US Health and Human Services yearly statistical reports on child
abuse. The reports are subject to bias and falsification, but
are incontestable when confronting the child protection
bureaucracy.
(May 2008) Australian researcher Greg Tooley checked death
reports for young children and confirmed the Cinderella effect.
Children with no natural parents (foster parents) are 6 or 37
times more likely to die than children with two natural
parents.
Hearings by the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family
Support of the Ways and Means Committee of the US House of
Representatives held hearings, May 8, 2008. The linked page is
the index of the testimony and submissions. There was just one
witness not entirely within the protection/pharmacological
system.
(April 2008) An anonymous tipster pointed out this copy of the
MMPI, used by psychiatrists to evaluate parents for fitness. We
believe it is authentic. Rate yourself the way the
professionals do.
(April 2008) State Secrecy and Child Deaths in the U.S. A joint
report of the Children's Advocacy Institute and First Star on
disclosure, or lack of it, following child fatalities from abuse
and neglect. It rates every state by quality of disclosure.
The current undue emphasis on confidentiality only masks
problems inherent in child protection systems. Public
exposure is a necessary step toward fixing these problems.
Each year, millions of taxpayer dollars go to support child
protective services investigations. Accordingly, the public
has a right to know if the laws for the protection of children
are being followed and its tax dollars well-spent. Child
abuse deaths and near deaths reflect the system's worst
failures. Until state laws require the release of accurate
and unfiltered information, we cannot identify the fault lines
in the system, and cannot begin to fix them.
(2007) Multiple Vaccinations And the Shaken Baby Syndrome by F.
Edward Yazbak, MD. Vaccines can produce reactions easily
mistaken for shaken baby syndrome.
(2007) Pediatric bipolar disorder: An object of study in
the creation of an illness, by David Healy and Joanna Le
Noury. The psychiatric industry extends a disease formerly
found only in adults to children. Marketing is not only for
treatments, but for the disease itself. A book for children,
including a coloring book, promotes diagnosis of bipolarity. An
active fetus kicking the mother's insides is now the basis for a
diagnosis requiring life-long medication. The drug companies
are forbidden to make claims that have not been substantiated by
studies, so the promotion is carried out by nominally
independent third parties. Drugs that cannot be promoted as
treatments for bipolar disorder are pushed as "mood
stabilizers". The substantial side-effects, such as shortening
life by twenty years, are ignored.
(March 2007) Researcher Joseph J Doyle Jr found an ingenious way
to measure whether foster care helps or harms the child,
separating out the effects of pre-placement harm and caseworker
bias. He compared outcomes of Illinois children handled by
caseworkers with a high propensity toward placement to those
with a low propensity. The marginal cases were removed from the
home by the former group, left in the home by the latter. By
comparing outcomes for the children several years later, he
demonstrated that leaving the child in the home produced better
results.
(January 2007, pdf) Kelly Colleen McDonald,
Child Abuse: Approach and Management,
published by the American Family
Physician. This article for doctors
advises them on how to spot and report cases of
child abuse. It is notable for its implicit
presumption (contrary to evidence) that children
taken into protective care will get better
treatment than from their parents, and for its
candid admission (routinely denied in political
statements by child protectors) that poverty is
a risk factor for child abuse.
(Jan 2007, MS-Word) A scandal in Kentucky
culminated in this report detailing the abuses
endemic in child protection agencies. While it
purports to be about Kentucky, the abuses are
similar throughout the US and Canada. Here is a
link to our local
copy.
(July 2006) Elizabeth Marsh wrote a letter to
the British Medical Journal titled The
General Public needs legal protection too,
suggesting that child abuse is inevitable, only
excessive abuse needs response.
Hearings by the Subcommittee on Income Security
and Family Support of the Ways and Means
Committee of the US House of Representatives
held hearings, May 23, 2006. The linked page is
the index of the testimony and submissions. The
testimony and letters linked below are only the
ones from witnesses outside the child protection
bureaucracy:
(May 2006, pdf) ACFC Family Violence report that
is an expanded version of the article below.
