Are children protected enough?

America is supposed to set an example for others. Our messages of democracy, free speech and protection of human rights are supposed to be the guiding light for the rest of the world. However, as the events of the past several months indicate, our message may be broadcast worldwide, but it isn't followed at home. While we are quick to condemn violations of children's rights everywhere else, we fail to set the example in valuing, and protecting, our own children.

The headlines tell all. Recently two teenage girls, out at 1:30 a.m. in a remote area of Los Angeles County, were saved when their abductor was caught because of the recently implemented AMBER Alert broadcast in California later that morning.

Since the rescue, Gov. Gray Davis has repeatedly congratulated himself for protecting California's children by launching the AMBER system. What Davis omits is that for months he resisted signing the bill.

Only the brutal abduction and murder of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion, and the public outcry that followed, exerted enough political pressure (he's in a tough re-election campaign) for him to sign the bill. AMBER is in effect in but 14 of 50 states.

Separation of church and state is certainly a historic American doctrine, but it was never intended to protect clergy who assault children.

While there is public pressure for the Catholic Church to take internal action to stop this abuse, with the exception of one highly publicized case in Boston, little action is under way to investigate and prosecute the offenders, again leaving American children at risk. Why?

More unfortunate is that when governmental authorities take action to protect children, they frequently caused more harm than good. Some social services departments are so inept that those children who are not literally lost by the system are subject to abuse, neglect and even murder at the hands of their supposed guardians. In Florida, the disappearance of a 5-year-old went unnoticed for 14 months.

In Maine, caseworkers failed to make quarterly visits to the home of a foster parent who is now on trial for murdering a 5-year-old placed under her care.

Los Angeles County is not exempt. Most anyone who keeps up with the news is familiar with reports on the ineptitude and even gross negligence of our Department of Children and Family Services. Just this summer, in the course of settlement negotiations over a pending lawsuit, DCFS was exposed when a 9-year-old child taken into foster care died.

In 1997, caseworkers removed the child from his mother's custody, claiming that she had intentionally made him ill. In fact, the boy had severe asthma, which the social workers dismissed. As a result of this asthma, the boy died after six weeks in foster care.

Admitting that social workers failed to inform medical personnel of his condition, the county agreed to pay $1 million to the mother of the child.

Had the child's welfare really been of paramount concern, he would still be alive today.

Although this local situation involved the taking of child from his biological mother, where possible, social services agencies generally prefer to return children to their biological parents at some point. The goal is family reunification.

Too often, that legacy of biology prevails over a child's welfare. In Washington, D.C., a biological mother killed her 23-month-old daughter, two weeks after the girl was returned to the mother from foster care.

Dependency courts throughout the nation are backlogged with cases of biological parents trying to regain custody of children they should never have been permitted to keep in the first place -- and maybe should have never conceived.

Yet, we spend millions each year on these cases, when that money could be spent on programs that would truly better the lives of children.

The foster care problem could be solved, in large part, by allowing adoption, but we fail to permit that while thousands of parents seek to adopt.

A gay couple in Florida is denied permission to adopt an HIV positive child that has been in their custody for years based solely on their sexual orientation, even though no one else wants the boy. Why?

Divorce courts, too, have problems in protecting children; it seems at times that the law is simply not set up to define best interests in determining custody plans. Best interests, too frequently, are what's best for parents, not children.

Cases can take years to wind through the system, and while children are interviewed by experts and placed in temporary custody situations, their own rights and opinions are at times disregarded, even when they are old enough to express them. Considering how America treats its children, it should surprise no one that so many of them become even more troubled adults.

Has anyone asked the parents of the girls rescued with AMBER why their daughters were out in a remote area at 1:30 a.m.?

If we truly want to be the model society for the world, then we'd best clean our own house first.

We need to educate parents and reform the very processes that are supposed to protect our children.

Until that occurs, headlines will continue to expose our hypocrisy.