Glossary

Child-Protection Glossary

adoption: Placement of a child with persons other than his natural parents, with full legal parental authority vested in the adoptive parents. Historically a charitable act, secrecy has turned adoption into legalized baby-theft.
advocacy research: Research aimed not at exploring the unknown, but at producing numbers to support a pre-existing dogma.
alienated parent: A parent whose child has been taught to hate him.
Amber ambush: Public alert to take children from parents.
anger management: A course of study often prescribed for parents involved with the child protection system. Social workers think of parental anger at child snatching as a lack of appreciation of their services.
attachment (disorder): Attachment refers to the child's bond with his parents. When children are removed from their parents and placed with substitutes, they often treat their new family as thieves. Psychiatrists treat this normal child reaction to aberrant adults as a disorder. In April 2000 Candace Newmaker was murdered in a form of crackpot therapy designed to cure this "disorder".
baby bounty: The funds appropriated to provide food and shelter to foster children. It includes the overhead to operate the agency, and is often large enough to serve as an incentive to snatch children from their parents. The term can also apply to the funds, originating both from the public treasury and adoptive parents, that go persons inside the adoption industry.
baby farm: Historically a place where care of babies was provided for hire. Unscrupulous baby farmers accepted a lump-sum fee for raising a baby to adulthood, then killed the baby a few days after admission. Baby farms became extinct near the turn of the twentieth century.
best interest of the child: A warm-sounding phrase that justifies atrocities in child protection and divorce. It belongs in the same book with other failed slogans such as separate but equal, arbeit macht frei and workers unite. The child's true best interest is keeping his parents.
birth-mother: In a world in which parents are deemed to be interchangeable, this term is necessary to distinguish the true mother from her substitutes.
bushwhacking: Service of legal process extremely close to the court date, preventing the target from obtaining legal counsel.
caregiver: Anyone taking care of a child. Use of this term suggests that parents are fungible.
caseworker or case worker: Any person child-protectors assign to the job of working with (or against) a family.
casewrecker: A case worker
Celexa™: An anti-depressant
Child catcher: A character in the 1968 movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, whose mission is to find and dispose of all children in the barony of Vulgaria.
children's rights: Ill-informed reformers often advocate children's rights as a remedy to the abuses of child protection. In practice, since young children cannot advocate for themselves, persons speaking for the rights of the child are usually courthouse hacks advocating destruction of the family.
Cinderella effect: The tendency of parents to be more abusive toward children who are not their natural offspring.
close your file: Children's aid never destroys a file. Some parents over thirty have been astonished to find CAS citing family history from when they were toddlers. When a CAS worker suggests she might close a file, it is a gambit to get a little more cooperation from her victim.
clutter: Social work jargon for the kind of case where workers can find nothing abusive in the family, so they search the house to find things out of place.
Concerta™: The same chemical as Ritalin, packaged for prolonged release.
consistent with: An expert witness can use this phrase to suggest to a jury events for which there is no evidence.
constructive serial sterilization: A doctrine that once a mother has lost a child to protectors, later children can be snatched in the delivery room. (from Barbara Bryan)
CPS: Child Protective Services, generic term for the child protection industry throughout the United States. Sometimes spelled CP$.
crown ward: Canadian term for a child legally severed from his parents.
desaparecidos: A term for the victims in Argentina's dirty war, in which persons disappeared, but police would not give family members any information about their fate.
detained child: What the social workers call a foster child, but without the beneficent tone.
disservices: Client's name for what child protectors think of as services.
eligibility spectrum: (Ontario term). Since the interventions that destroy a family are called "services", the criteria for determining which families get the intervention are called eligibility. In straight talk, the eligibility spectrum determines who loses his kids.
enmeshment: A condition in which two family members are so closely joined that they cannot function independently. When the persons are parent and child, for example a homeschooling family, it is a psychological justification for removing a child where neglect cannot be asserted. The term was popularized by Salvador Minuchin
err on the side of the child: A slogan justifying removal of children from their parents in dubious cases. Given that foster care is many times more dangerous than parental care, it is actually erring on the side of danger.
ex-parent: A parent completely removed from the life of his child. Also ex-father, ex-mother.
family death penalty: Crown-wardship, or termination of parental rights.
