by: Meteor Blades
Wed Oct 26, 2011 at 14:59:32 PM PDT
If you find typos here, it's because my hands are trembling in fury over the keyboard as I write this. That comes from reading Part 1 of National Public Radio's three-part report on yet another round of cultural genocide against the Indians of South Dakota. What it amounts to is state-sanctioned kidnapping. I hope that you'll take action to help bring an end to the continuing effort to separate Indian children from their families. Here are the bullet points from the kick-ass investigation Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters put together over 12 months:
• A 2005 study found that 32 states are, in various ways, failing to comply with the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed that law in 1978 after a century of federal policy had forcibly removed tens of thousands of American Indian children from their families and sent them off to abusive boarding schools.
• Under the law, social services agencies are supposed to place Indian children they remove from troubled homes into Indian foster-care homes. But that requirement is being ignored. And in South Dakota, more than 700 Indian children are removed from their families each year, often under questionable circumstances. Over the years, state records show, only 13 percent of these children have gone to Indian foster parents.
• Anecdotal evidence indicates that foster-care homes licensed to Indians are ignored by the state's social services agency when placing children removed from their families.
• Some children are taken for legitimate reasons, but most are removed because of "neglect," a fuzzy definition that often is arrived at because of a failure of the mostly non-Indian social-service workers to understand Indian culture. "[E]ven Native American children who grow up to become foster care success stories, living happy, productive lives, say the loss of their culture and identities leaves a deep hole they spend years trying hopelessly to fill," NPR reports.
• While Indian children make up less than 15 percent of the state's population, they are more than half the children in foster care. South Dakota receives thousands of dollars from the feds for every child it takes from a family, and typically gets more money if a child is Indian.
• South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugard once headed a group that was a major recipient of federal money provided for foster children. As lieutenant governor, he was on the group's payroll when it received tens of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, a "highly unusual relationship."
Meteor Blades :: South Dakota Kidnaps Indian Children and Sticks Them in White Foster Homes
"It enrages me," says Crow Creek tribal council member Peter Lengkeek. "We're very tight-knit families and cousins are disappearing. Family members are disappearing."
The Crow Creek tribe has lost more than 33 children in recent years. The reservation only has 1,400 people. Last year Lengkeek asked social service officials to tell him where the children were and who they were placed with.
Seven months later, he received a list. Lengkeek says every single child was placed in a white foster home.
He says if the state had its way, "we'd still be playing cowboys and Indians. I couldn't imagine what they tell these kids about where they come from and who they are."
"It's kidnapping," he says. "That's how we see it."
Except for the obvious reasons, many people may wonder why this matters so much to Indians, why it arouses our fury more intensely than just about any other conflict between Indians and non-Indians in today's world. That's because the foster-care program contains a powerful echo. Our rage arises out of a history that is, for many of us, devastatingly personal.
For instance, among Indians who participate in the Daily Kos group Native American Netroots, at least four of us have relatives who were yanked away from their families and sent to boarding schools (aji: great-grandmother; me, grandmother and great-aunt; navajo: mother; cacamp: grandparents, parents and himself).
Some went to government-run schools; others were taken in by church operations, Catholics and Mormons being among the prominent proponents of this approach to "civilizing" us.
In addition to being physically abused and treated as sexual prey in many cases, children in the boarding schools had their language, culture and religion yanked away. That wasn't collateral damage. It was the whole point. The concept behind the boarding schools, more than 150 of them by 1900, was "Kill the Indian...save the man," as noted in an 1892 Denver speech by Col. Richard H Pratt, founder of the U.S. Training and Industrial School at Carlisle Barracks, Pa. In short, demolish Indians by literally stealing their children.
Here's cacamp - Carter Camp - giving the short version of his boarding school story:
I was a repeat run-away same as my Mom, so I didn't graduate until I was 19. Mom never did because her Dad hid her from the agent after the first time. In my parents' day the schools were run like military academies where the kids marched in formation and drilled like soldiers. They had disciplinarians and jails and ran farms, which the students worked on to feed themselves. Those were the bad old days. By the time I got there, they were more benevolent but still strict about erasing our cultures. We still had to work on the farm two hours a day and more if we got in trouble.
The Navajo had it especially rough since they were forcefully rounded up like my parents were and taken up [to] Kansas, far from home, while the rest of us were sent by our parents because of poverty. We were high school age; so were the Navajo but they hadn't gone to any school before and most spoke no English so they had "special ed" and were segregated in different dorms. Funny thing though, we met and became friends with students from all over and later on became tribal leaders and American Indian Movement leaders who knew each other and could work together for things like tribal sovereignty.
Back then the Bureau of Indian Affairs agent stole the kids and ran roughshod over the parents and tribe. Today it's the State and the welfare system that is doing the same thing. We call our lost children "Lost Birds" after the baby girl who survived [the] Wounded Knee [massacre of 1890] and was adopted out to a white family but finally (recently) came home to her people to be buried again at Wounded Knee.
Each year we have "lost birds" coming home who have turned 18 and come seeking their families and yearning to learn their culture. Many times they don't even know who to ask for and sometimes they're quite old, grown up and with their own children looking for a connection to their past. Winter Rabbit reminded me of such a lost one. The majority of the stolen kids know their families and come home ASAP, so we have a large population of Indian kids who were brought up outside the tribe and have now come home. They almost all have stories of abuse. Only a few were lucky enough to find love and stability. Most are passed around in the system and bounce from foster home to foster home. This has been going on so long that thousands of lost ones are out there from every nation in America. It needs to stop.
Aji tells the story of her great-grandmother:
[My mom's grandmother] died without ever knowing who or what she was; it's taken a lot of work, years later, to piece her "self" together. Initially, the family thought she was of Scots descent, not realizing that the Scottish surname was that of her by-then-widowed mother's second husband. Her adoptive name was English. There is no record of what her traditional name (or any surname) might have been; they were more interested in covering up the very fact of adoption than anything else.
In the 1870s, the Catholic Church in Michigan was very invested in saving Indian children from an alleged "epidemic" of illness. What they were really doing was stealing kids and farming them out as fast as they could to reliably Catholic families who would ... "save the [wo]man by killing the Indian." No one knows how many were lost to white families via church theft. Hundreds, at a minimum. Probably thousands over the course of one generation alone. But one day in the late 1870s, a good white Catholic couple of English extraction left their home and traveled to the rez for two months, and came back bearing their new little Indian "papoose," promptly given a white name and identity, with never a reference to be made to the adoption, much less from where.
Ironically, when she married, her husband ran his father's logging business, and during the summer months, he traveled around the state; in his absence, she ran the business for him. She hired and fired - you guessed it - Indian laborers, some of whom were undoubtedly relatives, but neither side ever knew it. She died thinking that 1) she was English, and 2) she was the lineal descendant of those English "parents." To this day, I'm not sure how they explained the differences in coloring - probably via the "Gasp! That's not discussed in polite company" method.
Also ironically, after her adoption, her new parents went on to have nine biological children of their own. You'd've thought they could've been a little less greedy about acquiring someone else's child as a possession.
Nobody is suggesting that the foster-case system in South Dakota is treating Indian children the way the boarding schools did back, in Carter's words, in the "bad old days." Or that children are being snatched in quite the same way that the churches did decades ago. But many of today's Indian foster-kids are still losing their culture and the connection to their heritage.
Take the case of Janice Howe, one of the grandmothers that the NPR team focused on. Her four grandchildren, the children of her daughter Erin Yellow Robe, wound up in foster care despite the 1978 law.
Except rarely, that law requires that Indian children be placed with relatives, a tribal member or at the very least, another American Indian. And it requires states to do all they can to first keep a family together through services and programs. Surely, a grandmother qualifies.
But nothing Howe did over 18 months brought her grandchildren back until she told the Crow Creek tribal council that they were about to be put up for adoption. The council passed a resolution warning the state that if the Yellow Robe children were not returned, it would be charged with kidnapping and prosecuted. Nobody thought this would work, but it did.
"Antoinette came in and said 'Grandma, Grandma. We get to stay! We get to stay!'" ...
