I work in child welfare in Australia. Not sure how it compares to the models in other countries, but we desperately try not to remove child from their families. There is very little evidence to support it improves outcomes for those children, and the removing itself is highly horrific for everyone involved. Even in the instances we remove children, we actively attempt to work with the parents to address the issue. We are also beholden to the Courts to justify our decision making.
The harm we cause is better explained by systematic reasons (workload, case complexity, red tape, worker burnout and apathy, racism)
What happens if the cops are called, rather than child services?
This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not).
But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months.
It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.)
What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.
Yeah in my dealings with child welfare workers (in America at least), they are the first to understand how "the system", and they as a key component, can cause harm.
In America the system is split between people who say we should do everything we can to keep children safe in their own home, and people who think it is wokeness gone mad that a parent can test positive for drugs and not have the kids immediately removed. It is, as you’d expect, a calm and reasonable debate filled with claims that “I’m the only one who is thinking about the best interest of the kids!” and “you hate foster care so much you prefer babies to DIE instead of going to a safe foster home!” (As a foster parent, I have unfortunately found that this kind of idiocy is all too common among foster parents.)
The harm we cause is better explained by systematic reasons (workload, case complexity, red tape, worker burnout and apathy, racism)