I am not surprised to hear that Sue Suter is going to quit her job as chief of the Department of Children and Family Services and that her staff was ”burned out” from managing too many cases.
Few people are aware that a great deal of the case worker`s time is spent dealing with false and frivolous charges of child abuse. A large number of these cases are filed by vindictive parents during a divorce. Research has shown that almost 80 percent of child abuse cases filed against biological fathers during a divorce are false.
While DCFS has powers to immediately remove a child from a parent when a charge is made, it lacks the teeth to either take punitive action against the person making the false charge or to return the child to the innocent parent. The latter process may take months of expensive litigation.
If legislation is passed to give DCFS the power to prosecute people who maliciously make false charges, it would dramatically decrease the number of false charges and save the agency and taxpayers a considerable amount of money.
