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Department of Child Disservices: Difference between revisions
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#Genuinely caring parents and would-be parents will find it nearly impossible to adopt thanks to Child Services' [[Obstructive Bureaucrat|strangling bureaucracy]] and ridiculously judgmental policies. Social workers will never care if something is [[Not What It Looks Like]]; anything that could possibly be construed as contributing to a less than perfectly ideal home life is grounds for rejection, regardless of context.
In the worst cases, both of the above apply, and children can expect to be summarily yanked away from genuinely capable and caring guardians only to be dumped into nightmares of abuse and neglect. Children may opt for [[Staying
Frequently the Social Workers seem to have more power than the Repo guys, able to snatch the kids away from their parents without another word, when in truth this is only allowed in the most severe of cases and most countries require at least a warrant (although this is sought after privately to keep parents from making a break for it with the kids), which can take days and even weeks to procure - one bad day isn't enough to grab your kids.
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See [[Don't Split Us Up]], [[Promotion to Parent]].
The tropes: [[Beleaguered Bureaucrat]], [[Department of Child Disservices]], and [[Social Services Does Not Exist]]; overlap since they all involve the same problems. The employees are often overworked, underpaid, lack resources, and suffer the public’s wrath. They then turn into the [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]] and use [[Bothering
While the reality (and maybe [[Inherent in
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro
* ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro
* The plot of ''[[Witchblade (
* In ''[[Gunslinger Girl]]'', the Social Welfare Agency is directly responsible for brainwashing little girls into cyborg assassins, a process which guarantees their early deaths. Then again, considering what most of the girls experienced before entering the program, [[Black and Grey Morality|it is arguably still an improvement]].
* Subverted in the ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' episode "Plight of the Children". While the social workers do get too heavy-handed in their attempts to bring in the orphans, at least some of them genuinely want to help them. The oldest orphan and leader of the group Pigero eventually realizes this and allows the younger orphans to be taken away.
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== Literature ==
* ''[[
* ''[[White Oleander]]'' is built around this trope.
* [[Harry Potter]] lives in a broom cupboard until he's eleven, owns none of his own clothes, and is clearly overworked. He lives in an affluent enough neighborhood and his cousin is treated well enough so no one could find a justification like poverty. And yet, no one ever notices.
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* ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' uses this trope quite frequently with Mr. Poe, who places the Baudelaire orphans in one abusive home after another for the first seven books (with the exception being book 2).
** Especially notable is the first book, in which the sole criteria he uses to choose the children's guardian-to-be is how far out of his way he has to go to drop them off.
* Dante from ''[[A Rush Of Wings]]'' was deliberately put through this by the [[Government Conspiracy|shadowy government conspiracy of mad science]] for the express purpose of turning him psychopathic. Ironically, he's [[
* Elena's backstory in ''[[Women of the Otherworld|Bitten]]''. Elena was horribly orphaned at five years old, and her mother's best friend volunteered to adopt her. She was rejected because she was single, and Child Services made sure Elena never saw her again, believing in "clean breaks". Instead, Elena spends the rest of her childhood being shuttled from foster home to foster home, in many of which she is sexually abused by her foster fathers and/or brothers.
* In ''[[The Ship Who|The City Who Fought]]'' by [[Anne McCaffrey]] and [[S.M. Stirling]], the space station's brain wants to adopt a daughter who managed to stow away. Unfortunately, the social services worker assigned to the girl's case proves to be an outright bigot, and denies the application on the grounds that "a shellperson can't possibly raise a child," [[What an Idiot!|apparently in complete ignorance of the Federation's anti-discrimination laws]].
* In ''[[The Millennium Trilogy|Men Who Hate Women]]'', type 1 Social Services assigns the female protagonist [[Dark and Troubled Past|Lisbeth Salander]] under the care of a [[Rape
* One of the ''[[Babysitters Club]]'' Mystery Specials was about the girls investigating mysterious events while on a work experience trial at a shopping mall. They eventually discover that three young children are ''living'' in the mall because [[Don't Split Us Up|social services had threatened to separate them]] after their mother had to go into hospital.
* In [[Andrew Vachss]]'s Burke books, the protagonist, after being left to the State when his (apparently?) prostitute mother abandoned him, experienced the horrors of an at best ineffectual, at worst actively malicious system firsthand.
* Jada of ''[[Young Wives]]'' is a perfectly good mom with a layabout husband. The husband manages to get the entire court system on his side in a spectacular manner, to the point where Jada is barely allowed to see her children and has to have a social worker on hand whenever she does.
* The social services worker assigned to [[Alcatraz Series
* The social services workers in ''[[Acorna]]'' aren't so much evil as they are incredibly stupid. They declare that the miners who have been acting as Acorna's guardians for well over a year without incident cannot possibly be proper guardians to the girl because if they were parent material, they'd be office workers like them instead of miners. They also cannot tell the difference between 'absurdly large number of harmless birth defects'' (Such as two-jointed fingers, hooves, no incisors or canines, horn on head...) and 'member of unknown species', and try to have the girl undergo large amounts of unnecessary cosmetic surgery to correct the 'defects'.
