Arguments Against Child Welfare Policy

Society and government seek both to protect children from abuse and to defend the rights of the family. Weighing those two goals and determining which is more important in a particular situation poses a serious challenge. Child welfare experts constantly struggle to balance the risk of causing psychological damage to children by removing them from their families with the risk of exposing them to physical harm by leaving them with abusive parents or guardians. This decision is especially difficult when the evidence of abuse is unclear.

Ideology and Values
One law of child welfare policy that many people have opposed is the Adam Walsh Act. This law, which states had to adopt by 2009 unless they wanted to have a 10-percent cut in funds that Congress gives them to fight crime, requires states to make stricter laws about registering sex offenders and publish public information about where these sex offenders live and what they look like. This law also requires that the penalties for sex offenders who don’t register be stricter and more heavily enforced (Will States Say No). Not only are actual sex offenders required to be registered but people who were “convicted of nonviolent, nonpredatory crimes” (Duncan) are required to be registered as well.
With these stricter laws people should be happier but this hasn’t been the case. Many people have
criticized this law as being too strict and a “one-size-fits-all approach.” Making every sex offender be registered has brought up many concerns, one in particular being that kids as young as 14 years old must be registered. This law may be seen as causing potential problems but it is in place in order to protect children by giving families the chance to know who is around their kids.
Another opposing view to having stricter and more heavily enforced laws is the fact that if all kids who were suspected of being abused without any evidence were taken away from their home can do more harm than good.
Taking abused children away from where they are being abused is a necessary step in protecting children. Many people oppose taking away children at the first site of child abuse though because this is not always the best thing for the child. Many of these children get bounced around from foster family to foster family and are never given a real sense of home once they are taken away from their actual
home. This, many argue, can be even more damaging than being in a home that there is suspected abuse in. Also, the concern that abuse might not be occurring is also an issue, which would mean that taking them away from their family could be more detrimental to them than good. Though all of these concerns are legitimate the fact that children need to be protected is the main thing that should be focused on. It is, in the case of child abuse, better to take them away for a little bit and then put them back in the care of their family than to keep them in a household where they are being abused.
Though people may say that some laws are too strict, as is the case with the previous two examples, the laws that deal with child abuse need to be strict in order to prevent kids from getting hurt now and suffering the consequences of this abuse later on in life.