December 2006. A San Francisco Chronicle
editorial shows that child protectors conceal
deaths of their wards, even when there is a
state law requiring full disclosure.
Los Angeles reporter Troy Anderson has written a
number of articles on foster care in California.
The link is to a collection of his articles by
AFRA, some annotated.
Professor Stephen Baskerville in two video
interviews, the first in 2002 primarily on
divorce, the second in 2005 to a fathers
conference in Detroit on the impact of family
law. These are long files suitable only for
high-speed internet connections.
An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle shows the futility
of a 2004 law requiring disclosure of the records of children
dying in foster care. The law has little effect in the face of
determined foot-dragging by social services.
This 1998 article describes the relationship between Children's
Aid and the press, including large amounts of concealment by
child protectors, and successful efforts to plant suggested
"reforms" in newspaper articles.
Mad Nazi Dream of Racial Purity Revealed by Melissa
Eddy (May 2007). An article about two survivors of the Nazi
Lebensborn program to breed the master race.
(February 2007) Lawyer David Heleniak describes the methods
prosecutors use to end marriages in domestic violence cases. He
does not deal with the other kind of shotgun divorce, initiated
by the child protection system.
Akka Gordon was a caseworker for New York ACS for a year in
1998-99. She writes of her experiences. Workers are pressed to
classify every child's home as dangerous. The main condition
for hiring is that the applicant is alive. A caseworker gets
fired for telling a judge the truth.
This is Child Protection? Massachusetts family lawyer
Gregory Hession writes in the July 23, 2007 issue of the New
American. Following that is the cover story, Families
Separated by the State. Yet another cover story, September
17, 2007, Behavior Worth Medicating, deals with forced
drugging of children under pretext of treatment for psychiatric
disorders.
(2008) The Denver Post reports that outside agencies hired to
provide an independent review of problems with child protection
are not at all independent.
Big Business In Babies: Adoption, The Child Commodities
Market by Mirah Riben (April 2007). A thoughtful and
well-researched article on the failings of today's adoption
system.
Ritalin's reign and Doctor's orders. These
unsigned sidebars from the Globe and Mail (June 2007) give many
facts about psychotropic drug use by children in
Canada.
CBC's The Fifth Estate does a profile of Quebec Judge Andree
Ruffo in March 2006. She incurred the wrath of the social
services bureaucracy by failing to give them everything they
demanded.
Colorado-based Westword magazine profiles family advocate
Suzanne Shell. It includes cases of excessive harshness to
families as a means of discrediting their advocates.
The New Yorker Magazine of August 9, 2005 has an article "The
Bad Mom" debunking Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP or MSP).
It includes a narrative of the case of the Ottawa Ontario
deSousa family.
An article by James Wallace of Osprey Media displays the kind of
investigative journalism normally only seen in the American
press. Ontario's government agencies at all levels routinely
deny requests for information from the public, even routine
requests. Freedom of information requests are stymied with
legal exceptions.
Unusual Suspects by Pamela Weintraub in Psychology
Today (October 2007) A profile of a mother falsely accused of
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, deliberately harming a member of
her own family.
In this article in the New Statesman published in January 2000,
Bob Woffinden shows how secrecy laws ostensibly protecting
children really facilitate the destruction of the lives of
children and their families.
Sue Reid follows twenty years of the life of Lawrence Alexander
seized from his parents as a baby on a junk science theory of
abuse and subject to medical experiments that may be responsible
for turning him into a permanent invalid.
Cassandra Jardine describes what life is like in
foster care. Note the policy of separating a
child from foster parents once they become
attached to the child.
Christie Blatchford's in-depth report on the
death of Jeffrey Baldwin, placed in the home of
his incompetent grandparents by the Catholic
Children's Aid Society of Toronto. The page
includes some articles on the sentencing of the
foster parents, and a commentary.
Lisa Bierly had her children stolen in Utah. A
child with medical needs was neglected in care,
the mother was not allowed to give evidence to
the court, the family lawyer did not bring out
important points in defense, the lawyer for
social services vilified the family. A
functionary of the child protection system tried
to use it as a source of a child for her own
adoption. And even after acknowledging that the
removal was unjustified, the state would not
give the kids back. The children identified by
the pseudonyms Michael and Katie appear in other sources
as Jordan and Leigh. You can reach Lisa
Bierly at lsbierly @ yahoo.com (but remove the
spaces around the at sign).
Writer Mac Koch-Lebel details the reduction of the Chalupowski
family from millions of dollars in accumulated net worth to
nothing through a conspiracy of lawyers and judges.
A young woman, Katrina Clark, born of an
anonymous sperm donation, draws attention to the
fact that reproductive technologies are not just
about satisfying the needs of parents.
In 1988 a junk-science anal dialation test
justified removal of hundreds of children from
their parents for sexual abuse. In case the
link expires, do a search on "Cleveland
scandal".
A mother gives away a baby without informing the father of her
pregnancy. When he finds out, he petitions for custody, and a
DNA test confirms his paternity. The case becomes infamous when
the mother's new car raises suspicion of illegal payments, and
the family with custody requests child support payments from the
father. Father Rick
Fredrickson has his own website
(2008) A Sudbury mother, Lianne Gagnon, is exonerated by police
in the death of her baby. A second more harsh investigation two
years later also exonerates her. Nevertheless, her second child
is taken by CAS based on the opinion of pathologist Dr Charles
Smith, who later admitted his incompetence.
