Human Trafficking in Child Welfare: The Rehoming Experience

In the world of child welfare, there are many public relations campaigns to promote the integrity and moral ecstasy of taking in one of those heathen children who need to be saved.

It is called foster care and adoption.

The financial incentive to adopt children is quite enticing for the States and families who need a few extra dollars on the side, but the monetary allure of international adoption is even more profitable through subsidies and tax incentives.

Interstate adoptions under the Interstate Compact on the Placement of the Child, (ICPC) are excluded from the purview of public because no one knows about it and if they do, states like Michigan do not really care as it has no enforcement mechanisms.

The U.S, child welfare market is regulated in concept, only, leaving children after they have been formally adopted to become movable chattel or victims of human trafficking.

NOTE:  In many instances, adoptive parents will keep receiving adoption subsidies and adoption tax credits after a child has been rehomed.  

The funding does not kick in until there has been a judicial determination.

There are no data on rehoming or sexual assaults after adoption.

Girl spent months harboring secret, fearing she would be sent away again

NO IDEA: Nita Dittenber, now 18, said she had no idea that her adoptive mother
was using the Internet to look for families willing to take Nita. "There could have
been murderers or killers," Nita says. 
Authorities say an Ohio mother used ‘re-homing’ to keep allegations of sexual abuse from coming to light

MARYSVILLE, Ohio - On an Internet forum where parents sought takers for adopted children they no longer wanted, a teenager from Haiti was offered more frequently than any other girl.

Starting at age 14, Nita Dittenber was passed among four families over two years through a practice called “private re-homing.”

In September, Reuters exposed an underground market in which desperate parents use online bulletin boards to offer adoptees to strangers, often illegally and with no government oversight. The Internet forums, including the Yahoo group where Nita was advertised, can enable abusers to acquire children easily; in one case, a pedophile in Illinois took home a 10-year-old boy hours after an ad for the child was posted online.

In the last home where Nita was sent, re-homing served a different purpose, Ohio prosecutors contend. They say it was used to silence Nita and another girl in an effort to conceal the repeated sexual abuse of children.

For 17 months - from early 2011 until July 2012 - Nita lived in the Ohio city of Marysville with Jean Paul and Emily Kruse. Jean Paul was an information-technology specialist with the Ohio National Guard. Emily was a stay-at-home mother. The Kruses were the fourth family to take custody of her in America.

Not long after she was sent there, Nita says, the younger Kruse children told her they were being molested by Jean Paul. Nita says she struggled for months over whether to speak up about the allegations, fearing she’d be thrown out of the house and sent to yet another set of strangers if she did.

“I didn’t want to get passed around anymore,” Nita, now 18, says in an interview.

Months later, according to criminal charges filed in Union County Court here, Emily Kruse abruptly put Nita on a flight back to her original adoptive parents in Idaho - alone and “with only the clothes on her back.”

The reason: Kruse discovered that Nita had told relatives of the Kruses about the abuse accusations. Prosecutors say Emily sent Nita away to ensure the teen “would not be around to answer questions or participate in the resulting investigation.” They say another girl - an alleged victim of the abuse - was also threatened by Emily with re-homing unless she wrote a letter saying her accusations against Jean Paul were “not true.”

Jean Paul Kruse, 41, has pleaded not guilty to 17 felony criminal counts, including raping two of his daughters and sexually abusing another daughter. He and his attorney didn’t respond to interview requests. Emily Kruse, 36, has pleaded not guilty to felony charges of obstructing justice and intimidating a witness. She declined to comment; her attorney did not respond to questions.

SHOCKING CHARGES: Ohio National Guardsman Jean Paul Kruse, 41, was once the subject of a heartwarming story about the children he and his wife had adopted. Now, he faces charges of sexually abusing three of his daughters. REUTERS/Staff Sgt. Kim Snow/Ohio National Guard Public Affairs/Handout

RE-HOMED LIKE A PET

Since the late 1990s, Americans have adopted about 243,000 children from other countries. If the failure rate of international adoptions is similar to the rate at which domestic adoptions fail - estimates by the federal government range from about 10 percent to 25 percent - then more than 24,000 foreign adoptees are no longer with the parents who brought them to America.