Howe thinks the babies were treated well. But Rashauna and Antoinette left a size 10 and came back a size smaller. Howe says they hoard food under their pillows and hide under the bed when a car pulls up.
"I feel like they were traumatized so much," Howe says.
The children don't remember their native dance, something Howe says is especially important for Antoinette, the oldest.
"We go to sweats," Howe says. "We have ceremonies at certain times a year. She's got to be getting ready to learn these things that she has to do in order to become a young lady. They took a year and a half away from us. How are we going to get that back?"
Among other tasks, Danny Sheehan works for the Lakota People's law office. He has about 150 case files on removals.
"These are all the different people who had their kids taken away from their entire families. ... Not one of them has had their children left with a relative of any kind."
He hopes one day he can sue. ...
"Maybe if we devoted all our resources to a particular case and said, look, we're going to land on you like a ton of bricks [social services] and make you give this one kid back and sue you and do everything else, they would probably just turn the kid loose," he says. "But it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't stop them from doing it a hundred times again."
But why should lawsuits be necessary? There is a law against what's being done. It's just not being enforced. A good deal of the reason for that is because the centuries-long efforts to make Indians disappear, to make us invisible, has succeeded. Our political clout in such matters, even in places where we can still be found in substantial numbers, is next to zero. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act appears to us to be just another ignored bit of paper, like hundreds of treaties, and nobody official is doing squat about it. When it comes to invisible Indians who enforces the enforcers?
South Dakota Kidnaps Indian Children and Sticks Them in White Foster Homes | comments
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
by: navajo @ Thu Oct 27, 2011 at 14:35:43 PM CDT
[ Parent ]
-I'm really furious and disgusted with this guy:
Ten years ago, this group was in financial trouble. For several years, tax records show, it was losing money. Then in 2002, a former banker named Dennis Daugaard joined the team. He became the group's chief operating officer. A year later, he was promoted to executive director. And things began to change.
The money the group was getting from the state doubled under his leadership. Children's Home grew financially to seven times its size. It added two new facilities.
State records show it seized on a big opportunity. The state began outsourcing much of its work, such as training foster care parents and examining potential foster homes. Children's Home got almost every one of those contracts.
The group paid Daugaard $115,000 a year. But that wasn't his only job. He was also the state's lieutenant governor - and a rising star in state politics.
The seven years Daugaard spent at Children's Home - and his ability to turn the place around - were prominent features of his successful 2010 bid for governor.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Wexler wrote:
Sometimes I think the Nebraska child welfare system exists just to make everyone else look good. South Dakota tears apart families at the third highest rate in the nation; Nebraska is second worst (Wyoming is #1). The proportion of Native American children in foster care in South Dakota is four times their proportion in the general population, in Nebraska it's closer to seven times higher. Both states are among the ten worst when it comes to using the worst form of placement, group homes and institutions.
A culture of contempt for poor, minority families is deeply embedded in child welfare in much of the nation. That does enormous harm to children when they are torn from everyone they know and love - and it overloads child welfare systems so workers have less time to find children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their parents. Sadly, Nebraska and South Dakota are prime examples. Fortunately, there are many good people in child welfare systems trying to change this, and some states, such as Maine, Alabama and Illinois have made significant progress. Details are on our website.
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org
Thu Oct 27 07:56:46 2011
Richard Wexler wrote:
It's not just Indian children who are desperate to go home. Many children who "age out" of foster care head right back to their parents. Even when they can't live together, many former foster children maintain ties to their parents or other relatives.
Consider the results of a study of infants born with cocaine in their systems: One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the actual physical development of the infants was better when they were left in their own homes. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine. That doesn't mean we can leave children with addicts - it does mean that drug treatment for the parent almost always is a better first choice than foster care for the child. And of course, many children are taken from parents whose only crime is poverty.
None of this means no child ever should be taken away. But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But America has prescribed mega-doses of foster care, even when there are far better ways to keep children safe.
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org
Thu Oct 27 07:53:47 2011
Source http://www.nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1114/south-dakota-kidnaps-indian-children-and-sticks-them-in-white-foster-homes
CPS corruption hurts and destroys families worldwide. Please use caution posting about CPS here or anyplace on the internet. For your protection, using your full, real name and precise location is not advised. CPS has eyes everywhere and CPS is notorious for taking what people say, twisting it, embellishing on it and then using it against them in CPS "investigations" and at court proceedings.
Showing posts with label department of social services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label department of social services. Show all posts
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Stability For Children Is The Goal Of Social Workers Aiming To Strengthen Relationships, Marriages
We don't know what our readers think but we believe that as badly as social workers, CPS and DHHS have proven that they can mess up children and children's lives, maybe it is better if they don't dabble in families as noted in this article.
We fear that this porgram is just one more addition to the many in a social workers' arsenal of weapons to interact with families and children to build more cases to remove children from their homes, thus destroying more families.
---
Article Date: 06 Sep 2011 - 0:00 PDT
Child welfare professionals know that children are safer and healthier when the adults in their lives have healthy relationships, but most social workers are not trained to educate couples about strong relationships and marriages. Researchers at the University of Missouri are working to train child welfare professionals and future social workers to help individuals and families strengthen their relationships.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education Training (HRMET), is a five-year project facilitated by MU Extension and David Schramm, assistant professor of human development and family studies and state extension specialist in the MU College of Human Environmental Sciences. The purpose of the project is to develop training programs that give child welfare workers basic tools to foster positive relationships. The ultimate goal is to improve the stability and well-being of children by helping their parents and caregivers form and maintain strong couple and marital relationships.
"Many parents face multiple stressors that can weaken their couple relationships and spill over into parent-child relationships," Schramm said. "If social workers can teach parents to be more kind, understanding and respectful in their couple relationships, the result will be safer, happier environments for children."
HRMET's curriculum is two-pronged: a graduate-level course for social work students at MU and online and one-day training sessions for child welfare professionals. Both courses give current and future social workers simple tools to help parents choose partners, manage conflict and remain committed in their relationships.
"Most social work graduate programs focus on helping children, so the subject of healthy relationships for parents tends to be left out," Schramm said. "This project is exciting because the fields of human development and family studies and social work are merging for the first time to create better tools for child welfare professionals."
The graduate course is being taught for the second time this fall; six workshops were offered in the summer for social work professionals. More than 200 social workers throughout the state have received training and the feedback indicates that it is meeting a need within the profession.
"I learned a great deal about communication within couples, different communication styles and how to teach partners to communicate positively," said a HRMET participant. "As a child welfare worker, I can now identify problems within clients' relationships, explain to couples how their relationships affect their children, and offer them tools to help open the lines of communication."
The project, which started in 2008, is wrapping up its third year of research and curricula development. Project leaders, including faculty from universities around the U.S., hope to expand the program nationally.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/233854.php
We fear that this porgram is just one more addition to the many in a social workers' arsenal of weapons to interact with families and children to build more cases to remove children from their homes, thus destroying more families.
---
Article Date: 06 Sep 2011 - 0:00 PDT
Child welfare professionals know that children are safer and healthier when the adults in their lives have healthy relationships, but most social workers are not trained to educate couples about strong relationships and marriages. Researchers at the University of Missouri are working to train child welfare professionals and future social workers to help individuals and families strengthen their relationships.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education Training (HRMET), is a five-year project facilitated by MU Extension and David Schramm, assistant professor of human development and family studies and state extension specialist in the MU College of Human Environmental Sciences. The purpose of the project is to develop training programs that give child welfare workers basic tools to foster positive relationships. The ultimate goal is to improve the stability and well-being of children by helping their parents and caregivers form and maintain strong couple and marital relationships.
"Many parents face multiple stressors that can weaken their couple relationships and spill over into parent-child relationships," Schramm said. "If social workers can teach parents to be more kind, understanding and respectful in their couple relationships, the result will be safer, happier environments for children."
HRMET's curriculum is two-pronged: a graduate-level course for social work students at MU and online and one-day training sessions for child welfare professionals. Both courses give current and future social workers simple tools to help parents choose partners, manage conflict and remain committed in their relationships.
