Families are being destroyed with false accusations.

Too much power is given to social workers. Ikonen is also the founder of an NGO known as the October Movement that advocates for parents and children caught up in child protection cases. She charged that that the system’s spin-off, foster care, has become an industry that needs a steady supply of clients.

"No one in Finland has asked how much it costs, this system of child discrimination. We are ready to pay 15,000 euros a month to foster care providers that speak of diagnoses and symptoms and we don’t demand quality from them. … It’s certainly a billion-euro business nowadays."

Yle News asked Social and Health Affairs Ministerial Counsellor Marjo Lavikainen to respond to Ikonen’s claims. But she said the state doesn’t actually know how much the nation is spending on foster care.

"We also want to know more about it, so we have asked THL to look more closely at the cost of child welfare services and we will get a report this spring", Lavikainen said.

Yle News reached out to the national Institute of Health and Welfare, THL, to see whether they had any hard data on the money moving through the system. The organisation’s number crunchers provided a report, "Comparison of child protection services and costs for six largest cities in 2014" by the Kuusikko child protection working group. It provided figures on child welfare costs for six major cities: Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo, Turku, Tampere and Oulu.

If I don’t do as they say they threaten to take the kids away. Even my lawyer says I should shut up … and that I can’t fight the system.

YLE 8.3.2016 Finnish child welfare: Child protection or "for profit" foster care?