The portion on child protection runs from pages
41 to 55.
(February 2006) Study by the C D Howe Institute
What Can We Learn from Quebec's Universal
Childcare Program? It shows that universal
childcare for preschoolers decreases the
wellbeing of both children and parents.
(February 2006) Three University of Minnesota
researchers show that abused children fare
better staying with their abusive parents than
in foster care. Only the abstract is available
online.
(Winter 2005) For persons who have experienced
foster care this is an unnecessary study. Three
researchers from the University of Minnesota
find that foster care harms children. The full
article came from a reader with a
subscription.
Legal Aid made submissions to the legislature on
then-pending bill 210 on December 5, 2005.
While mostly bureaucratic speak, it contained a
short factual table:
Approximately 70 percent of children served
in their own homes by children's aid
societies live at or below the poverty
line;
60 percent of children's aid society
families are led by single parents (i.e.
young mothers) compared to a national
average of 17 percent;
40 percent of children's aid society service
recipients rely on social assistance;
One in sixteen live in a shelter or are
homeless;
50 percent of the families are relatively
new to Canada from a cultural or racial
minority; and
More Aboriginal children are admitted to
care due to attendant issues of extreme
poverty, domestic violence, and high suicide
rates that are two to five times the
national average.
October 2005. Research by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of
McMaster University shows that stepparents are ten to a hundred
times more likely to abuse a child than a natural parent. It is
called the Cinderella effect.
Hearings by the Subcommittee on Human Resources
of the Ways and Means Committee of the US House
of Representatives held hearings, July 9, 2005.
The linked page is the index of the testimony
and submissions. At this kind of hearing, large
numbers of persons earning a living from the
family destruction industry give testimony
favoring the appropriation, suggesting only
band-aid improvements. Below are the
submissions from persons outside the industry:
On July 13 2004 the Subcommittee on Human
Resources of the Ways and Means Committee of the
US House of Representatives held hearings. The
linked page is the index of the testimony and
submissions. Among the interesting submissions:
Forgotten Children, April 2004 (pdf). Texas Comptroller Carole
Keeton Strayhorn produced a report detailing the appaling
condition of Texas foster children. We have a partial summary of the pictures.
Thesis by Courtney Anne Barclay (2003, pdf) giving in chapter 6
a list of the US states and requirements for confidentiality and
disclosure of child protection records. Disclosure is mostly
restricted to other parts of the bureaucracy, disclosure even to
the parties involved in restricted in many states. Only two
states have any provision for disclosure to
journalists.
PBS has posted an extract from the book
Shattered Bonds, The Color of Child
Welfare (2002) by Dorothy Roberts. It
discusses changes in child welfare policy,
leading the the current emphasis on adoption
ahead of family preservation.
The last two pdf files can be downloaded by
right-clicking on the link, but cannot be loaded
into a browser, even on the original website.
This study by the Evan B Donaldson Adoption
Institute and Harvard University shows that most
prospective adoptive parents are turned off by
the bureaucracy, and do not adopt. It mimics
our experience in Dufferin, where upper-crust
families have been given the cold shoulder by
Children's Aid.
Child protectors get their funding by holding
children in their care, then asking legislators
to provide funding for them. Moves to genuinely
promote adoption would end their funding, and
therefore will not occur, no matter how many
scholarly studies find ways it could be made to
work.
pdf file of Arizona State Child Fatality Review Team, 2004.
Arizona reviewed almost all child deaths for 2003, suggesting
policy changes to decrease deaths. Their key recommendations
were: increase seat belt use, restrict teen driving, fence
swimming pools, parents should set a good example in using
seat belts, and parents should supervise children around water.
They did not include any of the usual child-protection bugaboos
such as messy home, spanking or parents arguing in front of the
kids. No similar analysis is available for Ontario since child
deaths normally remain secret.