"Most social work graduate programs focus on helping children, so the subject of healthy relationships for parents tends to be left out," Schramm said. "This project is exciting because the fields of human development and family studies and social work are merging for the first time to create better tools for child welfare professionals."
The graduate course is being taught for the second time this fall; six workshops were offered in the summer for social work professionals. More than 200 social workers throughout the state have received training and the feedback indicates that it is meeting a need within the profession.
"I learned a great deal about communication within couples, different communication styles and how to teach partners to communicate positively," said a HRMET participant. "As a child welfare worker, I can now identify problems within clients' relationships, explain to couples how their relationships affect their children, and offer them tools to help open the lines of communication."
The project, which started in 2008, is wrapping up its third year of research and curricula development. Project leaders, including faculty from universities around the U.S., hope to expand the program nationally.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/233854.php
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
FTC Testifies on Children's Identity Theft
The Federal Trade Commission today told the House Committee on Ways and Means Committee Subcommittee on Social Security that, "Protecting consumers th especially vulnerable consumers such as children th against identity theft and its consequences is a critical component of the Commission's consumer protection mission."
The Federal Trade Commission today told the House Committee on Ways and Means Committee Subcommittee on Social Security that, “Protecting consumers – especially vulnerable consumers such as children – against identity theft and its consequences is a critical component of the Commission’s consumer protection mission.”
Delivering the Commission’s testimony at a field hearing in Plano, Texas, Deanya Kueckelhan, Director of the FTC’s Southwest Regional Office, told the committee that millions of consumers are victimized by identity thieves each year. She said that the cost and prevalence of identity theft have caused the FTC to devote significant resources to combating the problem, acting aggressively on three fronts: law enforcement, nationwide complaint management, and education.
The testimony details some of the FTC’s initiatives to combat identity theft. For example, since 2001, the Commission has brought 34 law enforcement actions against businesses that failed to take reasonable steps to protect sensitive consumer information that they maintained. In one such case, the FTC alleged that ChoicePoint, Inc., sold sensitive information, including Social Security numbers in some cases, about 160,000 consumers to data thieves posing as ChoicePoint clients. In many cases, the thieves used the information to commit identity theft.
In addition to law enforcement, the FTC collects, manages, and analyzes identity theft complaints in order to target its education efforts and assist criminal law enforcement authorities. The FTC manages the Identity Theft Clearinghouse, a secure online database of identity theft-related complaints, the testimony states. The Commission makes the Clearinghouse data available to over 2,000 American and Canadian federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies who have signed confidentiality and data security agreements.
According to the testimony, the FTC and its partners have provided identity theft training to over 5,400 state and local law enforcement officers from over 1,770 agencies, and the agency also makes available a wide variety of consumer educational materials - including many in Spanish - to help consumers deter, detect and defend against identity theft.
The testimony noted that in conjunction with the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime, the Commission recently hosted Stolen Futures, a forum where educators, child advocates, legal services providers, and government and private sector participants explored issues associated with children’s identity theft.
The forum panelists noted that while identity thieves can access SSNs from children’s records in schools, doctors offices and other sources, sometimes family members who have fallen on hard economic times use the identities of their children. In addition, several panelists noted that sensitive health and other personal information of children in foster care is often circulated widely within the schools and social services networks, leaving foster children particularly vulnerable to identity theft, the testimony states.
The testimony cites one recent survey of children enrolled in an identity protection service that found that more than 10 percent had loans, property, utility and other accounts associated with their Social Security numbers. Another study estimated that more than 140,000 instances of identity fraud per year are perpetrated on children in the United States..
According to the testimony, children’s SSNs are uniquely valuable because they lack a credit history and can be paired with any name and birth date. “In effect, a child’s identity is a blank slate that can be used to obtain goods and services over a long time period because parents typically do not monitor their children’s credit, often having no reason to suspect any problem.”
Therefore, “child identity theft is especially pernicious because the theft may not be detected until the child becomes an adult and seeks employment, or applies for student and car loans,” the testimony notes.
The testimony identifies steps parents can take to minimize their children’s risk of being targeted by identity thieves, including challenging requests for SSNs and other personal information, and understanding how and by whom the information being collected is going to be used.
The testimony notes that based in part on the information gained through the Stolen Futures forum, the FTC is developing, with the assistance of the Department of Education, a “back to school” alert to educate parents about the importance of safeguarding their children’s sensitive information, which will be distributed widely through local and community organizations.
The Commission vote to approve the testimony was 5-0. Copies of the testimony can be found on the FTC’s Website and as a link to this release.
The Federal Trade Commission works for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, visit the FTC’s online Complaint Assistant or call 1-877-FTC-HELP ( 1-877-382-4357 ). The FTC enters complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 2,000 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The FTC’s website provides free information on a variety of consumer topics. Like the FTC on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Claudia Bourne Farrell
Office of Public Affairs
202-326-2181
STAFF CONTACT:
Steven Toporoff
Bureau of Consumer Protection
202-326-3135
The Federal Trade Commission today told the House Committee on Ways and Means Committee Subcommittee on Social Security that, “Protecting consumers – especially vulnerable consumers such as children – against identity theft and its consequences is a critical component of the Commission’s consumer protection mission.”
Delivering the Commission’s testimony at a field hearing in Plano, Texas, Deanya Kueckelhan, Director of the FTC’s Southwest Regional Office, told the committee that millions of consumers are victimized by identity thieves each year. She said that the cost and prevalence of identity theft have caused the FTC to devote significant resources to combating the problem, acting aggressively on three fronts: law enforcement, nationwide complaint management, and education.
The testimony details some of the FTC’s initiatives to combat identity theft. For example, since 2001, the Commission has brought 34 law enforcement actions against businesses that failed to take reasonable steps to protect sensitive consumer information that they maintained. In one such case, the FTC alleged that ChoicePoint, Inc., sold sensitive information, including Social Security numbers in some cases, about 160,000 consumers to data thieves posing as ChoicePoint clients. In many cases, the thieves used the information to commit identity theft.
In addition to law enforcement, the FTC collects, manages, and analyzes identity theft complaints in order to target its education efforts and assist criminal law enforcement authorities. The FTC manages the Identity Theft Clearinghouse, a secure online database of identity theft-related complaints, the testimony states. The Commission makes the Clearinghouse data available to over 2,000 American and Canadian federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies who have signed confidentiality and data security agreements.
According to the testimony, the FTC and its partners have provided identity theft training to over 5,400 state and local law enforcement officers from over 1,770 agencies, and the agency also makes available a wide variety of consumer educational materials - including many in Spanish - to help consumers deter, detect and defend against identity theft.
The testimony noted that in conjunction with the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime, the Commission recently hosted Stolen Futures, a forum where educators, child advocates, legal services providers, and government and private sector participants explored issues associated with children’s identity theft.
The forum panelists noted that while identity thieves can access SSNs from children’s records in schools, doctors offices and other sources, sometimes family members who have fallen on hard economic times use the identities of their children. In addition, several panelists noted that sensitive health and other personal information of children in foster care is often circulated widely within the schools and social services networks, leaving foster children particularly vulnerable to identity theft, the testimony states.
The testimony cites one recent survey of children enrolled in an identity protection service that found that more than 10 percent had loans, property, utility and other accounts associated with their Social Security numbers. Another study estimated that more than 140,000 instances of identity fraud per year are perpetrated on children in the United States..
According to the testimony, children’s SSNs are uniquely valuable because they lack a credit history and can be paired with any name and birth date. “In effect, a child’s identity is a blank slate that can be used to obtain goods and services over a long time period because parents typically do not monitor their children’s credit, often having no reason to suspect any problem.”
Therefore, “child identity theft is especially pernicious because the theft may not be detected until the child becomes an adult and seeks employment, or applies for student and car loans,” the testimony notes.
The testimony identifies steps parents can take to minimize their children’s risk of being targeted by identity thieves, including challenging requests for SSNs and other personal information, and understanding how and by whom the information being collected is going to be used.
