As a CASA guardian ad-litem with many years in child protection I’ve met many terribly abused children that have fallen through the cracks of overwhelmed child protection workers (and they never make the papers).

In my world, 99% of the abused and neglected children go unnoticed except to the overworked & under-resourced social workers and under- appreciated adoptive/foster parents.

Part of the problem is that since newspapers have been in decline, the old beat reporters just don’t exist anymore (at least in my community) & the topic is painful.

It hurts to confront the cruel reality that our communities deliberately visit on these children.

To appreciate the meanness of some states I point to (Mitch Daniels) Indiana’s stealing (redirecting) the funding promised to parents that adopted abandoned special needs children (after these children had been adopted) & Minnesota’s fiscally irresponsible de-funding of subsidized daycare which forced the county to place children in foster homes because their father’s job did not pay enough to afford daycare.

It costs way more to place children in foster care than it would have to subsidize his daycare payments.

It cost Hennepin County millions of dollars to pay for the care of the four year old boy the court thought would be better off with his father even though dad had a court order to stay away from young boys because of what he did to them.  My client is now is now 23, has AIDS, and has been in over 30 foster homes and he will be a ward of the state until he dies.  He was been tied to a bed, starved, beaten, sexually abused and left alone for days at a time from 4 to 7 years of age.  That never made the paper.  Nor did the four year old girl who I visited in the suicide ward of Fairview hospital (her sister’s story was much worse).

If you read Jordan’s reporting, it will be easy to hate the social workers involved.  Please remember that under-training & under-funding combined with giant case loads, makes their task impossible.

Like blaming teachers for failed schools or cops for full prisons, it’s the wrong place to focus.

We did this; our state legislators, governors, and the mean spirited political hate fest that rallies around fear and war at the direct cost to American children.

When a baby is found in a dumpster, the mother has horrible mental health issues & needs help, but our communities have accepted that we just don’t support young mom’s or their troubled children.

It’s all wrong and we know it.  It is up to us to talk about these issues and bother our media and legislators until positive change happens.

Policy violations in Colorado social-services system found amid deaths of 43 children

 

(Denver Post file photos)

Read more:Policy violations in Colorado social-services system found amid deaths of 43 children – The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/frontpage/ci_19844865#ixzz1l2oc8FUn

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It is a powerful statement on the lasting impact of child sexual abuse;

“Grace Brown created “Project Unbreakable” in October, 2011, and the tumblog appears to really be gathering momentum. The idea: “Use photography to help heal those who were sexually abused by asking them to write a quote from their attacker on a poster and photographing them holding the poster.”

So many stories from so many different people. Men, too, not only women. I was so moved by this post, which includes both a photograph and an audio narrative by an elderly woman who was sexually abused as a 12-year-old girl during World War II in Germany. Do listen to her story.

“You can never forget it. It is in your brain, marked like a stamp,” she says. “I still suffer from it.”

(via Jay Rosen)”

Thank you Boing Boing

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Before he was 18, Luis had seen 25 of his friends killed by violence.   From 1990 to 1998 6000 LA youth died in gang related violence.

Rodriguez writes that “Gangs flourish where there’s a lack of recreation, education, or employment”.

Our nation’s continued focus on punishment over accommodation/compassion for children has created the largest prison population in the world (over 2 million-add to that juvenile justice/child protection/probation/parole, and the numbers are staggering).

Criminalizing youth that society spurns & declaring them the enemy brings huge costs and great pain to the community and the families involved.

Minneapolis MN arrested 44% of its adult black men in 2001 (no duplicate arrests – 58% of those men went on to be rearrested for a second crime within two years).

Each large American community has its own truths and statistics relating to youth well-being (or non-well-being).

America leads the industrial world in teen aged STD’s, violent crime, preteen moms, child mortality, child poverty, child abuse deaths, and youth tried as adults (25%).

The police and the courts are not equipped to solve these problems.

It is up to communities to understand the nature and scope of these issues and treat children with sufficient care and resources to end the madness as stated by MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz; “The difference between that poor child and a felon is about eight years”.

Let’s all get behind child friendly programs and politics and end the pipeline to prison & preteen pregnancies that America now promotes.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

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This is the most tuned in high school I am aware of-digging deeply into social justice issues from Africa’s child soldiers to American juvenile justice.   I will speak to classes on Weds the 15^th.

From time to time high schools, colleges, & other organizations invite me to speak at their events.

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Somalia, because it has no functioning government, and the U.S. because we will not stop training child soldiers*.

Americans are proud of and outspoken about spirituality, values, and freedom – making proclamations about human rights, women’s rights, and so on.

My twelve years in County child protection as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem (Court Appointed Special Advocate/CASA) has taught me hard lessons.

Beaten children, sexually abused children, starved and neglected children enter the child protection system every day.  Three million children a year are reported to child protection services in America.

Their numbers and stories are staggering.  It is so painful and so common.

We do not offer adequate help or protection to children that need it the most.

Worse, we don’t like to talk about it.  There is nothing that brings cold hard silence to a conversation than talking about my experiences with child sexual abuse or otherwise traumatized children.

When there is no discussion by those in the know,  few people outside the system can understand the issues which means the media and politicians that could draw attention don’t (or they are mixed up in their understanding and speaking which is actually worse).

So nothing changes.  In fact, during these lean times, programs for abused and neglected children are disappearing all over our nation and things are getting worse.   Our Voices Matter was powerful program that allowed foster and adoptive kids a voice has recently disappeared due to lack of support.  Many truly useful organizations are disappearing today because we don’t support children that need help the most.

From the courts, social workers, CASA programs, & health and other resources, to the foster and adoptive parents that work so hard to make life bearable for traumatized youth, child protection systems throughout this country are overwhelmed and unable to provide the services these children need.

Until I became part of the system, I had no idea that that 90% of the youth in juvenile Justice came through child protection, or that over 50% of youth in juvenile justice suffered from mental health issues with fully half that number diagnosed with multiple and severe mental health problems (the  same is most likely true of children in child protection).

Without professional help, how do you un-teach drug use or sex habits to a 9 year old that has been forced to practice these things at home?

My first visit to a four year old was at the suicide ward at Fairview hospital.  I’ve written about a seven year old foster child that hung himself and left a note (he hated the Prozac).   There is nothing like facing a very young self-hating, suicidal child to bring home the cold hard reality that the mental health services, consistent help from the county (her new parent) will not be there.  Knowing that her chances of recovering to lead a normal life are very, very, slim.  This has made me feel like I’m part of a crime.

As long as we don’t talk about it, no one can know about it.  Social workers are trained to not talk about it.  These children have NO Voice in the substance and direction of their own lives.  They suffer every day all day and we don’t want to hear about it.

Whether you are an abused child, foster/adoptive parent/social or health worker; empower yourself to start this conversation (and tell your friends/family to vote for child friendly initiatives**).

LET’S START TALKING

Support KARA’s efforts;  sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

*It has been suggested that this is why Minnesotan’s were willing to pay 24 Billion dollars as their share of the Iraq/Afghan war over this two year budget, but unwilling to pay 6 billion dollars for healthcare, childcare, education, & infrastructure over the same period.

**My last official act as an active CASA guardian ad-Litem was to remove four children from a father whose only fault was that he could not afford daycare.  The state had defunded subsidized daycare & put the money back into the general fund (just like Indiana did with the money promised to parents that had adopted special needs children this year).

It was the state’s position that it would be cheaper, and the right thing to do, to tear these children from their hard working, honorable father, and put them in foster homes, than to fund subsidized daycare.  In what universe could this be true?

If you are a reader of this blog, you know that the Federal Reserve Board studies, www. AVAHealth.org, and overwhelming  data over thirty years clearly proves the extraordinary costs of letting children slip through the cracks into crime, prison, and more dysfunctional families. It’s way more efficient to save a child than to help a felon or preteen mom recover from a life of abuse and neglect and the behavior problems that follow.

What good are rights if there is no discussion or enforcement?

Support KARA, listen to or buy the book INVISIBLE CHILDREN, schedule a discussion or keynote speech.

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I am unable to respond quickly as my normal work can keep me away for days at a time.  This site and my efforts are designed to provide information and resources on and about child abuse and at risk children.

The Blogroll, Links, & Resources links on the right side of the page (located below the comments section) provide telephone numbers and contact information for organizations that have staff and can be of help (KARA has no staff).

If you do not find what you need, send me a brief description of your issues and I will answer with written suggestions as I am able.

I appreciate recommendations you make for positive experiences with organizations to add to our resource list & I do try to honor speaking requests.

Thank you for your understanding.

