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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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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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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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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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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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

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The cold water pipe had frozen solid in the Minnesota winter & the landlord had turned the hot water heater to “scalding” to compensate for the absence of cold water.

My legally minded friend Bob Olson pointed out that if she were my child, an insurance claim would be made against the property owner & at least some justice might be served.

Bob gave me a name of a top attorney who I engaged to represent this girl. Within a year the attorney argued successfully in a mediation with the insurance company and awarded this child the top limit of the landlords insurance policy (the landlord had after all, allowed the cold water pipes to remain frozen solid that winter and caused burns that would leave the girl terribly scarred her whole life).

Today, this young lady has a college fund and is a little compensated for the burns that made her legs look like scales when she grew up in a crack house.

I expect that other very young children in child protection systems have been terribly injured with insurable claims that will never see the light of day because the crack mom don’t know & the caseworkers are not trained to see this as a solution.

It does not seem right to me that the only children to be compensated for their insurable childhood injuries should be those that come from healthy families. In fact, those that need it the most, don’t come from healthy families.

Bob can be helpful and reached at 651-690-3494

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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People commented that it was even worse than I had described it. One social worker stated that there was such a high bar set for responding that by the time she and her colleagues were granted permission to investigate, most children have spent two to three years in terrifically abusive homes and were damaged for life.

Her advice to us was to report animal abuse because animal abuse gets investigated & when it is investigated, those people see things that can trigger a social worker saving a child.

This seemed pathetic to me at the time, but now I tell people how important it is.

We are now suffering through the worst abandonment of civic responsibility to American children in my lifetime. The child that died in the Chicago home above, is another powerful example of a hardening of our hearts and disregard for the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Service providers are so over worked and under resourced that only the worst of the worst cases are being investigated. About one in three reports is investigated today where I live in Hennepin County MN.

When the 18 month old baby drowned in the Minneapolis bathtub after 14 police calls to the home, Star Tribune reporters called me to gather information on how this tragedy can happen. My related case had 49 calls to the home before the children were removed (a prostituted seven year old and her five year old sister).

Normally when a baby drowns or is found in a dumpster, social workers are blamed, much like teachers are blamed for failing students, or the police are blamed for “not caring enough” about my accident or rape.

The next time one of your friends complains about the indifferent police, problems in the courts, schools or social services, remind them that we the service providers are working harder than ever, with fewer resources, more children, and a growing feeling of abandonment.

The caseloads are so high, the morale is so low, and the failure to fund new programs and make small cost effective improvements because of budget restraints ensures that our failures and unhappiness can only grow until the demand for attention, understanding, and change is heard.

We are in this terrible place where children drown in bathtubs and die in cages for the same reason the 35W bridge collapsed and killed and injured 160 people. We think we’re saving money.

The economic reality is that maintenance of children and bridges pays. When we don’t spend the small money to save children, bridges, and our communities, we have to pay the big money instead.

Instead of saving the 5 million dollars to replace the gussets on the 35W bridge, we spent almost a Billion dollars to rebuild it (not counting the human suffering).

Instead of saving the relatively small amounts of money to make life bearable for abused and neglected children, we pay millions over their lifetime for chronic illness, the burden on schools, social workers, crime, preteen pregnancy, & prisons (not including the human suffering).

Convince yourself, your family, and your friends that not voting, or not voting for the party that supports programs that improve the lives of children is ruining young lives and destroying our community.

Don’t be confused by the fear mongering and political rhetoric. Every vote counts. Pass this article onto someone you think needs to see it.

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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Huffington Post

The mother of a 14-year-old boy who died Thursday is under investigation after police found more than 200 animals in their squalid suburban Chicago home.

Neighbors of the Berwyn, Illinois family told NBC Chicago 14-year-old Matthew Degner’s lifeless body was dragged outside by family members Thursday, who presumably hoped that authorities would not look inside the home. Police did, however, and were horrified by what they found.

“Our animal control officers who have been in some pretty horrific and disgusting environments said this home was easily the worst they’ve been in,’’ sheriff’s spokesman Steve Patterson told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Degner was pronounced dead at MacNeal Hospital Thursday afternoon. An autopsy showed that he died from bronchopneumonia.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services took custody of three of the boy’s siblings, ages 12 to 17, according to the Chicago Tribune. A fourth sibling, who is 18, was hospitalized.

Officials told NBC that all of the children were suffering from flu-like symptoms recently.

From the Tribune:

Officials said it was unclear whether the animals or living conditions were responsible for the children’s illnesses. A spokeswoman for the Cook County Department of Public Health said the agency’s communicable disease unit had not been asked to respond as part of the investigation.

Neighbors told NBC that the children appeared malnourished and never attended school. DCFS told the Tribune they were kept in isolation, and rarely left the home they shared with their mother and grandmother.

“Social isolation is one of the most powerful risk factors for serious harm to children,” DCFS spokesman Kendall Marlowe told the Tribune. “If we as a community never knock on that door that no one ever seems to open, we may never know how bad it is or how we can help.”

