Til Death... (Oh Captain, My Captain)

I was watching an episode of Elementary the other day, and Sherlock said something to the effect of "when you frame someone, the best result is for the framed person to end up dead, that way they can never prove their innocence".

This is the same goal for a parent who sets out to deliberately alienate a child (children) from the other parent. If the alienated parent ends up dead, the alienator wins. There is no way for that parent to prove their innocence and love for the child(ren).

After all, when an alienator sets out on their path of destruction, they don't just target the parent, the entire circle of family and friends gets drawn in to the abuse. Either others become supporters, or they also become secondary targets of alienation.

For the longest time, the saying "it takes a village to raise a child" was legitimately recognized as a valid concept. It takes both parents (whether together or apart) and both sides of the family, as well as the extended network of friends on both sides to truly help a child grow into a productive member of society. This is how our society once grew and prospered, and it was revisited again as recently as this past decade in educational circles.

Yet this whole idea is totally contrary to the interests of a sociopathic, psychopathic, or narcissistic parent. A parent who alienates the other parent and/or all family members and friends is not interested in raising a healthy child. They are interested in being the center of the universe, and the focus of their child's attention.

Saddest of all is when the alienated parent dies.

I witnessed just such an episode. In this case, the parent was custodial and able to minimize the negativity and attacks by the other parent simply because it could only occur during visitation.

However, once this parent died, the alienator was given custody and immediately kicked into overdrive - making up for years of lost time.

The children were completely isolated from the network of family and friends that they had once enjoyed. Any requests for contact or visits was rebuffed or given conditionally. (The alienator was placing financial demands on others - employment or outright requests for money) as the terms for "possibly" seeing the children.)

It is time to take a stand - to promote awareness of this form of psychological and emotional abuse directed at children and parents. It is time for the "family" courts to recognize that it is a real phenomenon and to enact appropriate evaluative techniques to minimize or prevent its occurrence.

It is time to stand up, speak out, and expose the flaws in our system!

A Judge Speaks

Judge Alex Kozinski has detailed 12 reasons why the criminal justice system is "worrying". (Click here for the full text of the article)

We encountered quite a few of these issues first hand during the Jon Massey Case.

As there was absolutely NO evidence in our case, it being completely a "he said/she said" situation, the first four situations didn't really apply.

However issue number 5 - the topic of human memory being reliable, was a central issue in the case. (See the blog entries (Her Own Words!, Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News, and ADAs (Apparently Dumb Attorneys) for more details on what occurred in our case.)

This finding has troubling implications for criminal trials where witnesses are questioned long and hard by police and prosecutors before the defense gets to do so — if ever. There is thus plenty of opportunity to shape and augment a witness’s memory to bring it into line with the prosecutor’s theory of what happened. Yet with rare exceptions, courts do not permit expert testimony on human memory.

We had a judge and a District Attorney ignoring all the interview evidence that had taken place, and those parties actually PREVENTED the jury from hearing about this testimony in both the criminal trial, and the Family Court trial. It is fairly apparent that the falsity of the allegations was well-known, yet the judges and prosecutors were determined to get a "guilty" verdict at all costs.

Point number 7 - that juries follow instructions, was also an issue in our case. Twelve jurors reported out that the ONLY reason they believed a 16 year old girl (who was known to be sexually active and who had received fairly comprehensive health and human body instruction in school) was because she could describe the difference between a circumcised and uncircumcised penis. (See the blog entry Beyond a Reasonable Doubt for details.) There should have been no doubt that she could have gotten that information elsewhere, and there should have been no conviction.

Point 8 - "Prosecutors play fair" also came into play. I can tell you that prosecutors do NOT play fair.

We had witness tampering and intimidation occurring throughout the duration of the case. (Blog entries: Witness Tampering? and Coincidence?) This in addition to blatantly ignoring all testimony that had occurred at the suppression hearing from the county's own expert witnesses.