MikeT

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Attorney, successful businessman, & ACLU president Vance Opperman gave a spirited and informative talk at the Stone Arch DFL meeting in Minneapolis this morning.  He is a very smart and insightful fellow with a terrific grasp of so many critical issues, but not this one.

Unfortunately, like 99% of the nation, he has very little comprehension of why America has 25% of the world’s prison population, charges 25% of juvenile justice youth in adult criminal court, and is the world leader with five to ten times the murder and crime rates of any other *industrialized nation (for many years now).

On the plus side, Vance did speak to the African American Men’s Study & the importance of the institutionalized racist fact that 50% of Black Men are either in prison, on the way to prison, or on parole.

But when I asked him a question about how to solve the conundrum of preteen moms and adolescent felons, he said he was not very familiar with the issues.

I had hoped that Senator Amy Klobuchar would back me up.  She was in the audience and had worked in juvenile court when I was a guardian ad-Litem and she saw what I saw when she was a public defense lawyer in the court system that is child protection in our community.

Senator Klobuchar was in the Juvenile Court system when MN Supreme Court Chief Justice stated that 90% of the youth in Juvenile justice had come through Child Protective Services & the same time Hennepin County arrested 44% of the adult Black Men (2001, with no duplicate arrests).  Google “Rich Stanek Resigns” to find out more about how the appointed Police Commissioner made that happen.

Unfortunately, I did not get to ask the question about preteen mom’s (Industrialized World’s Leader) and STD’s (another World Leading category for America).

If communities were to foster conditions that lead to healthy children; our streets would be safer, more kids would graduate, we’d save money on police, prisons, and insurance.  It would also make for a happier and more knowledgeable citizenry, save tax dollars, and it would be the right thing to do.

* there are 24 other industrialized nations with great wealth and advanced infrastructures that the U.S. has compared itself to for many years.  Recently, due to America’s poor rankings, some journalists have begun comparing this nation to third world and emerging economies.

Please send me related stories.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

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Most of the industrialized world have recognized the value of supporting young families by providing opportunities that reduce the poverty and stress that so often lead to generation after generation of dysfunction and child abuse.

“Their methods for leveling the economic playing field start with providing all young children with healthy conditions for physical and mental development. Surprisingly, much of the research they rely on comes from America’s best universities.

The proof is that it works — these countries have broken the link of intergenerational poverty that afflicts our country.”

Support KARA’s effort to support positive politics for children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

http://www.startribune.com/printarticle/?id=136843378

Share this with people you think would like to help make life better for at risk children.

Support KARA’s effort to bring attention to at risk children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

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Like the settlement that was paid to the birth parents of the child lost forever (literally “disappeared”)  in the Nevada foster care system, or the dozens of brutal deaths children have suffered over the years in this nation where inadequate child protection services exist & social workers are regularly blamed when children are brutalized when in fact they are working in conditions that almost ensure that at risk children will pay the price for a counties / states malfeasance.

It would be far less expensive (see the studies & long term costs) and the right thing to do to see that foster & adoptive parents were well funded, well regulated, and early childhood programs set up to insure that every child had a chance to have a meaningful life in America.

Until then, let’s sue the pants off of states and counties that refuse to care for children.

New York Times Dec 29th article on 68 Million Dollar Settlement Proposal

Please send me related stories.

Support KARA’s effort to improve support for children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Full New York Times Article below;

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Vigil planned for slain 3 year old; http://www.google.com/url?

Terrell has a fund set up at M & I Bank:  Re-post from Don Samuels: A special fund has been established at M&I bank for the family of Terrell Mayes. Call (612) 904-8000 and mention the Terrell Mayes Fund.

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It just seems to me that America’s children should all have a chance to have a childhood.

I find it hard to accept that on top of being abused, having special needs, or neglected, these children are punished again by us as a society.  We are too cheap to make a place for them at the table.

Adoptive & foster families need more help than communities are willing to give.  Kids continue to suffer in overcrowded court rooms, underfunded child protection systems, & now the families that have historically stepped forward to adopt hard to place children are being overwhelmed.

Vote for child friendly initiative; call a state representative and speak up for a child.  Nothing else works (these kids can’t vote).

Denver adoption agency to close after 22 years

Read more:Denver adoption agency to close after 22 years – The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_19628951#ixzz1hqzEabvD
Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse

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Add this to the fact that American youth (as young as 11) are routinely charged as adults (25% nationally) and that cities around the nation arrest extremely high percentages of their minority populations (in 2001 Hennepin County – Minneapolis MN) arrested 44% of it’s adult Black Men – no duplicate arrests/58% of those men were rearrested for a second crime within two years making Minneapolis the Jail & Prison capital of the world.

Many states have funded their prison and jail systems at far greater rates of increase than their schools, daycare, or health systems, any of which could reduce the stresses driving the extreme growth in crime and courts.

A pathological lack of empathy is driving parts of our political body and ensures that generation after generation of dysfunctional families will continue to maintain the statistical truth that the U.S. has five percent of the world’s population and twenty five percent of the world’s prison population.  This scorched earth capitalism is now converting jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers to money making operations with the attendant problems of brutal and illegal conditions (that have sent some judges to prison).

Add that to the mental health issues addressed in the thirty years of study conducted by Dr. Bruce Perry & his conclusion that 25% of Americans will be special needs people by the end of this generation, & the Federal Reserve Boards study and argument for investing in children begins to look like a pretty good return on capital (not to mention it’s the right thing to do).

Not addressing these issues can only continue to make our streets dangerous, schools fail, and quality of life a shadow of what it has been.

Support day care, educators, social workers and early child initiatives.  Make mental health programs a mainstay of the juvenile justice system.  It is a proven improvement over the punishment model.

Please send me related stories.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Many in U.S. Are Arrested by Age 23, Study Finds

By ERICA GOODE

Published: December 19, 2011

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Happy holidays to all of you that work so hard for the best interests of the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Pine Island Florida

Guardian ad Litem Needed; http://www.pineisland-eagle.com/page/content.detail/id/520054/Guardians-ad-Litem-needed.html?nav=5049

Vero Beach Florida Gift Drive; http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2011/nov/24/guardian-ad-litem-angel-gift-drive-accepting-unwra/

Bridgeport Connecticut, Innocent Child Of A Murderer

This tells you something and absolutely nothing that might identify Annabelle, and that’s the way her guardian ad litem, Justine Rakich-Kelly, director of the Childen’s Law Center, wants it to stay. Annabelle, after all, is the 9-year-old …

http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/MariAn-Gail-Brown-The-innocent-child-of-a-2308310.php

Lake Lillian, MN Guardian ad Litem, termination of parental rights http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=In%20MNCO%2020111128169.xml&docbase=CSLWAR3-2007-CURR

Northern Virginia, Child Custody / Guardian ad Litem http://www.lieblichgrimes.com/Child-Custody/Guardian-Ad-Litem.shtml

Wilkes Barre Pennsylvania, Parents Target Family Court/FBI Court; http://www.timesleader.com/golackawanna/news/Parents_target_family_court_11-20-2011.html

Cincinnati Ohio; tested positive for cocaine, attempted suicide and was hospitalized with a self-inflicted stab wound. The child was placed in the temporary custody of her paternal grandmother, who she was living with at the time…

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=In%20OHCO%2020111118660.xml&docbase=CSLWAR3-2007-CURR>

Joliet Illinois

The purpose of the appointment of a GAL is to have a neutral, independent fact finder who reports to the Court. The GAL acts only under the direction of the …

<http://www.angelahendersonlaw.com/Guardian_ad_Litem.html>

Iowa City, Iowa;

Maurine A. Braddock, Iowa City, attorney for minor children and guardian ad litem for CBS Anthony A. Haughton of Linn County Advocate, Inc., Cedar Rapids, guardian ad litem for KMB Considered by Sackett, CJ, and Vogel and Eisenhauer, JJ. …

<http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=In%20IACO%2020111109305.xml&docbase=CSLWAR3-2007-CURR>

Lackawanna Pennsylvania;

FBI searches court administrator’s office Scranton Times-Tribune A source familiar with the visit told the newspaper the search warrant was related to the county’s guardian ad litem system. The FBI has been investigating the county’s guardian ad litem system, which is in the hands of one lawyer, attorney Danielle …

<http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/fbi-searches-court-administrator-s-office-1.1232356>

See all stories on this topic:

<http://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/fbi-searches-court-administrator-s-office-1.1232356&hl=en&geo=us>

Colorado Court Decision; No Attorney Client relationship between Guardian ad Litem and child;

Attorney-Client Relationship as it Pertains to the Guardian Ad Litem.

