Introduction By Barbara Bryan
NCADRC, Communications Director

FYI: Mute media have long declined to expose injurious practices of CPS when those initials best translate "counterproductive services" for either children or families.

As one whose investigative reporting days began Jan. 1961, I remain chagrined, saddened, frustrated at the inevitable result of more and more families dis-membered without a chronicle of the scandal that has too little effective exposure.

The article below illuminates the issue. It CAN inspire us to do the right thing using Innocence Initiative, SWAP (Social Work Again Proposal), and Constitutional Conferences on CPS Code. Playing catch up, even now, is a lot easier than finding siblings dating, married, and giving consanguineous DNA to their offspring because reallocations of children around the state and nation prevent their knowing whence they originated.

Since the influence of financial rewards to the system and supporters is unavoidably obvious, and many never abused children are adopted out of their families, the rest of the story is leaking out. If facts and warnings sound familiar, they have been spoken, written, mailed, telephoned, emailed, faxed, and presented for many years by this family advocate and others. If they did not make sense then, they still do not; but, they were and are true.

When It's "in the courts"

"It's in the courts; come back when it is over," has been the dismissive attitude of media. Its leaders and others could and should have known WITHOUT THEIR EXPOSURE AND SERIOUS OBJECTIONS IN THE BEGINNING OF ANY CLAIM CREATING CHILDLESS PARENTS the chance that children would grow up in their own families were minuscule.

"Oh, another one of those" rather than "Oh, my word, another one!" greeted stunned parents or caretakers, most of whom felt they were alone and "the only one" this embarrassing nightmare must have happened to. They lost ground from there because "child abusers" are notoriously the worst and most are shunned (if not beaten to a pulp in prison," guilty or not). "They ALL say they are innocent," shoulders are shrugged; so, WHO SHOULD CHANGE THE COURSE OF PERVERSE CHILD "PROTECTION"? When? How?

When children are taken FIRST--a constructive death penalty for family if abuse/neglect is believed because severe agency action (child removal) has occurred--and "investigations" justify what already has been done, WHEN COULD AN ACCUSED HAVE "PROVED INNOCENCE," a brazen disregard for the presumption thereof?

Most naive accuseds ARE "IN COURT" BEFORE THEY REALIZE THEY MAY NEVER AGAIN SEE THEIR VANISHED CHILDREN. What cruel punishment to take children first, instantly levy child support, court-appoint attorneys to urge vain "cooperation" when they have watched "goals" shifted on those who do, and judgment from one on the bench who declines to "judge" but immunizes all with a signature.

Gag Orders & First Amendment

Typically communication between the traumatized child, family and family friends is forbidden. In the eerie and uncomfortable silence, a frightened child is frequently taught to repeat elements of "imminent danger" for "documentation" and for court.

First Amendment protected expression, MOST VITAL AND SACRED between parent and child, is stopped; but, First Amendment groups ignore this cruelest of gag orders. Even media identifying parents under actual gag orders that inhibit press freedom seem disinterested in the First Amendment. Its current use by CPS and courts seal the fate of an accused innocent minus public notice.

Without protected parent-child communications--by telephone if there is a genuine concern for physical safety--a traumatized child is denied that hug, that assurance of safety President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush urge all parents to communicate to their children in troubling times.

Parents are set up to fail reunification and preservation efforts while naively hoping that the whole truth will be officially "documented" (by an agency with the most to lose if the entire story is told).

Among DSS/CPS standard practices are: use of agency-chosen and paid counselors (some naively encouraging complete cooperation with shifting agency suggestions; others accepting pay to recommend "legal stranger" status for parent and child in moneysaving time frames); long-standing relationship with judge who accepts an incomplete agency record, routinely approves agency recommendations, and lets agency attorneys keep exculpatory material from reaching "the court."

Hearsay as "Evidence"

A major problem is that third-party agency-favored financially interested hearsay is generated by preferred professionals (opinions and recommendations of any others ignored: restraint of trade for licensed practitioners with superior credentials, experience, and objectivity) and permitted by judges in closed-door proceedings to be "evidence" supporting prior agency actions. Without complete records, without "freedom of the press" (Minnesota has opened its CPS court proceedings), without knowledgeable counsel and vigorous defense, without communication with a presumed child "victim," or First, Fourth, Fifth and more Amendment liberty safeguards, just how is an accused supposed to act and react?