The testimony notes that based in part on the information gained through the Stolen Futures forum, the FTC is developing, with the assistance of the Department of Education, a “back to school” alert to educate parents about the importance of safeguarding their children’s sensitive information, which will be distributed widely through local and community organizations.
The Commission vote to approve the testimony was 5-0. Copies of the testimony can be found on the FTC’s Website and as a link to this release.
The Federal Trade Commission works for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, visit the FTC’s online Complaint Assistant or call 1-877-FTC-HELP ( 1-877-382-4357 ). The FTC enters complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 2,000 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The FTC’s website provides free information on a variety of consumer topics. Like the FTC on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Claudia Bourne Farrell
Office of Public Affairs
202-326-2181
STAFF CONTACT:
Steven Toporoff
Bureau of Consumer Protection
202-326-3135
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Meeting on Laura Cummings Law to be Held Monday
BUFFALO, NY - Local lawmakers say they will press even harder for passage of what is known as the Laura Cummings law to make sure social services workers can better protect vulnerable people. They're frustrated it has not been approved so far.
The law is based on the case of Laura Cummings who's own mother admitted killing her in January 2010 in their North Collins home where she was also abused by one of her brothers.
The bill, which was spurred by a 2 On Your Side investigation, would require workers from Child and Adult Protective Services to get a court order to enter a home to check on an individual after they are twice denied access. It would also go after anyone who would deny such access and that may be why the bill stalled in the Assembly according to one State Senator who sponsored the measure.
Senator George Maziarz said, "It would have made it a crime for individuals to deny access to an individual that they were harming. And I think that criminal penalty is what slowed this thing down and stopped it in the New York State Assembly. And we're gonna try to put some pressure on the Assembly when we go back...we will be going back in September."
Maziarz says the measure did pass in the State Senate and the Governor was expected to sign it. He and other members of the local delegation in the Senate and Assembly will hold a press conference on this subject Monday morning in Buffalo.
Source http://www.wgrz.com/news/article/131742/37/Meeting-on-Laura-Cummings-Law-to-be-Held-Monday
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Beware the Child Protectors by William Norman Grigg
When Salt Lake City police and caseworkers from the state Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) surrounded the home of Janet Adolf on June 4th, they were not responding to an accusation of child abuse or neglect. The armed raid had been staged to seize Mrs. Adolf’s eight-year-old daughter, who wasn’t at home — although her three terrified siblings were. According to Mrs. Adolf’s attorney Michael Humiston, the order had been issued because he had advised caseworkers of his intention to monitor their visits to Mrs. Adolf’s home in order "to protect Janet’s rights."
As the case is described by Humiston, Mrs. Adolf’s problems began when her eight-year-old daughter was "intimidated" into making allegations of sexual abuse. Although the family’s original caseworker, Kirk Soderquist, "tried to tell the court that there was no basis to the allegations," the youngster was removed from her home and temporarily placed in foster care; Soderquist was removed from the case and replaced with another caseworker.
"What Rights?"
After a month in a foster home, the child was returned to Mrs. Adolf and a second caseworker was assigned to make regular home visits. Humiston left a message with DCFS announcing his intention to "coordinate" the visits, so that he could be present to protect "the family’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights." According to Humiston, when this was explained to Judge Sharon McCully of Utah’s Third District Juvenile Court — who issued the order that led to the June 4th raid — she exclaimed, "What rights?"
Humiston, an attorney from Heber City, Utah, contends that the State of Utah has conducted "a systematic reign of terror." "By law, parents can be anonymously accused, and never get to face their accusers," observes Humiston. "There’s no right to a jury, no right to remain silent, and no that the parents are unfit."
In early March, Humiston filed a $500 million class-action suit against Utah Attorney General Janet Graham and several other state officials on behalf of five families whose children had been seized by the DCFS.
According to Humiston, the amount of damages sought in the lawsuit is equivalent to the amount of child welfare subsidies received by the state of Utah since 1994.
The situation described by Humiston is by no means unique to Utah. Across the United States, thousands of families have been ripped apart by citizen, teacher, or acquaintance — they enjoy none of the rights and immunities associated with due process. Acting in the "best interests of the child," social workers can terminate parental rights on a whim, and order police agencies to enforce those whimsical decisions at gunpoint. create a compulsory "home visitation" system, through which agents of the state will be able to subject parents to regular scrutiny — and determine for nearly a quarter of a century to create a national home visitation network. Should they succeed, armed raids similar to the one mounted against the home of Janet Adolf may become quite common.
"Village" Takeover
The "early childhood intervention program" — the Pre-natal and Early Infancy Project (PEIP). Christopher Caldwell of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, who covered the First Lady’s Senate campaign swing, explained that PEIP is a child abuse program that "involves sending social workers on regularly scheduled pre-emptive visits into the homes of children whose parents are deemed to put them ‘at risk’ of wrong parenting."
In her ghostwritten manifesto It Takes a Village, Mrs. Clinton gushes, "I cannot say enough in support of home visits" by government social workers. After all, she declares, "Keeping children healthy in body and mind is the family’s and the village’s first obligation," and in those "terrible times when authority we vest in government...." allowed abuse to occur," Mrs. Clinton contends that "social workers and courts should make decisions about terminating parental rights of abusive parents more quickly, rather than removing and returning abused children time and again." Government-authorized "home visitors" of the type extolled by the First Lady are authorized to pass judgment on the "adequacy" of parents, and to summon child protection workers should it be decided that the "village" must now "act in place" of inadequate parents.
Like most advocates of home visitation programs, Mrs. Clinton invokes the tragedy of child abuse to justify state intervention within the home. However, as the Physicians Resource Council (PRC), an affiliate of the Alabama Family Alliance, documents in a new study entitled The Parent Trainers, "most advocates of home visitation … clearly state that their goal is to institutionalize home visitation services for all new parents."
Deborah Daro, a former research director for Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA), candidly explained that the objective "is to bring home visitation services to all new parents." The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which was empanelled by George Bush in 1991, reached the same conclusion, calling for "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary neo-natal home visitation system" (which by strict definition could not be at once "universal" and "voluntary").
Home visitors — who are also called Family Support Workers (FSW) — serve three missions, according to the PCAA. First, "being a teacher is central" to the FSW’s mission. Second, "the home visitor is also a friend, adviser, and advocate for parents," and is responsible for helping forge links between the family and local "community service" gencies. "Finally," states the PCAA, "the home visitor is a monitor" who is expected to consultation sessions with CPS to review ‘high risk’ cases" and to take "appropriate actions … when abuse or neglect or imminent harm are suspected." One FSW explains that "because so many of our families are at risk of child abuse and neglect, our watchful eye can see the potential for danger before it becomes a real problem and do something about it."
In other words, home visitors/FSWs are the designated "watchful eyes" of the state within the home, empowered to "teach" parents, shepherd them into the suffocating embrace of the welfare state, and arrange for the seizure of children from parents deemed unsuitable. Furthermore, since enrollment in most home visitation programs begins with the birth of the child (and in some, enrollment begins before birth), the clear purpose is to make the state, by way of the home visitor, the custodian of first resort for the children involved. "We must remove the children from the crude influence of families," Soviet Communist Party educators were instructed at a conference in 1918.
"We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them." Dr. C. Henry Kempe, the most influential American advocate of home visitation programs, subscribed wholeheartedly to that concept.
Dr. Kempe was co-author of the ground-breaking 1968 book The Battered Child, which inaugurated the contemporary "war on child abuse."
Kempe’s work was cited as authoritative by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and by the American Academy of Pediatrics when it recommended in 1998 that pediatricians should "advocate at the local, state, and national levels for the funding … of quality home-visitation programs." Not surprisingly, Kempe also earned favorable mention in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. What makes Kempe’s influence troubling is the fact that he was an unabashed proponent of the totalitarian view that children are "state property," and that home visitation should be "a compulsory, universal service" imposed on American families. In a June 9, 1975 lecture to the Ambulatory Pediatric Association in Toronto, Dr. Hillary Clinton in her law journal writings and in It Takes a Village.