<http://www.harrisfamilylaw.com/updates/attorney-client-relationship-as-it-pertains-to-the-guardian-ad-litem>

Colo. Supreme Court Nixes Attorney-Client Privilege for Children in …

ABA Journal

A divided court ruled that a lawyer acting as a guardian ad litem is supposed to help the court act in the child’s best interest even if the child doesn’t want the lawyer to reveal information, the Denver Post reports. The case involves an alleged …

<http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/colo._supreme_court_nixes_attorney-client_privilege_for_kids_in_guardianshi/>

See all stories on this topic:

<http://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/colo._supreme_court_nixes_attorney-client_privilege_for_kids_in_guardianshi/&hl=en&geo=us>

Miami Fl;

Prosecutors and Guardian Ad-Litem Ask For One Trial in Barahona Case NBC Miami “It’s that simple,” said Guardian Ad-Litem Attorney Frances Feinberg. “We object because it’s more stress on the child, it’s more trauma to the child, it’s more depositions.” Prosecutors say Victor was starved, tortured and beaten by his adoptive …

<http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/Attorneys-Ask-For-One-Trial-in-Barahona-Case-133474723.html>

Here’s How You Can Help Children

The Ledger

I was her guardian ad litem. Guardians ad litem are court-appointed volunteers who advise the court about best interests of abused and neglected children whose families are under the supervision of the Department of Children & Families. …

<http://www.theledger.com/article/20111107/COLUMNISTS03/111109528>

See all stories on this topic:

<http://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=http://www.theledger.com/article/20111107/COLUMNISTS03/111109528&hl=en&geo=us>

Kappa Alpha Theta & Guardian Ad Litem Super Hero Run University of Central Florida Kappa Alpha Theta and the local CASA chapter, Guardian Ad Litem, are partnering up to host the first annual Super Hero 5K. Runners are encouraged to dress as their favorite superhero because every child needs a hero, but CASA children need superheroes. …

<http://events.ucf.edu/?eventdatetime_id=3137>

North Carolina Facebook GAL;

25th District NC Guardian Ad Litem – General Information: The Guardian ad Litem program is a legislatively sanctioned non-profit organization that actively …

<http://www.facebook.com/pages/25th-District-NC-Guardian-Ad-Litem/182028391878997>

Cascade County Montana

CASCADE COUNTY GUARDIAN AD LITEM, INC

crisis, knowledge as a guardian ad litem and other social service skills desirable. Computer literate and familiar with Microsoft Office, including Word and Excel. …

<http://www.casagal.org/News/Archive/2011/Documents/Office%20manager%20posting%2011032011.pdf>

Anderson South Carolina;

Guardian ad litem program needs volunteers in Anderson area Anderson Independent Mail Trained volunteers in the Cass Elias McCarter Guardian ad Litem Program helped more than 10000 abused or neglected South Carolina children last year, and the numbers will probably be even higher this year, according to officials. …

<http://www.independentmail.com/news/2011/oct/29/guardian-ad-litem-program-needs-volunteers-anderso/>

See all stories on this topic:

<http://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=http://www.independentmail.com/news/2011/oct/29/guardian-ad-litem-program-needs-volunteers-anderso/&hl=en&geo=us>

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A powerful 90 minute conversation addressing the strengths and weaknesses of today’s child protection systems and the civil rights of youth in America today.

Brutal truths and best practices.  Click on the link to hear the program.

Your comments are encouraged.

MikeT

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http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bill-murray/2009/10/13/community-matters–9pm-et-6pm-pt

More about the host & the radio show;

Part 1 of 3) On this episode of “Community Matters” Bill Murray, once a severely abused child, begins to publicly tell his life story for the first time. Now that his parents have died he feels free to do so. Mr. Murray, a long time recovering alcoholic and drug addict, hopes that revealing his past will help explain his passion for serving the community and improve his effectiveness on both the forum he’s founded here at LA Community Policing and the talk show he now hosts under its umbrella. On LACP’s “Community Matters” Bill advocates for members of society who are weak, vulnerable, innocent, socially outcast, abused, victims of crime, and the physically or mentally challenged. He often covers public safety topics such as domestic violence, child endangerment, missing people, homelessness, racism, victim’s rights, judicial reform and homeland security .. among many other things.

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Lawsuit Seeks to Stop State Welfare Agencies from Illegally Forcing Children to Repay Money Paid to Parents MarketWatch     November 23, 2011

In a lawsuit filed today in Alameda County Superior Court, two girls, 14 and 19 years old, are asking the Court to call an immediate halt to California’s illegal practice of forcing children to repay the old welfare debts of their parents or guardians.

Please send me related stories.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

… The county was threatening to cut this grant to repay almost $3,000 mistakenly paid to Irene’s mother in 1996-1998. “I don’t understand how the county can come after Irene for a debt that happened when she wasn’t even born,” said Ayers.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/lawsuit-seeks-to-stop-state-welfare-agencies-from-illegally-forcing-children-to-repay-money-paid-to-parents-2011-11-23

2)  I have spent thousands of hours in the presence of adoptive and foster parents, and only a few minutes of those hours were spent with people that did not need every nickel they had.   What kind of legislator would allow adoption child credits to be eliminated?  Heartless, Nearsighted, Very Spiritual:

Expiring tax credits add new obstacle to adoptions: Fears of ‘chilling effect’ accompany coming loss of financial help

Argus Leader     November 20, 2011

Congress’ financial involvement in encouraging adoptions appears to be nearing an end, a reality that some fear could discourage adoption in this state and country.

Families who adopted a child last year or this year and received more than $13,000 in tax credits because of it — whether they owed federal income tax or not — lose that benefit starting Jan. 1.

http://www.argusleader.com/article/20111121/NEWS/311210016/Expiring-tax-credits-add-new-obstacle-adoptions

3) Kentucky does not want its citizens to know how many deaths & near deaths child welfare is responsible for:

Lawmakers hope to hold hearing about Kentucky child-death records

Herald-Leader  November 17, 2011

http://www.kentucky.com/2011/11/16/1962216/lawmakers-hope-to-hold-hearing.html

KY ranks 41^st in Child Poverty, 44^th in Teen Deaths, & 42 in Child Abuse Deaths in the most recent collected data.

4)  Oklahoma; Why it’s not the social workers fault when a baby is found in a dumpster:

Expert challenges claims of progress at Oklahoma Department Of Human Services

News On 6  November 16, 2011

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services says it’s gotten better since a federal lawsuit was filed more than three years ago. But its own expert disagrees.

http://www.newson6.com/story/16060540/expert-challenges-claims-of-progress-at-oklahoma-dhs

5)  Pennsylvania (and Every Other State could) discover/s child sex abuse the most under-reported crime in the state.  As a long time guardian ad-Litem, I witnessed the most tragic cases of child sex abuse.  Many cases had years long adult on 4, 5, and 7 year old victims, most of which never were openly reported, none of which ever brought the perpetrator in front of a judge for the crimes committed.  When I wrote the book INVISIBLE CHILDREN  in 2005, there were 897 cases of child sex abuse reported in MN (I was one of 500 guardians, and I knew of 50 cases):

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review  November 18, 2011

Anne Bale, spokeswoman for the Department of Welfare, said on Thursday that the statewide child abuse reporting hot line logged 4,832 calls from Nov. 7-11 — the week after former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was charged with sexually abusing boys for a decade. That’s more than twice the number of calls the hot line receives during an average five-day period, she said.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/regional/s_767938.html

6)  Arizona flinches again at high profile child welfare deaths:

Arizona Republic  November 17, 2011

This is the third effort in the past eight years at some kind of child-welfare overhaul, each spurred by a spate of high-profile child deaths, including several that have been the subject of prior CPS reports.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2011/11/16/20111116arizona-child-welfare-task-force-cps-past-failures.html

Arizona ranks 46^th in births to teen moms, 40^th in Late/No Prenatal care, 36^th in Child Poverty, 38^th in Teen Deaths & 39^th in Child Abuse Deaths.

7)   How much money does New Hampshire save when more children are abused?  How much safer are your communities with more abused and neglected children being ignored?  How much better do schools perform with at risk children filling your classrooms (many of them on psychotropic medications and street drugs)?  The citizens will soon find out when services are cut to child protection agencies & service providers. Think Short Term.

NH: Rethinking prevention of child abuse and neglect ; Funding cuts put children & our future at risk

Concord Monitor (New Hampshire)     November 24, 2011

http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/294383/rethinking-prevention-of-child-abuse-and-neglect

 Illinois Catholics deny abused children foster / adoptive homes based on sexual orientation of parents:

Chicago Tribune  November 16, 2011

All religious agencies that declined to accommodate Illinois’ civil union law and refused to license same-sex couples as prospective foster parents no longer provide publicly funded foster care. A day after Catholic Charities across Illinois ended its historic partnership with the state, Evangelical Child and Family Agency in Wheaton confirmed that the state did not renew its foster care contract.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-evangelical-foster-care-gone-20111116,0,159896.story

My experience as a guardian ad-Litem taught me the terrific patience and sensitivity gay and lesbian couples bring to fostering and adopting.