Birds were flying freely in the home and dozens of cats were sick, hungry and surrounded by feces. Animal Control also found dogs, rabbits, squirrels, one raccoon, two monkeys and two kinkajous, according to NBC. The Animal Welfare League in Chicago Ridge helped remove the animals, bringing 196 of them to their southwest suburban shelter. Anyone wishing to help with the rescued animals can visit AnimalWelfareLeague.com or call (708) 636-8586.

No charges had been filed against the boy’s mother as of Saturday morning

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We, the lucky ones; Loving healthy families with enough to get by and some to share.

When the three year old now twelve looks back and remembers,

The person that helped me in this cold scary place;

The courthouse, The foster home, The terror of not my family,

God help me I’m so alone,

Hope comes from caring people,

Pass it on.

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When I wrote INVISIBLE CHILDREN in 2005, a 70 year old friend asked me out to lunch. After the meal he explained how he told no one of his abuse at the hands of a priest when he was a twelve year old boy and how finally at 45, after 2 failed marriages and several failed business partnerships, he sought out a therapist.

He was still seeing that therapist 25 years later.

Of the children I’ve worked with as a guardian ad-Litem, a high percentage of them have been sexually abused. I have seen the horror of child sex abuse and how 10 or 25 years later, a troubled being still fighting the darkness every day.

Child sex abuse may be the most under-reported crime in America. It could also be the most under-treated horror in America. As a guardian ad-Litem, my first visit to a hospital suicide ward to visit a four year old girl that had been horribly abused was never made public, or when I worked with the seven year old that had been prostituted, or any of the family members that practiced child sex abuse.

There are successful sex abuse recovery programs, but our local governments and state agencies don’t support them in a large scale, and the under-reporting of abuse means most children do not receive the help they need. As these children age, the damage from abuse does not disappear – it is often magnified and becomes a serious behavioral problem.

The medical people at http://www.avahealth.org/ are working to make the discovery and treatment of child abuse a normal part of medical examinations (support them). This would be a big first step in identifying the scope and scale of the problem and making treatment available to those that need it.

This is the longest and most powerful and articulate suicide note I’ve ever read and it has great meaning to me for its power to relate these two incomprehensible sorrows (abuse & suicide).

I could not read Bill Zeller’s last letter without feeling the terror, physical and mental impediments, and daily reminders of his childhood nightmares, adult confusion and suicide.

From the Huffington Post;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/bill-zeller-dead-princeto_n_805689.html

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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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The world feels unfriendly and uncaring at a time when others are joyful. It seems so unfair.

It may help to know that you are not alone & that people do care.

Part of the problem is that once we start believing people don’t care, we can behave in a manner that makes it harder for them to care.

Be very careful what you believe to be true.

There are many good people, the challenge is to believe in good people and find them.

Another big factor is that we are all more stressed this year, because of the added poverty from the recession and how this multiplies the problems of families, workers, and friends.

It is difficult to be thoughtful and kind when sadness and trouble are at our own door (but it is important to try).

My recommended blog of the day is written by a former foster child & I think it the best I have ever read (do send me other great foster blogs);
http://looneytunes09.wordpress.com/”>

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

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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Overburdened workers are managing large numbers of very troubled children with minimal resources, educators coping with seriously damaged youth in classrooms without adequate training or skills, and parents that need crisis nurseries, available daycare, and mental health services for their troubled children are often left without any help.

These are the folks that have a hard time finding the time to call a state representative, congress person, or governor to explain that these Invisible Children will soon be visibly troubled youth that will blossom into dysfunctional adults if we continue to avoid the obvious holes in our institutions.

They need our help.

For years now I have tried through the CASA guardian ad-Litem program, speaking, and writing to bring information to a larger audience hoping that every mind enlightened would benefit an at risk child somewhere.

Feel free to download (FOR FREE) and email my ebook INVISIBILE CHILDREN to people in your network.

Share your ideas in the comment section for helping to identify and address the most glaring problems facing abused and neglected children.

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

Support KARA buy our book or donate

Become part of KARA’s email network by sending a request to join to;

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

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Attendees were able to fill their bags with worthwhile literature, bumper stickers and activities and fill their minds with the wisdom and insight of speakers such as Garrison Keillor, Peg Chamberlain and Marion Wright Edelman. Following the rally, those in attendance were asked to fill out commitment cards stating that they will do their part to assure that ALL Minnesota children are given a fair start in life by informing law makers and holding them accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of children.

The event was conceptualized by a gentleman from North Minneapolis. Four years ago, Darrel Young brought his brother to the Twin Cities from Chicago. Intending to give him a better life than what he could find in Chicago, Darrel quickly became dismayed when his brother was slain just 4 doors down from his home on the streets of North Minneapolis. His 17 year old brother was walking home to his brother’s house when he was shot and killed. The next day in the paper, the headline merely read “Number 37″ because Darrel’s brother was the 37th homicide in Minneapolis in 2006.

As a result of this event, Darrel pledged to honor his brother by being a stronger influence in the lives of young people. He began working with the youth leaders of YALT, Youth Advocacy Leadership Training, at the Children’s Defense Fund and the vision of the 10-10-10 Rally and March came into fruition. The youth created, planned, organized and led the March and Rally every step of the way; they will even continue the momentum by speaking at congregations and working with the 2011 legislature to pass into law issues that are of importance in the lives of children and youth.

