Imagine yourself in a small, rural town, like those that speckle the back roads of our fair country from sea to shining sea. One stoplight, two gas stations, a high school with, say, 300 students--even if you've never lived there, chances are you drove through on your way somewhere more exciting. Half the town lives in the local trailer park. The other half, in cabins up yonder.

Small towns have their goods and bads, same as everywhere else. When everybody knows everybody, privacy can be hard to come by. That keeps people honest, sometimes; sometimes, it means people overlook something that maybe they oughtn't. And let's face it--that old sawhorse about the sheriff and the judge letting the crook off easy because he was kin, well, it does happen from time to time.

Seems to me about every third short story I read starts with a small-town girl escaping her abusive father for the glitz of big-city life, so that likely happens from time to time, as well. But while you're imagining yourself in this small town, imagine that state child "protective" services gets an anonymous phone call from a girl claiming she's being abused. She lives in an insular community, culturally and religiously homogeneous, and she's scared that if she calls the police they will just tell her daddy what she's doing. But when asked where she lives, all she will say is "I'm in the trailer park."

Imagine your surprise when, instead of a door-to-door canvas of the area or a prolonged surveillance operation, a SWAT team descends on this picturesque little trailer park and rounds up every child between the ages of 4 and 16. Those fortunate enough to have mothers are accompanied to the big city by a parent, but no fathers are permitted to come--every father is a suspect. No matter, however--soon the mothers will be sent away as well. The girl who made the report cannot be found.

Lest you think I'm leading you down a too-familiar path, imagine now that those teens with cell phones find their devices confiscated and searched. On the phones of some half-dozen teen-aged boys and girls the police find lewd photos--mostly, pictures the teens took of themselves and of each other. Three other teen-aged girls are pregnant. No further evidence of sexual abuse is found, but child "protective" services parcels the children out to foster care while trying to convince a judge to remove them from the trailer park permanently--because children who grow up in small-town trailer parks are more likely to become adults who live in small-town trailer parks.

In the end, the teen-aged males who had lewd photos on their cell phones are charged with possession of child pornography, thrown in jail for a few years, and registered as sex offenders. The females are given probation. The judge orders DNA testing on the families of the pregnant girls to determine whether any of the girls was the victim of parental abuse, adopting a guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude toward the fathers. Child "protective" services digs up some flimsy evidence of possible abuse in a few cases, sending about a tenth of the trailer park's children to better lives in the city, where they will be abused and exposed to drugs by their foster siblings instead of by their parents. After a grueling ninety days or so, the remainder of the children are sent home, woefully behind on their schoolwork and increasingly mistrustful of authority figures. Those parents who were foolish enough to try to reclaim their children through legal means are driven into bankruptcy and homelessness by the fees they accumulated.

Welcome to the American police state.

The story above is cobbled together from several current events. In Davis County, Utah, cell phone pictures may put a teenager in jail. In Texas, over 400 children are being taken from their parents based on a phonecall that was probably a hoax. Our daughters are being taught by television and movies--not to mention school teachers and government officials--to fear their fathers; one of the secrets on PostSecret this week was, "I don't have a closer relationship with my father because of child molestation and incest on TV and in movies."

I'm pretty sure I've alluded to most of these problems before, but this week I really feel the need to tackle them head-on. The phrase "think of the children" receives a lot of well-deserved mockery from pundits because (along with it's cousin, "terrorism") the concept of "child safety" pretty much deactivates the famed American capacity for critical thinking. Which is a very serious problem when so many laws formulated to "protect" children wind up destroying children's lives, again, and again, and again.

This has to stop.

I only wish I knew where to begin. The culpable bodies are so numerous that blame grows diffuse. Passing bad laws that harm children is one of the few things Republicans and Democrats can without fail agree to do. Conservatives are afraid that the welfare state will take all their money, but they don't seem to mind that the police state is taking their children. Liberals don't want the government interfering with private, personal reproductive choices, but private, personal parenting choices are apparently fair game as long as the gestapo... sorry, child "protective" services... can convince someone to file a phony report. There are too many prosecutors; sometimes I'm convinced that they get bored and start inventing new crimes just to see how deferential the judge--likely a former prosecutor--will be. And all of this rests on a base of an ill-informed, reactionary American Public with Do Something^TM tattooed across its collective forehead. We bellow and bray because the TV says our children are in danger, so when it is our children being placed among the pariahs on the sex offender registry or being marched out to newer, more socially mainstream families, we find that our cries fall on deaf ears.

I acknowledge that there are some very bad people in this world, people who exploit children for gain that is personal rather than political. And such people might be grateful, in the end, for laws that put them in prison or on parole; the alternative, for those who really do hurt children, is in many cases the singular experience of being literally torn to pieces by an angry mob.

But the betrothing of underage children to future spouses is not the same thing as consummating underage marriages. Taking a picture of oneself is not the same thing as coercing a child into lewd behavior. For that matter, taking a picture of one's boyfriend or girlfriend, though underaged, is not the same thing as coercing a child. These are not wise decisions. They are not decisions I condone, let alone endorse. But taking complaints seriously is not the same thing as rounding up entire neighborhoods for genetic evaluation in a fishing expedition motivated by thinly-veiled religious discrimination.

But these days, it would appear that protecting children is synonymous with wreaking as much havoc on their lives as we can manage.

In our desperate race to prove how much we care about our children, we make our first priority the punishment of the guilty--instead of the preservation of the innocent. For the punishment of the guilty, no price is too high--even the sacrifice of the innocent. Those children who victimize themselves through misguided youthful exploits are criminals first, especially if male. Never mind the disturbing truth that state "care" is about as likely to result in physical, emotional, sexual, and drug abuse as wherever the child was in the first place; as long as the guilty parties are found and deprived of their children, all is well.

And so we become that which we hate most, abusing children, through government channels, "for their own good."

There is, in all of this, one small comfort--one thing the United States finds unequivocally more important than "protecting" children. With the advent of millimeter wave scanners at U.S. airports, every time your children fly, someone can get a gratuitous peek through their clothing. A single fake phone call may be all it takes to deprive you, your neighbors, and everyone on your block of their (dare I say God-given?) parental rights, but when it comes to preventing terrorism, government-sponsored underage peep-shows are apparently a small price to pay.