Harvesting Children

Out of the south, where family, church, and freedom define daily life, a government system created to help is designed to fail. And fail, it does. Harvesting Children is about families in crisis and what happened to them after the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services (DCS) wrongfully took their children away. Some parents got their kids back, some didn’t. Either way, everyone was traumatized and their firsthand accounts can be found in this book.The book also examines child welfare agencies in different states. Some agencies are better than others but, still, 600,000 children are taken into custody every year in the U.S. and 400,000 of them are put in foster care. This book isn’t just about the children, though. It is about the grownups, too.. Those who try to help and those who make bad situations even worse. Attorney Connie Reguli battled DCS across the state. The only way she could be stopped was to create a fake crime and make her a fake felon. Then the system could take her law license and shut down three decades of vigorously defending parents. Veteran reporter Peter White describes the elephant in the room that everybody sees but nobody knows what to do about it. Too many kids are put in foster care. This book is about some of them and it explains how they got there. It describes how the child welfare system works, why it fails, and what can be done to change it. Harvesting Children - The Dark Side of Foster Care highlights people inside and outside the system who have devoted their lives to changing it. There is an addendum of writings from experts, advocates, lawyers, and scholars you cannot find together in any other place.This is an invaluable resource for sociology students, parents, grandparents, social workers, judges, lawyers and anybody else who has contact with the child welfare system. The next generation of social workers must be equipped to defend the rights of parents as well as children. They will learn how to do that If they read this book.