The featured topic of the July 23, 2007 issue of The New American magazine is “Families Separated By The State.” Attorney Greg Hession has a feature article in this magazine, titled, “This Is Child Protection?”
By Gregory A. Hession, J.D.
Created 2007-07-23 05:00
Imagine your terror and panic: you are awakened by an armed SWAT team in the middle of the night, demanding to be let into your home to take your children away. The grim-faced agents show you no warrant, no court order, and no mercy. They give you no reason for their presence, other than having received an unspecified report about child abuse. They bark commands and menace you and your children with their weapons. The children are taken out of your home screaming, shoved into cars, and whisked away into the night.
This is not a Soviet-era movie script, but a reality in thousands of homes in the United States every year, courtesy of state child protective services agencies.
The least reported and understood social crisis of our time is the vast new police state run by these state social services agencies, which are generically referred to as “child protective services,” or CPS. The states have different names for them, such as Department of Social Services or Department of Children and Families, but they are all operating under a federal mandate. Whatever they are called, our next generation of children may never recover from their predatory intrusions into families.
Some may dismiss these concerns as hyperbole, but the numbers are appalling. In 2005 alone, over 3.3 million reports involving six million children were made to state child-abuse hot lines, the vast majority of which eventually proved to be untrue. Over 500,000 children currently are in foster care. Another 300,000 or so are forcibly removed from their homes by the system every year. Tens of billions of dollars are expended every year on the care of these children, and on the juvenile court systems which enable it, along with costs of therapy, drugs, lawyers, and related services.
This system is relatively new. In response to professional agitation to “do something” about the problem of child abuse, Congress set forth standards for state child protection agencies in 1974, in the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act, also called the Mondale Act for its senatorial sponsor. If a state conformed their system to the federal mandate, it could get generous reimbursement from the feds. The states immediately complied, and modern child protection was born.
The system does not work, and never has. Thirty years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions of ruined families later, the problem of abuse is little improved.
Not one state has ever come close to meeting the bare minimum standards set out in federal law for CPS agencies. Of seven federal criteria that apply, only a few states have even met one, and no state even complies with a few of them.
In almost all cases, children are traumatized by their experiences in state custody. A large number of the children taken into captivity never return — many are adopted out to other families, killed, injured, or caused permanent psychological harm. Parents are rarely helped, even when they need some improvement.
Can this happen in America? It can, and it does. What follows is a brief tour through the seamy underbelly of the CPS system. That these agencies engage in such despicable behavior is often not believed by anyone who has not been directly affected by it. CPS structures and systems resemble those used by totalitarian regimes.
The Snitch Network
The entry point of most children into the child protection system is through a government-mandated “snitch network” consisting of 50-odd professions that are required by law to report any suspected child abuse or neglect to a state “hot line.” Teachers, police, therapists, doctors, nurses, even clergy, must report to CPS, under threat of prosecution. In addition, CPS propaganda has convinced many neighbors and friends and personal enemies to make such reports.
Once a report is made, the CPS agency has to decide whether it is credible, and if so, what to do about it. Of about 3.3 million calls to state hot lines in 2005, about 40 percent were screened out before going any further. For the remaining calls, the agency had to decide whether it was an emergency, or could be administratively investigated in due course.
Why are so many reports of child abuse being generated? A large contributing factor is that the legal definitions of abuse and neglect are so elastic as to encompass virtually any parental behavior, from spanking their children to letting them eat too much “fast food.” Also, supply sometimes creates its own demand, since an army of professionals has arisen to service the industry, and must be kept well fed.
In response to child-abuse emergencies, real or imagined, the agency usually sends CPS agents and police to a home. The police pry the children’s little fingers off their mother, with everyone screaming hysterically during the “pull,” as they call it.
In other cases, children are snatched from school or from buses after school, without notice to parents frantically waiting at bus stops. Often they are taken late on a Friday afternoon, so parents cannot challenge the action in court over the weekend, and so that the children can be held incommunicado and given medications — drugged — during that time. The goal is to soften the kids up to make “disclosures” about parental abuse in order to allow CPS to get a court order for custody. Sometimes CPS agents go to court to get an order before taking the children, but when they do so, it is almost always done in secret in a closed courtroom, without the parents or attorneys present.
Unfortunately, CPS often gets it wrong both ways — genuine abuse is often missed or ignored, while most of what is reported as abuse or neglect does not rise to any reasonable level of seriousness. (See chart below.)
Into the Belly of the Beast
After the snitch network does its part to get the children into the CPS pipeline, the cases either go into an elaborate administrative process, or to a so-called “shelter” court hearing, held within a few days in order to determine whether the removal of the children from the home was proper. At that court hearing, usually conducted in secret without the press or public allowed, the court will appoint separate lawyers for the mother, the father, and the children. Many of these hearings are conducted so quickly that parents do not have time to prepare a defense, and the lawyers often cut corners by telling their clients to just agree to keep the children in custody until a trial, which could be a year or more away. Only later do the parents find out that they had agreed that their children needed state protection and had waived any possibility of getting them back quickly, or even at all.
The cases that do not go to court are shunted into a surreal, nightmarish administrative system, and the children are often allowed to stay at home or with relatives while the bureaucrats dither.
A social worker will eventually make up a document called a “case plan” or “service plan,” in which the alleged failings of the parents are summarized. The case plan includes a set of tasks and social services intended to “fix” the parent, much like one might repair an appliance. In order to get the children back home if they were taken, or to foreshorten an administrative case, the parents must do all the activities mandated on the plan, such as going to parenting classes, meeting with a social worker, going to substance-abuse treatment, or getting psychological evaluations.
Social workers, often severely maladjusted and working out their own tortured past vicariously through their clients, frequently treat the parents with whom they work as property, ordering them around at whim. They set up services to be done during work hours, causing people to lose jobs and placing the family in financial distress. They can order that a man suspected of spanking his children must leave the home, putting additional emotional and financial burdens on a family.