* Discussed in ''[[The Dresden Files]]'', where Harry talks about his history as an orphan and getting bounced from one foster home to another. He notes that while there is a system in place to support children without families or suffering from abuse, it isn't perfect, and children can end up in poor homes as often as they end up in loving and caring homes. Unlike most portrayals, Harry doesn't seem to hate or disparage the child services system, but notes that it has it's flaws.
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== Live Action TV ==
* One episode of ''[[
** And of course, Bones herself had a rather nasty time in foster care as part of her backstory.
** This is also averted with Sweets, who at some point was taken away from his abusive parents and left with a foster family he was still close with when he joined the show, in his twenties.
* In ''[[
* A go-to trope when the ''[[Law and Order]]'' franchise ('''especially''' ''[[SVU]]'') needs a non-criminal / non-FBI whipping boy.
** Justified in the early ''[[Law
** An ''[[SVU]]'' episode has a Child Services worker who, after a distinguished career helping children reach good homes, is hounded to suicide after mistakenly trusting a child to a poor home, resulting in the child's death.
** But subverted in the episode with a mentally-abusive mother who pushed this trope so hard, her older son ''killed the younger'' to "save" him from Child Services when they started to investigate. It turned out there was an even older son who ''had'' been taken away, hadn't been beaten or raped in his foster homes at all, and was reasonably well-adjusted.
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* The Child Services of ''[[Judging Amy]]'' apparently has the worst judgment in the world. Every episode, they mishandle a child's case in some way so that Amy's mother can swoop in and rescue the child.
* Subverted in ''[[Dexter]]''. Rita panics about the visit of a social worker, so she asks Dexter to wait at the house while she isn't there. When the social worker arrives and Dexter tries to make excuses, she cuts him off by saying that Rita is a great parent, and that it's a pleasure to go by a house where someone cares. Continued in that scene where Dexter talks about how great child services was to him, even though at that moment he doesn't know {{spoiler|that child services had nothing to do with him, and that they did screw up with his brother. Or he was unfixable.}}
* ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'' has a scene where a social worker comes to inspect Cuddy's house to determine whether she is fit to adopt a child. Cuddy panics since she did not have the time to fully tidy up the house. The social worker tells her not to worry since she obviously cares a lot about the child and with her job as a doctor and the administrator of a hospital she is more than able to provide for the child.
* The ''[[
* In early episodes of ''[[The OC]]'', going into foster care is depicted as the worst thing that could possibly happen to Ryan, so that running away is preferable.
* The boys on ''[[Sons Of Tucson]]'' have a presumably correct belief that if Child Services knew that they were living without any parental guardian, they would be forced into some undesirable living arrangement. Because of this, they resort to hiring a [[Adult Child|rather immature]] man to pretend to be their father; not because they think he can take care of them better than they can take care of themselves, but primarily just so that they can keep on living in their current home rather than whatever Child Services would decide for them.
* A large part of Buz's backstory on ''[[Route 66]]''.
* The first victim of a [[Career Killer]] hired to act as a [[Vigilante Man]] in the ''[[
** In another episode ("Children of the Dark") where two foster brothers who were abused in their foster home are now serial killers, the team goes to investigate the family only to find that not only do they still have foster kids, but they still abuse them. This is incredibly obvious the first time they arrive, and one of the killers recalls his foster mother holding him underwater until he passed out, but Social Services says they'll have to run a full investigation first and the kids are returned home {{spoiler|one of them with a gun}}.
*** This is especially jarring because forensic psychologists (ie most of the main cast) often check homes for abuse. So Morgan having shown up and looked around was pretty much what their investigation would ''be''.
* In many [[Lifetime Movie of the Week]] plots, social services will inevitably be portrayed like they are incompetent. Both types 1 and 2. Alternatively, it will be portrayed as way too easy to adopt children if it moves the plot along.
* Averted in the fourth season of ''[[Queer
== Music ==
* [[
* [[Black Metal]] band Panopticon wrote an entire album about this called ''Social Disservices''.
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== Web Original ==
* In ''[[Dept Heaven Apocrypha]]'', what serves for Social Services in Asgard proved so ineffectual that {{spoiler|Nessiah}}, a victim of severe sexual abuse, was basically ignored until it was almost too late. It didn't help that the perpetrator happened to be a [[Villain
** Even now, it's hinted that they might give in to that pressure; they've been investigating for a few months but can't seem to decide what to do with the evidence they have that {{spoiler|Hector}} is a rapist.
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* Subverted in the pilot of ''[[King of the Hill]]'', when a social worker suspects Hank of abusing Bobby under ridiculously circumstantial evidence, but when his supervisor looks over his report he rather quickly dismisses it and ends the investigation.
* ''[[Drawn Together]]'' bounces around with this, because while they do take children out of the neglectful and incompetent care of Toot and Foxxy Love, they refuse to put Toot's adopted baby with the same people Foxxy's children are with currently because they're horrible people.
* In one episode of ''[[
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