People unfamiliar with the behavioral issues so often brought into the home by foster/adoptive children will find it hard to appreciate the skills it takes to parent and provide a safe home.  It seems wrong to me on several levels that a religious organization, would deny children that have suffered so much from having a family life, especially within a family that knows first-hand rejection, suffering, and the disconnect that comes from not being an accepted part of the family or society.

Religion should help and comfort people, not reject and punish.  We have plenty of that without religion.

From time to time KARA reports and comments on the state of child welfare and non-welfare in different states.

These reports are gleaned from newspapers around the nation with much credit being given to the Child Welfare Information Gateway Library.

Send me your newsworthy stories

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Below are state Child Well-Being Rankings by Every Child Matters/Geography Matters:

Ranking 50^th in births to teen moms and uninsured children: Texas (also 45^th in child abuse deaths)

Ranking 50^th in child welfare expenditures: South Carolina (also 48^th in child mortality)

Ranking 50^th in child poverty: Mississippi (also 49^th in infant mortality, births to teen moms, and overall ranking)

Ranking 50^th in child mortality: Louisiana (and 50^th in overall ranking)

Ranking 50^th in total tax burden of children well-being Oklahoma (also 48^th in child abuse deaths)

Ranking 50^th in teen deaths: Alaska (also 49^th in child deaths)

Ranking 50^th in child deaths: South Dakota (also 49^th in juvenile incarceration)

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I have not read the suicide note written by the seven year old foster child that hung himself in Florida, but I have read the most powerful suicide note ever written by a person raped as a child and it is printed below.  I have also had the experience of a acquaintance raped as a child confide in me (as the only person he ever told) what happened to him as a child and how it ruined his life until he sought therapy at 45 (he was over 70 when he told me & was still seeing the same therapist 25 years later).

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2011/01/08/child-sex-abuse-the-most-powerful-suicide-note-ever/

Bill Zeller, Princeton Grad Student And ‘Brilliant’ Programmer, Dies In Apparent Suicide

First Posted: 01- 7-11 08:40 AM | Updated: 01- 7-11 03:16 PM

Bill Zeller, a Princeton Ph.D candidate and renowned internet programmer, died Wednesday from injuries sustained in a suicide attempt. He was 27.

Zeller stunned the programming community with a 4,000-word suicide note detailing a childhood of physical and sexual abuse, which he had never before disclosed to anyone.

“I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions,” Zeller wrote. “… I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.”

According to the Daily Princetonian, Zeller posted the note on his website and e-mailed it to friends before taking his own life. The note in full can be seen below.

Zeller was a programming whiz kid, responsible for creating applications such as Graph Your Inbox, which visualizes Gmail use over time, and myTunes, which enables users to download others’ iTunes music. Zeller made the latter program while an undergraduate at Trinity College.

Zeller’s death has prompted an outpouring of grief on the internet, from those who knew him and those who didn’t.

“I’d first encountered Bill online years ago when he made a blog posting app, and then re-meeting him at a Princeton event last year, he’d begun by saying, ‘You probably don’t remember…,’” One user wrote on MetaFilter. “But we immediately reconnected about the cool project he’d done back then. More amazingly, he was doing super, super brilliant work at Princeton, which I found really inspiring and was so excited to see how far this young guy had come from such promising roots.”

Zeller’s note:

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning.

I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior.

The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug.

But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.
The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me.

I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties.

I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change.

I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me.

Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay.

I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls.

Because if being gay wasn’t the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.
Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her.

It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions.

I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough.

There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.
So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone.

Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone.

She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.
I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people.

The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you.

I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.
So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give.

I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was.

And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations.

All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am.

And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.
—
I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.
A random example:
“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation.

I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.
Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best.

One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live.

All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.
—
To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.
Bill Zeller
—
Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

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I was only one of five hundred MN guardians IN 2005, and knew this number to be just a fraction of the true number as I personally counted fifty sexually abused children in my caseload & the court system I was working in at the time.

Here’s what I’ve learned about child sex abuse in Minnesota & how it applies to child sex abuse at Penn State.

1)       No One Wants To Talk About It.  Even trained social workers are uncomfortable with this topic and reporting it can mean the fall-out impacting them – it’s easier to let it go.  I have witnessed non-reporting & under-reporting by people working in the field of policing, education, child protection & a friend who admitted years after the fact that he lived near a five year old girl that was being prostituted.  I tell the story in my book of a seven year old girl that was prostituted and not taken out of the home during 48 police calls to her home.

2)     No One Understands.  Very few people understand the lifelong impact the rape of a child has on that child and the adult that child becomes.  Suicides and dysfunctional lifelong lifestyles are common to untreated child rape victims. I have visited 4 year old’s in suicide wards & written about a 7 year old who hung himself and left a note.

3)      This May Surprise You; Our courts are almost incapable of dealing with child rape.  Children make a less than useless witnesses in their own defense.  Brain development of a child guarantees that a good defense attorney will “confuse the witness” which destroys the case.  I have attended conferences at both William Mitchell law school & Hamline University on this topic and listened to judges & prosecuting attorneys (the child’s defender) also admit to confusing the witness in these cases. *In none of the child rape cases in my caseload (about 25) were the molesters ever brought to trial (because the child is not a useful witness – no witness, no case).  If it is not seen and reported (it did not happen—see the problem?)

I predict that many of Jerry Sandusky’s sodomized victims will not come forward because of the serious stigma attached to rape and sex abuse in this nation.

A friend bought me lunch when I wrote INVISIBLE CHILDREN and told me why he had never talked about and would never report his being molested by a priest when he was a young boy.  He also told me what it was like to discover at age 45 the impact of that rape and how it had wrecked two marriages and three business partnerships before he realized his need for help.  He began therapy at 45 & now 70, still seeing the same therapist.

Americans don’t like to talk about sex in even a healthy manner & will further punish people that come forward to talk about it.  Boys almost never do, and only a small percentage of women do.  The stigma is real & we fear becoming part of a messy deal.  Then there’s the history of blaming the victim (even when she’s seven years old) makes reporting so much harder than it should be – see Penn State.

Children don’t have much of a chance in America.

Molesters like Sandusky destroy the lives of hundreds of children over their lifetime.  The child remains severely damaged year after year until help comes from somewhere (usually nowhere). I’ve said about several of the sex abuse children in my caseload that this child has never had a nice day in her life.

Anxiety, terror, Prozac & Ritalin are predictable parts of the life of an abused child.  They feel dirty and often blame themselves for the crime.  Not being able to function normally in school makes life miserable and too often criminal or sexually active & a preteen mother or father.  Just how does one un-teach sexual behavior to a nine year old without professional help?

Predicting the impact in human life years for each Sandusky type abuser, using my 70 year old friend as an example, if only 33 of my friends years are considered (from age 12 to 45), multiplied by just 100 victims (not a high estimate in a case like Sandusky’s) = 3300 years of damage & pain that is rarely reported and even more rarely treated.

In my 12 active years as a guardian ad-Litem, there was almost no effective therapy for the sexually abused children I worked with.

One sad family of four very young and sexually abused children, each had to be placed in separate foster homes because when they were together, the children would sexualize their behavior & at the time, nothing could be done about that.  These children were terribly abused in their birth homes & again by a court system that offered them a fig leaf.  The molester was left in the home and continued his evil behaviors.  The pain these children suffered was immense; the molester once kicked the seven year old so hard she went into convulsions.

How many children had been victimized by Sandusky before 1998 when he was first questioned by police for molesting a boy in a shower?  How many children did he molest from 1998 to today?

Child sex abuse in our communities  is a huge problem that affects many of the three million children reported to child protection services in America each year.  Cases like Sandusky are rarely identified and even more rarely reported.

Millions of children are impacted for life and this will continue until you and I began to better understand its impact and find our voice for reporting and helping children recover.

*I’ve had extensive arguments with a judge & my supervisor about a singular violent and extended rape of young children in a family and the cruelty of leaving this molester in the home (8 years later he was still practicing his criminal behaviors on a four year old boy).

**National  Center For Victims Of Crime www.ncvc.org

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Please visit the CASA website www.casamn.org & make your friends and circle of influence aware of the good work CASA does.