No government agency tracks what happens to these children after they reach America, and none monitors how frequently children are transferred to strangers via the Internet. But on a single online message board examined by Reuters—a Yahoo group called Adopting-from-Disruption — a child was offered for re-homing about once a week during a five-year period. Most of the children were adopted from overseas. One was Nita.

After Reuters published messages from the Yahoo group, Nita’s adoptive aunt began reading the posts. Reporters had removed names and other identifying information. But Tammy Dittenber says she quickly recognized that some of the messages were about Nita, based on details about her age, nationality and state of residence.

Tammy says she knew that Nita’s adoptive parents - her in-laws, Tony and Michelle Dittenber - had sent Nita to other families. But Tammy says she had no idea how until she read the posts.

“I said, ‘Oh my God! All the puzzle pieces are coming into focus,’” Tammy Dittenber recalls. “...I realized she had been re-homed the way you re-home a pet.”

Re-homing a child is easy. No state or federal laws specifically prohibit it, and state laws that restrict the advertising and custody transfers of children are often confusing and rarely spell out criminal sanctions.

An agreement among the 50 U.S. states called the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, or ICPC, is meant to ensure that child welfare authorities oversee custody transfers, review prospective parents and account for what happens to children sent from one state to another. Many law-enforcement officials - including police who investigated the Kruse case - have never heard of the compact.

Even so, Ohio state officials say prosecuting the Kruses for breaching the pact would be futile. “There are no sanctions or criminal penalties in Ohio for violating the ICPC,” said Benjamin Johnson, a deputy director of the state’s Department of Job and Family Services.

Authorities handling the Kruse cases are now calling for state measures to address re-homing, and other states have already taken action in response to the Reuters investigation.

“I was scared and nervous. I didn’t want to get passed around anymore.”

In Illinois, lawmakers held a hearing on the practice, and Colorado, Florida and Wisconsin are moving forward with bills aimed at stopping re-homing. “We need to protect kids who are literally being traded between homes,” said Republican state Rep. Joel Kleefisch, who sponsored the Wisconsin bill. The state senate passed the measure this week, and it now awaits the governor’s signature. “This legislation puts Wisconsin on the national forefront of addressing re-homing and attacking it head on,” Kleefisch said.

At the federal level, a group of 18 Republican and Democratic members of Congress is seeking hearings to “identify ways to prevent these dangerous practices.” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, called for broad action in a letter to Obama administration officials, writing that it was “stunning” that “this practice of advertising children, usually over state borders, does not seem to violate any federal laws.”

Yahoo shut down the re-homing groups that Reuters brought to its attention, and the Illinois attorney general is pressing Facebook to explain how the social network polices itself. Reuters found that adoptive parents also were offering unwanted children there on a private page called Way Stations of Love. In a Jan. 21 letter responding to the attorney general’s inquiries, Facebook said it had found “no evidence of the type of Pages you described” but that “if people were discussing the activity in closed Groups or in private messages, we do not know about those communications unless they are reported to us.”

‘HOW CAN PEOPLE DO THIS?’

Born Nita Durand and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Nita still speaks with a trace of a Haitian accent. She says her birth parents were poor and sent her to an orphanage when she was 9, hoping she would have a better life than they had.

THE FUTURE: Nita Dittenber recently completed
a residential treatment center for troubled girls.
Now, she says, she is focusing on her dream:
to return to her native Haiti to help orphans.

In 2009, Tony and Michelle Dittenber adopted her and brought her to their home in Nampa, Idaho, just outside Boise. Tony helps operate a food warehouse. Michelle books flights for an airline.

