Wounded Innocents

The war against child abuse has become a war against children. Every year, hundreds of children die, thousands more are forced to live with strangers, and countless American families are torn apart. This is called a "child-protection system."While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse - in fact, hurting the very children that they were intended to help.Wexler reinforces his arguments with horrifying descriptions of children summarily removed from their homes, of families shattered because of false reports, and of children whose parents are guilty of nothing more than poverty being thrust into the maelstrom of the chaotic foster-care program. He writes of severly abused children - those needing the most help - whose cases are ignored because the system diverts scarce resources to trivial or unfounded cases, and who are reinjured, sometimes fatally after their plight has been called to the attention of authorities.Wounded Innocents illustrates how well-meaning efforts to help children have gone terribly wrong and how the current child-protection system desperately needs to be replaced with one that offers real help and real hope to abused and neglected children.

Richard Wexler is a noted child welfare advocate and executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform,(NCCPR), an organization seeking major change in America's child protection systems, favoring family preservation, opposing excessive and inappropriate interventions, critical of inadequate or inappropriate foster care and adoptions. In Congressional testimony, Wexler has described the group as "a nonpartisan, nonprofit child advocacy organization." Wexler’s writing about the child welfare system has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major newspapers. He has been interviewed by CBS's 60 Minutes, National Public Radio, CNN, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's Today, CBS This Morning, ABC World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, and other media.