The mission of CASA Minnesota is to broadly support volunteer advocacy on behalf of abused and neglected children in our state. We believe that every abused and neglected child in Minnesota court proceedings should have a volunteer advocate working for their best interests. In pursuit of this goal, we do the following:

• Assist in the recruitment and retention of Minnesota volunteer guardians ad litem
• Provide initial and continuing education and support to Minnesota volunteer guardians ad litem
• Increase public awareness about child welfare and guardians ad litem
• Provide a network for communication among Minnesota volunteer guardians ad litem
• Advocate for legislative change, public policies and best practices that enhance the quality of advocacy and care for abused and neglected children

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http://boingboing.net/2011/11/03/twin-rivers-police-association-stops-selling-t-shirt.html

I’ve written on the police tasering ten and twelve year olds, the growing movement to try very young children as adults, and the chronic over representation of African Americans in jails & prisons everywhere.

In my experience as a guardian ad-Litem, all children want to be “normal” and lead nice lives, but too many of them are born into toxic homes and their communities are quick to punish and incarcerate instead of nurture & enhance their lives.

How can America’s youth ever hope to lead normal lives when so many of them have serious criminal records & drug problems (legal and illegal) by the time they are eighteen?

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

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http://boingboing.net/2011/11/02/video-judge-beats-disabled-daughter-for-using-the-internet.html

Pass this on & support public advocacy for at risk children (they need your help).

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

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This Indychannel.com news article points to Federal statistics showing that Indiana has one of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the nation.

“Some child advocates said they’ve seen some progress recently, but others said they are gravely concerned about recent abuse and neglect deaths and what they consider backsliding services”.

It was clear after talking with adoptive and foster families at their annual conference that Indiana’s failure to protect it’s children is due to the politicizing of children’s issues and not the hard work being done by foster & adoptive parents, educators, & social workers that are trying to provide homes, education, and services.

We all know that healthy children become healthy adults & contributing members of our community & that unhealthy children become preteen mothers & juvenile felons that cost our cities and states a fortune over a lifetime.

Wake up Indiana politicians.  Your citizens depend on you to understand basic humanity and economics.

Citizens, wake up your politicians (the children can’t do it without your help).

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

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More Indiana Children Die From Abuse, Neglect, Report Says

Child Advocates Chide Backslide In Children’s Services

INDIANAPOLIS — Federal statistics show that Indiana has one of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the nation, though Department of Child Services officials claim their statistics show progress. 

Recent cases of child abuse deaths are indicative of how some Indiana children fall through the cracks, and federal reports obtained by Call 6 Investigator Joanna Massee are counter to DCS claims that the child welfare system is improving.

Some child advocates said they’ve seen some progress recently, but others said they are gravely concerned about recent abuse and neglect deaths and what they consider backsliding services.

 

Deaths Of Children Spur Concern

The cases of Devin Parsons and Christian Choate highlight what many consider to be the failings of DCS.

Greensburg police found Parsons, 12, fatally beaten in June. His mother, Tasha Parsons, and her boyfriend, Waldo Jones, were subsequently charged with murder.

Randy Parsons, Devin’s great-uncle, said he wasn’t aware of the extent of abuse that police said went on in the boy’s home.

“You just never expect anything like that,” Parsons said, adding that he didn’t realize a DCS employee visited the boy’s home days before his death. “I think the job wasn’t finished.”

Christian Choate, 13, also had a long history with DCS before his death earlier this year. According to the agency’s records, Christian lived in a cage and received regular beatings during the last months of his life.

In May, investigators pulled Christian’s body from a shallow grave in Gary. His father, Riley Choate, and his stepmother, Kimberly Kubina, were charged with murder.

Records obtained by the Call 6 Investigators showed that the families of both children had a long history with DCS.

DCS Director James Payne said he thinks his agency is better at protecting children than ever before, and he cautioned against using child fatalities as a measuring stick.

“First of all, nobody in the system looks at fatalities as a measure of whether or not the system itself is doing a good job in helping protect children,” Payne said. “Often the fatalities occur without any contact before. Often they happen in circumstances that were unpredictable.”

Child Welfare Tracking Systems Inconsistent

Nationwide, child safety workers criticized an inconsistent tracking system for child deaths.

Because federal and state reports cover different time periods, the numbers don’t match, and that means the number of deaths can look like it’s going up in one report and down in another.

For example, the most recent Child Maltreatment Report released by the Department of Health and Human Services showed an increase in the number of child deaths from 2008 to 2009. The federal government counted 34 deaths in 2008 and 50 deaths in 2009. The federal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.

The state’s most recent Child Abuse and Neglect Report of Child Fatalities showed a decrease in the number of child deaths from 2008 to 2009. The state government counted 46 deaths in 2008 and 38 deaths in 2009. The state year runs from July 1 through June 30.

Payne said a better way to evaluate the system is to look at statistics, such as fewer children being placed in residential treatment.

“The system is much better now,” Payne said.

DCS is focused on helping children thrive in the home because taking them out is very traumatic, Payne said.

But the cases that involved Devin and Christian indicate that leaving abused and neglected children in a home can also be devastating.

Child Advocates’ Opinion Mixed

Privately, leading child advocates and service providers told Massee they disagree with Payne’s claims that the system is improving. Publicly, they choose their words carefully if they say anything at all, fearing retaliation.

Massee asked Payne if the culture at DCS discourages criticism within the agency.

“I suspect there is at some level,” but not at the executive level, Payne responded.

David Sklar, who leads the Children’s Coalition of Indiana, an organization that works to support and lobby for children and families, said child advocates and service providers fear retaliation for voicing concerns about DCS.

“They’re afraid to advocate for those clients because they’re afraid that the state might look somewhere else to provide those contracts,” Sklar said.

Sklar added that advocates are also concerned that the state is spending fewer dollars on therapeutic services that help address and prevent child abuse and neglect.

“We are starting to see a backslide,” he said.

Last year, DCS gave back nearly $104 million to the state general fund, money that could have been used for children. Payne said the agency did not need the cash.

When Massee asked Payne about these spending decisions, he granted RTV6 unusual access to the agency, adamant that his system is working.

During a roundtable discussion with DCS employees, Massee asked case workers about the difficulties they face on the job.

Supervisor Melissa Clark said she has seen positive changes during her 17 years with DCS, but she also said the work comes with challenges.

“It can be a life and death decision that we’re making,” Clark said. “We do see some turnover. It is a stressful job. It’s emotional. We deal with the crying child that’s being removed from their parent.”

Denise Brightman said she has spent 21 years working with families and worries about making a mistake “every day.”

While workers such as Brightman and Clark can only control the cases assigned to them, State Rep. Bill Crawford, D-Indianapolis, said he is concerned with decisions being made at the top.

Crawford criticized the state’s decision to spend less on services for abused and neglected children in need.

“There are too many child advocates from around the state of Indiana who are crying foul,” Crawford said.

Child advocates said the unspent funds could be used for services such as counseling for young abuse victims, clothing and food for foster kids and toward other services for families, such as those in which Christian and Devin once belonged.

Speaking privately, one leading child advocate told Massee, “This needs to be a call to action. The system will succeed when the private sector and public sector work together.”

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Children have no lobby, no voice, & can’t fight back when a MN Governor* states that “children that are victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the State Of Minnesota”.

There’s nothing a five year old can say to the governor of Indiana about the elimination of the state’s newborn screening fund (paid for by birth fees collected from parents), or the retroactive termination of adoption subsidies to the five hundred families that adopted special need children based on the promise that they would have assistance for their special needs children.

I doubt that a nine year old could clearly explain the problem facing California foster children because 1,000 state-licensed facilities match sex offenders’ addresses;

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/us/california-sex-offenders/

Will Nebraska’s five or ten year old old foster children be allowed to speak to the governor or at the state house about the total collapse of the states’s Privatized Child & Family Services, or what it is like to be abandoned by your birth family and the county in the same year?

http://www.northplattebulletin.com/index.asp?show=news&action=readStory&storyID=21588&pageID=3

More & more states are finding it useful to abdicate their responsibility to children & blame cost savings, immigrants, alcohol, or any number of flimsy excuses for why the government should not intervene.

The other industrialized nations are far more child friendly and a significant number of American states now compare unfavorably with third world nations.

Please share your ideas with KARA, Kids At Risk Action for making a louder, clearer voice for America’s children.  Pass this on to your friends & people you think should be more aware.  Submit your comments about what works and doesn’t work in your community.

*Tim Pawlenty

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

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The evening before my talk I listened to story after story of the “fluid” nature of Department of Child Services policy, families not being allowed to question decisions or policy for fear of being blackballed, and what it’s like to watch long established, workable policies disappear to be replaced by whimsy and bullying.

