So it's entirely appropriate that a group of Utahns who say their children have been wrongfully taken from them chose Christmas Day to stage a protest at the Matheson Courthouse.

Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family's poverty is confused with child "neglect." Other cases fall on a broad continuum between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain. What these cases have in common is the fact that it is the children who suffer, in the name of "child protection." They are children like the son of Ikaaka Kaheaku. The 17-month-old boy was taken away even though the father was never accused of any maltreatment. The child was taken when his mother was arrested -- but the two parents don't even live together.

They are children like the children of Norma Jean Bauer, who was herself a victim of domestic violence. She fled from the abuser, but that wasn't enough for the Division of Child and Family Services. It compounded the trauma already suffered by her four children by taking them away from their mother and throwing them into foster care.

Even a former DCFS caseworker who is now a professor of psychology says the Utah law creates a "legal maze which destroys families, punishes children and devastates parents."

And what does DCFS offer in response: Only excuses.

We can't take children on our own, they say. The courts have to approve. But that's not really true. DCFS workers, like their counterparts in every other state, have the authority to have children removed from homes instantly, without court permission. The parent must then go to court to fight to get the child back. Typically the parent arrives in court overwhelmed and confused, without even a lawyer. What chance does she have? Indeed, this newspaper reports that "juvenile court judges almost always rubber-stamp DCFS recommendations."

The second excuse from DCFS is even worse. No matter how much harm they do to children, they invariably justify it by saying they have to "err on the side of caution." But when a child is suddenly taken away, not only from mom and dad but also from brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, teachers and classmates, then left with strangers, it is an incalculable emotional trauma. For some young children, the experience is akin to a kidnapping. Others believe they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. How is that "erring on the side of the caution"?

That harm occurs even if the foster home is a good one, and most are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. And the more the system is overwhelmed with children who don't need to be there, the greater the temptation to lower standards and overcrowd foster homes, increasing the risk of abuse. If a child is taken from a safe home only to be beaten, raped, or killed in foster care, how is that "erring on the side of the child"?

But even that is not the worst of it. Agencies like DCFS tend to be arbitrary, capricious, and cruel -- leaving some children to die in dangerous homes even as they take others from homes that are safe. The more these systems are overwhelmed with children who don't need to be there, the less time is left for workers to make life-and-death decisions. They make more mistakes -- and more children die. How is that "erring on the side of caution"? There are a few states and localities that have bucked the family-bashing trend.

For example, thanks to a lawsuit that led to a landmark consent decree, Alabama is rebuilding its entire child welfare system to emphasize keeping families together. Twenty-one counties have completed the rebuilding process. In those counties, the foster care population is down by 33 percent, and an independent, court-appointed monitor has found that children are safer now than they were before the changes.

The good news is that one of the leaders of the Alabama reform effort, Paul Vincent, is now helping to plan and monitor court-ordered reforms in Utah. The bad news is that instead of embracing these changes, DCFS keeps going to court to try to avoid them.