Nita was 13 at the time. She became one of nine Dittenber children, four biological and five adopted, including Nita’s younger biological sister. Each of the adoptees is Haitian.

The Dittenbers and Nita clashed from the start. Nita had “behavioral issues,” Tony Dittenber says. Nita says she thought the Dittenbers were harsh and treated her unfairly.

After the family tried without success to get help from social service agencies, Michelle says she turned to the Internet. She had read offers for children in the online forums. “My first thought was, ‘How can people do this?’” Dittenber says. “Then as I read through it and read people’s stories and what they’d been through, I understood.”

In August 2010, Michelle posted a message on the Yahoo group Adopting-from-Disruption. Her profile name: idmomofmany.

“I have a 14 year old daughter I adopted from Haiti,” she wrote. “Unfortunately we are needing to find a new family for her. Where do we start?”

Re-homing victim: ‘I could have been dead’

Since she was adopted and brought to America at age 13, Nita Dittenber was passed from family to family through an underground market for adopted kids. The practice, called "private re-homing," was uncovered last year by a Reuters Investigation

It was the first of several times Michelle offered Nita on the Yahoo group. In her posts, Michelle portrayed Nita as a “bully” with an “attitude of entitlement.” The girl “lies” and is “manipulative,” she wrote, but “does love little kids very much” and has “a soft spot for elderly people as well.”

Each time they transferred custody of Nita, the Dittenbers used a notarized power of attorney document stating that Nita was now in the care of the new family, Tony says. No social workers or attorneys were involved, he says, and there was no official vetting of the parents taking in Nita.

Nita says she did not know that she had been advertised on the sites until her aunt read the Reuters report and told her about it. “I didn't really know what was going on,” Nita says. “I had no clue about where I was going to live and for how long.”

The first two families to take Nita — one in Ohio, another in Idaho — sent her back to the Dittenbers.

Then, Nita was sent to the Kruse home in Marysville. It was her third move in less than a year. She was 15.

‘NINE IS ENOUGH?’

It seemed like a good option. Michelle says that the first Ohio family who’d taken in Nita knew and vouched for the Kruses.

In 2008, the couple also had been profiled in a heartwarming story distributed by the Ohio National Guard, headlined “Nine is enough?” The article described how the Kruses happily scrambled to care for their large family.

At the time, the story said, the Kruses had five biological children - four from previous marriages — and four adopted overseas. A photo showed a grinning Jean Paul tickling one of the adopted children, a girl born in Liberia.

“We wanted a girl because they have it so hard there,” the story quotes him as saying. “They are often raped and molested from a very young age.”

Within weeks of arriving at the Kruse place, Nita alleges, several young girls in the home told her they were being sexually abused by Jean Paul. She says she wasn’t abused herself but was terrified to come forward. It took her about nine months to share the allegations with Emily, she says. When she finally did, Nita says, Emily accused her of lying and promised to put her on a plane back to Idaho if she told anyone else.

FELT REJECTED: As she was passed from home to home, Nita Dittenber says she developed an eating disorder and contemplated suicide. "I remember praying to God, 'Please take me,' because I did not want to go through that again," she says.

Nita kept silent for another eight months. “I was like, ‘I’m not about to ruin this one,’ ” Nita says. The stress of being sent from family to family was overwhelming, she says: She suffered an eating disorder and contemplated suicide.

Then, in July 2012, Nita and two of the girls were visiting with a Kruse family relative. Nita says she recalls feeling glum that day, burdened by what the young girls were continuing to tell her. The relative asked her why she looked so down. Nita told her of the alleged abuse, and then the other girls told their stories.

The relative took Nita and the girls to see other family members, Nita says, and they went over the allegations again.

In court documents, authorities describe what happened next: After learning that the abuse allegations had come to light, Emily picked up Nita at a local hospital where the teen was working as a volunteer. Emily then took Nita directly to the nearby airport in Columbus.

