Every now & then I receive nasty comments from readers accusing me of every terrible thing you can think of. Honest, grounded differences I publish.
Ungrounded, untrue accusations I do not publish.
Just to be clear, I am a volunteer guardian ad-Litem & gender neutral when considering who’s more at fault in child abuse cases. Blaming any sex, any religion, nationality or economic class solves nothing (it’s just a different flavor of hate speech). To accuse me of this based on one recent article (out of 400) is really unfair. To my angry reader, please read fifty or sixty of these articles and see if you get a more balanced perspective.
I believe that as bad as things are in child protection services (for everybody involved ), the men and women doing the work are decent fair minded people (even to have chosen this un-glorious, low paying profession) overworked, under-trained, and under – resourced. The hours are long & the results are painful. It ain’t the worker bees wrecking the children.
They are terrific people working in a harsh environment inside of communities that don’t understand the depth and scope of the issues facing abused and neglected children which leads to underfunding and lack of support which guarantees failure. And this won’t change until the conversation gets louder and more forceful (which is the intent of this blog and my efforts).
A few days ago I spoke at a meeting of police and justice workers. An inner city minister friend of mine accompanied me and spoke eloquently about how hard it is to get state ward children into a mind frame that has any chance of respecting them or following any rules – these kids hate authority. You would too if you were abandoned by your family, left unprepared and disconnected from society and the foster homes you grew up in.
No matter how hard social and justice workers try, success evades them. To throw rocks at them is an undeserved injustice making an already impossible job even less satisfying.
Yes, there’s tons of unsolvable problems facing the abused and neglected children of America & only the commitment and cooperation of we the people will solve them. Uniting & supporting organizations and people from the bottom up is crucial. It will take all of us working together to find better answers.
The best answers lie in supporting more and better services for children as well as young families and providing sufficient guidelines, resources, and training for the people doing the work.
Stop with the hate speech. Be constructive. If you must beat on people, bother the people who don’t know or don’t care (wake them up).