The the common-law maxim, "A man’s home is his castle," Kempe insisted that "all too often the child is a prisoner in its dungeon. It is a dungeon of constant anger, dislike, aggression, or even hatred."
While most people would acknowledge that such dismal, tragic circumstances do characterize the plight of a relatively small number of children in our country, Kempe insisted that the conditions he described were normative rather than exceptional, and thus justified a "limited intrusion into family privacy by society" in the form of "health visitors." Such visitors would be regarded as "fully capable of determining which children are at risk, whether they are thriving adequately or not doing well," and help to "form a bridge between these families and the health care system."
Regular the teacher, the school nurse, or the school nurse practitioner.
Kempe emphasized that the regime he described would not be limited to troubled families; rather, participation in the home "health visitor" program would be compulsory for all, "similar to the concept of compulsory, universal schooling": "It seems incomprehensible that we have compulsory education, with truancy laws to enforce attendance and, I might add, imprisonment of parents who deny their child an education, and yet we do not establish similar safeguards for the child’s very survival between birth and age 6."
Lethal Guardians acting as officers of the state, which is, after all, the most powerful instrument of organized coercion and lethal violence. Once again, Kempe’s priorities are in harmony with instructions given in 1918 to Soviet educators, who were told: "From the first days of their lives [Soviet children] will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
Kempe also emphasized that a stealthy, incremental approach would be necessary in order to construct a nationwide home visitation system. The program could begin in "any state, or any of our 3,362 counties," he told his audience in Toronto. Furthermore, he admonished advocates to be flexible enough to adjust their proposals to meet local conditions. "If it should turn out that local or state health departments are not very interested or are unwilling to undertake the health visitor program, there may be other approaches for its implementation," he observed. Pointing out that the state of Michigan had "placed the charge on the [state] Department of Education to assure that everyone is ‘educable,’" Kempe explained that this mandate "gives the Department the right to provide screening procedures and comprehensive health care to make every child school-ready."
The Clinton Administration’s Goals 2000 — which was an outgrowth of a national education agenda created by the Bush Administration in 1989 — provides millions of dollars in federal subsidies for state early-intervention programs, all of which are justified by the supposed need to ensure that children arrive at the doorstep of government schools "ready to learn."
State Property
According to Kempe, "those of us who are qualified to assess and correct the problems that produce child abuse and ‘failure to thrive’ should have explicitly described the child as the property of the state.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton provoked widespread criticism for her suggestion that children should have the right to "divorce" their parents — but, once again, she was merely building upon Dr. Kempe’s work. "When marriages fail, we have an institution called divorce, but between parent and child, divorce is not yet socially sanctioned," Kempe commented during his 1975 lecture. For parents deemed these families," Kempe declared. "When that fails, legal termination of parental rights should be attempted."
From Kempe’s perspective, parents exercise authority over their children only by the grace of the state, and the state has the right to revoke parental authority at any time: "Where the state is supreme, the particular problem is easily managed; in a dictatorship each child belongs to the whether one of our cherished democratic freedoms is the right to maim our own children."
Kempe offered this paean to totalitarianism, the world had not yet beheld the horrifying spectacle of the state-run orphanages in Communist Romania, in which thousands of children lived and died in unimaginable filth and squalor. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Transylvanian despot who ruled that the individual Romanian child "is the socialist property of the whole society."
Communist China’s child care policies are also in harmony with Kempe’s vision of the child as "state property." A Chinese population control womb, murdered through infanticide, or confined in state-run orphanages.
Steven W. Mosher, one of the world’s leading experts on Red China’s "one-child" policy, describes that nation’s government-run orphanages as "killing fields." Human Rights Watch-Asia reported in 1989 that Chinese orphanages have a mortality rate of at least 72 percent, with medical neglect and malnutrition the leading causes of death. Most of the children consigned to this hell are girls; an account recently smuggled out of China described a case in which a starving girl child, desperately seeking surcease from starvation, attempted to eat the flesh from her own arm. child care regime.
Foot in the Door
Dr. Kempe was the founding director of the Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Colorado. Kempe’s successor, Dr. Richard Krugman, served as chairman of President Bush’s U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which recommended "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary" home visitation system.
In 1985, the state of Hawaii enacted the "Healthy Start" program, a home visitation program that identifies "at risk" families through screening at birth. Healthy Start literature acknowledges that the program "evolved from the work of the Kempe program in Denver."
maltreatment … or maternal life skills, mental health, social support, or substance abuse."
Healthy Start officials, according to the PRC report The Parent Trainers, are now "screening over 52 percent of all new births in the state and provid[ing] services to roughly 20 percent of all newborns and their families."
In 1992, Hawaii’s Kempe-inspired Healthy Start program was used as the template for the Healthy Families America (HFA) initiative, which was created by Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA) in conjunction with the Freddie Mac Corporation and Ronald McDonald Charities. PCAA, it will be task force" promoting home visitation services under various program names. "In California," notes the PRC, "programs are called ‘Welcome Home Baby,’ Georgia’s program is known as ‘First Steps,’ Colorado’s ‘Bright Beginnings,’ Illinois’ ‘Good Beginnings,’ Massachusetts’ ‘Good Start,’ and Arkansas’ ‘New Beginnings’...."
To those state-level examples, a recent report published by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation (a major corporate supporter of home visitation programs) adds Missouri’s "Parents as Teachers" program; the "Nurse Home Visitation Program" — based on Elmira, New York’s PEIP program — which has been put in place in Memphis, Tennessee and Denver, Colorado, "and [is] now being replicated nationally"; Arkansas’ Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), "which seeks to prepare 3-year to 5-year-olds for kindergarten and first grade"; and the Comprehensive Child Development Program, "a five-year federal demonstration program that worked with poor families in 24 sites to promote malignant design of using home visitation programs as an incremental means of nationalizing children as "state property."
The PCAA reports that "Healthy Family" sites, under various names, are operating in 42 states and the District of Columbia. A recent survey by the organization found that one in five parents with children under the age of one received some type of home visitation service in 1997.
Furthermore, the organization’s effort to make home visitation universal received a tremendous boost in the federal budget for fiscal year 1999: The PCAA received $33 million through the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, and an additional $14 million for "research and data collection." The organization’s 42 state chapters also have access to Children’s Trust Funds, which are financed through surcharges on marriage licenses and birth certificates, fees for vanity license plates, and check-offs on individual state income tax returns.
In addition, the PCAA "was instrumental in the reauthorization of the Family Preservation and Support Services Program (renamed the Safe and Stable Families Program)," points out The Parent Trainers. Federal funding for that program, which totaled $275 million in fiscal year 1999, is projected to increase to $305 million by 2001 — and a large portion of that amount will be devoted to cultivating and expanding government home visitation efforts.
Testing for Child Abuse
In order to determine which newborn children are "at-risk" and thus qualify for home visitations, observes The Parent Trainers, state-based "Healthy Family" groups must "gain access to medical records of women who are pregnant or have just given birth. To complete this phase, HFA programs employ ‘Family Assessment Workers’ (FAWs) who will screen and assess mothers to determine their risk status." In some cases, an FAW "is designated as a temporary, volunteer employee of the hospital (when she is on hospital grounds) to allow her access to medical records. In other cases, a member of the hospital staff may agree to do the initial record screen and then make referrals to the FAW. Or, the FAW may not have access to medical records, but may be allowed to enter hospital rooms and administer ‘verbal screens’ by asking postpartum mothers directly to answer the questions on the 15-point initial screen."
The questions in the initial screening deal with the mother’s marital status and history, education, socio-economic status, family background, and Family Stress Checklist" (FSC) — ten open-ended, invasive questions presented to both parents. The FSC is supposedly designed to determine a parent’s propensity toward child abuse. On each question the parent receives a score from 0 (no risk) to 10 (highest risk). According to Hawaii’s high risk category, eligible for Healthy Start home visitor services." However, as The Parent Trainers points out, "A score of 25 … is fairly standard risk and in need of home visitation services."