“Michelle was on the Internet a lot. She’d come back and say ‘there’s a family here who will take her.’ I was like ‘OK.’”

Emily “did not tell the child where she was going and did not permit her to pack her clothing or other belongings,” prosecutors allege in court documents. At the airport, they say, she ordered Nita to get on a flight to Boise so that the girl couldn’t be questioned in any investigation of Jean Paul. The move was so abrupt, they allege, that Emily didn’t give the Dittenbers advance notice that Nita was heading back to Idaho.

The Dittenbers were away on vacation at the time, so they asked Tony’s brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Tammy Dittenber, to pick up Nita. When Nita walked off the plane, she “looked lost and really confused,” Tammy wrote in a police statement as part of the Kruse criminal cases. “…She said she had nothing. No suitcase, duffle bag, carry on, nothing.”

Almost immediately, Michelle Dittenber again began offering Nita for re-homing.

In a July 24, 2012, post on the Yahoo group, Michelle blamed Nita for the rupture with the Kruses.

“The last straw with the last family was her making allegations that the dad in the family was sexually molesting all the kids but her,” Michelle wrote. “...I would love to be done with her permanently.”

Soon, however, child welfare workers and police began to investigate the Kruses. In August 2012, 10 children were removed from their home.

Later that summer, police in Nampa, Idaho, interviewed Nita as part of the investigation. Sgt. Don Peck says he never looked into how Nita came to live with the Kruses. He says he had no reason to believe her custody transfer was improper, despite an Idaho state law that prohibits anyone without a state license from advertising children for adoptions.

Jean Paul Kruse is scheduled for trial in May; Emily Kruse is scheduled for trial in July. The two no longer live together, and some of the couple’s children have been returned to Emily’s care.

‘HEART TO HEART’

Eventually, the Dittenbers sent Nita to Mercy Ministries, a Nashville residential treatment center for troubled girls.

In December, Nita received a certificate for completing the program. In her eight months at Mercy Ministries, she says, she recovered from her eating disorder and regained a sense of self-worth, making friends and bonding with staff.

“I had no clue about where I was going to live and for how long.”

Michelle, who says she now regrets her decisions to re-home Nita, traveled to Nashville for the graduation ceremony. For the first time, Michelle discussed with Nita how she had used the Internet to seek new families for her.

“I was like, I do understand that you needed help…but there could have been murderers or killers,” Nita says. “You don’t know those people. I could have been dead.”

Michelle says she told Nita that “she always has the option to come back home” to Idaho.

Nita has no such plans. Today, she is living outside Nashville with Sandra Booker, a nurse she met through church. With Booker’s help, Nita intends to finish her education and “focus on the future.” Her ambition, she says, is to return to Haiti and work with orphans.

(Additional reporting by Blake Morrison. Edited by Blake Morrison and Michael Williams)

Leave a comment on our Facebook page or tweet us @SpecialReports and use the hashtag #ChildExchange. You can also send us an email atchildexchange@reuters.com.

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Wanna See A Michigan Policy Lie To Cover Up Medicaid Fraud?

Here, I present to the public, Michigan's blatant lie on how it conducts business in child welfare.

Yes, it is true to say that this is proper information presented on the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.

Yes, it is true to say that there are no lies presented on the names and titles of administration.

Yes, it is true to say the final decision maker on the ICPC is not the compact administrator.  It's  Mr. Omnipotent. Bill Johnson, the Superintendent of Michigan Children's Institute!

Michigan Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC)

First Amended Petition of Quo Warranto

Another Section Of The Wall Is Built - N-DEx, CODIS & The Central Registry Of Child Abuse & Neglect

The U.S. is building the wall.

The wall is an AI cybersecurity wall because the U.S. does not have one.

N-Dex and CODIS are sections of the wall.

The other side of the John Walsh Act is the States Central Registry of Child Abuse and Neglect that no one wants to talk about because citizenship of children is not documented in child welfare.