As with most government programs, there are unintended consequences that no one considered when putting the scheme together. Since social workers are so easily duped, divorcing spouses have made extensive use of CPS reports as a weapon in family court. Want to get custody fast? Just call CPS and accuse the other spouse of abuse. CPS will also do the bidding of schools that have trouble handling difficult children, and will threaten parents who do not want to drug their children with ADHD chemicals.
When children are placed in foster care, the agency usually treats them with mercenary callousness. Social workers and foster parents do things to children that if done by parents would likely have triggered removal of the child. Children are routinely kept out of school for weeks, are denied needed medical care, and are even abused physically and sexually. Children with asthma are often placed with heavy smokers, and children with speech impediments are often placed with immigrants who struggle with English. Almost all children are heavily drugged, with up to six powerful mind-bending medications, in order to ensure their docility.
Even in little ways, the system continually shows contempt for its captives. Social workers leave a home without putting the children in car seats, cancel visits with the parents if they have better things to do, or place the children in homes far from the parents in order to make it harder to have visits. The grinding banality of socialist-spawned child care is soulless, loveless, and arbitrary.
Abuse committed against a child while in foster care is supposed to be investigated by a special outside unit, similar to an internal-affairs division in a police department. However, mindful of potential lawsuits if abuse were discovered, the investigators usually don’t find any. Statistics reported to the government about abuse in foster care are low because the agency gets to do its own investigations. In my experience representing parents, most of whose children have been actually abused in foster care, the CPS usually sweeps the allegations under the rug and fails to stop the abuse.
Outcomes of Child-abuse Investigations
Though states' "child protective services" intervene readily in family situations, using as a guideline for intervention whether a child "is at risk of maltreatment," even after 40 percent of allegations of child abuse are initially screened out, a further 66 percent of the remaining allegations of child abuse are found to be unsubstantiated. (This number includes the cases labeled on the chart as "Alternative Response Nonvictim," where no investigation of the reported child abuse was undertaken, yet it was determined that there was no abuse.)
Your Day in Court
Juvenile or family court is where the fate of millions of children is decided. Not many years ago, these courts were a sleepy sinecure for a few political hacks. Now, with the child-abuse industrial complex in overdrive feeding them, juvenile courts have come into vogue. Crowds of sad-faced parents shuffle around the court’s waiting areas, lining the halls. Lawyers, forgetting the indescribable pain that their clients are enduring, openly laugh and gossip with CPS attorneys and therapists.
At court hearings, the parents usually cannot speak, and the children’s wishes are almost never heard or considered. Hearings often last only a few minutes, or even seconds. The traditional rules of evidence and notions of due process are rarely observed in these special courts, which are neither criminal nor civil. Hearsay on top of hearsay, sometimes three or four layers deep, is often admitted into evidence, which would never be allowed in any traditional court.
The burden of proof for taking children away from parents on a temporary basis is merely to show by a “preponderance of evidence” that the child was abused, which is a weak and ill-defined standard. By contrast, the state has to prove guilt in a speeding ticket case beyond a reasonable doubt. A final termination of parental rights requires that the state prove unfitness by “clear and convincing evidence,” still well short of the quantum of proof required to prove jaywalking.
Most juvenile cases end with a judgment against the parents, allowing CPS to keep the children until they are 18, or to farm them out for adoption. The home team — that is, the CPS prosecutor and social workers — are in front of the judge every day. The process becomes a choreographed dance, like a Mozart-era minuet, with all the players moving in lockstep and the outcome often determined before the first witness is called.
By looking at the numbers, one would conclude that there is an epidemic of child abuse in America. However, the evidence shows that there is actually an epidemic of hysteria about child abuse, because most of the official complaints are either false or greatly exaggerated. It is a squalid business. Big “non-profit” companies have arisen to service the insatiable demand for warehousing children and providing therapy, education, and other services. Special needs children can sometimes fetch thousands of dollars per week for these sub-contractors from the state and the feds, which make millionaires out of the subcontractors owners and officers.
Tens of thousands of parents have their parental rights terminated every year, and their children taken for adoption to other persons or families. In 2005 alone, 67,000 children were removed for adoption. Another 110,000 were waiting for adoptive homes. Each of these children has been through a painful removal from parents, a lengthy court process, numerous foster homes, large amounts of drugs and therapy, and sometimes years of waiting.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed by Congress in 1997, sets out adoption quotas for the states, with money bonuses for exceeding them, and even larger bonuses for processing a larger number of “special needs” children. Thus, adoption becomes the goal for many children who should not be taken from families in the first place. For CPS, it becomes just a commercial sales transaction: meet the quota, collect the cash.
Some parents do abuse children, and states have comprehensive criminal laws to deal with those cases. Most persons would likely disagree with CPS in how it defines abuse or neglect. Families are attacked for home-schooling or spanking their children, for not overseeing all play activities, or for when a child has an accident. Sometimes a child’s illness, poverty, or parents who are going through a time of conflict will trigger CPS involvement. There is also a palpable animus against families who are religious, or who do not like state interference. Only a very small percentage of the 3.3 million reported cases annually prove to be genuine abuse, and the system does a bad job of sorting them out.
There are reasons why the system does a bad job. Colleges churn out hordes of 23-year-old social-work graduates, childless and clueless, who are sent into homes to make life-changing decisions. Their formal education is grounded in doctrinaire Marxism and feminism, and they believe in their viscera that the state should communally raise children.
Another disincentive to changing the system is the fact that social workers are given legal immunity for almost any discretionary decision no matter what harm results to the children. Social workers exercise virtually unlimited power over families, with little accountability to anyone for overreaching or even for egregious offenses.
Federal reimbursement is the locomotive that drives the child-protection business. Regardless of what families actually need, CPS determines where to place its resources based on what returns the most reimbursement. The vast percentage of federal reimbursement (90 percent) comes from taking children into custody, while only a tiny fraction (10 percent) is available to help intact families. In other words, taking children pays, helping families costs.
