BackgroundChild protection practices are highly contested by many parents, healthcare professionals, lawyers and the media. In Geneva, Switzerland, critics denounce the cascading effects of collusion between psychiatric experts and judges, as well as the psychological abuse to which parents and children are exposed. Based on a psychotherapeutic clinical practice with mothers of children in or threatened with placement, this work examines the series of traumas generated by psychiatric expertise and the so-called protection process, starting from the hypothesis that the latter, due to its anchoring in fundamental violence, develops a protection/violence confusion and a cross-border psychopathology mobilizing individual, institutional, and societal limits. PurposeThe author begins by describing and name a clinical process related to parent–institution interactions that escapes representation, and that consists primarily of acting out. Secondly, the author wishes to provide parents and network stakeholders with keys to understanding this particular process. MethodThe author articulates administrative and psychopathological characteristics of the institutional and clinical field, basing his reflection on the psychoanalytical approach. Several reports by forensic psychiatrists and clinical interviews (with six mothers of children in foster care or at risk of being placed in foster care) are used to support the understanding of the global dynamics of the protection process. ResultsThe clinical elements brought by the mothers studied point to a denial of an inaugural trauma (linked to a forced mother–child separation in the absence of an emotional separation) and a series of double constraints at the origin of a pathological protection process. Several decades of scientific studies demonstrate the traumatic effects of the mother–child separation as well as the lasting psychopathological consequences: PTSD, depression, behavioral disorders, suicide, etc. The forensic reports at our disposal confirm the criticisms put forward by the media, parents, and lawyers: they are built on an accumulation of confirmatory biases and do not meet the criteria of a case study in qualitative and quantitative research. They promote the pathologization of the protection process. The Service for the Protection of Minors, the institution at the heart of the process, seems to operate on the basis of a denial pact that allows the group to exist on condition that a set of representations are denied, repressed, and rejected. The Court of Auditors (an independent evaluation body) confirms that parents are neglected in the process, while the conditions for the child's return home are not sufficiently established. As for the right of the child, it does not seem to be sufficiently respected. ConclusionThis study tends to confirm the hypothesis of a protection/violence confusion generated by a system whose existence depends on the concealment of fundamental violence and its representations. It allows a better understanding of the dynamics at play and the cascade of trauma caused by protection procedures, while providing theoretical and clinical keys for a more appropriate intervention with parents of children in foster care.