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freedombenyesterday at 2:30 PM0 repliesview on HN

> fixing social services so that they actually provide better help when requested instead of making things worse

Agreed, and I wish more people would realize this. When I was a kid, one of my friend's brothers was accused of molestation. The accused kid was around 8 or 9 and the victim was around 5 or 6. The social services came in and immediately got the mom fired from her job (she was a school teacher), put the family through tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, utterly disrupted the lives of the entire family, got the accused kicked out of school and put in a special school for troubled kids (which itself brought a whole host of issues), and nearly ripped the family apart. There was no evidence at all of the crime, other than the word of the accuser (a 5 or 6 year old child). Fast forward a few years later and the accuser apologized profusely and admitted that it had never happened. Oh and also the accused was at a friend's house at the time of the supposed molestation, and the friends' parents had told the investigators that. Law enforcement dropped the case having determined it not likely to be true and certainly nowhere near the evidence for prosecution (in fact, there was evidence that the event never happened), but social services proceeded with all of the above anyway. So yeah, there's a lot of work to do to make anybody want to trust them to help rather than make everything worse.