The game of cadging federal CPS dollars has become so intense that states often hire multi-million dollar consultants to assist them in maximizing federal reimbursement for the children they take. For instance, Massachusetts hired the now-defunct Arthur Anderson Consulting, at an estimated fee of about $8.6 million, to structure the state program to take advantage of as many federal reimbursement categories as possible.
What Can Be Done?
Is the system really as corrupt, incompetent, destructive, and ineffective as this article portrays it? No, it’s actually far worse — if you ask a parent whose children have been victimized by it! The public perception is that CPS is doing a tough job, and standing against child abuse. However, any family caught in its web would testify to a completely different reality. When I take on a new case and forewarn a family about CPS dirty tricks, they usually think I am exaggerating. Surely it can’t be that bad. However, after the first court hearing, or if their children are removed, those families uniformly confirm that I didn’t tell them the half of it.
What should be done to address the problem of child abuse and the problem of abuse by the system of parents and children? It won’t be easy because CPS policies and actions are based on a deeply flawed world view. Moreover, the agencies are run by inept and agenda-driven managers and social workers, and are enabled by a dysfunctional legal system.
Real reform would cut at the very heart of the premise of child protection — that the state is a better parent, a legal doctrine called parens patriae in Latin. Some fixes are obvious — end federal standards for and funding of state child protection agencies, set objective standards for child abuse, require traditional due process in juvenile courts that are open to the public, and eliminate immunity for social-worker malfeasance.
Millions of children are imperiled by this imperious, abusive CPS system, which works quietly without much public scrutiny. Change will likely come only when its cruelties have been exposed, and the public reaffirms that raising children is the responsibility of families, not the state.
False Allegations Of Abuse In Divorce by Reverend Dennis Austin
False Allegations Of Abuse In Divorce By Reverend Dennis Austin
There has been a dramatic increase in the number of divorces over the last thirty years. Experts estimate that at least half of all marriages will end in divorce. Divorce has an effect on everyone involved, especially children if there are children in the relationship. Many times divorces become very hostile, which results in long courtroom battles. These battles are over money, houses, land and cars, but the most sensitive, traumatic and often the most cruel battle is the battle over the custody of the children. Custody battles for children are often long and heated debates over which parent is the better parent for the child. In the past, custody was always awarded to the mother because of the belief that children needed to be nurtured.
In recent years, there has been an upward trend to fathers seeking custody rights to the children. Often times parenting plans can be set up with mediation between the two parents but in most cases, the court becomes involved. During custody battles, there is a growing trend of one parent alleging abuse by the other parent. Before 1973, Child abuse was rarely reported to authorities and often times it was covered up. In 1963, reports of suspected child abuse was 160,000 but between 1976 and 1993, the total yearly number of child abuse reports grew from 669,000 to over 2.9 million after the child abuse protection legislation that Senator Mondale sponsored. The passing of this legislation has also resulted in the increase of allegations of child abuse in divorce battles.
In 1975, thirty five percent of all child abuse reports were unsubstantiated, but by 1993, that percentage sky-rocketed to sixty six percent. In divorce, when allegations are made and the police conduct investigations, ninety seven percent of these claims are unable to be substantiated. It is obvious that many allegations of abuse which are reported in divorce situations are false and ninety five percent of those accusers are women. With the high amount of divorces, the percentage of those divorces which abuse is reported, and the percentage of which are unsubstantiated, it shows that children are being used as pawns to hurt or destroy the other parent. These false allegations of abuse, even if proven to be false, can ruin someone's life and have a devastating effect on the children.
Two syndromes have been occurring in rapidly increasing numbers since 1980. The first is called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS). Douglas Darnall, PhD. States that, many women say that PAS does not exist or it is simply a tool used by male dominant courts to take the children from their mothers. They also contend that fathers and attorneys use PAS as an aggressive defense for physical and sexual abuse. There are three different types of alienators. The first is the naïve alienator who recognizes the importance of and encourages the relationship between the children and the other parent and only occasionally will do or say something that may alienate. This is not done to try to destroy the relationship between the children and the other parent.
The second is the active alienator who alienates the children from the other parent by lashing out at the other parent in front of the children. They may even give the children the choice of whether or not the child wants to visit with the parent although the court has ordered rights to visitation.
The third type of alienator is the obsessed alienator who does everything in their power to align the children to their side and campaign to destroy their relationship with the targeted parent. The obsessed parent is bitter and angry and tries to completely remove the targeted parent from their lives by vilifying them and set themselves up as a victim/hero. Some weapons that the alienating parent uses are false allegations of domestic violence, sexual or physical or emotional abuse of the child, mental illness on the part of the target parent, or alcoholism/drug abuse/homosexuality on the part of the target parent. This is a form of parentectomy, or the removal or erasure of a parent from the child's life.
The second syndrome that is occurring is called Sexual Allegations In Divorce (SAID). SAID is a false accusation against one parent, usually the father, for molesting the child. In the American society, there is such a sensitivity or outrage about child abuse that when an allegation is made, it is presumed to be true. Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, the accused child molester, especially fathers, are guilty until proven innocent. Upon allegation, the courts generally order the removal of the child from the father and at the very best, allows the father only limited supervised visitation until the matter is completely settled.
Frank Zepezauer states that "in some jurisdictions, the accusation can send a man to prison for life. In others, it can incarcerated him for ten or twenty years or more and brand him, for the rest of his life as a sex offender. At the very least, it can immobilize him in custody proceedings by involving him in costly litigation." SAID is often used by women to alienate the father from his children. It is used more often than physical abuse since there is often no physical signs from sexual abuse. A defense attorney in San Jose, California states, "In one fell swoop, she (the mother) can get her husband completely out of her and her children's lives, and assure herself complete custodial control. And in one fell swoop, she can completely destroy the man's life, and any semblance of a normal relationship between him and his children."
One may wonder what the alienator would have to gain in making such false accusations or why one parent would try to erase the other parent from the child's life. There are several reasons. Fear of losing their parental identity, loss of family structure, envy, rage and revenge are all viable bases for which one parent will alienate the other parent from the child. This epidemic is not exclusively seen in America but is wide spread throughout the world. In the National Shared Parenting Association (Saskatchewan Chapter) Press Release, it states that in Canada, a Children's Aid Society study showed that of 1200 complaints of abuse, 900 involved custody disputes. Of those 900 allegations, two thirds (600) were found to be false.
