I will say that the legal descriptor of underage children as being the property of the parent is kind of a fucked up concept if you think about it, since possession of people is not really kosher with my moral framework. Or most other people's for that matter.

However the state recognizes a compelling interest in providing legal protection for a child. And given that children mature at different rates 18 is sort of an arbitrary cut off to use, but it's a useful one. The main problems that I see with your view is that the cost would be prohibitively expensive. There are already mechanisms in place that sort of do this, and I don't do it all that well. Social workers have an incredibly overburdened caseload and CPS kids playing complaints all the time. The lack of willingness to fund that sort of program that could adequately assess whether or not a child is being abused is very difficult, because you basically would have to have someone in the home almost every day in order to get a fully accurate picture of how things are. It has a lot of potential for abuse. The problem becomes how many more social workers are you willing to hire? and how much are you willing to pay them? Because they have a legal obligation to make the right decision and could be countersued if their assessment was found to be inaccurate and it led to deadly consequences. You have also, the issue that in United States for example is a place of varying cultures and what is considered to be inappropriate behavior in some places would not be considered inappropriate in other places.

Would you essentially need is a federal statute that defines in very clear terms what constitutes abuse, which at this point is mostly at the discretion of the states. It's important to remember that the people who make up the bureaucracy that carries out these laws are a product of the areas that they live in.

Because if the definitions were any looser, and if the states were allowed to decide what those definitions were, they could decide to take away the children of gay and lesbian parents, or nonreligious parents. And you know in places like Tennessee and Arkansas that they would try to do exactly that sort of thing.

Never mind the fact that any additional spending on social welfare is basically legislative poison in this Congress, it would be an incredibly huge burden on the tax system akin to Social Security lite. That in itself could be abused quite easily. You would have people, mostly younger people teaching other kids how to pass the test and depending on how loose the states definition of what constitutes abuse or neglect they could leave after one argument with their parents. With them living collectively in dorms, You have a lot of potential for that to become a haven for criminal activity, especially with the additional legal protections that they get as minors. In larger cities gangs already sort of fulfill this type of role for kids that have absent parents. I'm not saying that that would always happen, and I don't want to be cynical about people, but I am cynical about institutions. And by establishing this giant bureaucratic framework with a lot of potential money involved. You're always going to have people who try to take advantage of that bad ways. The potential for terrible unintended consequences is enormous. The cost would be associated with it would also be enormous.

I don't want you to think that I don't see any potential for reform of the current system. There's definitely changes that can be made internally that would greatly improve situations for young people, especially those of vulnerable populations. A federal law on what constitutes child abuse, it was written very carefully and with very clear instructions on how it could and should be enacted would be very beneficial. There are lots of ways to make incremental changes without overhauling the entire system, heedless of consequences.