Get Off Facebook And Engage Stakeholders: A Response To Legally Kidnapped

Here is another moment of clarity from our friends over at Legally Kidnapped, but before we get into LK's analysis of this video, let us step back and take a moment to examine my take.

For those of you who know nothing about child welfare services, which is about 99.9% of the stakeholders, we must first identify the stakeholders.

PRIMARY STAKEHOLDERS:  These are the individuals, including the privatized contractual entities, domestic NGOs, and private social impact investors who expect their financial investments to be optimized and generate a profitable return in the retention of a child remaining in the system for as long as the case generates cost-reimbursements.   The guidelines for this financial retention model are found in the Adoption Safe Families Act.

SECONDARY STAKEHOLDERS:  These are the administrators, child welfare service workers, judges, elected officials and other employees of these "charitable" organizations who rely upon their weekly paycheck (or campaign contributions) in perpetuating the system in its current form.

TERTIARY STAKEHOLDERS:  These are the children and relatives are who identified and monetized through federal funding as "targeted populations", a.k.a. "The Poors" and can only access resources and services (i.e. housing, jobs, food, education, transportation, child care, mental health, traditional health care) due to the unraveling of the social safety net.

Now, when there is a child welfare case open, whether validly or invalidly, it does not matter.  There is too much money involved.

LK has pointed out that we do not know the details of the case, but that is not the point here.

The point is that posting videos of this nature in the social realm, in this case, Facebook, becomes even more of a justification to allow the child to linger longer in the system, or just terminate parental rights and adopt the kid out, which we all know statistically may never happen.

Here are a few "preponderances of evidence" that will be put into the record to support the position of Child Protective Services keeping the kid in foster care longer from the posting of the video below:

• Munchhausen by Proxy:  This is when a parent, normally the mother, will manufacture a fictitious situation of their child being in danger/harm and garner public attention for a personal benefit, either monetarily or to repair their public reputation.  The mother made her own child cry or to be embarrassed which demonstrates mental illness.  This is considered child abuse.

• Future Emotion Harm:  Yes, child welfare workers have bestowed upon them the soothsaying powers of predicting if the parent will make the child cry, again, in the future.  This is an actual evidentary standard in child welfare cases.

• Abuse and Neglect:  A parent who posts a video of a child who is in the custody of the state is violating the privacy of the child and confidentiality of the case without permission from the court/state and will be summed up in court reports as "abuse and neglect", without any further explanation or opportunity for response from the parent.

The video captured an emotional moment and I even know of parents whose children would scream in desperation not to be taken away from the one hour a week visitation because they knew they were going to be raped, nightly, again, in foster care but in the end, no one cared.

Quintessentially, no one cares because the system is too big to fail.

As for the Families First Act, all it does is add on another layer of unregulated, privatized services on top of a dysfunctional system, devoid of any civil rights or constitutional protections of due process.

How about repealing the ASFA, first.

To sum this up, get off Facebook and start engaging these stakeholders.

• Write, call, attend community functions with your elected officials and community leaders;
• Start a group and tell your elected officials you will or will not support their elections;
• Put on public events to educate and bring services and resources to people;
• Ask for help and advice from these stakeholders.

How not to win your case by exploiting your child to drum up sympathy for your cause

By LK

The following video was recently posted to Facebook.  I'm sure many of you have already seen it.

My heart goes out to this child.  It's disgusting what he has to go through, the poor little guy.

Under the original video, which has been shared to multiple groups, pages and walls on Facebook you will see lots of comments from CPS victims whose hearts are broken, or who couldn't watch it without crying.  You can see them being reminded of similar occurrences in their own cases.  You see them crying out that CPS needs to be stopped.  Their poor emotional hearts are being ripped out of their chests over this.  "Oh my God it's only a poor helpless CPS victim child!!!  How can they do this to him?  It is absolutely devastating!.

Now I'm not saying that CPS is right here, nor am I claiming to know any of the details of this case such as what happened 5 minutes before or after the video or why CPS was in her life in the first place, but I do know how CPS operates because I've been studying this mess for years.  Do you know what CPS will see when they view this?  CPS will see this mother exploiting her child to drum up sympathy for her cause.  I'm sorry but it's true.  This will not help her case.  Nor will it help to fix this problem of CPS abuse of power which will only be fixed through legislation and enforcement and improvement of current laws.  The video may win the hearts of one or two bleeding heart legislators but they will quickly be put in their place by the special interests or rather the System Suck constituents who want to protect their meal tickets.  Ultimately it will hurt her case.  It will lead to a poor little boy who needs his mother to spending a longer stint in foster care.

I'm sorry but I'm calling bullshit on this one and will strongly suggest that if you have CPS up your ass that you DO NOT make video's like this.  Why?  Because I know how CPS thinks.  I can totally see how CPS will use this video against the mother who, BTW, could have handled it much better. She could have added a line like, "but I love you and will see you real soon," or "everything will be okay."  She could have have done something... anything to comfort this child who SHE was CLEARLY upsetting.  She could have given him a hug, for example, but no.  Instead The mother is leading him on while trying to capture the drama on camera. She's upsetting him by telling him that they're going to take him away again and filming it when she should be enjoying the little time she has with him and reassuring him that it will all work out. She could have offered him some strength, some reassurance, some love.  She offers him no comfort at all and instead continues playing into it, "they're going to come whether I want them to or not.  You know this."  It's like she knew how he was going to react so she staged the whole thing and for nothing but the dramatic effect.

What I would much rather see is a video of the child kicking and screaming and grasping onto the mothers leg while the caseworker dragged him away while the mother offers him some love and support.  There will be plenty of time to let it all out after.

Now I know why this video was posted and I can sympathize with that.  It was put there to tug on your heart strings.  It was created to piss you off, to make you cry, to somehow motivate you to take some action against CPS because how could they do this to poor helpless children?  Of course what this video will lead to is a lot of pissing and moaning on Facebook, perhaps the cutting off of the mothers visits, who knows.  Maybe you could all get together, stand on the steps of your state capital and have a good cry.  Then when you're done, maybe you can learn some facts and numbers and actually offer some solutions to the problem which don't include traumatizing children.  You could, for example, demand that your US Senators support and pass the Family First Act which would free up federal funding that is specifically designated for foster care so that CPS can help keep families together by providing needed services in the home rather than removing the child and creating whole new sets of problems all the way up to an adoption bonus.  That is just one simple thing that we can all do that takes nothing more than a phone call.  Then when you learn what's in it and learn what it's all about perhaps you can come up with solutions and legislation to put forth in your own state.

Come on people, you all need to be smarter about this.  Stop the drama because emotional people can't come up with good solutions.  And crying about it isn't going to do a damn thing.

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