The Roman Catholic church vs. the foster care system

Over the past decade or so the Catholic church has encountered some needed criticism over it's mishandling of instances of sex abuse, but running across a story entitled Children in care not protected against sexual abuse: report yesterday as part of my normal newsreading reminded me that it's not just the Roman Catholic church that has problems with this sort of thing.

Here, for example, are a couple of reports from the New York Times over the last twenty years touching on child sex abuse in the foster care system. Here's a brief excerpt of the first:

... though the majority of foster parents are excellent, evidence of widespread abuse in foster care is overwhelming.

A Baltimore study found abuse in 28 percent of the homes examined. A second Baltimore study found four times the number of substantiated reports of sexual abuse in foster care as in the general population. And when alumni of what is said to be an exemplary, model foster care program in the Pacific Northwest were questioned, 24 percent of the girls said they were victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse in their foster homes.

Similarly here's another article on the subject about a decade later:

In certain counties of New Jersey in 2001, nearly one in five children who were placed in what state officials considered their most promising foster homes nonetheless wound up abused or seriously neglected, according to the state's own statistics.

Those rates of abuse, in the financially pressed counties surrounding Newark, are some 30 times what national experts have said is tolerable for any child welfare system.

It's not just a Roman Catholic problem - though they did mishandle quite a few such cases - but rather a more general problem. Is the Roman Catholic church's non-spectacular record better or worse than the records of some of these more-secular organizations? I'm not sure.

I'd also make more or less the same case as that first New York Times article's headline asserted: Foster Care's Horrors Argue for Intact Families. You have to consider not only the risk of not taking action in removing children from somewhat questionable parents but also the high risk involved in taking action. Typically people seem to prefer action over inaction, but such may in maybe cases be an irrational and harmful path to tread. (And here I'm haven't even yet gotten to the expense of taking action... just the risk to the child of doing so).