Twelve years in the making, Children of the State: Stolen for Profit sets out to change the discourse on child protection, and provides a detailed account of morally indefensible, international family and child protection laws and practices. It presents a devastating compilation of statistics and analyses of failed family and child protection systems for concerned citizens, policy makers and law reformers. Leaving no stones unturned, it prudently explores urgently needed viable alternatives for those dispossessed and without a voice.

The consequences of these policies can now be seen across the Western world where they seriously impact millions of individuals, whole communities and the social order of our time. The book draws attention to the State's supreme power of authority over the nations’ children, and how this power has been used to create a multi-billion dollar global industry engaged in the redistribution of stolen children for profit.

Children of the State: Stolen for Profit, looks at the 400 year history of legitimised child removals, which are currently impacting one in four of the civilian population of most nation states. All made possible due to 21st Century national governments of all political persuasions stubbornly clinging to little known but omnipotent 16th Century political and institutional doctrines. These in turn provide governments the legitimacy to forcibly remove millions of children from their biological families.

Today, every child is at risk of being deprived of the protection of their biological family because, we the civilian population, have collectively failed to recognize the supreme guardianship powers of the State. Perceived legal rights to the protection of their own family, something that everybody incorrectly assumes parents and children are legally entitled to, are in fact non-existent.

Accumulatively estimated to impact more than six million Australians and currently draining our annual taxpayer funded budgets to the tune of $53 billion, that this issue is not at the top of the national agenda places a huge question mark over the quality of our collective conscience and vigilance. Widespread exploitation of crisis ridden global family and child protection systems is rampant.

Without rights or anyone to turn to, the overwhelming socioeconomic consequences of misguided family and child protection policies reach deep into every community, where so many of our families, friends and neighbours, struggle in silence each day with the effects of their imposed loss of family protection.

Peter van de Voorde

Books