The prosecutor additionally used an "expert" witness to testify regarding a widely discredited theory, CSAAS. (Blog entry: Junk Science)

Finally, there was the active suppression of evidence and testimony by wrongfully applying a statute. (Blog entry: Wolf Cry!)

The police are NOT objective (point 10). (Blog entries: Pick and Choose! and This Isn't CSI Folks!) We had police officers intimidating witnesses and interfering with actual criminal matters - if the 21 year old boyfriend were charged, that would discredit the case against Jon Massey.

Judge Kozinski also spoke out about the fallibility of the Grand Jury system - which we also experienced: A Grand Jury Ain't So Grand!

Then end result is that Ruby not only got what she wanted (What a Girl Wants!) but also taught her friends how to manipulate the system to their own ends (Ruby Slippers).

It is time to stand up, speak out, and reform a system that is broken and corrupt beyond retrieval.

Ruby Slippers

There's the saying, "you can't know about someone else until you have walked a mile in their shoes".

Unfortunately, in this day and age of lives plastered all over social media, our younger generations are growing up believing that "what you see is what you get" aka WYSIWYG.

Almost three years ago, Ruby made false allegations against her de facto stepfather in order to keep her boyfriend at the time from being arrested (she was 14 and he was 21).

Ruby was also involved in drugs at multiple levels (stealing prescription drugs from family members, using drugs, and selling drugs to others) and that was on the verge of being discovered.

Read more about the outcome of that situation at www.jeffersoncountyny.com as well as in the earlier blog entries here.

Now Ruby was a highly intelligent young lady, and she had a friend with whom she maintained contact for a number of years, let's call her Sapphire.

Sapphire had also gotten caught up with the same crowd that was involved in drug and sexual behavior, and Ruby and Sapphire had renewed their contact, once Ruby was allowed access to social media.

By some mysterious coincidence - the drugs and other inappropriate behaviors (including potential theft or other threatening behaviors towards family members) have been occurring with Sapphire also.

And by another odd and "totally coincidental" event, Sapphire has now made false allegations against one of her family members who tried to stop her.

So Ruby has handed down her shoes - because she learned that she really didn't have to walk that mile at all.

Once the false allegations were out of her mouth - CPS and the District Attorney, as well as a corrupt court system, picked her up and carried her to the winner's circle.

And now Sapphire will get the same free ride, because she has learned that if you don't get what you want, or you are on the verge of getting in serious trouble, make false allegations and it all goes away.

It is time to stand up, speak out, and expose a corrupt system!

Anti-Social Workers

"Social workers" hired by the "Family Services System" (CPS, DSS, Family Court) often have little or no education relevant to their job, and are often given "job training" and "workshops" by their employers which is specifically targeted at advancing the aims of these agencies. (Read the blog entries It's All About the Money!, It's All About MORE Money!, It's All About OUR Money! for more details.)

The Chen family found out just how inept and untrained these social workers can be when they contacted Family Services for assistance with their autistic son. (Click here for a link to the article.)

Rather than receiving the help that an agency named "Home Supportive Services" should be providing to parents tasked with round-the-clock care for a high needs child, the social worker took it upon herself to manufacture a CPS case against the Chens.

It took over a year and action by a Grand Jury to supposedly clear up the issue, although at this point the county isn't even acknowledging the problem.

All of the recent publicized incidents involving law enforcement (Baltimore, Ferguson, NYC) have raised doubt in the public and reluctance to turn to the police for assistance. But incidents like that encountered by the Chens (as well as many other people) have caused parents and families to actively turn away from and avoid those agencies that supposedly are tasked and funded to support and assist them.

It is time to stand up, speak out, and expose the fraud that is DSS/CPS/the Family Court System.

NYC #1

So apparently NYC rates as the "worst" foster care system in the United States.

But what goes beyond that is the defense of the system by a "Legal Aid" attorney who should be working to correct the problems.