Visitors to the KARA booth were able to watch a video slideshow produced by KARA, sign up to be on our email list and wear a bracelet displaying a fact about children that they were challenged to share with three other people before going to bed that night. The shocking facts stated on the six different bracelets included:

* Foster children are twice as likely as war veterans to develop PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder);
* 25% of U.S. youth in the Juvenile Justice System are tried as adults;
* 50-75% of U.S. youth in the Juvenile Justice System have a diagnosable mental illness;
* 25% of high school graduates in the United States are illiterate;
* Most states are growing prison spending much faster than higher education spending;
* firearms deaths of children in the U.S. are more than 10 times higher than all the other industrialized nations combined.

Attendees were also given a copy of Mike Tikkanens’s book, Invisible Children with a KARA bookmark that read:

Each day in America:

– 4000 children are arrested

-30 children die of gunshot wounds

– 4 children are killed by their parents

- 15,000 children are beaten, molested, neglected or watch their mother being beaten or raped

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Here are a few grandparent stories from my CASA cases a few years ago;

Grandma told me that “when that child is 18, I will be 88 years old”. She had adopted four tragically abused grandchildren, the youngest was a Quadriplegic.

My heart was heavy with just how much physical and mental energy raising these very troubled children were going to be for this dedicated grandmother. What strength it took this dear sweet person to make this giant commitment.

Another example of extreme courage by a grandparent came a few years later when after 49 police calls to a home, the two girls were finally removed from their violent drug using home because the 7 year old tried to kill the 5 year old in front of the police officer.

I believe that the 7 year old had been prostituted.

Grandma stepped in and adopted her grandchildren accepting all the difficulties that go along with raising terrifically abused children.

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.

Send us stories and information about how your community supports grandparents in these circumstances.

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One in 10 children now lives with a grandparent, study shows

By DIANE STAFFORD

The Kansas City Star
One in 10 children now lives with a grandparent, study shows

The number of children living with their grandparents has risen throughout the past decade and jumped sharply during the recession, according to a new analysis of census data.

One child in 10 now lives with a grandparent, the Pew Research Center reported this week.

That represents an 8 percent rise since 2000, with 5 percent of the growth occurring in 2007-2008, the research center noted.

A grandparent is the primary caregiver for about four in 10 of those children, indicating that at least one parent is present in many of the homes.

Nearly half of the children being raised by grandparents also live with a single parent, the report said.

Reasons for the increase in grandparent responsibilities likely include higher unemployment or home foreclosures among parents, single working parents who can’t support households, and incarcerated or substance-abusing parents.

Grandparents who serve as primary caregivers for their grandchildren are disproportionately black and Hispanic, the report said, but the increase in grandparent caregiving “has been more pronounced among whites.”

“The number of white grandparents primarily responsible for their grandchildren rose by 9 percent from 2007 to 2008, compared with an increase of just 2 percent among black grandparents and no change among Hispanic grandparents,” Pew researchers reported.

Living with grandparents doesn’t necessarily mean better financial circumstances.

Nearly one in five caregiving grandparents lives below the poverty line, Pew reported. Forty-seven percent of the households have incomes that are one to three times the poverty rate.

The data showed that 62 percent of grandparent caregivers are women and 38 percent are men. Two-thirds of grandparent caregivers are married.

To reach Diane Stafford, call 816-234-4359 or send e-mail to stafford@kcstar.com.

Posted on Fri, Sep. 10, 2010 10:15 PM

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/09/10/2214270/one-in-10-children-now-lives-with.html#ixzz0zJTEyiLx

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I understood the liability issues but could not abide by so many fearful regulations and did generally what seemed like the right thing to do for the very unhappy and disoriented child in my caseload.

Today I see more and more CASA programs thinking outside the box and providing ways for their volunteers to get more involved with the youth they serve as this Voices For Children Program in California demonstrates

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jul/22/volunteers-act-parents-foster-children-never-had/

Looking back at the overly stressed child protection system I volunteered in, children need a consistent caring adult in their lives.

For several of the children in my caseloads, I was that person as the other adults (social workers, foster parents, educators and health care people people) came and went over the years.

As economic chaos continues to shrink nonprofit & community resources for abused and neglected children, the need for CASA volunteers, staff, and directors to build successful programs that can put a consistent caring adult into the life of the children they serve is ever greater.

CASA is most often the only voice a child has once in our overburdened court system. The program is perfect for discovering people that want to help children. Do you support the CASA program in your community?

Many new and useful possibilities are being provided to children caught up in the child protection system as organizations like CASA to fill these needs.

Often, the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) is the only consistent adult in the child’s life and can make a world of difference just by being there.

CASA Minnesota
CASA National

Voices4children.com
CASA volunteers are making a huge difference in the lives of abused children. Tell your friends.

Volunteers act like parents foster children never had
BY SHARON A. HEILBRUNN, SPECIAL TO THE UNION-TRIBUNE
THURSDAY, JULY 22, 2010 AT MIDNIGHT

PEGGY PEATTIE / UNION-TRIBUNE
Candace Kaimuloa is going to college. She shyly chose a quilt from a shelf at Target while shopping for dorm accessories with her Voices for Children advocate Genevieve Rohan. Kaimuloa is also graduating from the foster care system.

