"I'm quite afraid you can't be all that familiar with the 'instrusive state-sector' if that's what you think. The over-riding priority of the social services is always to keep families intact, and to keep children with their parents."
I think the families of the late Sally Clark, Trupti Patel and Angela Canning might all have good reason to disagree with you, as might those children taken into care against their will in the Orkneys and in Nottingham, at the say so of ideologically fixated social workers.
It is intersting first, that having started talking about the abuse in childrens' homes, you sleep effortlessly into criminalising the family - when the evidence is that children are a lot safer if they are not taken into care. The NSPCC's 2000 report, despite its very loose definition of abuse found that ninety per cent of families were not abusive. On the other hand a report into Birmingham Children's homes found that more than half of teenage girls in them were being prostituted.
Second, you so readily assume the perspective of the state, thinking that the solution to domestic abuse (which you acknowledge is widely exagggerated) is to put people into the care of the Christian Brothers, or their British counterparts.