Most people do not realize the effects of parental alienation on children and the false allegations of abuse. Many young children whose mothers have made false allegations of abuse will develop false memories of abuse because of leading questions or suggestive counseling. These children are left fatherless. Parentectomy results in children becoming depressed, sometimes reaching suicidal proportions. They often lack self-esteem. Often they will turn against the alienator in later adolescence when they realize they have been "brainwashed" against the other parent.
David Blankenhorn gives statistics of fatherless children. He states that forty percent of American children will live apart from their fathers sometime before they are 18. He also says that drugs, child and adult abuse, poverty, teen pregnancy, gangs, crime and growing prison population are all driven by the separation of fathers from their children. He states, "A man can communicate to his son how to be a good man. The best mother in the world can't do that."
"Children who are deprived of their natural fathers, compared to children in two-parent families, are more likely to go to prison by eight times, to commit suicide by 5 times, to have behavioral problems by 20 times, to become rapists by 20 times, to run away by 32 times to abuse chemical substances by 10 times, to drop out of high school by 9 times, to be seriously abused by 33 times, to be fatally abused by 73 times and to have a 44 percent higher mortality rate."
These statistics are alarming and horrifying but what is behind all the statistics are hurting children who long for a normal life and was never given the chance to have that. They long for a relationship, with both their parents, that is healthy. Many times the mother has so convinced the children that their father is worthless, that they have a bitter resentment toward their father, which is solely based on the fabrications of the mother. This can ruin the child emotionally. It is not only boys that need their fathers in their lives to help them become emotionally stable.
"Adolescent girls whose parents divorced during their oedipal years, we postulate that particular coping patterns emerge in response to the absence of the father which may complicate the consolidation of positive feminine identification in many female children and is observable during the latency years. We illustrate both the existence of these phenomena and implication for treatment:
1) intensified separation anxiety 2) denial and avoidance of feelings associated with loss of father 3) identification with the lost object 4) object hunger for males."
This also shows the hurt and anger that a child goes through with the loss of the father in their lives. They repress their feelings and act out upon them trying to make themselves whole again but without any hope of doing that because the only way would to be able to undo the emotional abuse that the alienating parent perpetrates on the child.
The target parent has literally lost their children. In essence, their children have died. The target parent grieves but continues to love their children from a distance. They are forced to live as if their children are dead. The only hope that the target parent has is that someone will be able to reach their children and explain what has happened and the child will be willing to start a relationship with their lost parent. This alienation from their child can, as one can imagine, cause an increase in suicide rates among fathers. It is financially devastating to those who choose not to take their lives and result in poverty. They must fight long legal battles to clear their names of the crime that they have allegedly committed. This can take thousands upon thousands of dollars as well as years of court proceedings.
Many men lose everything they own to fight the court system because not only have they lost their rights as a parent, they have lost their reputation as well but they are still required to pay child support to those children. Even once a man has been cleared of the charges of abuse, there will always be emotional scars from the abuse that their ex-wife and the court system has ravaged them with. As stated earlier, many are branded as child molesters for the rest of their lives even with an acquittal.
The legislation that passed that began this massive surge of false abuse allegations is called the Mondale Act of 1974 or the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). This law was well intentioned to stop child abuse, but it has created an epidemic of false allegations of abuse. CAPTA matches monies to states that comply with their provisions, which are to set up programs which identify and prosecute child abusers. CAPTA created a vague and ambiguous definition of child abuse which is left up to the subjective discretion of the caller who reports the abuse or investigator. CAPTA has been revisited many times and has had minor amendments.
President Clinton re-authorized the act in the fall of 1996. Most states have what are called Child Protective Service Workers (CPS). These workers, along with law enforcement officers, investigate abuse reports. While the law enforcement officers have been trained to be objective, the CPS have not been and they even are called "validators" which raises a question to their role in an investigation. The CPS have authority to deny a parent the access to the children even if there is a court order which allows them to have visitation with the children. The CPS will send a child for an evaluation. According to the Mondale Act, if an evaluator does not report suspected abuse and the child goes back to an abusive situation, the evaluator can be imprisoned. These evaluators are often either afraid of the consequences of imprisonment if they mistakenly place a child back in the home of an abuser or they may even be a validator as the CPS workers.
The indicators that these validators use to determine abuse are actually quite common behavior which even normal children sometimes exhibit. Some of these indicators include, bedwetting, acting out, nightmares, whining, temper tantrums, thumb-sucking, and compliant and fearful behavior. These validators often propitiate allegations of abuse because it puts food on their tables. It is their career and without such allegations, they could be without a job. Although this is a horrifying thought, this is a reason to ignore evidence that shows innocence and only present to the court "evidence" that substantiate the client's claims of abuse.
In Armin A. Brott's article "A System Out Of Control: The Epidemic Of False Allegations Of Child Abuse", he states that, "In California, for example, the Victim/Witness program will pay directly to a licensed therapist up to $10,000 per child for counseling as long as the child was alleged to have been abused. An additional $10,000 is available to counsel the child's mother. The only catch: to get their therapy paid for, the child victim and her mother must see a therapist from an approved list. Guess who directs the mother to a therapist who would be best for her and her child? CPS, of course." These CPS workers often ask leading questions which can distort the children's memories. In their reports to the court, they often ignore evidences that would clear the accused, such as lie detector tests and outside therapist evaluations and rely solely on the child's evaluations which have been skewed by the CPS and the therapists that they recommend.
In a report disseminated by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) Child Maltreatment 1995 Reports From the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System depicts more than three million reports of alleged child abuse and neglect in 1995 of which two million of those complaints were without foundation.
