Family Forum / Parenting / Spanking / November 2006

Apparently Dave Thomas of Wendy's, the big supporter
of adoption got PO'd about CPS before he died.

http://www.expertclick.com/NewsReleaseWire/default.cfm?Action=ReleaseDetail&ID=8
838&NRWid=1079

Accused Parents Lack Legal Teams

Pepsi, Tylenol, Wendy's can resume business and write off legal
expenses and relatively (for them) small financial losses following
even a national scandal that begins with an opportunistic false claim.

Too many families falsely accused and wrongly prosecuted will literally
lose relatives, but they will have not way to recover their children or
their once good names.

They never will recover emotionally, physically, socially,
professionally, financially or in any other way.

An "impact statement" allows real victims to spell out specific
injuries in a courtroom in front of convicted perpetrators for the
benefit of the judge prior to sentencing. In cases arising from false
allegations of child abuse or neglect those offenders are agents of the
state. They are nearly wholly immunized no matter how egregious their
actions affecting child or family.

Procedural and court processes against parents or caretakers accused
are tax-subsidized, paid for by "the people." The State and U.S.
Attorney General will defend official offenders of our liberty
safeguards spelled out as state and federal constitutional rights but
bypassed in administrative law. Reread what the U.S. Supremes opined in
DeShaney.

Where are state laws requiring local agencies to "make whole" (insofar
as objectively possible) families they have hounded--without offering
or providing meaningful services IF wanted or needed--when even their
own appeals process finally overturns a wrongful action?

"Family" Services?

Using improper reports to CPS of child protective services (most
morphed agency names now include "family services") and misnamed
investigations or assessments, locals start the nightmare, take accused
innocents accused into court after the trauma and stigma of removing
children. They leave an insurmountable paper trail. Then, even when the
original action is overturned by their own final regulatory appeals
process, they are not required to clean up the mess.

That paper mess, by then documents in court files, signal that a person
will be hounded for payment of "child support" never owed per foster
care orders fraudulently created, not to mention blotched credit
records that effectively sandbag employment chnces. Consequences of
leaving inappropriate court papers also mean myriad other life-changing
and destroying results of violating a citizen's civil rights "under
color of law" with impunity by those employed and empowered to protect
children.

Unless and until those elected to Congress accept and act on their own
accountability for appropriating huge amounts of money sent to
states--states that funnel money to locals usually without monitoring
OR by covering up when the decades-old violations persist--nothing will
change.

Money from Congress is the gas, just as pass-through operations in each
state represent the gas-soaked rags. Still, it is the
extraconstitutional, uncompassionate and uncompromising actions of
unchecked local agents that strike the match against stunned families.
Is no one responsible for the resulting conflagration that dis-members
society's most vital building block, the family?

Anyone to Blame?

Anyone over age 18 may be affected by a baseless allegation. Anyone
under 18 may be labeled a "victim," whether or not true. A dependent
adult may fall on either side. Laws threatening to prosecute anyone
over the age of 14 who makes a false report were enacted to frighten
briefly angry falsely accusing teens. If a recantation (he/she really
did nothing to me) wrecks the story a prosecutor needs, the law against
making false allegations may be perverted.

No able and articulate professional, politician, entertainer or
influential sports figure (and forget media that play up occasional
sensational individual cases of false allegations) wants to appear to
be on the side of an ACCUSED child abuser or neglecter. Nearly every
influential publisher or producer or spouse, anyone prominent in any
field, is an active or honorary member of a locally based or national
child abuse prevention organization. Numbers of those groups are
funded, minimally tax-exempt, by one to three levels of government.

"Education" funding to instruct how to recognize and prosecute, for
example, the emotive but baseless theory of "Munchausen Syndrome by
Proxy" (MSP) is in the Department of Justice budget. Among effects of
much scientifically baseless education is the disappearance of
conservatively thousands of children, including infants from the
delivery room moved straight to pre-adoptive homes per 1997 federal
legislation.

Groundswells of pro-adoption publicity--minus the truth that too many
never abused children become Paper Orphans by the stroke of a judge's
pen--leave no place for mistakenly or maliciously reported parents to
stand in hope a newborn and siblings will be returned by government
agents or proxies who raced away with them. Forget ever reading or
hearing an apology: that might suggest there was accidental or
deliberate error in agent judgment or from an underinformed or overly
influenced bench.

Heaven help anyone with a child manifesting a genetic disorder such as
"brittle bone," or reaction from doctor-prescribed medicines or
state-mandated vaccines, not to mention environmental concerns (mold
blowing through a home's air ducts affecting a baby's breathing) or an
undiagnosed infection and other discoverable but deliberately not
sought triggers labeled "child abuse."

April is always worst

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month. Never seems to be the month that
common sense, required competence and Constitutional safeguards will be
permitted or demanded to clear false allegations of child abuse or
neglect. Frankly, the label sticks, inside and out, for the accused and
involved children no matter what happens to the paper. It sticks even
when the children mature and do their utmost to speak after
prosescutors and other officials cannot silence them.

When can we prevent family abuse that invariably traumatizes children
removed from never-abusing homes? What about innocent parents behind
bars, convicted because discredited theory was accepted by a judge who
ignored or ruled out objective science? Not even proving that the
prosecution paraded perjurious witness, the jury was tainted and
tampered with, exculpatory information was withheld for decades and
worse has been able to free more than one innocent mother.

In UK where the MSP label was coined and made public in a Lancet
article in August 1977, incarcerated parents are being freed as an
educated public derides its originator's claim that he shredded his
notes. His motivation theory, never peer reviewed or replicated, is
"discredited" where it began but still widely used. Freeing innocents
in UK is a start and an appropriate example for reluctant courts in
America.

When will we halt reallocation of children for praise and profit to
both local agents who take them and homes that offer a new "forever
family" while depositing post-adoption subsidies, enjoying Medicaid
coverage, respite care and so much never offered or available to
families with chronically ill children.

Those very ill children--"over-utilizing" the system because efforts of
their strongest advocates, their parents--bring with them the largest
continuing tax-paid subsidies and services to a new and less demanding
residence. I've dubbed them cash calves, as newspaper series on group
home abuses (North Carolina's Charlotte Observer and Fayetteville
Observer) prove they are.

Who will be responsible when cousins and siblings date and marry
because they have no idea where they originated, that they shared one
or both parents in common?

Isn't that a good enough reason--protecting "our" children from
marrying a close relative without realizing it--to turn a common
concern into common sense? Is this April finally the time to clearly
differentiate between actions used against a person falsely accused of
child abuse and actions against a one who is actually guilty?

Child Abuse Prevention Month should recognize the right of a child to
be protected from wrongful removal from a loving home (or extended
family if the home is unsafe). Are we keeping the "numbers of reports"
up at the expense of "our" children's future? God-given DNA connects
children to family no matter what kind of American CPS Shuffle is
tax-subsidized?

**The above may be reprinted and circulated as long as writer's name,
email and (c) symbol are included. Barbara Bryan (BHBryan@aol.com)
April 25, 2005

Barbara Bryan (BBryan@aol.com)
Communicatons Director
National Child Abuse Defense & Resource Center
 
Phone : 540-345-1952
Contact Kimberly Hart