Corrupted Social Workers in Israel are untouchable (In India it means impure)

פקידת סעד פעם אמרה לי שיש לה כח כמו של אלוהים.

פקידי סעד בישראל נחשבים לאנשים בלתי נגיעים. באמצעות שחיתות מתמשכת, תוך ניצול פרצות בחוק הם פיתחו חסינות חזקה אפילו יותר מראש הממשלה.

בהודו המונח בלתי נגיע מתייחס לאדם טמא.

“Most of the time, I was taking their kids away for no good reason“ –A New York City social worker.

All it takes to begin the potential destruction of an Israeli family is a call to one of the child protective “hotlines” in Israel such as ELI hotline. The call can be made anonymously, making the hotlines potent tools for harassment. More often, however, false allegations are well-meaning mistakes made by people who have taken the advice of the so called “child savers”.

Though the Israeli laws generally encourage — or require — reports if you have “reasonable cause to suspect” maltreatment, “child savers” urge us to call in our slightest suspicions about almost any parental behavior. The hotlines then forward the calls to police or welfare departments who send social workers to investigate.

 These social workers can go to a child’s school or day care center and interrogate them without warning. Such an interrogation can undercut the bonds of trust essential for healthy parent-child relationships and traumatize children for whom the only harm is the harm of the investigation itself.

 Social workers can search homes and strip-search children without a warrant.  Strip-searching is routine.

Then it is up to the worker to decide if the case will be “substantiated” and the accused will be listed in a state “central register” of suspected child abusers. Social workers make these decisions on their own. There is no hearing beforehand, no way for the accused to defend themselves.

No proof is required to “substantiate” a case.

And what if parents object to all this? What if they want to defend their children against a strip-search, for example? Technically, in some circumstances, they can say no to a social worker. But if they do say no, the social worker can wield the most feared power of all — the power to remove a child from the home on the spot.

Israeli social workers have that power, and sometimes they call the police to do it for them. Parents then must go to court to try and get their children back.

And it is a very short day. Such hearings tend to be five-minute assembly line procedures with a social worker who does this for a living on one side, and a bewildered, impoverished parent who just met her lawyer five minutes before — if she has a lawyer at all — on the other. Children are almost never returned at these hearings. If the children are lucky, they may get to go home after the next hearing in 30 or 90 days. Or maybe they will never go home at all.

And who are these Israeli social workers that wield this enormous power? In most cases, a bachelor’s degree in anything and a quickie training course devoted largely to how to fill out forms are the only requirements for the job. Turnover is enormous and caseloads are crushing. And the worker will find little guidance in the law, which is so broad that almost anything can be deemed abuse or, especially, neglect. Given all that, it’s easy to see why so many children are needlessly removed from their homes.

But that is not the only tragedy. Enormous caseloads dominated by false and trivial cases steal workers’ time from children in real danger. That’s the real reason children sometimes are left in unsafe homes. 

There is a social worker who allegedly told us “I have the power of God.” Even more frightening than the thought of a worker saying such a thing is the fact that it’s true. Social workers do have the power of God. And rarely is the power of God accompanied by the wisdom of Solomon.

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