- PEGGY PEATTIE / U-T
Candace Kaimuloa gets a push on a bicycle at Target from her Voices for Children advocate Genevieve Rohan during a shopping excursion to get ready for college.

VOICES FOR CHILDREN

What: Volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocates for foster children

Where : 2851 Meadow Lark Drive, San Diego, CA 92123

Who : People interested in volunteering should contact Susan Smith at (858) 598-2235

Information: speakupnow.org

It was a frame. A black frame, with multiple spots for pictures and the word “Family” in large letters at the top.

Most teenagers would pass right over it while shopping. It didn’t have any bling. It wasn’t terribly stylish. Heck, it wasn’t even in the right aisle at Target. It was abandoned in the furniture section by a previous shopper, and it caught foster teen Candace Kaimuloa’s eye.

Family.

Something the teen barely had.

She looked at Genevieve Knych-Rohan and said, clearly: “I want to buy this.”

Knych-Rohan understood.

For the past six years, Knych-Rohan, 46, has been the family Kaimuloa, 18, never had. The two met when Knych-Rohan, a recruiter for a local biotech company who is married and has two stepsons, became a Court Appointed Special Advocate to Kaimuloa and three of her brothers through the nonprofit organization Voices for Children. The organization pairs volunteer advocates with foster children in the region to identify and advocate for their needs.

“It’s different from being a mentor or Big Brother or Sister figure, because CASAs have court orders,” said Kim Penny, vice president of marketing and development for Voices for Children. “They are assigned by the court for this child’s case. They have access to court reports, school reports — really, access to all aspects of the child’s life.”

Special advocates spend a minimum of 10 hours a month with their foster child. They advocate for anything from eyeglasses and braces to transportation to and from school events.

The individualized attention can sometimes be difficult for social workers to provide.

“Social workers have a high caseload and are responsible for many children and their families, and are therefore not able to focus attention on one child at a time,” said Penny, who noted there are nearly 6,000 children in San Diego County’s foster care system.

“Voices for Children has a huge impact on what I do as a social worker,” said Steven Wells, a senior protective services worker with the county’s Child Welfare Services Department. “It’s really important that CASAs are around because they’re charged with keeping an eye on everything the child needs.

But it’s the intangibles that sometimes make the most difference.

It is the special advocate who celebrates a foster child’s birthday when parents don’t call or visit. It is the special advocate who is on the sidelines when a foster child plays his first soccer game and has no family in the stands. It is the special advocate who helps a teen with relationship issues in high school or does her hair before prom.

“The CASA is often the only consistent adult in the child’s life,” Penny said.

On a recent trip to Target, Knych-Rohan accompanied Kaimuloa as she picked out items for her college dorm room at University of California Davis. It was a first for Kaimuloa, who was using money she won from an essay contest to make the purchases.

“I’ve never been able to choose before,” she said as she eyed an aisle of linens, her smile exposing two dimples. “I’ve never been able to pick out what I wanted.”

She was learning about things like thread counts and closet organizers from Knych-Rohan, who insisted on snapping her photo in the aisles of Target and embarrassing her the way any mother would to a daughter about to go to college.

Kaimuloa is thankful for those pictures. Without Knych-Rohan, Kaimuloa would have nothing to fill the frame she found. Knych-Rohan began taking pictures of Kaimuloa and her brothers the day she met them, when Kaimuloa was 12 and her parents could no longer care for her.

Now, there are pictures of Knych-Rohan with Kaimuloa and her brothers at the zoo, ice skating, bowling, surfing and golfing. There are pictures of the family clowning around and supporting one another at school events.

Sometimes, Knych-Rohan was the only link between Kaimuloa and her brothers, as the family was separated into different group homes when they entered the foster care system.

“The court suggested the kids get together one hour, once a week,” Knych-Rohan said. “Invariably, there would be at least one or two of the kids who wouldn’t be brought. So I started picking up the older boys and bringing them to the family visits.”

Knych-Rohan tears up as she thinks about her relationship with the Kaimuloa children.

“In the beginning, they didn’t have a lot of motivation,” Knych-Rohan said. “Nobody checked on their homework, no one cared if they got good or bad grades. No one would come for their open houses at school.

“So I made a bigger deal about helping them get good grades and helping them with projects,” she continued. “I went to their open houses. They are so appreciative that someone cares enough to meet their teacher or talk to them on the phone. There are a lot of children who just don’t have one person they can call when they need to talk something through.”

Kaimuloa remembers the hesitation that came with allowing someone new into her life.

“At first I had a wall,” she said. “Why should I trust her? She’s just like everyone else that comes in and out of my life. But then she was consistently in my life. And I learned she was a volunteer, and she was taking time out of her day to spend time with us. I never expected that, and she was very happy. That helped us be happy.”

Knych-Rohan encouraged Kaimuloa, who missed fifth, sixth and seventh grade, to go back to school. She agreed, and was forced to take special education classes to catch up. She later took honors and Advanced Placement courses and served on the Associated Student Body, the school’s TV station, the volleyball, basketball and track teams and homecoming court.