Children are transferred to the custody of the States privatized, foreign corporations, where no one wants to talk about the policy of ICPC, which is not a law.

With a database, one can no longer file false claims, but do not tell that to DHS an its new immigration rule which allows a private, foreign corporation, like Bethany Christian, to keep families together, in the least restrictive, contained environment under human asset management systems, indefinitely, for billing purposes, transferring rights to the corporate parent.

So, if a foreign corporate parent has sole, legal custody and guardianship of immigrant humans, what is the citizenship of the human assets of the foreign corporation?

And this is why we are building the wall.

N-DEx System Helps Law Enforcement Identify Offenders

Criminal justice investigators across the nation use the FBI’s National Data Exchange (N-DEx) System in their daily work to connect people, places, things, and events—often across jurisdictional boundaries—that may at first glance seem unrelated. Recent N-DEx successes include identifying a suspect in a homicide case, identifying a felon involved in a fraud case, and locating three probationers who traveled outside jurisdictions into neighboring states. Here are details from the cases and information on how investigators used the N‑DEx System to close them successfully.

Homicide Suspect in North Carolina
Recently, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina was investigating a drug-related homicide. Officers believed the suspect and the victim knew each other, since the victim had been talking on the telephone with the subject just before the homicide. The only information the officers had was a phone number they obtained from the victim’s cell phone. Charlotte-Mecklenburg staff searched the phone number in several databases without success. Finally, they ran the number in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service Law Enforcement Information Exchange (LInX) System and received a hit from the LInX System’s access to the N-DEx System.

The N-DEx System record included a name and address related to an effort by the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) to locate the suspect on a separate warrant. With the information from the USMS report, Charlotte-Mecklenburg staff obtained a photograph and subsequently positively identified the suspect. The suspect was arrested for murder and robbery, and the case was closed.
Felony Fraud Case in Tennessee

An investigator with the Belle Meade Police Department (BMPD) in Tennessee was investigating a felony fraud case involving a small group of professional con men who targeted female senior citizens. The women hired the men to perform odd jobs such as vehicle, driveway, or roofing repairs, but the men fraudulently overcharged the women for inferior work.
The investigator queried the subjects using the National Crime Information Center and the Interstate Identification Index, but found no records. However, when the investigator accessed the Regional Information Sharing System’s Regional Organized Crime Information Center portal and logged into the N-DEx System, he found multiple incident reports showing a pattern of similar complaints in other states.
One such incident in Glenview, Illinois, was nearly identical to the Tennessee case. The report included the details of the main subject, noting the man’s comment that he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he was there just for the money. When the BMPD investigator presented this information to the subject, he reacted uncomfortably and showed signs of his guilt.

Members of the group are currently awaiting trial in Tennessee. The investigator credited the N-DEx System with saving time and effort by helping him identify patterns in seemingly unrelated crimes and connecting him to law enforcement staff in Illinois. The investigator praised the N-DEx System, saying, “N‑DEx is one of the most valuable tools in my 35 years in law enforcement.”
Probation Absconders in New Mexico

An executive assistant in the Security Threat Intelligence Unit of the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) searched the N-DEx System for any recent records on probationers who had absconded from their jurisdictions. Using the N-DEx System’s batch search tool to query multiple individuals at once, the executive assistant found three subjects who had fled and were later arrested in other jurisdictions.

Five days before the search, the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office in Texas booked one subject for burglary, assault, public intoxication, and other offenses. The Wise County Sheriff’s Office in Texas arrested a second subject earlier in April for possession of drug paraphernalia and tampering with evidence. Twelve days prior to the search, an agency in Durango, CO, booked the third subject for driving while intoxicated.

The executive assistant verified the custody status of the subjects, then forwarded the updated information to the relevant NMCD officers. Those officers placed holds on the subjects, which means they will serve their sentences, then be returned to the NMCD.
National Data Exchange (N-DEx) Seal

For more information about how your agency can use the N-DEx System to help further its investigations, contact the N-DEx Program Office at ndex@leo.gov or call 304-625-0555.

