Raised By The Courts, A Judge’s Insight Into Juvenile Justice
“I’m sorry, Javaris,” I said after sentencing. “I can’t excuse your crimes, but somehow I think that we failed you too. Your family failed you, the system failed you.”
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Raise Your Voice For At Risk Children (Give to the Max Day November 17th)
Thank you all for helping KARA advocate for an end to our public health epidemic child abuse and child trauma. With your help, we are raising awareness for at risk children’s issues and poised and ready to create lasting change.
Like you, I am an advocate. As a founding member of Kids At Risk Action, I have not stopped using my voice for change. And now you can join me in raising your voice by continuing to receive and share our weekly updates, buying KARA’s INVISIBLE CHILDREN book or making a contribution to show your support.
Please consider making a tribute contribution to show your support of those who stand up to say Yes to improving the lives of abused and neglected children.
Best wishes,
Mike Tikkanen
DetailsRace To The Bottom, Untrained Social Workers, Over Work & More Dead & Suffering Children In Indiana
“We have children dying in our region and we are awarded with recognition of system improvement. Really?” he wrote. “The timing of this award is hard to accept given the recent tragic death of 10-year-old Tramelle Sturgis.
“How many more kids will die before we all take a deep look at what is going on with child welfare services in Indiana and reverse the draconian cuts in funding and see how those cuts are negatively affecting the safety net of child welfare?”
DetailsRace To The Bottom
From California, as if life for poor children were not difficult enough, State sponsored Indentured Servitude:
Lawsuit Seeks to Stop State Welfare Agencies from Illegally Forcing Children to Repay Money Paid to Parents MarketWatch November 23, 2011
DetailsQuality Of Life
There is little that comes easier for a sixty or seventy year old person when it comes to raising children.
The physical and mental demands made on grandparents by their younger charges are tremendous.
From the bottom of my heart, Thank You.
From the rest of us, let’s see to it that they and the children they care for, get adequate help from our communities to make their tasks a little easier and more successful.
Happy Grandparents Day in advance.
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Punishing Traumatized Children (the beatings will continue until the morale improves)
Thank you Chris Serres & Star Tribune for identifying how severely the St Cloud Children’s home for children fails abused and neglected kids.
Children live here because a judge found their birth homes so dangerous that the child needed to be removed from the home and placed at the St Cloud Children’s Home.
Instead of providing a safe haven, this facility has been tagged repeatedly with multiple violations over many years. Children having sex in the presence of a staff member, head banging to the point of black eyes, swollen faces and abrasions.
To put a human face on what these violations look like;
As a volunteer CASA guardian ad litem, one of my 11 year old child protection boys (call him John) was misbehaving at a Cambridge Children’s Home.
John was forced outside by a low paid, undertrained staff member, on a ten degree MN night and told that he would be allowed back inside in an hour.
Instead, John walked home, in a T shirt, on the highway from Cambridge (35 miles). 11 year-old traumatized youth don’t often make good decisions (especially children on multiple psychtropic medications).
John was in child protective services (and this group home) because his father tied him to a bed and left him alone for days without food or water from the ages of four to seven.
John was regularly sexually abused, beaten & starved over 4 years living with his dad. When I met him, this 7 year-old boy was covered in bruises from head to foot and on both sides of his body.
DetailsPunishing The Mentally Ill (Minnesota is not alone)
Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune article supports a position I’ve held for years. By ignoring or under-serving people with mental health problems we are manufacturing state wards, preteen moms, and felons and this is making our cities dangerous and unsafe.
Our current policies of dumping the mentally ill in detention, jail, and prison places a huge burden on educators & juvenile, criminal justice workers, and especially the families (often grandparents, and foster and adoptive parents) that live with them.
Not much teaching gets done in a classroom populated with disturbed youth on Prozac. Safety and behavior management becomes the teachers primary concern at the expense of educating all the other youth. Our nations miserable graduation and drop out rates, STD rates (we lead the world), and crime rates (we also lead the world) are all tied to how we ignore and under-serve people with mental health issues.
Forcing foster/adoptive parents and service providers (educators, social workers, juvenile & criminal justice workers) to be the front line in managing mental health issues of the children and youth in their charge is an overwhelming task that rarely ends well for the children and youth. These children need professional guidance to overcome the serious issues that have triggered dangerous behaviors and the explosive increase in psychotropic medicating of five and ten year old children in our society.
DetailsPunishing Mental Health Problems With Horrid Juvenile Justice; In Many States, This Is The Rule, Not The Exception
Thank the legal community for shining a light on the abhorrent conditions facing mentally troubled California youth.
There’s good reason the Feds are denying California’s request to extend the time for compliance within their jails and prisons and this is a prime example.
14 years old, bipolar and placed in solitary for 22 1/2 hours daily for one hundred days. Read the whole article below. Mean people in a mean system.
California, your justice systems just stink.
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Public Records (the mystery of child abuse and child protection)
My story is triggered by a graphic demonstration of malfeasance by a public servant (Harper’s Magazine article below) and my response to conversations with Brandon Stahl at the Star Tribune and a former administrator at Hennepin County. Both told me how inaccessible important child protection public records become when someone decides for no good reason to…
DetailsPTSD study of abused children
In my experience as a CASA guardian ad-Litem working with children over twelve years, I have only rarely seen adequate services provided. A County Judge has provided me with the psychotropic medical prescriptions of the five and ten year old children that have passed through her courtroom in child protection
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