False allegations of abuse in divorce is an epidemic that is sweeping the world. Children are becoming the heirs to hatred passed down to them from their parents and because this is all that they know, they in turn foster this pain, hatred and deceptiveness in their own adult relationships. The children are crushed under the weight of the system and a parent that is only looking out for their own best interests. Look at the rise in crime in recent years. There needs to be an accountability set within the legislation that would help to stop the false allegations of abuse and the propitiation of such allegations by the judicial system through CPS. The Mondale Act does not provide boundaries that would provide for prosecution of those who make false accusations. Where is the protection of the innocent in all of this?
The CPS has become a money making business and not a public service. Their theories that children do not lie about such issues are false. Many times children are coached into believing that something happened when it really did not. It is important to have laws to protect the innocent children from abuse but it is also equally important to protect the innocent adult from a wrongful accusation that could ruin them for the rest of their life.
America's judicial system was founded on the principal that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The CPS has changed the law in this issue to guilty until proven innocent. Those who commit perjury are indicted and imprisoned and there should also be the same punishment for those who falsely allege abuse. This legislation will never change until men and women come together and protest the unjustness of this issue. Most people's attitudes are "it is better to falsely convict than to allow a child to be abused." There is no justice in this. The American Constitution gives us the rights to justice. Only if we decide to speak can our voices be heard.
There needs to be an accountability that the CPS has so answer to so that they cannot simply ignore the truth. Therapists should not have to fear making an honest evaluation. We cannot sit by and allow the burden of proof to always be on the father. The burden of proof must be placed once again on the courts and the person that makes the allegations. Children and the target parent will never lead normal, healthy lives until the abuse is stopped.
Legislation needs to be changed to protect all the innocent, not just one. Let's be the voice of freedom and justice to change the legislation on the abuse laws so that false allegations cannot be made so easily, destroying the life of one of America's citizens and hurting the most precious thing that God has given us, his children.
Reverend Dennis Austin
Credits go to: PAS The effects of PAS on the child and Target Parent, Dean Tong on his Abuse Excuse Web Site www.abuse-excuse.com, The Father's Manifesto Forum (statistics), National Shared Parenting Association's Press Release, PAS Directory, Armin A. Brott A System Out of Control: The Epidemic of False Allegations of Child Abuse Effects of Fatherless Studies and Citation
Thanks to the many law enforcement offices that were contacted for information.
Richard Wexler's Testimony on CPS false allegations to the Senate Committee
Prepared Testimony of Richard Wexler
Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources Subcommittee on Children and Families Hearing on Child Protection: Balancing Diverging Interests
Richard Wexler, Assistant Professor of Communications, Penn State University
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee, I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to testify before you this afternoon.
My name is Richard Wexler. I am Assistant Professor of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University -- Beaver Campus. before joining the Penn State faculty, I was a journalist for 16 years, and I spent much of that time covering child welfare issues, work which led me to write the book, Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse. (Prometheus Books: 1990, (1995).
I am also Vice President of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an all-volunteer organization working to change the child welfare system. More than a hundred years ago, citizens who hated and feared the immigrant poor branded them genetically inferior and took away their children, placing them in middle class and wealthy homes or institutions. These people proudly called themselves CHILD SAVERS.
The term child saving has gone out of fashion, but the practice has not. today's child savers know it is no longer fashionable to label the poor genetically inferior -- at least I hope that is still unfashionable -- so they are labeled psychologically inferior instead. But the result is the same: their children are taken from their loving arms into the homes of middle class strangers. It's the child savers who often can be heard from after testimony like that you just heard from Jim Wade.
They are the ones who shed crocodile tears over a family's plight while defending the system that caused it. They are the ones who insist that, while it's too bad about poor Alicia, the case was just an aberration.
Mr. Chairman, if nothing else comes out of this hearing, please understand this: The Wade Case is not an aberration. The Wade Case is what happens when well-meaning people turn the war against child abuse into a war against children. We have created a system that destroys children in order to save them. as Kermit Wiltse, Professor Emeritus of Social Work at the University of California at Berkeley has put it: "We have a monster on our hands." Two out of three reports alleging child abuse are false reports.
America's children are victimized by false allegations of child abuse more than two million times every year. The child savers are, to use one of their own favorite phrases -- in denial -- about this. They'll say, in effect, those parents were probably guilty, but we just couldn't prove it. That is not true. Of course there are times when guilty parents will wrongly be labeled innocent. But, thanks to research commissioned by NCCAN, we know that workers are two to six times more likely to wrongly label innocent parents guilty. Indeed, according to the statistics gathered by the child savers, Jim Wade is a "substantiated," a "confirmed" child abuser.
And it's really not hard to see why this happens. When child savers claim that cases are wrongly labeled unfounded because abuse couldn't be proven, they know full well that no proof is required. In most cases, "substantiation" means only that an untrained, inexperienced caseworker checked a box on a form. It does not mean a court made a determination, it does not mean that the accused even got to make his or her case. And it does not mean that the accusation was proved beyond a reasonable doubt or even, in most states, by a preponderance of the evidence, the lowest standard any court will accept. It means only that the worker thought there was "some credible evidence" of guilt, even if there was more evidence of innocence.
Last year, in a case from New York brought by members of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that: "the 'some credible evidence' standard results in many individuals being (labeled child abusers and placed in the state's central register) who do not belong there." It is only cases that cannot even meet this incredibly low standard that are labeled unfounded. So if anything, the estimate that two thirds of all reports are false is an underestimate.
Next, we need to turn to the types of cases that are included in the child savers' definitions of maltreatment. Think of child abuse and what comes to mind? Probably a child brutally beaten, or tortured, or sexually assaulted, or killed. Substantiated cases of these kinds present, at most, eight percent of all reports of maltreatment. That does not make child abuse a minor problem. Even a small percentage is a big number, and child abuse is both overreported and underreported. Furthermore, even one case of abuse is a tragedy we should not be prepared to tolerate. (I only wish the child savers would say the same about even one case of needless foster care placement).
The problem of child abuse is serious and real -- it's the solutions that have been phony. And it's those phony solutions that have caused so much misery. Most of the other 92 percent of all reports are false reports or cases labeled deprivation of necessities. And what does that mean?