FLAW: Family law.
fostercarceration: foster care + incarceration, by Susan Jackson.
foster care: An arrangement for care of a child in which legal authority vests in a bureaucrat who may see the child for one hour a month or less, while the day-to-day care is provided by a paid contractor with no legal authority over the child.
foster parent: The contractor mentioned in the definition of foster care. Candidly called "foster contractor".
gender: When used as a euphemism for sex, it suggests that sex roles are arbitrarily assigned rather than biologically determined.
harvested mother: A mother whose children have been taken for adoption. (originated by Erika Klein).
he or she: This now-common pronoun serves to remind readers that there is something wrong with masculinity by itself. We do not concur, and avoid the compound pronoun.
legal orphan: A child freed for adoption by severing all legal ties with his parents. Also paper orphan, and in Canada, crown ward. In many cases, the parents are still willing and able to care for the child.
lithium: In pharmacology, a mood-stabilizer qv.
mandated reporter: A person required by law to report suspected child-abuse to child protection agencies. This now includes just about every professional who comes in contact with children in his work, such as teachers, doctors, day-care workers and policemen. Also known as snitch.
mercenary parent: What the social services industry calls a foster parent.
mood stabilizer: Drug companies may not make unsubstantiated therapeutic claims for off-label uses of drugs. The term mood-stabilizer has no official definition, so any drug can be promoted for this use.
multidisciplinary approach: A form of cooperation in which members of different trades generate business for each other.
natural parent: See: birth mother.
noble cause corruption: A state of mind in which a person commits otherwise illegal or immoral acts for a worthy purpose. It explains the actions of workers and experts in actions to separate children from their parents, break up marriages and sometimes jail people on false allegations. Similar to the aphorism "the ends justify the means".
olanzapine (generic): An anti-psychotic.
parental alienation syndrome (PAS): A pattern of behavior in which a child is taught to dislike or fear a natural parent. The term was coined by Dr Richard Gardner to describe divorced parents, but the same syndrome can occur in child protection cases.
paper orphan: see legal orphan
parenting: Prior to the era of political correctness, parent was not used as a verb, or if used at all, referred to the reproductive process of becoming a parent. It now refers to the acts of caring for a child. Routine use of this verb suggests that a substitute parent is as good as the real thing.
parenting capacity assessment: In Ontario, an evaluation of a family by a professional selected by the Children's Aid Society. In all but the rarest cases, the parents fail.
parenting classes: A form of treatment often prescribed for a family by case workers. As well as running down the clock, bad lessons serve the purposes of child protectors, since when the child fails to improve, they can further blame the parents.
psych whore: Colloquialism among legal professionals to describe psychiatrists who diagnose children with disorders in order to increase funding of child protection agencies.
public pretender: Play on the words "public defender", referring to their habit of offering no meaningful defense.
public serpent: Someone who might describe himself as public servant. Term attributed to Marilyn Treveno.
Risperdal™: An anti-psychotic.
Ritalin™: A stimulant administered for its calming effect.
services: The social services industry's name for their actions, even when destructive of families.
shaken baby syndrome: A medical theory that a baby can be killed by shaking that causes no perceptible damage to the skeletal system. Purportedly, subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhage are the indicators of shaken baby. The theory is now scientifically discredited, but many persons falsely accused are still suffering consequences.
shotgun divorce: A divorce imposed against the will of both partners.
snitch: See mandated reporter.
social worker: A person with credentials in social work. But the term is often used as a synonym for caseworker
social worker smirk: Anyone who has seen it knows what it is.
Sophie's Choice: A novel by William Styron and movie starring Meryl Streep. The title character enters a Nazi concentration camp and has seconds to decide whether to give up her daughter or her son.
SS: Schutzstaffel, the parent organization of the Gestapo, which carried out the holocaust; also social services.
support: In normal use, assistance, but in social worker jargon, orders delivered under threat.
termination of parental rights: The severing of legal ties between parent and child. It is known as the family death penalty. The Canadian term is crown-wardship.
therapy: In proper use, the treatment of an infirmity, but in social services usage, often a form involuntary and destructive intervention in a family. Clients define therapist by adding a space inside the word.
think dirty: Phrase used in the Ontario Coroner's office during the heyday of pathologist Dr Charles Smith, expressing their attitude in cases of child deaths. Many innocent parents of dead children were falsely accused of homicide, and many more lost their children because of the think dirty accusations.
Trileptal™: A mood-stabilizer qv.
Village People: Unwanted professionals entering the life of a child. Derived from the name of a musical group formed in the late 1970's combined with the title of Hillary Clinton's child-care book It takes a Village.
Walther (verb): Walthered describes the railroading or harming of families with small children with no justifiable cause, except to cover up one’s own incompetency. Originated by blogger kbp, based on the actions of Barbara Walther, the county judge in the Yearning For Zion case in Texas.
wraparound services: A program in which a large number of professionals collaborate on the treatment of one child, brought under control of the therapeutic system by the courts.
wolf fairy: Name for social worker by youngest son of caller to the Alex Jones show.