With no prescribed etiquette for accused parents, experience shows they are stunned and hurt but also fearful and furious at the taking of their children usually at gunpoint (or firepower nearby). They are surprised and outraged at instant child support orders against them to underwrite their child's being held hostage with strangers. Cost-free, less restrictive and terrifying alternatives are available among safe family homes and with faith-based friends but they are ignored (if not properly documented for HHS/OIG.

If those wrongly accused react reasonably, if they bring unwanted notice to agency actions, determination to flatten their resistance rachets up several notches: repeat until the messengers stop talking. Breaching constitutional rights "voluntarily" is a price most parents pay too quickly as the cost of promised contact with the missing child. Many are told "You don't need a lawyer," until they have made irrevocable choices against interest trying honestly to meet a child's best interest.

If silence of an obnoxious accused, looking everywhere for someone who knows and cares how the system is hurting his/her child, comes only when long distance service is stopped for inability to pay, so be it. One less annoyance for the agency. But where does the buck stop?

Immaculate Perception

Some appointed to act as a child's lawyer, even some hired to evaluate sentiments about an accused, make little effort to meet the child or learn his/her natural habitat. Many make no effort to actually meet or get to know the parent who may be made childless by the stroke of a judge's pen. Some call that sort of ghost opining Immaculate Perception. Is no-show-but-still-I-know in the Commonwealth's regulated "standards of care" for professionals? Does it pass Ethics Codes of the professional's membership organizations?

No accused parent, caretaker, teacher or day care worker can balance scales of reason, reality, or justice against superior resources of the prosecuting state and agency (mostly federal funding but portions also of state and local tax money). The purse, sword, and sovereign immunity stands between their integrity and "right" to make choices as parents for children they brought into the world.

TOTALLY OPPOSITE A PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE, accused parents--their children removed, they on a "deadbeat" list for child support if they don't pay, labeled abusers or neglecters, flagged on the Central Registry to prospective employers, and warned about to mentoring groups and against church volunteer service--HOW WILL THESE PEOPLE DEFEND AGAINST mistaken, mischievous, or malicious allegations? The miracle is that any ever does. And at what cost?

Last night on CNN a report on image rehabilitation (from a prior President's image to that of Enron executives and even Michael Jackson) showed the general public fairly quickly forgives or ignores sexual sins, is far less forgiving of transgressions involving money and financial trust, and nearly never again restores to former image one accused of any bad act against a child. Accused parents are already "in court" before the accused grasps the consequences of being prosecuted MINUS BILL OF RIGHTS PROTECTIONS FOR THE WORST IMAGINABLE "CRIME" (as all perceive "child abuse").

Barbara Bryan

Barbara Bryan, NCADRC, Communications Director
National Child Abuse Defense & Resource Center
P.O. Box 8323, Roanoke, Virginia, USA 24014
540/345-1952; Fax 504/345-1899; BHBryan@aol.com

National Office: NCADRC, P.O. Box 638, Holland, Ohio, 43528 USA
419/865-0513; Fax 419/865-0526; www.falseallegation.org

Fox news report on CPS

System Intended to Protect Children Under Fire for Overzealousness

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

By Robin Wallace

An obese girl is yanked from her parents in Arizona. A New York couple loses custody of their son because they refuse to drug him with Ritalin. A Colorado boy is stripped and examined by school officials because he said he'd been spanked one morning. A Christian mother loses her daughter for teaching forgiveness.

Prudent precaution on the part of America's child protective services agencies or proof positive of a system run amok?

Cases like these are fueling what is becoming a growing backlash against state child protective services. It's a movement swelling as more and more examples surface of parents being snared in a system that critics say uses murky definitions of child abuse to dictate private family values, child-rearing methods, lifestyle choices, and even religious practices.