It can include cases in which a parent deliberately starves a child to death -- but far more common are cases in which the foodstamps ran out at the end of the month and there wasn't enough to eat. It can include cases like the famous one in Chicago in which the parents jetted off to Acapulco and left their children unsupervised. But far more common is the single mother working two jobs to try to stay off welfare who loses her children because something goes wrong with a makeshift babysitting arrangement.
Listening to child savers, it's easy to get the impression that every child in foster care was taken from parents who are brutally abusive or hopelessly addicted. Many such cases exist. But our foster homes also are filled with cases which stem from what Dana Mack of the Institute for American Values calls: The pernicious confusion of poverty with neglect. Child savers piously insist that they never break up families for "poverty alone." But courts in New York City and Chicago have found that in those cities, child savers routinely break up families because those families lack decent housing. A New Jersey study found that 25 percent of the foster children in Newark were in care not because they had been beaten or raped, but because their parents were homeless. (Incidentally, CAPTA includes a Title directed at this problem, and I recommend that funds be shifted from elsewhere in CAPTA to increase that funding).
Even the Child Welfare League of America found, when studying so called lack of supervision cases in New York City, that the services' needed most were the obvious ones, day care and babysitting, but the services offered most were foster care and the ever popular, counseling. (As an appendix to this testimony, I have included two issue papers from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform which discuss the issue of child abuse numbers in more detail).
Child savers tell us that this is the price we have to pay to protect children in real danger. It's a matter of children's rights, they say. One prominent Child Saver likes to say that "Not one child ever died of a social work evaluation." And over and over again, they tell us we must "err on the side of the child."
But the problem with this system is not that it hurts parents, though of course it does. The problem with this system is that it hurts children.
When the caseworker comes to the door, demands entry, pulls a small child aside and starts asking traumatic questions; when the worker then strip searches the child looking for bruises, how is that erring on the side of the child?
Such strip searches are common practice. In America today, Timothy Mcveigh has more protection against a search of his home or his person, than does an innocent child. The child savers constantly speak of "children's rights," but for some reason, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure never seems to be one of them.
When the child is taken away needlessly because the home is too messy, or there's not enough food, when she is dragged away from everyone loving and familiar and thrown in with strangers, how is that erring on the side of the child?
And when false reports and trivial cases overwhelm the system, cascading down upon untrained, inexperienced caseworkers forcing them to steal time, money, and attention from the children who really do need to be taken from their parents, how is that erring on the side of the child?
We've all heard the stories of children who died because child protective services didn't intervene when it should have, and we wonder: How could it have happened? It happens because workers are so deluged with false reports, they don't have time to give any case the attention it deserves. The workers know this. When florida caseworkers were polled about barriers to doing their jobs, 67 percent cited having to investigate obviously false reports and poverty cases.
This is a system which errs in both directions -- sometimes it intervenes too little, far more often, though with far less publicity, it intervenes too much. If we can reduce intrusion on innocent families -- and we can -- we also can save far more children in real danger.
How exactly did erring on the side of the child benefit Alicia Wade? Think all the time, and money, and effort that went into what amounted to thirteen months of torture-by-therapy for Alicia? Think of the costs of the therapists and the caseworkers and the prosecutors and the courts -- not to mention lots lots of social work evaluations. These resources are not unlimited. In Alicia's case they were, in effect, stolen from some other child in San Diego County whom we will never know who really did need intervention and who, you can be sure was missed.
Alicia Wade is not alone. While she suffered extreme emotional abuse while taken from her family, for other children, foster care is even worse. In the name of child protection, foster children have been beaten. In the name of children's rights, foster children have been raped. And in the name of erring on the side of the child, foster children have been murdered.
When Sara Everman was about eighteen months old, she was taken away by child savers -- after a social work evaluation, I'm sure -- because they thought she wasn't growing fast enough. They placed her in a so called specialized foster home. Six weeks later, Sara began running a very high fever. But the specialists in this specialized home made a doctor's appointment for two days later. On the way to the doctor, Sara stopped breathing. By the time they got to a hospital, she was dead.
Later, Sara's mother said: "She should have been in the hospital two days earlier when she had a 104.8 degree temperature. When she was home, she went the emergency room if her temperature got over 101. I didn't care if they laughed at me when I got there or not. One time I took her when she was cutting a tooth.
"I kept her alive for a year and seven months," Sara's mother said. "they had her for six weeks and three days and she died."
Many other children are not just neglected, they are brutally abused in foster care. I don't have time to tell you their stories, but I want you to hear at least some of their names:
Clayton Miracle of Atlanta, Jerrell Hardiman of La Porte, Indiana, China Marie Davis of Phoenix, Tajuana Davidson of Phoenix, Corey Greer of Treasure Island Florida, Gladys Campbell of Philadelphia, Joey Huot of Philadelphia, Henry Gallop of Boston, Aaron Johnson of Boston.
You won't find it on the coroner's reports, Mr. Chairman, but I submit that these children died of social work evaluations. They died after someone decided to -- err on the side of the child. Please don't let the child savers write these children off as aberrations.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of foster parents are generous, loving people who do the best they can for the children in their care -- like the overwhelming majority of parents, period. And abuse in foster care is not always abuse by foster parents, it can be children abusing each other. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than the rate in the general population.
A Baltimore study found abuse in 28 percent of all foster homes. A second Baltimore study found rates of sexual abuse in foster care four times higher than the rate in the general population. Perhaps most significant was a survey of alumni of what was said to be an exemplary, model foster care program in the Pacific Northwest. In this lavishly-funded program caseloads were kept low and both workers and foster parents got special training. This was not ordinary foster care, this was Cadillac Foster Care. But in this program, 24 percent of the girls said they were victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse in the one home in which they had stayed the longest -- they were not even asked about the other homes.
Benjamin Wolf, an attorney who brought a landmark suit against the Illinois foster care system calls that system: "A laboratory experiment to produce the sexual abuse of children."