Tami Steckler, head of the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice, blasted the suit as “short-sighted” and warned that it could “stall the progress being made by those of us actually working with these families and children.”

“As the organization that represents almost all the children in New York City foster care, we have been working very closely with the current Commissioner to improve outcomes,” Steckler said in a prepared statement.

“This lawsuit is being brought by attorneys who have never represented clients in New York City’s foster care system, yet purport to know how to fix it, at a time when foster care numbers are at an all-time low and collaboration is at an all-time high.”

Collaboration at an "all-time high"? Sounds like the only collaboration that is doing well would be the collaboration between Steckler and the current Commissioner.

It would be interesting to trace the funding stream for the Legal Aid Society Juvenile Rights Practice - anyone care to hazard whether the money comes from the same locations that fund DSS and the foster care system?

So, let's take a look at their website: Legal Aid Society Juvenile Rights Practice - information from their own site reveals:

The Division was established concurrently with New York State's Family Court in 1962

and

The Juvenile Services Unit, the social work component, was formed as a result of the pioneering work of Juvenile Rights in teaming social workers with lawyers in order to adequately address the educational, social, and psychological issues that arise in Family Court proceedings.

Care to wonder where the "social workers" are found? I would be willing to bet that they are graciously supplied by DSS - in other words, DSS helps to keep control over the attorneys who should be only accountable to their child clients.

There has already been repeated documentation that DSS not only doesn't work to reunite families, but actively works to estrange family members from  each other, terminate parental rights as rapidly as possible, and farm children out for adoption.

It is time to stand up, speak out, and expose CPS for the outdated, abusive system that it is.

Legalized Abuse

From the US to Canada, Great Britain to Australia, children removed from their parents and placed in foster care, group homes, detention centers, or other locations are being subject to abuse.

But worse than that, the abuse is being covered up or ignored by the very system that was designed to prevent it from occurring.

Why? Because abuse of children while in the care of CPS/DSS/DFCS is the clearest demonstration that the system is irretrievably broken and needs to be dismantled and replaced with something that truly works to the benefit of children and families.

One of the most recent examples of how convoluted the system has become is the Border Force Protection Act in Australia. Despite the law regarding mandatory reporting of child abuse, the mandated reporters will now face prosecution if they report the same abuse occurring against children within a detention center.

Daily more reports are made of children being sexually and physically abused while in foster care - and this doesn't even begin to encompass the psychological and emotional abuse inflicted by social workers and foster parents who engage in estrangement techniques to work towards termination of parental rights and subsequent adoptions.

• http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130266
• http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-foster-care-in-crisis-experts-say-1.1250543
• http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/crime/2015/04/02/foster-care-child-abuse-case-headed-to-grand-jury/70864558/
• http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-28/hundreds-of-children-in-foster-care-abused-last-year-report-find/6052006
• http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Foster-child-sexually-abused-on-state-s-watch-6137702.php
• http://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/apr/20/care-system-failures
• http://www.kptv.com/story/27635026/dhs-to-pay-out-millions-after-two-young-children-say-they-were-abused-by-their-foster-parent
• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/major-study-reveals-true-scale-of-abuse-of-children-living-in-care-9587244.html

The links above are just a small sample of what is easily found from mainstream media when you Google "foster care abuse".

The numbers statistically would be much higher if all the actual cases of abuse in foster care were reported. However a variety of issues prevent reports from being filed:

• the children are too young to report the abuse;
• the people attempting to report the abuse are the biological parents - and CPS/DSS ignores them or labels the reports as "lies";
• children old enough to report the abuse are frequently convinced that they are at the mercy of the case worker/foster parent (due to being ripped from their family/parents) and they don't think that anything will be done.

Even one case is "too many", yet DSS/CPS/DFCS continues to relentlessly seize children on a daily basis and place them in environments where they are just a commodity that earns cash - for the foster parents and for the system.

Educate yourself on a system that is irrevocably broken worldwide.

It is time to stand up, speak out, and expose CPS.