Resources
National Data Exchange (N-DEx)


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Dump and Lump Child Welfare Funding

  

Restructuring of Child Welfare Funding

PEOPLE WHO VIEWED THIS PAGE ALSO VIEWED

• Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children
• Child Welfare
• ICPC Point of Contact List
• Children and Family Services Reviews
• Fostering Connections to Success Act

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Issue: Restructuring of Child Welfare Funding

Impact:

Currently, the federal funding streams received by the state child welfare agencies are categorical in nature and emphasize out of home placement...to maximize its revenue.

Position:

No formal position because elections are around the corner and the child welfare lobbying organizations are rallying up their clients to make political campaign donations.  A position would jeopardize a political career.

Summary:

The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care reviewed the current funding structure and recommended the following in their May 2004 report:

• Preserve federal foster care maintenance and adoption assistance as an entitlement and expand it to all children, regardless of their birth families' income and including Indian children and children in the U.S. territories; This will never work because wealthier families can afford attorneys who would bring civil legal proceedings against child placing agencies, eventually taking a chunk out of the profit margins for these non-profits.

• Provide federal guardianship assistance to all children who leave foster care to live with a permanent legal guardian when a court has explicitly determined that neither reunification nor adoption are feasible permanence options; Guardianship, in these situations, is with the State. Instead of creating another revenue-maximization scheme, qualify all children who have been placed in foster care for Social Supplemental Income  (SSI), with special provisions of placing the money in a trust fund for the child.  Upon the age of 18 or emancipation, the child is granted the trust and continues to receive payments under current eligibility rules.

• Help states build a range of services from prevention, to treatment, to post-permanence by (1) creating a flexible, indexed grant from what is included in Title IV-B and the administration and training components of Title IV-E; and (2) allowing states to "reinvest" federal and state foster care dollars into other child welfare services if they safely reduce their use of foster care; and  

Dump and Lump: 

(1)  Transfer all Title IV-B and Title IV-E programming to Targeted Case Management of Medicaid;

(2)  Get rid of the Medicaid Moritoria;

(3)  Mandate States Medicaid Fraud Control Units to aggressively go after Medicaid Fraud in child welfare with increased recovery percentages and financial disincentives;

(4)  Expand access to the courts through increased indigent funding for legal representation, funded with Medicaid fraud recoveries; 

(5)  Create a public awareness campaign to report child welfare fraud to a newly established national child welfare complaint registry; and, 

(6)  Establish financial disincentives through reductions in the FFP for States to contractually debar, prosecute, recover and report to the HHS OIG exclusionary database.

• Encourage innovation by expanding and simplifying the federal waiver process and providing incentives to states that (1) make and maintain improvements in their child welfare workforce and (2) increase all forms of safe permanence. I promote expanding and simplifying the federal waiver process to include projects to stop Medicaid fraud in child welfare.

These Pew Commission recommendations have met with some resistance, but there continues to be an on-going dialogue in the child welfare community.  These Pew Commission recommendations were made by a bunch of folks who held financial interests in the adoption of these policies.  Michigan Supreme Court Justice, Maura Corrigan was the brain child to the conflict of interests of judicial advocacy in child welfare.  Not only would she encourage judges across the country to sit on advisory boards of these child placing agencies, but she would also promote adoption and extended lengths of stay in foster care by ruling for the case in favor of the child placing agency whose board you sit.  

Justice Corrigan was so good with benefiting from judicial advocacy, she even had her campaign to have her colleagues vote as Chief Justice funded and promoted through child welfare.

Status:  No one knows what the hell to do and that is why everyone keeps coming to my sites.