Among typical FSC questions can be found inquiries regarding "harsh punishment"; PCAA literature emphasizes that spanking is considered a form of abuse. Having been "suspected of abuse" is another risk factor for a parent, as is being "in the midst of multiple crises or stresses," having "unrealistic expectations of the child’s behavior," or perceiving a child’s behavior as "difficult or provocative." Clearly the FSC is designed to define most — if not all — parents as placing their children "at risk." This is to be expected, given that the objective of "Healthy Start" and its offspring is a universal system — based on voluntary enrollment if possible, but employing coercion if necessary.
The FAWs charged with conducting "screenings" and arranging for home visitations are generally volunteers who may have had only a few days of training. No specialized academic background is required to become a FAW; a high school diploma or its equivalent is sufficient. (One PCAA survey found that one-quarter of all FAWs had no college training.) FAWs are encouraged to lure parents into visitation programs by offering bottles, breast pumps, or other helpful gifts to parents as a pretext for a post-hospital visit. "Comments made at a recent HFA national conference indicate ‘creative outreach’ may also include sending flowers to the reluctant mother on Mother’s Day, or even sending flowers to the mother of the mother, if it appears she is the source of resistance," observes The Parent Trainers. "It may also include taking the reluctant mother out to the beauty parlor if this may gain her confidence and make her feel obligated to participate in the program."
To illustrate the success of such tactics, an Arizona program reported that "90 percent of mothers offered the program accept HFA services." Furthermore, PCAA urges FAWs to make "persistent outreach efforts" for several months, if necessary, until reluctant families "have explicitly of the service." Should Kempe’s vision of compulsory home visitation to protect children be consummated, it stands to reason that rebellious parents would be the first to have their children taken from them — as the case of Janet Adolf’s family in Salt Lake City would seem to illustrate.
Levels of Involvement
As is almost always the case with any grand, malevolent scheme, the Kempe-inspired home visitation campaign makes malicious use of the worthy motives of otherwise decent people. Diana Lightfoot, director of the Physician’s Research Council and co-author of The Parent Trainers, explained to The New American: "There are three levels at which the home visitation scheme is working. At the first, most immediate level, we have the social workers or FAWs themselves, who usually have no agenda beyond doing what they consider to be the right thing — fighting child abuse, helping children get a good start, helping parents who may be overwhelmed. And of course, these are all very commendable motives."
At the second, intermediate level, continued Lightfoot, "we have the state departments of social services and other government officials who know means they employ. For a lot of state officials, the chief motivation is money; there is a lot of taxpayer money being thrown at the states by the federal government for these programs. At the top level we have the ideologues — the Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, and Donna Shalala types — who family."
Dr. Sam Watson, Lightfoot’s co-author, remarked to The New American that "Kempe, despite his reputation as a great humanitarian, praised country are the product of that same mindset as well. In some states, money from the state lottery is underwriting home visitation programs; in others it is money from the tobacco settlement. These sources of revenue have been a real windfall for advocates of home visitation."
"The seed of Kempe’s vision has been planted, it has been watered with taxpayer money," Lightfoot stated. "Whether it will grow to fruition depends upon the American public. It is vitally important that we educate families and parents about the dangers of home visitation programs, and the totalitarian nature of the vision behind those programs."
© Copyright 1999 American Opinion Publishing Incorporated
Source: http://jimcooper.biz/ptfw/resources/BewareTheChildProtectors.pdf
As the case is described by Humiston, Mrs. Adolf’s problems began when her eight-year-old daughter was "intimidated" into making allegations of sexual abuse. Although the family’s original caseworker, Kirk Soderquist, "tried to tell the court that there was no basis to the allegations," the youngster was removed from her home and temporarily placed in foster care; Soderquist was removed from the case and replaced with another caseworker.
"What Rights?"
After a month in a foster home, the child was returned to Mrs. Adolf and a second caseworker was assigned to make regular home visits. Humiston left a message with DCFS announcing his intention to "coordinate" the visits, so that he could be present to protect "the family’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights." According to Humiston, when this was explained to Judge Sharon McCully of Utah’s Third District Juvenile Court — who issued the order that led to the June 4th raid — she exclaimed, "What rights?"
Humiston, an attorney from Heber City, Utah, contends that the State of Utah has conducted "a systematic reign of terror." "By law, parents can be anonymously accused, and never get to face their accusers," observes Humiston. "There’s no right to a jury, no right to remain silent, and no that the parents are unfit."
In early March, Humiston filed a $500 million class-action suit against Utah Attorney General Janet Graham and several other state officials on behalf of five families whose children had been seized by the DCFS.
According to Humiston, the amount of damages sought in the lawsuit is equivalent to the amount of child welfare subsidies received by the state of Utah since 1994.
The situation described by Humiston is by no means unique to Utah. Across the United States, thousands of families have been ripped apart by citizen, teacher, or acquaintance — they enjoy none of the rights and immunities associated with due process. Acting in the "best interests of the child," social workers can terminate parental rights on a whim, and order police agencies to enforce those whimsical decisions at gunpoint. create a compulsory "home visitation" system, through which agents of the state will be able to subject parents to regular scrutiny — and determine for nearly a quarter of a century to create a national home visitation network. Should they succeed, armed raids similar to the one mounted against the home of Janet Adolf may become quite common.
"Village" Takeover
The "early childhood intervention program" — the Pre-natal and Early Infancy Project (PEIP). Christopher Caldwell of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, who covered the First Lady’s Senate campaign swing, explained that PEIP is a child abuse program that "involves sending social workers on regularly scheduled pre-emptive visits into the homes of children whose parents are deemed to put them ‘at risk’ of wrong parenting."
In her ghostwritten manifesto It Takes a Village, Mrs. Clinton gushes, "I cannot say enough in support of home visits" by government social workers. After all, she declares, "Keeping children healthy in body and mind is the family’s and the village’s first obligation," and in those "terrible times when authority we vest in government...." allowed abuse to occur," Mrs. Clinton contends that "social workers and courts should make decisions about terminating parental rights of abusive parents more quickly, rather than removing and returning abused children time and again." Government-authorized "home visitors" of the type extolled by the First Lady are authorized to pass judgment on the "adequacy" of parents, and to summon child protection workers should it be decided that the "village" must now "act in place" of inadequate parents.
Like most advocates of home visitation programs, Mrs. Clinton invokes the tragedy of child abuse to justify state intervention within the home. However, as the Physicians Resource Council (PRC), an affiliate of the Alabama Family Alliance, documents in a new study entitled The Parent Trainers, "most advocates of home visitation … clearly state that their goal is to institutionalize home visitation services for all new parents."
Deborah Daro, a former research director for Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA), candidly explained that the objective "is to bring home visitation services to all new parents." The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which was empanelled by George Bush in 1991, reached the same conclusion, calling for "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary neo-natal home visitation system" (which by strict definition could not be at once "universal" and "voluntary").
Home visitors — who are also called Family Support Workers (FSW) — serve three missions, according to the PCAA. First, "being a teacher is central" to the FSW’s mission. Second, "the home visitor is also a friend, adviser, and advocate for parents," and is responsible for helping forge links between the family and local "community service" gencies. "Finally," states the PCAA, "the home visitor is a monitor" who is expected to consultation sessions with CPS to review ‘high risk’ cases" and to take "appropriate actions … when abuse or neglect or imminent harm are suspected." One FSW explains that "because so many of our families are at risk of child abuse and neglect, our watchful eye can see the potential for danger before it becomes a real problem and do something about it."
In other words, home visitors/FSWs are the designated "watchful eyes" of the state within the home, empowered to "teach" parents, shepherd them into the suffocating embrace of the welfare state, and arrange for the seizure of children from parents deemed unsuitable. Furthermore, since enrollment in most home visitation programs begins with the birth of the child (and in some, enrollment begins before birth), the clear purpose is to make the state, by way of the home visitor, the custodian of first resort for the children involved. "We must remove the children from the crude influence of families," Soviet Communist Party educators were instructed at a conference in 1918.