Many families voiced that they were not allowed to get together and hold foster/adoption discussions without DCS present. This sounds like a constitutional violation of free speech to me (if you know an attorney, i think it is a fair question, or call Bob Olson, 651-690-3494)

On Saturday morning, at the end of my talk, there were more written questions than we could respond to, but it was perfectly clear that almost everyone had strong feelings about Indiana’s public policy about abused and neglected children being based on political ideology.

The State of Indiana today feels it a better investment to pay $75/day per inmate in its prison system than to pay foster families any more than $18/ day support fees for its children.

It is hard to feed a child for $18/ day and anything extra becomes a real burden to most Hoosier families. Is this what we think of children in America? Not my America.

Dear Indiana legislators, please recognize that most adoptive and foster families don’t come from the top one percent (see Wall Street Protesting).

I found it difficult to believe that the state’s newborn screening fund, collected from birth fees paid by parents, has been captured by the governor & directed back into the general fund instead of providing services and supplies for infants with birth disorders?

How cold and cruel are your state legislators?

How could Indiana retroactively terminate adoption subsidies to the five hundred families that adopted special needs children based on the promise that they would have assistance for their special needs children?

Ethically and economically, these are terrible decisions that will cost Indiana children & citizens for many years to come.

Before these cuts Indiana Ranked almost last, 49th out of the 50 states in not supporting child welfare, 37th in child mortality, 47th in juvenile incarceration, 32nd in child death from ages 1 to 14, & 33rd In births to teen moms (As listed by Child Well Being, Geography Matters).

We are the people that once were the middle class, now being pounded on to make this nation work and bring it back to where it can be a friendly, safe place to live.

We know that healthy children become healthy citizens and that every cost benefit analysis shows conclusively that subsidizing healthy children is a far better investment than subsidizing malls or prisons.

It’s not only the ethical & right thing to do, it is the most economically sound, ethical, and right thing to do.

Thank you Indiana foster & adoption families for your commitment to the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

The tide will turn as the community wakes up to these serious & costly injustices to bring back a more child friendly public policy for Hoosier children.

Support the Indiana Foster Care & Adoption Association in its efforts to bring Change to Indiana

Pass this on – written speech below –

Good morning, It is great to be here,

Speaking for abused and neglected children is one of the most important things that I do.
Spreading critical information to raise awareness is a big first step in bring change to a troubled system.

Abused and neglected Children have no voice in the homes they are raised in, the courts that rule their lives, or the justice system that so many of them spend the rest of their days trying to Stay out of.

Children are not able to object when politicians use children’s issues as a political football.

Did you know that social workers are trained not To Speak about child protection issues outside of their work day, and it appears that no one is allowed to criticize Indiana DCS.

No one talked or wrote about the 4 year old girl I visited in the suicide ward at Fairview hospital or her 7 year old sister with a vocabulary of fifty words that was kicked so hard by her 200 pound sex abuser that she went into convulsions.

After 12 years as an active volunteer GAL I’ve come to know hundreds of at risk children, adoptive & foster parents, teachers, social & healthcare workers, judges & juvenile justice workers.

I’ve met allot of great people trying hard to improve the lives of at risk children with little help, few resources, & almost no appreciation. Individually, we can feel overwhelmed by a cold system – I believe that together we can have an impact and bring the badly need change to how at risk children are treated in this state.

Abused and neglected children have no lobby, the media doesn’t understand them, and our own community and politicians don’t seem to care about their needs.

This lack of awareness is why the people, programs, and policies that could make a difference in their lives go unfunded WHILE the jails continue to fill, schools to fail, & communities to suffer.

We here in this room, can explain to our friends, our networks, politicians & media, our stories and the economic and social costs of bad public policy.

Nothing was made public about the 4 year old boy who was removed from his perfectly fine foster home by a judge and sent to live with the man who had a court order to stay away from young boys because of what he did to them.

Andy was tied to a bed, sexually abused, beaten, starved, and left alone for days at a time for four years before child protection services intervened in his life; only after a teacher reported his full body bruises.

He is still my friend 15 years later… he has AIDS and never received the mental health services that could have helped him lead a normal life.

The judge that gave Andy back to his father thought he was saving the county foster care money when in reality, Andy has gone on to cost the county millions of dollars in institutionalization and mental health services,

Not counting the pain and suffering HE has brought to so many of the people that have come into his life

OR THE FACT THAT ANDY WILL CONTINUE TO BE A SIGNIFICAN COST TO THE COUNTY AS LONG AS HE LIVES.

So not only was this a huge ethical and perhaps criminal failure on the part of my counties child protection system, it would have saved the state millions of dollars to treat the boy fairly. If more politicians understood this, children would be safer & counties more prosperous.

We are all mixed up when we think we’re saving money by not providing children with help and better options while they are still young.

America’s institutions are now creating exactly the opposite of what they were designed for and we are all suffering because of it.

Friends, this is a civil rights issue and a communications issue.

These children cannot speak for themselves AND WE MUST SPEAK FOR THEM… that’s why I’m here today.

IT IS Because Social workers are trained to not speak of child protection outside of their work-day That,

No one knows about MY CLIENT, the prostituted 7 year old who was left with her drug addicted prostitute mother even after 48 police calls to her home, or what the juvenile officer on the case said to me when I asked why.

Because there are no beat reporters at the Newspapers due to budget cuts, NO ONE understood why the 18 month old baby girl drowned in the bathtub after 11 police calls to her home… several reporters called me for an explanation, but the media went on to blame the social workers instead of our understaffed and under-resourced child protection system that I had spoken of.

A few months ago when a MN teenager stole the family car and drove to Iowa and pointlessly murdered two clerks… his mother was crucified in the press even though she had spent ten years trying to get her SON mental health care with no luck.

Instead of concentrating on the people, programs, and policies that would make these horrible events less likely to happen we attack the caregivers & the people doing the work while politicians make political hay blaming teachers, SOCIAL WORKERS, and the VERY institutions they are SUPPOSTED TO BE SUPPORTING.

Rather than openly discussing the issues seeking better answers, we are all caught up in blaming the people doing the work & making children’s lives and our communities more dangerous and unhappy.

Today there’s a new mental health center in Red Lake MN; but it was not there the day Jeff Weiss wrote about suicide and homicide and how his mother wished he’d never been born, or how the Prozac made him crazy just a few days before he murdered his grandfather and fourteen others and took his own life.

He too had been asking for help for a long time. The center was built in response to Jeff’s tragedy just months after the violence occurred. The community agreed completely that the NEW MENTAL HEALTH center was necessary and had no trouble finding the money to build it.

Most of us in this room know what needs to change but we don’t know how to make change happen. We are so busy providing care and safety to children that there just doesn’t seem to time for anything else and we don’t feel that individually we can make a big difference in public policy.

We all experience how frustrating it is — to be a part of or work with underfunded programs AND overworked service providers. We are afraid of speaking out for fear of being blacklisted by a harsh and unfair system that changes its policies based on the current administrations political ideology.

This is not fair to children, nor is it fair to the families that raise them.

WE WATCH the steady stream of at risk children slip through the cracks – into preteen pregnancy and the JUSTICE SYSTEM.

The media’s confusion, politicians dis-interest, and public apathy is why there is a lack of funding and support for early childhood programs, reasonable foster care rates, day care, & mental health SERVICES for children.

Perhaps I’m an optimist, but I believe that it is this basic MISUNDERSTANDING that explains why millions of America’s non-birth family caregivers get so little support for the serious problems facing the children they care for.

What should be a central theme of media concentration & public policy discussion INSTEAD is printed IN the back pages of the newspaper until a baby is found beaten to death and then RATHER THAN SUPPORTING programs that would lessen the potential for that act to be repeated, we blame social workers and build one more jail cell.

MN’s PREVIOUS governor TIM PAWLENTY has stated that, “children that are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem nor are they the problem of the state of MN”

Wording much like this is part of his political party’s public policy platform. There should be no question as to which party is trying to dissolve the safety net for children in this nation.

Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, those 23 other nations with 200 year old democracies and solid infrastructures, America has fallen behind in almost all the quality of life indices for children these past 20 years.

A number of U.S. states are now comparable to third world nations in teen deaths, child mortality, child poverty and juvenile incarceration. We now lead the whole world in juvenile crime & sexually transmitted diseases among our youth.

Federally, the “Imminent Harm Doctrine” is the only law that protects children in America. This statute allows children whose lives are in imminent danger to be removed from a home. Because of this, children spend far too long in abusive and neglectful homes without services or a chance to escape.

WE NEED TO DO MORE TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM VIOLENCE AND DEPRIVATION.