Child Savers are finally beginning to acknowledge the harm of foster care -- but their alternative is even worse: orphanages.
The media have been filled with tours of what I call luxury orphan resorts, like Boys Town, which has a 500 million dollar endowment. Of course there are model orphanages, there are also model prisons and model mental institutions -- they are called models precisely because they are unusual.
To find out what real orphanages will be like, one need only look at New York City's experiment with orphanages in 1987, that's 1987, not 1887.
Seventeen group homes -- that's supposedly the good kind of orphanage -- were established for infants and toddlers. Some were run by the city, some by private agencies. The city called them "congregate care facilities" but they soon acquired a new name: baby warehouses.
By the time the state ordered the baby warehouses shut down just two years after they opened at least two children had died of infectious diarrhea because of unsanitary diapering practices -- the number may have been higher, the record keeping was as bad as the sanitation. A third died because, like 91 percent of the children in the baby warehouses, he had not been properly immunized. The children were cared for by untrained workers working in shifts, who often did not even know the children's names.
At one baby warehouse, the children were spoken to only when they did something wrong.
No doubt the child savers will say these facilities were aberrations. All seventeen of them. But I can cite case after case of similar horrors from all over America.
And that should come as no surprise. The back to the orphanage movement is based on the notion that the same governments and private agencies that gave us the prison system and the juvenile justice system and dotted the landscape with hideous warehouses for the mentally ill and the mentally retarded now suddenly will produce loving, humane institutions for children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black. Forgive me if i'm skeptical.
If foster care is not the answer and neither are orphanages, what is? For many many children, the answer is help to keep them safely in their own homes. We know this can be done.
Michigan and Alabama have cut their foster care rates using proven programs that are more humane than substitute care, less expensive than substitute care, and, most important safer than substitute care. I would be glad to discuss this in greater detail during the question period. I must caution you, however, that these programs have been endangered by the legislation passed by the house combining multiple child welfare programs into a single block grant. The problem is that the money for foster care and the far smaller sum available to keep children out of foster care have been put in the same pot. And in the political war between prevention and institutions, institutions always win. If the house plan passes the Senate, I guarantee you that the prevention money will be swallowed up by the child welfare establishment and used for foster care.
I have no problem with ending the entitlement status for foster care funds, indeed, I think it is a good idea. But not if you're going to let states and localities cannibalize prevention programs to make up the difference. Please, please, build a fire wall around Title JVB money and money under the family preservation and family support act. Leave these funding streams separate from any block grant.
Finally, I appeal to all of you not to allow this to become a partisan issue. The majority already has taken a step toward bipartisanship.
You invited a lifelong liberal Democrat to be your second witness. I am a card carrying member of the ACLU, and it was a former member of the ACLU National Board who founded the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
Child Saving combines the worst aspects of liberalism and conservatism. It will take the best of each philosophy to stop it, and provide real help and real hope to children in need. Thank You.
I would be pleased to respond to any questions.
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform Issue Paper 3 Understanding child abuse numbers
The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. child savers misstate the nature and extent of child abuse in america in order to gain public support for phony solutions. A first step toward real solutions is understanding what the numbers really mean.
The most commonly-used number concerning child abuse is the number of reports alleging maltreatment taken by child protective "hotlines" in every state.
According to the most recent such survey, there were 2,989,000 reports alleging maltreatment in 1993.
Unfortunately, in news stories, this often comes out as "nearly three million cases of child abuse." that is not true.
For starters, nearly two-thirds of those "reports" -- 66 percent -- are false.2 Data concerning false reports are discussed in detail in the next issue paper. But what about the reports that are labeled "substantiated" or "indicated" by protective workers. The data show that "indicated" cases of "major physical abuse" or sexual abuse represent only about eight percent of all "reports" alleging child maltreatment. Far more common are cases categorized as "deprivation of necessities." Often, these are cases in which a family's poverty is confused with "neglect." (See issue paper 5, Child Abuse and Poverty). Even the group that compiled this data acknowledges that the category "likely is related ... to economic status." Substantiated cases of "deprivation of necessities" constitute more than 20 percent of all reports. (The remaining substantiated reports were categorized as "minor physical injury," "other physical injury" "other maltreatment" and "emotional maltreatment.")3
In summary: out of every 100 child abuse "reports," 66 are false. Another 20 are "deprivation of necessities" and only eight are major physical abuse or sexual abuse.
Data from survey research often are similarly flawed -- or the data are taken out of context by the child savers.
Thus, for example, the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse declares that a Denver study of sexual abuse allegations "found that only eight percent of reports were false."4 In other literature, the figure from that study has been given as six percent. (The difference depends on whether cases in which the researchers could make no determination were included when percentages were computed).
In fact, whether one uses six percent or eight percent, that figure applies only to malicious falsehoods. The researchers found that an additional 17 percent of the reports were made in good faith but also turned out to be false.
And in another 24 percent of the cases the researchers could not determine if the report was true or not.5
Child abuse numbers
Thus, what this study actually found was that at least 23 percent and possibly as many as 47 percent of all sexual abuse allegations are false. furthermore, to be considered true in this, study, a report needed only to meet the standard used by most child protective agencies -- that there be "some credible evidence" of abuse even if there is more evidence that there was no abuse.
Some numbers are repeated so often that people are surprised to find how little data there are supporting them. Studies attempting to estimate the percentage of people sexually abused during childhood have come up with results ranging from one percent to 62 percent.6 In addition, these studies use widely varying definitions of abuse, and usually include abuse by anyone, not just cases subject to the jurisdiction of child protective services. But because large numbers attract more attention than small numbers, the claim appears repeatedly that "one out of three girls and one out of ten boys will be sexually abused" during childhood.
The best evidence we have concerning the true prevalence of sexual abuse comes from a review of 20 different studies conducted by seven canadian researchers. They found that the studies with the best methodology consistently found that between 10 and 12 percent of girls under age 14 are sexually abused by someone (not necessarily a parent or guardian) during their childhoods. The study that produced the "one out of three" claim was singled out for criticism by these researchers.