"We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them." Dr. C. Henry Kempe, the most influential American advocate of home visitation programs, subscribed wholeheartedly to that concept.
Dr. Kempe was co-author of the ground-breaking 1968 book The Battered Child, which inaugurated the contemporary "war on child abuse."
Kempe’s work was cited as authoritative by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and by the American Academy of Pediatrics when it recommended in 1998 that pediatricians should "advocate at the local, state, and national levels for the funding … of quality home-visitation programs." Not surprisingly, Kempe also earned favorable mention in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village. What makes Kempe’s influence troubling is the fact that he was an unabashed proponent of the totalitarian view that children are "state property," and that home visitation should be "a compulsory, universal service" imposed on American families. In a June 9, 1975 lecture to the Ambulatory Pediatric Association in Toronto, Dr. Hillary Clinton in her law journal writings and in It Takes a Village.
The the common-law maxim, "A man’s home is his castle," Kempe insisted that "all too often the child is a prisoner in its dungeon. It is a dungeon of constant anger, dislike, aggression, or even hatred."
While most people would acknowledge that such dismal, tragic circumstances do characterize the plight of a relatively small number of children in our country, Kempe insisted that the conditions he described were normative rather than exceptional, and thus justified a "limited intrusion into family privacy by society" in the form of "health visitors." Such visitors would be regarded as "fully capable of determining which children are at risk, whether they are thriving adequately or not doing well," and help to "form a bridge between these families and the health care system."
Regular the teacher, the school nurse, or the school nurse practitioner.
Kempe emphasized that the regime he described would not be limited to troubled families; rather, participation in the home "health visitor" program would be compulsory for all, "similar to the concept of compulsory, universal schooling": "It seems incomprehensible that we have compulsory education, with truancy laws to enforce attendance and, I might add, imprisonment of parents who deny their child an education, and yet we do not establish similar safeguards for the child’s very survival between birth and age 6."
Lethal Guardians acting as officers of the state, which is, after all, the most powerful instrument of organized coercion and lethal violence. Once again, Kempe’s priorities are in harmony with instructions given in 1918 to Soviet educators, who were told: "From the first days of their lives [Soviet children] will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
Kempe also emphasized that a stealthy, incremental approach would be necessary in order to construct a nationwide home visitation system. The program could begin in "any state, or any of our 3,362 counties," he told his audience in Toronto. Furthermore, he admonished advocates to be flexible enough to adjust their proposals to meet local conditions. "If it should turn out that local or state health departments are not very interested or are unwilling to undertake the health visitor program, there may be other approaches for its implementation," he observed. Pointing out that the state of Michigan had "placed the charge on the [state] Department of Education to assure that everyone is ‘educable,’" Kempe explained that this mandate "gives the Department the right to provide screening procedures and comprehensive health care to make every child school-ready."
The Clinton Administration’s Goals 2000 — which was an outgrowth of a national education agenda created by the Bush Administration in 1989 — provides millions of dollars in federal subsidies for state early-intervention programs, all of which are justified by the supposed need to ensure that children arrive at the doorstep of government schools "ready to learn."
State Property
According to Kempe, "those of us who are qualified to assess and correct the problems that produce child abuse and ‘failure to thrive’ should have explicitly described the child as the property of the state.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton provoked widespread criticism for her suggestion that children should have the right to "divorce" their parents — but, once again, she was merely building upon Dr. Kempe’s work. "When marriages fail, we have an institution called divorce, but between parent and child, divorce is not yet socially sanctioned," Kempe commented during his 1975 lecture. For parents deemed these families," Kempe declared. "When that fails, legal termination of parental rights should be attempted."
From Kempe’s perspective, parents exercise authority over their children only by the grace of the state, and the state has the right to revoke parental authority at any time: "Where the state is supreme, the particular problem is easily managed; in a dictatorship each child belongs to the whether one of our cherished democratic freedoms is the right to maim our own children."
Kempe offered this paean to totalitarianism, the world had not yet beheld the horrifying spectacle of the state-run orphanages in Communist Romania, in which thousands of children lived and died in unimaginable filth and squalor. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Transylvanian despot who ruled that the individual Romanian child "is the socialist property of the whole society."
Communist China’s child care policies are also in harmony with Kempe’s vision of the child as "state property." A Chinese population control womb, murdered through infanticide, or confined in state-run orphanages.
Steven W. Mosher, one of the world’s leading experts on Red China’s "one-child" policy, describes that nation’s government-run orphanages as "killing fields." Human Rights Watch-Asia reported in 1989 that Chinese orphanages have a mortality rate of at least 72 percent, with medical neglect and malnutrition the leading causes of death. Most of the children consigned to this hell are girls; an account recently smuggled out of China described a case in which a starving girl child, desperately seeking surcease from starvation, attempted to eat the flesh from her own arm. child care regime.
Foot in the Door
Dr. Kempe was the founding director of the Kempe National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Colorado. Kempe’s successor, Dr. Richard Krugman, served as chairman of President Bush’s U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, which recommended "the sequential implementation of a universal voluntary" home visitation system.
In 1985, the state of Hawaii enacted the "Healthy Start" program, a home visitation program that identifies "at risk" families through screening at birth. Healthy Start literature acknowledges that the program "evolved from the work of the Kempe program in Denver."
maltreatment … or maternal life skills, mental health, social support, or substance abuse."
Healthy Start officials, according to the PRC report The Parent Trainers, are now "screening over 52 percent of all new births in the state and provid[ing] services to roughly 20 percent of all newborns and their families."
In 1992, Hawaii’s Kempe-inspired Healthy Start program was used as the template for the Healthy Families America (HFA) initiative, which was created by Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA) in conjunction with the Freddie Mac Corporation and Ronald McDonald Charities. PCAA, it will be task force" promoting home visitation services under various program names. "In California," notes the PRC, "programs are called ‘Welcome Home Baby,’ Georgia’s program is known as ‘First Steps,’ Colorado’s ‘Bright Beginnings,’ Illinois’ ‘Good Beginnings,’ Massachusetts’ ‘Good Start,’ and Arkansas’ ‘New Beginnings’...."
To those state-level examples, a recent report published by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation (a major corporate supporter of home visitation programs) adds Missouri’s "Parents as Teachers" program; the "Nurse Home Visitation Program" — based on Elmira, New York’s PEIP program — which has been put in place in Memphis, Tennessee and Denver, Colorado, "and [is] now being replicated nationally"; Arkansas’ Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), "which seeks to prepare 3-year to 5-year-olds for kindergarten and first grade"; and the Comprehensive Child Development Program, "a five-year federal demonstration program that worked with poor families in 24 sites to promote malignant design of using home visitation programs as an incremental means of nationalizing children as "state property."
The PCAA reports that "Healthy Family" sites, under various names, are operating in 42 states and the District of Columbia. A recent survey by the organization found that one in five parents with children under the age of one received some type of home visitation service in 1997.
Furthermore, the organization’s effort to make home visitation universal received a tremendous boost in the federal budget for fiscal year 1999: The PCAA received $33 million through the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, and an additional $14 million for "research and data collection." The organization’s 42 state chapters also have access to Children’s Trust Funds, which are financed through surcharges on marriage licenses and birth certificates, fees for vanity license plates, and check-offs on individual state income tax returns.
In addition, the PCAA "was instrumental in the reauthorization of the Family Preservation and Support Services Program (renamed the Safe and Stable Families Program)," points out The Parent Trainers. Federal funding for that program, which totaled $275 million in fiscal year 1999, is projected to increase to $305 million by 2001 — and a large portion of that amount will be devoted to cultivating and expanding government home visitation efforts.
Testing for Child Abuse
In order to determine which newborn children are "at-risk" and thus qualify for home visitations, observes The Parent Trainers, state-based "Healthy Family" groups must "gain access to medical records of women who are pregnant or have just given birth. To complete this phase, HFA programs employ ‘Family Assessment Workers’ (FAWs) who will screen and assess mothers to determine their risk status." In some cases, an FAW "is designated as a temporary, volunteer employee of the hospital (when she is on hospital grounds) to allow her access to medical records. In other cases, a member of the hospital staff may agree to do the initial record screen and then make referrals to the FAW. Or, the FAW may not have access to medical records, but may be allowed to enter hospital rooms and administer ‘verbal screens’ by asking postpartum mothers directly to answer the questions on the 15-point initial screen."
