In my experience, the police, social workers, and school officials all believed/sided with my parents.
When I was younger (about 10) my elementary school called social services when I came in to school bruised and bleeding all over from a beating. A social worker visited ONCE and then came by for a second and final visit to tell my parents that she was closing the case and believed it to have been an "isolated incident".
Then I was twice physically grabbed by the hair and dragged out into the street at 15 and 17 and told never to come back (school friends took me in those times). I continued attending high school and getting good grades. I made school officials aware of my situation, but they didn't want to be involved in that can of worms and turned a blind eye, encouraging me to go back. Within a couple of months, my parents sent the police to bring me back, saying that I was a "runaway" (I wasn't) and denying throwing me out. I told them the real story, which was corroborated by the people putting me up, but the police just told me I had two choices: To go back with my parents, or to go to juvenile hall, "where I would find out what real hell was like" (police officer's words, not mine). He showed me zero compassion and treated me like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, rather than a desperate and terrified abused teen.
And then at 23 I moved back in with my mother for a very short stint, as I lost my job in the recession and had nowhere to go. The caveat she gave me was that I had to go to the meetings. I faked it for almost two months, as best as I could, for survival's sake, but what can I say...I'm a terrible liar. I was thrown out with only a couple of days' notice and nowhere to go, and ended up living out of a vehicle in a parking lot for 9 months, and in what was basically a converted shed in the desert for another year and a half.
There's a reason that parents can get away with this stuff. Very few people actually care about kids or view them as real people rather than an extension of their parents. It often has to get insanely bad before anybody is willing to take action, and often troubled teens are viewed as little brats just acting out of rebellion, rather than a human being with a legitimate problem. It's been my experience that adults in an authority position are usually far more likely to take the parent's side and believe the parent's version of events. And many JW parents are experts at turning on the waterworks and playing the martyr card..."We're just a good, helpless, loving Christian family cursed with a selfish, disobedient, ungrateful son/daughter!" It's bullshit, but effective.