Child welfare advocates have been working to develop a proposal to reform federal financing of child welfare. This collaboration, Partnership to Protect Children and Strengthen Families, proposes to allow states to direct the unused portion of their annual allotment of Title IV-E foster care and adoption subsidy dollars to support a range of child abuse and neglect prevention services, ensure federal support to all children in foster care by eliminating the current income eligibility criteria, extend federal support to Native American children, and enhance accountability by requiring annual state reports on expenditures.

Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) introduced the Invest in KIDS Act (HR 5466) on 2/8/08. The legislation would give states the option to include a prevention component in their foster care and adoption assistance state plan and eliminate the federal income and asset eligibility requirement.

Underground Railroad Is Alive In The UK But Not The US

The Unites States has yet to construct a sophisticated network to assist families.

In Michigan, the tentacles of the Superintendent of the Michigan Children's Institute Bill Johnson are far more nefarious than one can believe.  He possesses the omnipotence of no oversight to dispel the governing authority of another state.

These are issues of placement which have been nefariously promoted for the purposes of campaign contributions.

The Amer Act, recently introduced by Congressman John Conyers, Jr,, was pathetically retained to intentionally omit me from discussions in D.C.

What ever the arrogant reasoning, the problem now manifests itself as another issue of omission.  The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC).

Without going into grueling detail, allow me the moment to share the issues.

The Amer Act fails to address the current legislation on placement decisions.  It comes across as adequate but does nothing more than promulgate the status quo of operations within the State of Michigan, which is a leader in national child policy, and other states.

I have too many individuals who have contacted me from across the nation asking why one man, Bill Johnson, has the omnipotence to make or break a family.  This man will allow people to spend their life savings under the guise of getting their grandchildren or other members of affinity only to be shot down at the last minute, or should I say when the time threshold has come to fruition for him to have the traditional legal argument that. "the child has bonded with the new family and has been in care too long."

I know what he does is unethical and illegal.  Why?  Because state administrators have told me they cannot find anyone else dumb enough to take on the position.  Michigan does not want to change, let alone acknowledge MCI.  This is quit apparent in the Dwayne B. v. Granholm federal settlement case of which District Judge Edmonds is about to release Michigan form the oversight of Kevin Ryan, monitor.

The following article has nothing to do with Michigan or even the United States. but it has to do with the political climate of the lunatic fringe trying to transmography Parental Rights as something the average person can posses.

If the average person could possess Parental Rights, then what would happen to the powers of the States Attorney General in dealing with child abuse cases?

Duh.

Let us recognize the beauty of the new underground railroad.  I am praying it does not come to the Unites States because I am on a mission to make it unnecessary.

August 7, 2012, vote.  And vote for me.  If you cannot vote for me, spread the word.  I'm on a mission...

  Revealed:  the networks helping families flee social services

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An exclusive investigation by Channel 4 News gains unprecedented access to underground networks which help families flee from social services in the UK.

The families say they are forced to flee because they will not get a fair hearing in the UK in thefamily courts. They turn to shadowy networks, often based online, and run by other parents, many of whom have already lost their children to the care system.

The scale and sophistication of the networks is extraordinary. We were told of safe houses across the UK where parents and their children could lie low before heading overseas, of fake birth certificates and of keys for rented homes in foreign countries that are exchanged in the middle of the night by strangers connected only by the networks.

As to the numbers involved it is impossible to verify, but we were told by one woman central to several groups that help parents get out of the country, that there has been "anything [from] 300 to 600 families in the past year that have left [the UK] from the involvement of social care".

The most popular destination is the Republic of Ireland, but the networks extend across Europe, Mediterranean countries being the other main destinations for families on the run.

From UK foster care to Cavan

We went to Cavan, a small town in the Republic of Ireland and one of the hubs for the network. There we met a mother who described a meticulously-planned snatch operation to steal her four-year-old son from foster care in the UK. At an organised contact session, she arranged an untraceable car, fake ID papers and even had a wig waiting in the car. "I knew I had to get him and get to the boat straight away. I knew that if I got caught, I would be done for kidnap," she says.