The World Health Organization defines torture as extended exposure to violence and deprivation.

Too many children in America live for years in abusive homes and suffer from extended exposure to violence and deprivation. We are just now beginning to fully understand the life-long consequences of child abuse. Did you know that;

Children in the child protection system suffer from post-traumatic stress at twice the rate soldiers returning from Iraq do.

MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that 90% of the youth in juvenile justice have passed through child protection in MN.

Nationally, 50 to 75% of the youth in juvenile justice suffer from diagnosable mental illness & that fully half of that number have multiple, chronic, and serious diagnosis.

Almost all adult felons have passed through juvenile justice .

The reason I talk about this is that Marion Wright Edelman Founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has been telling us for years that the majority of At Risk Children are in a pipeline to prison.

Few of us know how serious this is;

80% of youth aging out of foster care are leading dysfunctional lives.

The United States has 5% of the world’s population & almost 25% of the world’s prison population

25% of America’s juvenile offenders are tried as adults.

As far as guns & getting shot; it’s safer to be an on duty cop in America than it is a teenager.

I am convinced our citizens and politicians simply don’t understand the depth and scope of the problem, nor the economic and social consequences of not supporting early childhood programs, daycare, and early learning.

We, who work with, live with and love at risk children must become empowered to be a voice for children if change is going to happen.

We must learn to speak with a clear and unified voice to represent the children that have no voice.

Until we understand and bring voice to the problems of abused & neglected children, the media will continue to blame social workers when a baby is found in a dumpster, jail & prison cells will be built instead of classrooms & our communities will remain high crime areas.

In a move much like just happened under past Governor Pawlenty in MN, your Governor has cut over a hundred million dollars from child services and diverted the money to pay bonuses to state workers that slashed programs.

20 million dollars was taken from the Healthy Families Program leaving over 4400 first time parents of at risk children without support services; A PROGRAM PROVEN TO BE 95% EFFECTIVE IN HELPING NEW PARENTS SUCCEED.

Thousands of Hoosier children will not be receiving mental health or addiction services, abused and neglected children will be left in the home without treatment or counseling and reducing education spending by more than 300 million dollars leaves many kindergarten classes at 1/2 day and INDIANA schools will continue to struggle for the most basic necessities.
How could the Indiana’s state newborn screening fund, collected from birth fees paid by parents, be directed back into the general fund instead of providing services and supplies for infants with birth disorders?

How could Indiana retroactively Terminate adoption subsidies to the 500 families that adopted special needs children based on the promise that they would have assistance for their special needs children?

Ethically and Economically these are terrible decisions that will cost Indiana children & citizens for many years to come.

Before these cuts Indiana Ranked almost last, 49th out of the 50 states in not supporting child welfare, 37th in child mortality, 47th in juvenile incarceration, 32nd in child death from ages 1 to 14, & 33rd In births to teen moms (As listed by Child Well Being, Geography Matter).

The U.S. Federal Reserve bank, under Art Rolnick IN MN, studied the economics of early learning and proved that the return on investment for early childhood programs are far better than subsidizing real estate or businesses (or giving bonuses to state workers for cutting needed programs).

There is no question that early childhood programs provide counties, cities, and states real savings and healthier citizens.

So why was one of my last official duties as a GAL was to remove 4 young children from a father who was guilty of nothing other than not being able to afford day care? Because our last governor redirected those dedicated funds back into the general fund.

WHICH MADE SUBSIDIZED DAYCARE ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO OBTAIN IN MN.

Did my state think it was saving money by forcing these children into foster homes rather than helping a poor working man pay for day care?

I’m a businessman; I’ve run the numbers and it costs way more money to take children out of the home and place them in foster homes than it does to help dad with day care payments, and it makes the families lives broken and miserable.

This was just like the false savings the judge thought would come from taking Andy out of a perfectly fine foster home & giving him to his criminally abusive father & WHAT REALLY HAPPENED DESTROYED THE BOY & COST THE COUNTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.

It’s not only morally reprehensible and the wrong thing to do, it is the most expensive, morally reprehensible and wrong thing to do.

Our institutions are now creating exactly the opposite of what they were designed to create.

Before I leave this slide, I would like to draw your attention to the resource websites listed and say a few words about them;

www.Aha.mn

(Adoptees Have Answers) a national program with terrific model in MN… worth study and consideration; Involves the youth & families in powerful networks and programs & communication. Wonderful people & a powerful program for adoptive and foster families.

www.AVAhealth.org

(Academy on Violence & Abuse) founded by an emergency room doctor who recognized that most of his emergency room patients had been abused children. Dr. Bruce Perry Study; 25% of Americans to be special needs people by the end of this generation…

www.invisiblechildren.org KARA Kids At Risk Action (KARA) public advocacy for abused and neglected children.

Your networking connection to Indiana Foster and Adoption resources.

www.ifcaa.org Is Your organization…, join it.

Please raise your voices and become a member of the Indiana Foster care & Adoption Association

Use these resources to find information and to get our message out. Tell your friends and circles of influence that you need their support & share this information with them. By all means communicate between conferences.

NOTE; You will find source material for what I have said here today both at the invisiblechildren.org blog and also in the INVISIBLECHILDREN book that you can download for free on the website, or borrow one of the copies I have provided for my talk today.

(Transition; 2 slides), Mental health,

like it’s meant to be talked about…
like any other health.
How to get it, how to keep it.
DR READ SULEK SAYS IT WELL;

Transition; children coping,

JUDGE Heidi schellhas,

Early in my GAL career, Judge Shellhas shared with me pages and pages of psychotropic drugs proscribed to 5, 7, & 9 year olds in her courtroom over a one year period…  She was very disturbed by this trend and we know that this policy is dangerous and needs to change.

Dr Read Sulek.The ability to cope as the best definition of mental health;

Dr. Sulek HAS created a 3 part, economically sound model for providing mental health care to schools.

It is A TERRIFIC NATIONAL MODEL… INSTEAD;

Because of lack of funding, MOST CHILDREN ARE PRESCRIBED PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS WITH LITTLE OR NO THERAPY TODAY.

33% of Georgia Foster Youth on psychotropics,

Most states would find this to be a fair estimate if they were too keep track also.

Many states have abandoned mental health services for children, more and more states are now sending all MISBEHAVING HIGH SCHOOL youth to jail INSTEAD OF TO THE COUNSELORS OFFICE for help with behavior problems.

Transitiion; Because of the media’s misunderstanding &the politicians willingness to make children’s issues into cold hard politics, there is confusion, distraction, deprecating, dividing and blaming where there should be cooperation & concern for three year olds living in dangerous circumstances.

We must stand up to those politicians that are making political hay on the backs of children’s issues.

WE NEED TO BE UNITED AND SUPPORTIVE OF THE PEOPLE DOING THE WORK AND NOT REWARD THOSE WHO ARE deliberately misleading and destructive & furthering their political careers at the cost of thousands of young lives.

THERE IS Not a religion in the world that abandons the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Recruit your friends to this cause.

Transition; These Key issues ARE written about extensively on the invisiblechildren.org website;

AS A PEOPLE WE DON’T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT;

1) Torture/Trauma/MENTAL HEALTH, SEX ABUSE,

THE World health org DEFINES TORTURE AS; EXTENDED EXPOSTURE TO VIOLENCE AND DEPRIVATION

MN IS NOW investigating 202 violent child deaths THIS LAST YEAR; over half OF THEM WERE beaten or shaken to death…

SOME OF YOU MAY REMEMBER THE Boy who died locked in a cage HERE IN INDIANA last year;

ALMOST ALL STATES ARE SUFFERING BIG INCREASES IN EARLY CHILD HOMICIDE & ACCIDENTAL DEATH.

DID YOU KNOW THAT 10% OF ALL SEVERE CHILD BURNS ARE DELIBERATELY INFLICTED?

2) Ready to learn vs. ready to FAIL,

Why are per child education costs HIGHER IN U.S. ? BECAUSE more and more OF AMERICA’S CHILDREN ARE NOT READY TO LEARN when they get to school. Until this changes the costs will continue to rise and schools will continue to fail. Don’t blame the teachers.

Weigh the cost of doubling down on the cost of teaching reading to third graders… (my volunteer work began when I saw several states using failed 3RD GRADE READING TEST SCORES to predict the need for prison space ten years out).

75% of inmates illiterate, ALMOST 20 % COMPLETELY ILLITERATE;

We know the economic and social costs of not graduating & that being able to read by the 3rd grade is critical to making it in school and making it in life.

Better and more available daycare and supporting education are critical if this is to be solved.

