would be CPS, mostly ex-foster children.
People who believe in punishing "bad parents", while obviously NOT agreeing on what bad (or good, or "good enough") parenting actually is, sometimes resulting in 2 people in CPS intervening for outright contradictory reasons. People who work in the front-end of CPS are all about why they are better, and why society needs to be fixed. With violence and punishments, of course, not with help and/or support. Grace is the real evil in that movie, despite being innocent and spending all her time trying to help, executing the will of the "folks" "protecting" children.
You will note the ONE constant in all CPS systems around the world: those who decide what is done to the children NEVER actually have to watch (or even follow up on) what these actions actually do to those children. And absolutely nobody is responsible for what happened, except the children themselves. NEVER will you see a system where the people administering the system assigned the same responsibility parents have. They take kids away, with violence, make them shut up until 18, then dump them on the street.
And make no mistake: these people ONLY want punishments dealt out. In theory, not to the children, but those children are "not their responsibility". Which effectively means they take everything from those children, "for their protection" and give nothing to them. The caretakers are minimum wage failures (sometimes victims of CPS themselves) that cannot give a decent future to their kids. It's "not a punishment, it's just difficult". Everything from their parents, school, friends, right down to the idea of a playground they recognise is taken from those children. You can tell me that's "not" punishing children as much as you want.
And people misunderstand children's reactions. Like in the movie "Short Term 12". After a while you realise WHY Jayden attacks her dad's car. Not because of the abuse, but because he is responsible for getting her into CPS, and taking away her future (same reason Marcus attacks himself). Jayden is attacking Grace for being a terrible pseudo-parent that takes away her future, a parent that's nothing but a countdown timer to prison, she is not attacking her dad for abuse at all, but for delivering her to Grace.
CPS also creates institutions themselves, along these lines. They rename them and the techniques they use every 10 years or so, currently they're on "applied behavior analysis" (ABA), a supposed cure for "autism" (this decade's catch-all diagnosis masking the fact that CPS, psychologists, psychiatrist and whatever cheaper version of those (orthopedagogy is the current name) is bullshit and can't correctly diagnose disorders, or do anything about them. Oh well. I guess it's an improvement over PDD-NOS).
The concept is always the same: isolation, idiotically bad schooling or none at all, and constant violence against children.
See for example the largest study on CPS ever:
https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583
Or it's popular summary "Troubled homes better than foster care":
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-02-foster-study_N.htm
And let's not forget just how bad the reputation of CPS is where it comes to getting things wrong. Some studies claim that false accusations of child abuse, because there is no standard of proof for taking the kids away (only for locking up the perpetrators), that the false diagnoses and false accusations far outnumber the true ones.
And like anyone who's seen an orphanage (they don't like to be called that anymore) and half of all foster homes knows. Seeing damaged kids in those places is perfectly normal: those places damage kids. These places are not hospitals, where patients come in damaged and get fixed. These places damage kids, they don't fix them. They're more like the ragged pillow at the bottom of a half-pipe, a catchment area for broken bones, doing MUCH more to protect the reputation of the rest of the system than preventing or helping with injuries.
And the horrible thing about such places is that they effectively prevent the kids from having a future (they have extremely bad schools, no alternatives, limited learning materials, ...), but throw them out at 18 years (and please: 21 years or even something ridiculous like 45 years would NOT be better). Please stop pretending that after 10 years where crime (from stealing from other kids to dealing drugs) is the only way to get even a trivial little extra, no-one would remain clean.
That only happens in protected settings. And the sad truth is that even very bad parents still provide a very protected setting for kids.
Besides, these places, for the large majority they don't even try: treatment, though often the very reason kids get taken away, effectively doesn't happen in such places. Just 1 underpaid person, often without any qualifications, per 15 or 20 kids, and some director "handling" 20 groups. That's all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Term_12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Crasher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_Family
Please note: "System Crasher" is the more realistic of these movies (especially "Instant Family" is extremely toned down, I can guarantee a kid doesn't just shout 2 sentences if they fear everything they have will be taken away. They fight and scream and cry and kick and ... for 2 months).
If you watch "System Crasher" 5 times you will even start to see WHAT is happening. This kid made a mistake. Mistake lead to reputation (ie. to school teacher at the very least pestering her), which escalated matters. Help, effectively meant using violence against the child and more and more fear. And of course, the kid never gets any say, and therefore never learns WHY one needs control over oneself. This escalates and escalates and escalates BECAUSE OF YOUTH SERVICES. If they refused to intervene in the beginning of the problem, the odds of it just blowing over were very, very high, as the kid and parents would be forced to self-regulate their relationship. That would have happened, and at that point there would no longer have been a problem. And, frankly, it's hard to argue that any tactic, other than what was done, was worse, given the outcome.