I have been watching a lot of old made-for-TV movies on DVD lately, and the majority of them are true stories of such nightmarish proportions as to give the entire free world a collective case of the willies. These are horror stories about what happens to family rights when Social Services steps in to "do its duty". Usually what happens is that parental rights in the case of children and family rights in the case of the elderly, go right out the window, so some perfect stranger can control how you live, think, act, and behave in public, not to mention in private. These people, on the whim of one person's testimony, right or wrong, can stroll right into your home, search through your personal things, and take over your very life to do with as they please.
I have had my own encounters with Social Services in dealings with my elderly grandmother who has mild dementia. Basically a woman we had never seen before, who did not know us from Adam, walked into my grandmother's hospital room one day while we were visiting her, and informed us in no uncertain terms that we were going to put her into a nursing home. Naturally, we were stunned by this announcement and wanted to know our options. She told us there weren't any. She had to go to a nursing home right now, and that was that. She said repeatedly that she did not want to disrupt our lives, and that she understood our feelings at that moment, but I don't think so. Social Workers don't have feelings when they come into your life and strip you of all fundamental rights and freedoms.
We stood our ground with that woman and fiercely defended my grandmother, and finally, one other option was placed on the table, rather reluctantly, it seems. We could either put her in a home or we could let her stay in her own home with strangers coming in weekly to cook, clean, and bathe my grandmother. Both options sounded repugnant to all of us, including granny, but we chose the lesser of the two evils and told the social worker to set up arrangements for helpers to come into her home. The social worker seemed pleased with the decision and left us to our own distressed thoughts. Then her doctor came in and told us she could go home, and all seemed right as rain. We took her home.
She was home for a few days but then the dementia took over for a while and we had to call 911 because granny claimed to be sick when she was not. The paramedics took one look at her and decided she could not stay there in her own home alone, so she was brought to our home, where she was to remain until someone clued us in as to what to do with her in regards to nursing homes. We waited, the days went by, and we waited some more. Finally, after five days of waiting, and the tension in the house growing to unbelievable proportions, we simply took her back home and left her there where she has been residing ever since. Later on we found out that we cannot send her to a nursing home without her permission, which she was not about to give, unless we went to court and officially took her rights away.
All of that trouble because of one nosy social worker. I understand the need to protect young children from abuse and neglect, and I have no problem with that, but what I refuse to comprehend is the amount of freedom those people possess that gives them the right to simply waltz into your life, disrupt it completely, force you to make tough decisions, and then walk away as if they were never there in the first place. Are these people human? Do they have feelings? Do they have emotions? You would never guess it when talking to them. They come at you with all the tenderness of a battering ram, and you have no choice but to sit there and take it. To me that is one scary way of life.
I think families need to make decisions together, without outside interference, at least in the case of elderly people. They are not property of the state, they are not objects to be shuttled from one place to another just because some stranger feels like redecorating. They are human beings, even if they are not completely in their right minds all the time. And what about those poor families where children are taken away, and terrible investigations are begun, interviews are conducted by people determined to get the answers they want like the Nazi Gestapo has come to your door. What about those families? Where are the rights of the innocent when someone is determined to prove them guilty? Where is this Gestapo when children really are being abused and neglected and sexually assaulted? Where are they then?