“If I didn’t have Genevieve, I don’t think I would have been so successful in everything I’ve done,” Kaimuloa said. “I never thought I’d have anyone in my life that cared about me long enough to help me with anything. She’s like my mom. She was more of a mom to me than my own mom.”

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http://www.ldnews.com/news/ci_15513594

Getting more people involved in gathering and disseminating information about the issues of child abuse and what can and should be done to protect and serve vulnerable children has to be a good thing.

After many years as a volunteer guardian ad Litem it is clear to me that most folks don’t have a very good concept of the needs of abused and neglected children. It is also obvious that abused and neglected children are not being well served in our nation today.

Too many of them do not receive the help they need and are going lead dysfunctional lives. They hurt themselves and the community they live in.

Supporting positive change for the hardworking people that do the work to improve the lives of abused and neglected children and appreciating that results will always be a product of effort and an efficient application of resources is sound policy.

The focus must remain on improving the quality of services to children, and not politics and name calling.

This process can add accountability and provide a positive source of insight and overview of the complex system of children, courts, foster and adoptive parents, and service providers.

The downside is that if the panel is not well constructed and well managed, it can become a negative force of unsupportive, nonconstructive people that will not help build a more effective child protection system in your community. Be certain to bring only positive well meaning people that care about the needs of children on to your panel.

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amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

Child-welfare panel forms

The citizen review group will evaluate the treatment of child-abuse cases in Lebanon and 12 other counties.
By JOHN LATIMER Staff Writer
Updated: 07/15/2010 10:46:48 AM EDT

A citizen review panel representing Lebanon and 12 other counties is organizing with a mission of evaluating and improving the services provided to victims of child abuse.
The South Central Region Citizen Review Panel already has a handful of members and is looking for volunteers to represent Lebanon County, said its chairman, Sheldon Schwarz. The term is for two years and requires a commitment to attend meetings scheduled every other month in Mechanicsburg, where the panel will discuss and evaluate the policies and procedures the counties’ have in place to treat child-abuse victims.

A background in a related profession is beneficial but not necessary, Schwarz said. The current panel of eight members represents a wide variety of experiences.

“This is open to any citizen interested in protecting the rights of neglected and maltreated children,” he said. “We are not looking for employees of the (child-welfare) system. We are looking for anyone who cares about children and is committed to do something about it.”

The review panel is the first of eight regional panels being established across the state in accordance with the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. In addition to Lebanon, the South Central Region Citizen Review Panel represents Adams, Bedford, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Fulton, Huntingdon, Juniata, Lancaster, Mifflin, Perry and York counties.

Gov. Edward Rendell authorized the formation of the review panels in 2006 to make the state eligible for federal grants and other funding to benefit child-abuse services. Guidance and financial support for the panels is provided through a grant to the Pennsylvania Child Welfare Training Program, which is administered by the University of Pittsburgh. The training program has offices in Mechanicsburg, where the South Central Region review team meets.

The review panel is overseen by a policy board appointed by the Pennsylvania Child Welfare Training Program, Schwarz said. However, it is an independent entity that does not answer to the Department of Public Welfare or any other state agency. At year’s end, a report containing recommendations for improvements to the child-welfare system is produced and provided to the state, he said.

At this point, the review panel’s focus and goals are still being formulated, Schwarz said. Panels already working in some states evaluate their local systems by reviewing child abuse on a case-by-case basis, but he favors taking a different approach.

“We are still very much on the ground floor,” he said. “We are charged with finding what can be done to improve the system and make it more responsive to abused and neglected children. … For me, I would personally like to look at the broader picture — at the overall legislation and regulations in place to see if they are working well at the county level.”

Those interested in applying for a position on the South Central Region Citizen Review Panel or have questions are asked to call the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act coordinator at 795-9048 or e-mail PACRP@PITT.EDU.

johnlatimer@ldnews.com; 272-5611, ext. 149

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Blaming social workers for murdered babies is like blaming the police for who rides in the squad car and it won’t solve anything. Until the caseloads become more reasonable and the departments get the resources they need to improve the lives of the children they visit, the suffering and death of innocent children will continue to rise.

It is a terrible indictment of our society (what is it we value?)

What frightens me most about this story is the counties move to hide information about the continued death and abuse of children in the county system. Their argument is that it puts the family on trial and brings terrible publicity to the department.

The counter to this is that until the public and policymakers understand the numbers, the suffering, and the hopelessness these families are living in, the cycle will continue to expand generation after generation as it has for about fifty years. Change will not come without awareness of the need for change.

The topic is uncomfortable so we avoid it.

The truth makes us look bad so we hide the information.

Child sex abuse, neglect, and violence against children in this nation have grown exponentially and by not reporting this bad news we are only delaying the reckoning that we must face (and helpless children are dying because of the hiding and underreporting of information). Get the real information from the medical community; www.avahealth.org

A Minneapolis baby suffered the exact same type of bathtub drowning death last year after 14 calls to child protection. I was called by the Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters who were surprised when I told them that as a volunteer CASA guardian ad Litem one of my cases had 49 police calls to a home before the children were removed from the home (and then, only because the seven year old tried to kill the five year old in the presence of the police).