Overzealousness in efforts to protect children may seem an odd charge. But an expanding group of critics — from family-rights activists to doctors to social workers — claim a system designed to help children is spiraling out of control. A system once criticized for not doing enough may now be doing too much, they say.

Money Motives?

Activists lay part of the blame for what critics call a "frantic kidnapping frenzy" on the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, legislation that rewards states with cash "bonuses" of $4,000-$6,000 per kid and other windfalls for each child permanently adopted out of foster care.

The law was intended to prevent children from languishing in foster care. In addition to the bonuses, the ASFA also removed protections for parental rights and made getting families back together a priority. Under the new law, though, states have much more leeway in deciding whether their social workers made a "reasonable effort" to reunite a family.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers the ASFA a sparkling success.

The HHS' Lynn Henison says the bonuses were meant to apply only to adoption-eligible children already in the system. The money, she says, prods states into cutting through red tape and moving kids into permanent homes.

But how those kids wind up in the system in the first place is left to the individual states. It is this fact — and the money motive — that has critics outraged.

"The people getting the money for the children should not be the same people deciding to take the children," said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a Sacramento, Calif., organization that provides legal support to cases involving parental rights, religious rights and civil liberties.

Nev Moore, founder of the Massachusetts-based Justice For Families, said states need a steady supply of adoption-eligible kids to keep the federal dollars flowing. In some states, social workers are even paid individual cash bonuses for each child they take into custody.

"Each child has a dollar value," she said.

Harry Spence, Massachusetts' new Department of Social Services (DSS) commissioner, dismisses such charges as "perverse and ludicrous," and said the critics making these allegations are putting kids at risk.

"If you think these kids haven't been harmed, then you think it's about money," Spence said. "They are wild and irresponsible charges," he said.

Defining Abuse

In a high-profile case last summer in Ware, Mass., a one-day-old baby was taken from its mother. The alleged neglect? The mother was not holding the baby or the bottle correctly when she fed her newborn. A trial is set for March to determine if the mother, 27-year-old Diana Ross, will lose her parental rights.

Ross is currently fighting the state of Massachusetts for an older child also in foster care, and is suing the state because a third child died while in state custody. The state took Ross' older children because they were frequently found wandering alone outside. Because of her history, Massachusetts DSS required the hospital to file an abuse report even though the nurse filing the report noted that the hospital staff was unable to observe or establish any abuse or neglect.

There's no question that in many cases, like Ross', parents can come under state scrutiny for good reasons. But family activists say parents with a legitimate need for assistance from the state often wind up being branded abusers even if physical or sexual abuse is not alleged.

In 1999, according to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting System, 49,000 children were placed in foster care based on "unsubstantiated" reports of abuse and neglect. Of the 900,000 substantiated cases of child abuse filed each year, almost 40 percent fall under a vague "other" category separate from physical or sexual abuse or serious neglect. The remaining 60 percent are mostly for neglect.

It is those "unsubstantiated" and "other" cases — almost 400,000 of them — that gall the likes of Nev Moore. "Child abuse needs to be defined as a deliberate act with the intent to harm," she argues.

Activists say home schooling, devout religious practices, persistent diaper rash, scratches from a new pet puppy, milk intolerance, cystic fibrosis, a broken home heating system, and messy housekeeping have all been documented not just as abuse or neglect, but as the reason for taking a child into state custody.

Spanking, for example, is frequently the basis for abuse complaints filed by caseworkers, teachers and doctors, even though spanking is not defined as abuse and some states have gone so far as to specifically legislate the right of parents to spank their children.

"These social workers often have different philosophies than the parents of what's in the best interest of the child," said Dacus. "Lifestyle issues come into play. So you have a large portion of children being taken from parents by strangers, put in a stranger's home perhaps with totally different values and social and ethical and sexual lifestyles than their parents," he said.

"We get a lot of everyday childhood injuries. We had a case where a father grabbed his 16-year-old daughter's arm to keep her from getting on a motorcycle," Moore said. "We've seen reports where the abuse is 'arguing in front of children.'"

"It can come down to the inappropriate, individualized judgement of a caseworker," said Cornell University's James Garbarino, who trains social workers and just published a new book, Parents Under Siege. "It is sometimes dangerous that they have this authority."