In this article professor Stephen Baskerville shows
that there is more at stake in family law than
unhappy parents. The very structure of our way of
life is under attack.
This May 2001 report from the Edmund S Muskie
School of Public Service supports the idea of
arranging for adoption before your child has
legally been separated from the family. They
call it "Concurrent Planning".
Interview in Reason magazine with a physician
critical of the psychiatric profession. Mr
Szasz originated the term "therapeutic state"
for the social control exerted by labeling
forms of behavior as disorders requiring
compulsory treatment. The article includes a
link to his own interesting home page.
A study by Florida researchers compared the
progress of babies born to cocaine addicted
mothers raised in foster care or parental care.
Even for these disadvantaged babies, parental care
produced better results. The original article is
not on the web, the link is to a summary by a
journalist. Richard Wexler cites the study as:
Kathleen Wobie, Marylou Behnke et. al., To Have
and To Hold: A Descriptive Study of Custody
Status Following Prenatal Exposure to Cocaine,
paper presented at joint annual meeting of the
American Pediatric Society and the Society for
Pediatric Research, May 3, 1998.
From the Nordic Committee for Human Rights, a
lecture by lawyer Siv Westerberg on child care
in Sweden. He develops the idea that the
twentieth century police state is being
superseded by the therapeutic state, which he
dubs the socio-medical totalitarian state.
Instead of controlling the people with the
army and police, the state now recruits the
social and medical services as its soldiers.
The lecture applies to Ontario just as well as
Sweden.
This article is written by a law student
who is a former caseworker for the
Administration for Children's Services (ACS)
of New York City.
It features experiences from his career in
child removal, and a recitation of the
uselessness of the foster care system, every
assertion backed up with a footnote.
Among those assertions:
A child is more than twice as likely to die
of abuse in foster care than in the general
population. The rate of sexual abuse in foster
homes has been shown to be two to four times
higher than in the general population, while
physical abuse is three times higher. In group
homes, the rate of physical abuse is ten times
higher than in the general population, while the
rate of sexual abuse is twenty-eight times
higher. The high rate of abuse in group homes
is due to the frequency of abuse between
children. The Los Angeles Times, relying on a
1997 grand jury report, reported that "many of
the nearly 5,000 foster children housed in Los
Angeles County group homes are physically abused
and drugged excessively while being forced to
live without proper food, clothing, education
and counseling." Reports of long-term residents
in New York City's group homes subjecting
newcomers to rape, robbery, and assault are
common. Also common are reports that girls in
New York City's group homes are being pimped out
by local gang members.
Besides being endangered while in the state's
custody, many, if not most, of the children in
foster care were unnecessarily removed from
their homes.
Whether or not the child is removed, the
family becomes a funding source for a variety of
professionals and agencies. It is difficult to
"indicate" a report, or find that there is some
credible evidence to believe that maltreatment
has occurred, without providing services to the
family and the child. After a child has been
removed, the parents are assigned services that
they must complete if they want to be reunited
with their children. In 2001, the federal
government spent $295 million on such services.
The caseworker picks from a menu of "cookie
cutter" services which may or may not have any
relevance to the family's problems. Services
include drug testing, parenting classes,
counseling, homemaking, or even the provision of
a child's bed. Although these services have
been shown to be ineffective, "[t]he issue is no
longer whether the child may be safely returned
to the home, but whether the mother has attended
every parenting class, made every urine drop,
[and] participated in every therapy session."
Thus, "[t]he agency's service plan usually has
little to do with services for the family. It
is typically a list of requirements parents must
fulfill in order to keep their children or get
them back."
The theme of the article compares the treatment
of foster children and their natural parents to
slaves. Aside from coerced labor, their condition
is identical. This view likely has more use as a
moral paradigm than as a legal theory that will
put an end to wholesale child removal.