Abused and neglected children have no voice but the social workers and police that visit their homes. When a worker has a monstrous caseload, babies die and children suffer. Abused children suffer their traumas for life and communities bear that cost in the courts, schools, and unsafe communities that result from their double abandonment.

We have money for wars, big stadiums, and even in times of economic downturns we afford what is important to maintain our lifestyle.

Funding programs for abused and neglected children is the very least we can do to assert ourselves as a civilized people.

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Other recent child tragedies

Child’s death illustrates L.A. County’s growing problem resolving backlog of abuse cases
Though child welfare officials had been told abuse was occurring in the victim’s home nearly two months ago, investigators had yet to determine if he was at risk when he died Saturday. The county continues to struggle meeting investigative deadlines for many cases.

By Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times
June 30, 2010

The tip that abuse was taking place in the Long Beach home where 2-year-old Joseph Byrd lived came to Los Angeles County child welfare officials nearly two months ago.

But 57 days after opening an investigation into the allegations, social workers had yet to determine if Joseph was at risk when the toddler was pronounced dead Saturday. Coroner’s officials have listed the case as a homicide.

At the time of Joseph’s death, social workers were still looking into allegations of abuse and neglect in a family that already had been investigated five times, according to sources familiar with their history. Three of those cases were substantiated, sources told The Times.

Joseph’s case is a grim illustration of the growing number of abuse and neglect investigations still open past the state’s 30-day deadline.

Despite pledges to resolve Los Angeles County’s mounting backlog, the crisis has deepened significantly in recent weeks. At last count, cases involving more than 20,000 children reported at risk of abuse or neglect had not been fully investigated within 30 days — up from 18,000 in May. Even with a temporary extension allowing L.A. County 60 days to complete its inquiries, social workers were unable to meet the new deadline in 5,400 cases involving more than 12,000 children — up from 3,700 such cases last month.

Joseph’s father told doctors at Long Beach Memorial Hospital that his son drowned in a bathtub while he was unattended. Authorities, however, have questioned his story. Coroner’s records indicate suspicion that Joseph had ingested drugs, although tests to determine toxicology will not be complete for weeks.

Long Beach police officials this week asked for the public’s help in determining what happened.

What is clear is that Department of Children and Family Service leaders continue to struggle to complete timely investigations.

“Right now, our caseloads for these workers are within the yardstick where we want to be,” Supervisor Gloria Molina said Tuesday. “If you tell me we need more people to make the same dumb mistakes without proper supervision, I disagree.”

In May, department head Trish Ploehn said additional staff was needed to expedite investigations.

“The social worker staff simply cannot keep up with everything we are asking them to do,” she said, adding that she planned to make the case to county supervisors that hundreds of additional social workers were needed. “All of the things that equate with quality do take time.”

In the end, Ploehn never submitted a budget request for additional social workers, citing the county’s tight finances.

Instead, department officials have relied on temporary reassignments of existing staff members to the investigative unit, increasing the number of child abuse investigators to 992 from 596. Even so, the backlog has gotten worse, and many of those workers, whose regular jobs are considered essential, soon must return to their previous posts.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said there was “no excuse having a backlog of this magnitude” in a department that has grown to nearly 4,000 workers from about 2,900 nine years ago. He expressed growing frustration with what he described as a lack of strong management and reactive policymaking.

“Not only is their well-being on the line,” he said of the children, “their lives are on the line.”

Molina said there was “obviously” a deep disagreement over the department’s direction.

“Right now, I am surprised she is not being more efficient and effective,” she said of Ploehn. But Molina said Ploehn’s job was not in jeopardy.

Lizelda Lopez, spokeswoman for the California Department of Social Services, said Tuesday that her agency remains supportive of L.A. County’s efforts. The county, Lopez said, “is doing more than is required by regulations” in its child abuse investigations.

Ploehn also declined to respond to questions about the increasing number of cases that remain open past both deadlines. In a statement, she said the department was “legally unable to share any information on the details of this investigation until it is completed.”

“The death of any child is tragic and heartbreaking, and it pains all of us whenever it happens, no matter the circumstances,” Ploehn said. The increase in the backlog of cases was “consistent with seasonal trends,” she said.

In recent months, Ploehn has dramatically reduced the number of child death case records released to the public. Under a law that went into effect in 2008, authorities are supposed to make public the records for child fatalities resulting from abuse or neglect. Department officials in L.A. County disclosed case histories in almost all such deaths that occurred in the first 18 months of the law.

After a series of stories on the deaths in The Times last year, the release of records slowed dramatically. Of the 23 most recent deaths resulting from abuse or neglect since June last year, the department has released limited records in only two cases, citing a provision in state regulations that allows the district attorney or police agencies to redact information that might jeopardize a criminal investigation. Without such disclosures, determining how many child fatalities in the county involve families or children with previous department involvement is essentially impossible.

