Guide to DCF Organization
DCF runs a closed and secret business, to keep its victims from figuring out the system. Here is a an explanation of the key parts of their organization, and a guide to the vampires, impalers and pillagers who inhabit it.
Only the most evil tyrant could put together a system as bad as the Dept. of Children and Families.
Only the darkest-souled tyrant, like Sauron, the evil overseer of the land of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, could put together a system like the Massachusetts Dept. of Children and Families (DCF). Most people cannot begin to figure out how its system works, and why it does what it does, other than knowing that it traumatizes children and ruins families. Here is a clear, simple guide to all the relevant parts of DCF, and who is who in their organization.
How DCF is Organized
From the lowly social workers at the bottom, all the way to the evil overlord at the very top, the DCF is organized to exert unchallengeable power over families in the Commonwealth, to achieve maximum control over a vast snitch network, to manage a huge child warehousing operation, and to steal as much tax money as possible.
The macro information about the agency is that it is one of many departments in the monstrous bureaucratic octopus called the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
The piece of this empire that you will have most of your dealings with is the "Area Office", of which there are 29 around the Commonwealth. Each one has four layers of management in its structure, which looks like a pyramid. It starts with a large number of social workers at the bottom, which are organized into teams of five or six, each under a supervisor. Five or six supervisors then report to an Area Program Manager, all of which are under the person who runs the whole lair, the "Area Director".
Teams of social wreckers are organized into groups that do the various functions required for case management. Some are investigators, who are the first to go in to a home when your family is ratted out to the hotline by a snitch. There are assessment workers, who go in after the investigators are done, and do an even more detailed investigation. There are also teams of on-going social workers, who take over after the assessors are done, and who stay with the case as it plods along over the months and years, grinding the family into despair.
Continuing on this first social worker tier, there are teams of "hot-line" workers, who take calls from snitches who report child abuse to DCF, which is the main way they get business into the system. Another group is made up of adoption workers, who oversee a case once it is on a track to terminate parental rights and permanently take a child for adoption. There are also some special-ops teams called emergency response workers, who do night and weekend child kidnapping, especially on Friday nights when the court closes, so no one can do anything to stop them.
These teams are under control of supervisors, the second level up.
The area program managers, third up from the bottom, claw their way up to that position by either out-lasting their fellow jackals, or by proving to be highly reliable tools of the regime. It probably takes a while to excise enough of your humanity to do that.
On the top is the area director, who runs the whole lair, generally overseeing 100-150 people. Area offices are organized into regions of 4 or 5 areas, overseen by regional directors.
A related but independent group is the set of local DCF legal offices, in which the lawyers who persecute families in court in order to keep their children in DCF custody ply their sordid trade.
There are also offices that recruit, hire, and train foster parents, in order to keep and house the 11,000 children that DCF has in captivity.
Other notable figures in the DCF are headquartered in Mordor itself, 24 Farnsworth Street in Boston. There is the so-called "fair hearing" unit, which provides review hearings of investigations where parents want to challenge the findings that they have abused their children. There is also a special super-secret unit which investigates reports of abuse in foster homes, which really covers up any injuries to children held in their warehouse operation, so as to avoid lawsuits by parents.
There is also an official called an "ombudsman", meaning a parent advocate, a position currently occupied by a quite decent gentleman, one Kevin Barboza, who actually does care about kids and solving problems. (I am saying that seriously, not sarcastically.)
The two persons you will deal with the most are your social worker and her supervisor. They are the Orcs whose decisions are being controlled by their area program managers and area directors, who you won't see much, but who are now running your life.
Area Directors are the persons to whom you must address all requests to records, not to your social wrecker.
DCF has a web site with a lot of information and statistics on it, and that I recommend that you visit and study. Of course, their Ministry of Propaganda has prettied up all their predatory tactics, but the site still has a lot of insight into their ethos, along with a lot of facts and figures.