Her son had originally been put into voluntary care after she had a breakdown. She insists she got better but they refused to return him - leaving her, she says, with no choice but to run.

Having made it to Ireland she turned herself in to the authorities in the belief – shared by many in these networks – that she would get a fairer hearing from Irish social services. "They are not idiots over here but it's the way they act [and] work completely differently," she says. "They took him, completed the assessment and decided what was in my son's best interests."

For this mother that decision turned out to be that she could keep her son. Having been helped by the network herself, she in turn began to help others. This is how the networks regenerate themselves and grow.

Read more: Do expert witnesses harm family court cases?

'Punished for something that we hadn't done'

The charge levelled against the parents we spoke to was not physical or sexual abuse but emotional abuse or the risk of future emotional neglect or abuse. They say it is a charge that they cannot defend themselves against.

We met one British couple, Julie and Andy (not their real names), hiding out in a southern European country [pictured above]. The network helped them flee from the UK earlier this year when they discovered she was pregnant. They are now a couple in hiding.

Like many parents we met, their argument was that they were not given a fair hearing by a system that was too quick to remove children. Their child was removed at birth because the mother, who suffered pre-natal depression during her pregnancy, and the father, were assessed as posing a risk of future emotional neglect.

According to the couple, the local authority "just pressed the nuclear button". Talking about their daughter being placed in care they told Channel 4 News: "We hadn't hurt her. We were punished for something that we hadn't done."

While they accept the need for action in some cases they insist that parents can be accused of something that it is impossible to defend themselves against: "We recognise that that the child protection system is important but you can be convicted of the potentiality of causing harm or neglect."


They are now in hiding. "Once you've lost one you have no chance at all...after our experiences of our first child we have absolutely no confidence at all in the system."

Read more: Families 'traumatised' by court system

Social services vs parents

Channel 4 News discovered an unlikely figure in an unlikely location, who is a central character in these networks. He has taken it upon himself to assist in the flight of many of these families. Sitting in Monaco, Ian Josephs [pictured left], an 80-year-old British businessman, puts it bluntly. "It's war," he says, "between parents who've had their children taken and the social workers who've taken them."

Having first come across what he sees as family courts' injustice some 30 years ago, he now helps hundreds of families each year as they fight the system to keep their children. "I get two or three new calls every single day practically," he says. "That doesn’t sound too many, but if you multiply it by 365 it comes to quite a lot."

But it is more than advice: "I'm no Bill Gates, but I do pay for pregnant women to escape the country."

He is motivated by an unshakeable belief that the system and the family courts have the wrong approach and that other countries will treat parents fighting charges of emotional neglect in an entirely different manner. "If you saw the women that I have seen whose babies have been snatched from them by truly heartless social workers who've shown no compassion, no sorrow, no pity, no words of consolation, you would think that somebody should do something about it," he says.

"Why is it happening so much in England and not in France, for example, where I live, or Monaco where I live, and not in Spain and not in Italy? It's a very British phenomena."

Who are the networks helping?

Mr Josephs and the other networks say they screen parents and do background checks into their histories before offering help. But how much can they really know about the parents and children they help flee the UK and the safeguards of the child protection system?

It all poses profound questions about who these networks are helping and whether they are not in fact putting some children in further danger. It is a view shared by Professor Corinne May-Chahal, the co-chair of the College of Social Work. "It is clearly saying that there is something very wrong with the system, if the only option people have is to run then there has to be something that needs to be looked at," she told Channel 4 News.

She adds that the potential risk to some of the children involved is of serious concern: "There are probably some very vulnerable children and how can we know they are getting the right help? It is really very worrying. If what's happening within the system is forcing parents or encouraging parents to leave then that could well be putting them in more danger."

And she says that this points to a wider issue in the system designed to protect children. "We all know the system has to change. And it’s not just social workers that need to improve - that is the key. Social work has to work within the system and it is the system that needs to change, not just one person or professional body within it."