But those in the trenches say that evaluating cases based on a strict definition of abuse is almost impossible in a multicultural world where views on parenting differ wildly and families can be stricken with tremendously complex and infinite numbers of problems and issues.

"I think ... that this is an enormously complicated area of law and social practice where the question is between acceptable parental behavior and what constitutes endangering the welfare of a child," Spence said. "There is always a place where you make a decision on that boundary."

Massachusetts has very clear laws defining abuse and neglect, yet many cases still are judgment calls.

"In a huge, complex culture that is multicultural, there is no easy place to go to define [abuse]," Spence said. "I think the debate goes back and forth all the time and must go on and continue."

Thin, Gray Line

Dennis Sklenar, a social worker at New York University Medical Center in New York City, has seen just about everything in his 23 years on the job. He still recalls vividly the afternoon 10 years ago when a father wheeled the corpse of his two-year-old daughter he had beaten to death into the hospital lobby in her stroller.

But Sklenar also recalls with equal horror a case in which a family came close to being destroyed because their baby suffered from a rare medical condition that presented itself as classic signs of abuse.

Hospital social workers, emergency room doctors and pediatricians detect abuse by determining if parents' accounts of how the child sustained an injury match the injury, Sklenar said. There are injuries, like spiral fractures and certain head traumas, that cannot be explained away the way some bruises or burns can.

The infant the young couple brought into the hospital one Friday night had fluid collections on the brain, a head trauma that the doctors could only explain as abuse-related. But the parents did not have a suspicious story or send out other warning signals, he said.

"Everyone was crazed that we had to report this," Sklenar recalls. "We kept saying, this family is going to be destroyed," he said.

The case was reported, and social workers went to the family home and strip-searched the couple's 19-month-old other child looking for bruises or other signs of abuse. They found none. On Monday, a neurosurgeon found that the infant suffered from a congenital medical condition that produced the brain fluid.

"At that point, the damage was done. The family was traumatized and accused of abuse," Sklenar said. Dr. Steven Kairys, professor of pediatrics at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick, N.J., and director of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said even doctors and hospital social workers are wary of the child protective system these days.

"There is a fair amount of mistrust between the medical community and CPS," Kairys said. "Some doctors feel the state is too arbitrary with its decisions. They're not done in a way that fits the evidence," he said.

"Child welfare workers are asked by the public to exercise judgments that are more life-and-death judgments than any other public employee other than police officers," Spence said. They are asked to predict the future and to often enter dangerous situations, he said. "Mistakes are made both ways," he said.

In hospitals, a team of doctors and social workers consult with each other to round out an abuse evaluation, and Sklenar cautioned against social workers making abuse evaluations by themselves. But the cases reported from doctors and hospitals are usually clearer-cut cases of physical or sexual abuse or serious neglect, and only 2-3 percent of abuse reports come from doctors, Kairys said. Most are filed by teachers, neighbors and through anonymous tips, and most of these fall into cases of neglect that are much more difficult to determine.

It's these cases where kids are removed from homes for undefined "other abuses" that cause the problem.

Activists say a clear policy that prevents state and city services from taking kids out of their homes for reasons other than physical or sexual abuse or serious neglect would take the gray areas out of judgments while protecting families. In fact, they say, reforms would actually help abused children by reducing social workers' caseloads, clearing the backlogged docket of family courts, and allowing the system to focus on the children and families most in need.

Spence said state agencies are "moving rapidly" to initiate policies that recognize the importance of the biological family, and that it is the state's responsibility to continually improve the system based on experience. But if public opinion is now swaying toward family preservation and parental rights, a decade ago it was swinging hard against those priorities. Spence said state agencies can't tailor their policies to public opinion.

"One of the things agencies struggle with is not to swing back and forth between these extremes," he said. "There is a critical responsibility to keep building and learning upon actual experience in case after case of what constitutes risk," he said.

However, the neat-and-tidy procedures and policies critics are looking for are not a realistic expectation.

"There are no easy rules. Life doesn't come in easily defined packages," he said.