Richard J. Gelles was once one of the most widely published and vocal defenders of family preservation - keeping troubled families together - as a primary goal of social policy. But everything changed when he ran into the tragic case of David Edwards, an infant who was murdered by his mother after falling through the chasms in the child welfare system. Using David's story as a starting point, Gelles eloquently argues that these children must be taken out of harm's way.

Gelles also offers several suggestions for rehabilitating the system, including changing its first priority of family preservation to one of child safety, eliminating mandatory reporting of abuse, focusing the system on the more dangerous and harmful cases of maltreatment, developing better and more accurate means of assessing risk, giving better training to caseworkers, and separating the investigation of abuse from case management.