(2008) Alloma Gilbert writes of her experiences as a foster
child. While not all foster parents are as bad as Eunice Spry,
multiple foster placements make it likely that a foster child
will encounter at least one foster mom from hell.
Annette M Hall has assembled a multi-media
account of the case of Sharen and Mike Gravelle,
accused of abusing eleven adoptive children by
keeping them in cages. This is a dumping-ground
case. Where normal people have to wait years to
adopt one child, social services unloads large
numbers of difficult children on one adoptive
family. If it does not come to light, they are
rid of their problems, but if it does, the
adoptive parents make credible scapegoats.
Watch the video and decide whether the Gravelles
were monsters.
Douglas Montero of the New York Post breaks the
story of foster children used as guinea pigs in
drug tests. A later article by Kristal Brent
Zook in Essence magazine recaps the story. Eugene Weixel has a blog dedicated to this
scandal.
An autism advocacy group has collected newspaper
articles on the death of Stephanie Jobin at the
hands of child protectors. They also include
the inquest
recommendations.
A girl is maced and removed from her mother.
The US~Observer does not reach the journalistic
standards of a daily newspaper, but the
mainstream press has totally ignored this story.
Our own news page also has two articles, the
first on August 10,
2005, the second on August
14.
(Feburary 2007). In this case from Texas the
press gets away from the freak cases, and deals
with the most typical child protection case, the
single mom. CPS intervenes in a family with
problems and makes those problems even worse.
Child protectors offer the mother a "Sophie's
Choice": You can have some of your kids as long
as we get the rest. When a girl runs away and
the family really need help, they get the cold
shoulder. A digression shows how all problems,
even intentional failures by child protectors,
result in more money for the child protection
system.
Tolerance allows pedophiles, masquerading as the
now-protected homosexual, to infiltrate child
protection agencies and foster homes, even
classifying young boys as gay, in order to pass
them off to their friends for sodomy.
In January 2001 5-year-old Logan Marr died at
the hands of employees of the Maine Department
of Human Services. These reports by Terrilyn
Simpson, as long as a short novel, are in pdf.
The first deals with the seizure and murder of
Logan, the second, written four years later,
describes the indifference of elected
politicians to parents. She mentions this
photograph of Governor Angus
King brandishing duct tape. Here is another
program by PBS.
Dorothy Rabinowitz writes in the Wall Street Journal on the
story of Father Gordon MacRae, a Catholic priest serving time
for sexually abusing clients. According to the article, the
acts of abuse never occurred, but were part of a successful
design to raid the Catholic Church for damages.
Dorothy Rabinowitz was the first journalist to question the
truth of allegations of ritual satanic abuse in the 1980's,
writing articles in the same paper exposing the cases of Kelly
Michaels in New Jersey and the Amirault family in Massachusetts.
Perhaps a similar series of articles could do in the child
protection juggernaut.
Douglas Moore, a homicidal pedophile, was an assistant to a
foster family in Belfountain Ontario. This two-part series from
the Toronto Star describes his life. This is the kind of care
your child could get from children's aid.
(November 2007). A mother is falsely accused of Munchausen
Syndrome by Proxy and her only daughter goes into foster care.
Reported by the (mainstream) Boston Globe.
A British social worker avoids jail after found guilty of
perjury. The judge found that no other social worker had been
caught lying. This image may take some time to load.
A baby girl is needlessly removed from her
parents. Under the tab "Families vs Government"
there are several more child protection stories,
including the Stratton case.
On July 8, 2004 police went to the home of
Lester Eugene Siler in Tennessee. They asked
his wife to leave with his child so that they
could speak to him alone. Before leaving, his
wife turned on a tape recorder, creating the
linked recording (needs Windows Media Player).
It includes threats, probably now routine in
police work, to harm the suspect's wife and
child. This is a very disturbing recording, not
for the squeamish.
[06:12] Officer Franklin: No... You
listen to me. You listen to me. Let me tell
you what's gonna happen. If you don't sign,
I'm gonna go right back there where your
wife's at, and I'm gonna put her ass in jail.
I'm calling the Department of Human Services
and I'm gonna take your fucking kids from you
today.
and later:
[25:10] Officer Webber: Eugene, sign it
buddy, or we're gonna go down and git your
wife. You want us to do that?
When David and Desiree Smolin discovered the teenaged girls they
adopted were stolen from their mother, they took an unusual
course of action. They spent years finding the mother,
eventually reuniting the girls with her. The story from ABC
suggests adoptions of stolen children are rare, but in the US,
Canada and the UK it appears most adoptions through child
protection agencies fit this pattern.
Dr Daryl Steiner of Cleveland diagnoses cases of subdural
hematoma as shaken baby syndrome, even among newborns who got
the injury during natural childbirth.
A four-year start-finish tale of family destruction. In cases
that end in adoption, real names can be used, since the children
are no longer known by those names.
The New American, a publication of the John
Birch Society, describes the Wenatchee witch
hunt. It contains a brief portrait of Robert
Perez, shattering the myth that child-protectors
are dedicated public servants motivated only to
protect children.
A social worker's career is destroyed in this
story of a wolf devoured by other wolves. The
article details the steps by which an unfounded
accusation results in total destruction for the
victim, the same process by which the wolves
normally devour sheep.