Los Angeles County district attorney’s officials told The Times that they have been unable to locate any staffers who objected to the release of the information in the cases where they have been cited as objectors. Department officials declined to identify the police agencies they say objected in the other cases.

garrett.therolf@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Back up; L.A. County welfare agency refuses to release files on children’s deaths
Officials cite 2007 disclosure law in barring access to data on recent cases.
February 13, 2010|By Garrett Therolf
Los Angeles County’s embattled child welfare agency has clamped down on the release of information about 12 recent deaths among children who have passed through the child welfare system.

The decision follows a series of articles in The Times last year that detailed flawed casework. The cases prompted some reforms at the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, including enhanced training for social workers.

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This severely disabled child was turned away from the Lake City Medical Center after being alerted by social workers of his urgent need of medical care;he was sent home with a note (where he had just come from).

The story caught my eye because it similar to what happened to a child in my guardian ad-Litem caseload except that my young friend got immediate relief from a toxic environment when the care provider quickly determined that this condition must be investigated.

Starved, beaten, tied to a bed and sexually abused, my seven year old needed an advocate. The damage lasts for a lifetime. Nothing makes it disappear. Catching and treating horrific abuse early allows a greater chance at recovery.

The only voice a young child has when being terribly abused is a teacher, a social worker, a medical person or some other caring adult.

Children have no voice of their own. They can’t understand what is happening to them and they often don’t know it is wrong.

They only know that it is their own life and that it hurts.

That terribly abused children can be turned away from hospitals and sent directly back into an abusive home speaks volumes about our community.

Today 2/3 of child abuse calls are being screened out of child protection in Hennepin County. The national average is 1/3.

Yes, I agree that providing more services to people that are screened out is a positive approach (the argument for the greater number of screened out calls). My experience has been that the system is overwhelmed and underfunded, and this young boy may be out of the home, but what about others like him that go unreported or untreated?

How do you think the hospital in your community would handle such a case?

I know people that refuse to believe that the abuse being reported could possibly be occurring (especially the sexual abuse of very young children).

There are three million cases of child abuse reported in this nation each year (when we count them).

Let’s implement procedures to make sure that this sort of error is minimized. “What you do to your children, they will do to your society”. Pliny 2500 years ago

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Lake City ER sends starving disabled boy home with just a note

Lake City Medical Center cited for violations.

By PAUL WALSH and WARREN WOLFE, Star Tribune
Last update: June 17, 2010 – 8:16 PM

A severely disabled boy was wrongly sent home from a hospital emergency room in Lake City, Minn., without an assessment or treatment — but with a note saying he was well enough to return to school — after Wabasha County officials ordered the boy’s parents to seek treatment for his unexplained injuries and weakness.

The next day, officials say, local authorities sent an ambulance to the boy’s home and took him to a different hospital, where he was admitted for several days with what state investigators described as “severe malnutrition, starvation, bedsores and uncontrolled seizures.”

In a report made public Thursday, the Minnesota Department of Health cited Mayo Health System’s Lake City Medical Center for violating two federal rules on emergency room care. They concluded that a nurse at the hospital granted the father’s request that the boy not be examined but be sent home with a note.

Lake City Police Chief Lyle Schumann said Thursday his office is investigating whether the family should be charged with a crime.

Under federal rules, the hospital should have recorded the boy’s March 4 visit to the emergency room and conducted a medical assessment to determine whether he required emergency treatment — regardless of what the father wanted — said Stella French, who supervises the Health Department investigators.

The Health Department did not offer any identifying information about the boy, his family or any other individuals. County, hospital and police officials also declined to release the boy’s name, age or school.

How the story unfolded

According to the Health Department report:

School nurses examined the boy on March 1 and 2 after he was absent for a week. They saw several open lesions on his back and noted he could not walk or feed himself and lay on a school cot in the fetal position. They contacted the parents both days and urged that he see a doctor. After the boy missed school on March 3, the school notified county social service officials of the boy’s “urgent need for medical care.”

Social service and law enforcement officials told the family to take the boy to an emergency room as soon as possible. The father took the boy to Lake City Medical Center that evening. He told the nurse that he didn’t want his son examined by a doctor but wanted a note saying his son could return to school.

On a prescription pad, the nurse wrote that the boy was “vitally stable and there is no emergent/urgent need that needs our attention.”

When Wabasha County social service officials discovered the next day that the boy had not been treated, they went to the house, were given the nurse’s note by the father and immediately called an ambulance.

An administrative nurse at Lake City told the Health Department she reviewed the case with the emergency room nurse and counseled him about his performance.

Protocols not followed

In a statement Thursday afternoon, the hospital said “the child’s condition did not appear to be serious when he was first seen in our emergency department.”

However, it acknowledged “our policies and protocols, designed to protect patients, were not fully followed.”

The hospital also noted that “we identified and implemented several improvements to our processes as a result of this situation to ensure that an incident like this does not happen again.”

The nurse cited in the Health Department report is still employed at the hospital in acute care, said hospital spokeswoman Asia Christensen. She declined to say whether the nurse was disciplined in any way. No appeal of the state’s findings is planned, Christensen said.

Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482

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In defense of the profession, in the twelve years I worked as a guardian ad-Litem, this story did not happen to me. The social workers I was engaged with were truly committed and in this line of work because they loved kids and wanted to make a difference in their community. Social work is a calling (being a nanny pays way better and is much easier).