7 That 10 to 12 percent figure, like all of the best evidence concerning the true extent of child abuse in America, is cause for alarm, concern, and action. The real numbers are bad enough. Exaggeration serves only to panic us into seeking "solutions" that hurt the very children they were intended to help.
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform Issue Paper 4
False Allegations: what the data really show
As the previous paper in this series noted, a huge proportion of reports of child abuse are, in fact, false reports
But to a child saver, there is virtually no such thing as a false allegation of child abuse. False reports are labeled "unfounded" or "unsubstantiated" but child savers insist that's not the same thing as false. They offer several reasons why, in all likelihood, any parent accused of child abuse must be guilty. such arguments are a classic example of a half-truth. They are, quite literally, half of the truth.
Of course, America's stumbling, bumbling child-saving bureaucracy is going to mislabel some real cases of abuse -- some guilty families will be let off the hook after an investigation. but that same bureaucracy repeatedly mislabels innocent families as guilty.
This question was examined by a major federal study, commonly known as the Second National Incidence Study or NIS2. This study second-guessed child protective workers, re-checking records to see if they had reached the right conclusion. The researchers found that protective workers were at least twice as likely and perhaps as much as six times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty as they were to wrongly label a guilty family innocent.1 Thus, not only are 60 percent of all allegations false, chances are that figure is an underestimate.
Yet child savers insist that false reports are not really false. These are their reasons, and why those arguments don't wash:
The case was labeled unfounded because the worker couldn't "prove" guilt in fact, workers don't have to prove guilt. There is no trial, no judge, no jury. A worker can label a parent guilty and place his or her name in a state central register based entirely on her own suspicions.
The real problem is the reverse: Innocent people whose cases have been wrongly "substantiated." In most states, a worker can label a case "substantiated" if she thinks she has "some credible evidence" of maltreatment, even if there is more evidence of innocence. In a case brought by members of the Coalition, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in 1994 that "the 'some credible evidence' standard results in many individuals being placed (in the central register) who do not belong there."2 It is grossly misleading for child savers to label such cases as "confirmed" or "substantiated."
The parents are guilty but the law doesn't define what they did as child abuse. State laws are so broad that virtually anything a parent does or does not do can be labeled abuse or neglect, if a worker sees fit. Indeed, as the previous paper explains, the largest single category of "substantiated" maltreatment is "deprivation of necessities," a category filled with cases in which parents have been accused of neglect because they are poor.
The investigator had so many cases that she couldn't investigate long enough to uncover abuse or she was not trained well enough to detect it. the same worker may miss evidence showing that a parent is innocent for the same reasons.
The parents are guilty but the system has no help to offer, so the case was labeled unfounded. on the other hand, often the system will provide help for any kind of family problem only if the family is accused of child abuse. Therefore, workers sometimes deliberately mislabel innocent parents guilty in order to get them help with other problems.
In addition, most states lump together cases in which there has been actual maltreatment with cases where the worker thinks something just might happen in the future. These so-called "at risk" cases may make up half or more of the 40 percent of all allegations that are "substantiated."
And finally, the enormous pressure on workers has to be considered. If they label a case false and harm comes to a child, they face loss of their jobs, the enmity of the press and the public, and perhaps even criminal charges. If they wrongly label parents guilty, even if that leads to needless foster care placement and all the harm that can cause for a child, the worker suffers no penalty--so workers practice "defensive social work" and wrongly accuse innocent parents.
For all of these reasons it is clear that of all reports alleging child abuse every year, the vast majority are false -- "not "unsubstantiated," not "unfounded" just plain false.
1. Study findings: Study of National Incidence and Prevalence of Child Abuse and Neglect: 1988 (Washington: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1988), Chapter 6, page 5.
2. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Decision, Anna Valmonte v. Mary Jo Bane, Docket No. 93-7183, March 3, 1994, pp. 2242,2244.
3. For example, unlike most states, Kansas does not lump these categories together. therefore, in Kansas, only 11 percent of all reports are substantiated. (Office of the Legislative Post Auditor, Performance Audit Report, 1990, p.6).
Ricardo Villalobos - Therapist, White Collar Child Abuser, Abuse and Trauma enabler for little children,Child Abuse Fabricator, big time liar. 1908 T Street, NW, Suite A Washington , DC , 20009 Phone: 2022972825 email:Therapist@ricardovillalobos.info Woodburn Mental Health Clinic, Annandale, Virginia Kolmac Clinic, Silver Spring, Maryland Whitman-Walker Clinic, Arlington, Virginia The Women's Center, Vienna, Virginia Argus House for Adolescent Boys, Arlington, Virginia Will County Dept. of Mental Health, Addictions Counseling Center, Joliet, Illinois
+Several people have questioned Mr. Ricardo Villalobos and his credibility as to his intentions as a therapist.
+In 2008, Judge Charles Maxfield of the Fairfax Circuit Court issued an court order preventing Ricardo Villalobos from having any further contact with two young children he was providing therapy on a bi-weekly basis for over a year while claiming that the children were depressed and confused due to sexual and physical abuse by their father that he had diagnosed.
+In 2007 Judge Leslie Alden of Fairfax Circuit found Ricardo Villalobos's expert testimony lacking any credibility.
+Mr. Villalobos came to court to testify as a expert witness on child abuse - when asked if he had brought his credentials/resume/curricum vita with him. His answer was No, I did not think it was needed in court. (During his testimony, it was learned that, he had never testified as a expert witness before and hence did not know he should have brought his resume with him to court.
+Ricardo Villalobos was conspiring with a convicted felon Lawyer Robert Machen ( Who spent a year in a federal prison) and CPS worker Shannon Traore aka Shannon Tyler...( who was later fired from Fairfax County Child Protective Services). see:Fairfax County CPS SocialWorker accused of Fabricating Child Abuse allegations.
The featured topic of the July 23, 2007 issue of The New American magazine is “Families Separated By The State.” Attorney Greg Hession has a feature article in this magazine, titled, “This Is Child Protection?”
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