3) Pschotropics vs. Therapy,

Ritalin is a cocaine derivative that was banned in Sweden in 1968 because of suicides.

In America, psychotropic medications seem to be about all we have to offer troubled youth as there are virtually no mental health services available in most states.

Like in OHIO, all misbehaving youth are sent to jail.

In 2005, when I wrote the book INVISIBLECHILDREN, there were only13 child psychiatrists in my entire state – with one of them practicing in my county.

SHE WAS TERRIBLY OVERWHELMED AND COULD ONLY PROVIDE brief periods of her time to 5, 7, & 9 year olds that had been raped and beaten.

In most systems, the COUNTY PAYS RIDICULOUSLY LOW RATES AND THEN DOESN’T PAY THE BILL on time or in full.

Many service providers have just quit being available where they are most needed.

There is a huge need for consistent and high quality mental health services for youth in America. It would pay for itself in just a few years; our children deserve better.

Missouri model/Children’s Defense Fund reference.

4) Punishment model vs. Restorative Justice & studies that should be explained to every policy maker;

On the invisiblechildren.ORG website, our Century College volunteer intern David mast Wrote about a study of 254 youth that committed 220,000 crimes over 12 months, THINK ABOUT this is stunning…. What is this costing our community?

In the Ramsey County ACE study4 YEARS AGO, over 70% of the violent and serious crime caused by youth IN ST PAUL MN, were committed by juveniles from fewer than 4% of the families within the community.

We know who these children are and what they need, it would be much better investment to help them gain the skills they need to live rather than preparing them for a lifetime of incarceration.

I have written extensively on the fact that 25% of American juveniles are tried as adults in the U.S. EACH YEAR.

THIS MEANS THAT 200,000 youth ARE tried IN THE CRIMINIAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.. each year, ONCE THEY ENTER THE SYSTEM most of them remain forever.

WE ARE building Too many prisons and not enough schools and health services. THE PRISON LOBBY IS STRONG. The children’s lobby is us. WE MUST GET STRONG

Economics of failure;

Nebraska tried to privatize its entire child protection system and failed completely just last month, with devastating results for the children of Nebraska.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, A Pennsylvania JUDGE was sentenced to many years in prison for receiving payments for each juvenile he committed to THE STATE’S privatized detention system (many if not most of the youth he sentenced were innocent). HE RUINED MANY YOUNG LIVES. The judge’s prison sentence will not benefit the incarcerated youth or change their lives.

PRIVATIZING CHILD PROTECTION, JUVENILE JUSTICE & CRIMINAL JUSTICE APPEARS TO BE A DANGEROUS TREND IN OUR NATION.

I have many stories of abusive privatized juvenile system failures in MN and am convinced that unless facilities are well monitored, staffs better trained, and management not directed by political ideology or religious beliefs, that children will continue to suffer as I have experienced in child protection as a CASA guardian ad-Litem.

Two of my stories are absolutely indefensible near death experiences for my child clients while in the custody of private care providers.

ONE, A 35 MILE WALK HOME IN A T SHIRT ON A 10 DEGREE NIGHT BECAUSE HE WAS CAST OUTSIDE FOR SWEARING (HE WAS AND IS MENTALLY CHALLANGED), this organization was staffed by undereducated and undertrained young people grossly unqualified for the work they were doing.

THE SECOND EXAMPLE WAS A SUICIDE WATCH FACILITY THAT LIED TO ME ABOUT ITS EXPERTISE AND ABILITY TO DEAL WITH SUICIDE AND INSTEAD OF HELPING A SUICIDAL YOUTH, MADE HIS LIFE MUCH WORSE. This was a religious organization that put its own ideology in front of the needs of the child.

CHILD PROTECTION is a public health crisis & needs to be treated as such;

Dr. Bruce Perry is right 25% of Americans will be special needs people by the end of this generation (I personally believe that it has already happened).

Each new generation of abused and neglected children are now parenting their own next generation of at risk children…,

We must ask our policy makers, WHAT DOES 30 to 40 years of institutionalization COST?

WHAT IS THE cost of crime IN AMERICA EACH YEAR? 1.6 trillion is the insurance industries estimate in insurable losses.

JUST A FEW IMPORTANT FINAL FACTS BEFORE I MOVE ONTO WHAT WE CAN DO TO change all this.

In my homestate, MINNESOTA, our share of Iraq war is twenty six Billion dollars OVER THE NEXT 2 YEARS, THIS IS money that we have.

BUT WE DID NOT HAVE 6 Billion dollars FOR OUR SCHOOLS, ROADS, CHILDREN, AND HEALTH CARE THIS LAST LEGISLATIVE SESSION.

David strand, a KARA board member, has ACTUALLY made public policy on children’s issues in Finland OVER A TEN YEAR PERIOD WHILE HE LIVED THERE….and he talks about the huge difference

BETWEEN HOW THE REST OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD TREATS CHILDREN & HOW AMERICA IS TREATING its children

THE DANES HAVE DENTAL CHAIRS IN THIRD GRAD CLASSROOMS, SUBSIDIES FOR CHILDREN TO INSURE SAFETY, AND A GOOD EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE AND MENTAL HEALTH CARE ARE FREE FOR CHILDREN in most ADVANCED nations,

Did you know that; Day care workers are among the lowest paid workers in America?

Earning about the same as food service workers THAT ARE THE LOWEST PAID WORKERS IN THE U.S.

(in the rest of the industrialized world day care workers are well respected, well qualified, and well paid for the work they do enhancing the lives of their nation’s children).

The current assault on teachers & the dismantling of unions is a terrible development.

Think about it; Foster and adoptive families are being denigrated by the same politicians, who are blaming teachers for a failing education system and social workers when a baby is found dead or brutalized.

All because they won’t support the institutions these people must work in. What’s it like to be a teacher with 3 or 4 very troublesome Prozac children in a classroom of 35 or 40 students and not be able to control a classroom?

What’s it like to oversee twenty or thirty very troubled families as a social worker and have bad things happen?

What’s it like to have very disturbed foster children in a foster or adoptive home and worry about violence or terrible behavior problems with no help from the county?

Instead of supporting children and their caregivers in these circumstances, many politicians are destroying systems that work and damning the people that do the work.

Economically & socially it’s the opposite of sound policy making.

THE REST OF THE WORLD SEEMS TO KNOW THE VALUE OF HEALTHY CITIZENS.

One of our next big political fights is going to be raising the standards and availability of daycare in the U.S. Be on the right side of this argument.

MAKE SURE YOUR FRIENDS UNDERSTAND these issues also. Building awareness among our friends & circles of influence is a critical first step.

For as much talk as we have about the importance of children in this nation, we have not been putting our money where our mouth is. Let’s become a unified voice for children & change this.

What can we do?

In closing I’m making a personal request of you today to do 3 things that will make a big difference for our children and communities.

1) Find and understand an issue important to you & talk about it with your friends & neighbors. The more we learn and talk about these issues, the more comfortable we become in our conversations and the more likely we will be to speak out; Remember, The squeaky wheel gets the grease… no squeaky wheel, no grease & nothing changes – information is powerful.

2) Vote – and convince your friends vote.. tell them about your issue… tell them that not voting means less day care, fewer early learning programs, and far less support for children and education.

3) FINALLY, call your state representative, senator, and governor and tell them who you are, what you want, and why you want it. You pay their salaries, and they have to listen to you. Unless they hear from us on a regular basis, there IS simply no awareness of the pain being visited on these children

Be the one in your family to understand how public policy can be impacted.

Become empowered to be a voice for children.

Continue this discussion at our blog at invisiblechildren.org &

PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR RESPONSE TO THIS TALK & MAKE SUGGESTIONS THAT I MIGHT IMPROVE IT.

Thank you for the work you do and your commitment to at risk children

KNOW THAT WE CAN IMPROVE THE LIVES OF AT RISK CHILDREN BY STICKING TOGETHER AND SAYING OUR PIECE.

If we are successful as foster and adoption parents, we change the lives of a few children.

If we can come together and speak as a group, we will change the lives of thousands of children AND THEIR CHILDREN for many years to come.

I WILL NOW TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS. ******

Support the Indiana Foster Care & Adoption Association in our efforts to bring back sensible public policy for at risk children and the families that care for them.

Indiana Foster Care and Adoption Association
509 East National Avenue
Suite A
Indianapolis, IN 46227

info@ifcaa.org

www.ifcaa.org

Office: 317- 308-6555

Please pass this blog onto your circles of influence & those people you feel might respond to the politicizing of special needs and at risk children.

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Sign the State Adoption Subsidy Petition to help place foster children leave foster care for adoptive homes;

http://ifcaa.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=84&Itemid=130

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