From Truthout:
n 1968, Warfield Productions and Dramatic Features released the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang starring Sally Ann Howes and Dick van Dyke. The plot revolved around an English inventor with two precocious children and an unreliable flying car. Was Howes his girlfriend? I don’t really remember the details — I was not quite four. What I do clearly remember was the villain: a child-catcher. The child-catcher literally had a big net, much like a butterfly net, that he used to steal all the children in the village. As a young girl, this terrified me.
When you are that small, parents are your world, and when they are gone or you are separated from them — for whatever reason — your world crumbles. Most everyone seems to agree that removing a child from a parent is traumatizing for both. With few exceptions, our nation collectively recoiled in horror at the sight of children separated from their parents and put in cages along the United States southwestern border. Why then, is there a silence around children of the incarcerated being legally, methodically, and routinely taken from their parents?
There is a glaring disconnect between policies and judicial procedures on the one hand, and the people affected by these systems on the other. For instance, in 1997, Congress passed a law called the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). It states that if a parent does not have physical custody of their children for fifteen out of the preceding twenty-two months, they can lose custody.
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