The questions in the initial screening deal with the mother’s marital status and history, education, socio-economic status, family background, and Family Stress Checklist" (FSC) — ten open-ended, invasive questions presented to both parents. The FSC is supposedly designed to determine a parent’s propensity toward child abuse. On each question the parent receives a score from 0 (no risk) to 10 (highest risk). According to Hawaii’s high risk category, eligible for Healthy Start home visitor services." However, as The Parent Trainers points out, "A score of 25 … is fairly standard risk and in need of home visitation services."
Among typical FSC questions can be found inquiries regarding "harsh punishment"; PCAA literature emphasizes that spanking is considered a form of abuse. Having been "suspected of abuse" is another risk factor for a parent, as is being "in the midst of multiple crises or stresses," having "unrealistic expectations of the child’s behavior," or perceiving a child’s behavior as "difficult or provocative." Clearly the FSC is designed to define most — if not all — parents as placing their children "at risk." This is to be expected, given that the objective of "Healthy Start" and its offspring is a universal system — based on voluntary enrollment if possible, but employing coercion if necessary.
The FAWs charged with conducting "screenings" and arranging for home visitations are generally volunteers who may have had only a few days of training. No specialized academic background is required to become a FAW; a high school diploma or its equivalent is sufficient. (One PCAA survey found that one-quarter of all FAWs had no college training.) FAWs are encouraged to lure parents into visitation programs by offering bottles, breast pumps, or other helpful gifts to parents as a pretext for a post-hospital visit. "Comments made at a recent HFA national conference indicate ‘creative outreach’ may also include sending flowers to the reluctant mother on Mother’s Day, or even sending flowers to the mother of the mother, if it appears she is the source of resistance," observes The Parent Trainers. "It may also include taking the reluctant mother out to the beauty parlor if this may gain her confidence and make her feel obligated to participate in the program."
To illustrate the success of such tactics, an Arizona program reported that "90 percent of mothers offered the program accept HFA services." Furthermore, PCAA urges FAWs to make "persistent outreach efforts" for several months, if necessary, until reluctant families "have explicitly of the service." Should Kempe’s vision of compulsory home visitation to protect children be consummated, it stands to reason that rebellious parents would be the first to have their children taken from them — as the case of Janet Adolf’s family in Salt Lake City would seem to illustrate.
Levels of Involvement
As is almost always the case with any grand, malevolent scheme, the Kempe-inspired home visitation campaign makes malicious use of the worthy motives of otherwise decent people. Diana Lightfoot, director of the Physician’s Research Council and co-author of The Parent Trainers, explained to The New American: "There are three levels at which the home visitation scheme is working. At the first, most immediate level, we have the social workers or FAWs themselves, who usually have no agenda beyond doing what they consider to be the right thing — fighting child abuse, helping children get a good start, helping parents who may be overwhelmed. And of course, these are all very commendable motives."
At the second, intermediate level, continued Lightfoot, "we have the state departments of social services and other government officials who know means they employ. For a lot of state officials, the chief motivation is money; there is a lot of taxpayer money being thrown at the states by the federal government for these programs. At the top level we have the ideologues — the Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, and Donna Shalala types — who family."
Dr. Sam Watson, Lightfoot’s co-author, remarked to The New American that "Kempe, despite his reputation as a great humanitarian, praised country are the product of that same mindset as well. In some states, money from the state lottery is underwriting home visitation programs; in others it is money from the tobacco settlement. These sources of revenue have been a real windfall for advocates of home visitation."
"The seed of Kempe’s vision has been planted, it has been watered with taxpayer money," Lightfoot stated. "Whether it will grow to fruition depends upon the American public. It is vitally important that we educate families and parents about the dangers of home visitation programs, and the totalitarian nature of the vision behind those programs."
© Copyright 1999 American Opinion Publishing Incorporated
Source: http://jimcooper.biz/ptfw/resources/BewareTheChildProtectors.pdf
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Family Sues Child Protective Services for Parental Rights Violations
Contact: Fred and Michelle Dinwiddie, 731-499-7471; Patrick Michael McGraw, Attorney for Plaintiffs, 540-904-5704, patmcgrawlaw@cox.net
ROANOKE, Va., April 18, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- A lawsuit has been filed Virginia Federal Court concerning violations of Parental Rights by a Virginia couple. Fred and Michelle Dinwiddie formerly of Giles County, Virginia have filed the lawsuit against 30 defendants regarding the removal of their children in March of 2008 for allegedly abusing and abandoning their children.
The Dinwiddie's children were removed for 8 months total and placed in foster homes throughout the New River Valley some up to two hours away from they're home. Although the Dinwiddie's were found to be innocent of the charges at tax payer expense the local Department of Social Services chose to keep their children and impose a host of "Community Services" upon the parents and their children in a prolonged effort to keep them separated rather than reunify the family.
Details of the lawsuit show that while the parents were suffering at the hands of authorities, the children were suffering at the hands of social workers, foster parents, therapists, foster care agencies, and even other foster children. In a 36 page document filed in Federal Court the Dinwiddie's assert that the Defendants violated their Constitutional Rights and accuse the defendants of Fraud, Defamation, Tortious Interference with Custodial Rights, Breach of Duty of Good Faith and Fair Dealing, Breach of Lawful Duty (Negligence), Breach of Written, Oral, and Implied Contract, Common Law Conspiracy under Virginia Law, and lastly Business Conspiracy.
"Before my children were taken into foster care they were polite and respectful towards each other and ourselves as parents but after their foster care experience we noticed a marked change for the worse regarding their attitude and behavior," said Fred Dinwiddie. "It took a long time for them to readjust and tell us their experiences, fears, and apprehensions related to being in foster care. They had lost respect for us because they felt we couldn't protect them anymore."
Michael Dinwiddie also listed as a Plaintiff in the suit is serving in Afghanistan.
Videos of the Dinwiddies visiting with their children:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4peNBmntwQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU3F8YXAD4I
Source: Christian Newswire
ROANOKE, Va., April 18, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- A lawsuit has been filed Virginia Federal Court concerning violations of Parental Rights by a Virginia couple. Fred and Michelle Dinwiddie formerly of Giles County, Virginia have filed the lawsuit against 30 defendants regarding the removal of their children in March of 2008 for allegedly abusing and abandoning their children.
The Dinwiddie's children were removed for 8 months total and placed in foster homes throughout the New River Valley some up to two hours away from they're home. Although the Dinwiddie's were found to be innocent of the charges at tax payer expense the local Department of Social Services chose to keep their children and impose a host of "Community Services" upon the parents and their children in a prolonged effort to keep them separated rather than reunify the family.
Details of the lawsuit show that while the parents were suffering at the hands of authorities, the children were suffering at the hands of social workers, foster parents, therapists, foster care agencies, and even other foster children. In a 36 page document filed in Federal Court the Dinwiddie's assert that the Defendants violated their Constitutional Rights and accuse the defendants of Fraud, Defamation, Tortious Interference with Custodial Rights, Breach of Duty of Good Faith and Fair Dealing, Breach of Lawful Duty (Negligence), Breach of Written, Oral, and Implied Contract, Common Law Conspiracy under Virginia Law, and lastly Business Conspiracy.
"Before my children were taken into foster care they were polite and respectful towards each other and ourselves as parents but after their foster care experience we noticed a marked change for the worse regarding their attitude and behavior," said Fred Dinwiddie. "It took a long time for them to readjust and tell us their experiences, fears, and apprehensions related to being in foster care. They had lost respect for us because they felt we couldn't protect them anymore."
Michael Dinwiddie also listed as a Plaintiff in the suit is serving in Afghanistan.
Videos of the Dinwiddies visiting with their children:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4peNBmntwQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU3F8YXAD4I
Source: Christian Newswire
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)