It is my belief that people want to do their work well, especially when it involves the welfare of abandoned, helpless children. This story does not reflect that.

When a person fails to complete a simple task, and a tragedy occurs, we (the system/management) should find the problem and insure that it can’t happen again. 

The problem lies it a system that is not well designed to see to the well being of the children it is meant to serve. This system is being undermined by our current economic chaos, and children are suffering.

There needs to be accountability and a greater responsiveness built into our child protection system. This will not happen without public support and more resources.

Not valuing children reflects badly on our society and it is beginning to show.

If children were as important as expensive business machines, the doctor would have had the authority to save this child’s life (or some other fail safe process would have been in place.

KARA supports more training, better resources, and greater attention to the needs of social workers, teachers, and service providers to at risk children, because it is difficult work.

This unfortunately cannot change what happened to Portia.

She would have turned 13 this summer, had she lived beyond seven weeks. She could have been my daughter, had I chosen to foster and later adopt her as I had with her older brother and sister.

Instead, all that I have to remember her by are the pictures from her big sisters 3rd birthday and the bulletin from her funeral. Her tiny casket was paid for by Ramsey County Child Protection; her grave was unmarked.

I knew of Portia before she had ever entered the world. The child protection worker assigned to her older siblings called to inform me that my foster children’s mother, Faith, was expecting again.

This next child would be her seventh. The six children she had already birthed were split up in four different homes – three foster homes and one child was with his father.

After the six children, ranging in age from nine months to 14 years, were removed from her care after being left alone in their apartment for five days, it was decided that the next baby would be removed at birth and placed directly into foster care. Because the one year old and two year old were placed with me, it made sense to make a placement agreement for her unborn child to be with her siblings.

I was reluctant to accept this placement, this child. Her one-year-old brother had come to me, for the first time, when he was two weeks and six days old.

Faith probably nursed him in the first few weeks of life. The act of breastfeeding a newborn would normally be considered a loving act by a mother, giving her baby the healthiest food available, but when the mother is using crack cocaine it is as bad as mainlining the drug right into the newborn’s veins.

When my son came to me, his tiny frame would tense up and shake as if he were having a seizure. Not knowing what to do, I did what came to me instinctually. I would hold him and rock him and soothe him until the shaking would pass. This two-week-old baby was going through withdrawal. By removing him from the mother and placing him with me, his supply had been cut off and he was experiencing life, for the first time since conception, without the influence of drugs.

In the seven-and-a-half months that my son was with me following his initial placement in my home, I watched him grow from a tiny newborn to a robust eight month old.

He still harbored the effects of being addicted to cocaine, mainly a high sensitivity to sound, but he was still hitting all of his developmental milestones and was on target for both his height and weight. He even said, “I love you” as clear as a bell when he was only six months old. Of course he only said it once and I was the only one present to hear him, but he said it and I quickly called everyone I knew to share this accomplishment.

When his mom got out of jail, he was returned to her. However, Faith heard the cry of crack louder than she heard the cries of her children and she very quickly went back to her drugs and prostituted herself to support her habit.

Her six children were only with her five weeks before the police went into the apartment on a Sunday afternoon and found that the children had been alone since Wednesday. Two weeks later, after a short stay in a shelter, my son came back to me. The social worker asked if I would also take his two-year-old sister.

Here we were several months later and my children’s birth mother was expecting again. Although initially I wanted to say, “yes” to this child, my mind became consumed with all of the “what-ifs?”

I knew this child was also being exposed to crack in utero, just like my son; what if the challenges of taking care of another crack baby were too much for me? My son and his sister were two of thirteen children I took care of on a regular basis, at least three of the children were born addicted to crack and three had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. (It is not certain if my daughter, the child who was two at the time, was exposed to crack in utero.

To this day she does not exhibit the symptoms that I have come to recognize as the effects of crack on a fetus.) Could I handle another new born experiencing withdrawal considering everything else I had on my plate?

Towards the beginning of her second trimester, my children’s birth mother was arrested and sentenced to serve enough time that she would likely carry out the remainder of her pregnancy in jail. I was relieved to know this. I thought this would cut off Faith’s supply of drugs and therefore the child would not be born addicted.

Sadly, her little heart and other organs were formed while her mother was using crack, but at least she would not be born addicted. I felt confident that I could handle this child and I was ready to move forward with the placement agreement, once little Portia was born.

It didn’t take long for folks more seasoned than myself to laugh at my expectation that this child would not be born addicted to crack because her mom was in jail. I remember one worker saying to me “Honey, if you think this mom isn’t getting her fix in jail, I have some great property in Alaska I would like to sell you.”

I guess I was naïve in thinking that jail kept the bad guys in and the bad things out. I was told that it was very likely that this baby would be exposed to crack through out her entire gestation period. I called the social worker and told her to come up with another placement plan.

When Portia was born, she was placed in the home of a trusted foster parent, a woman with several decades of experience in the system. In the mid-nineties, however, crack was still a relatively new phenomenon. All of us raising crack kids were still trying to figure out just how this exposure on the fetus would impact the child through out its life.

I don’t know what this woman’s experience was in caring for babies with this unique special need and none of us knew, at the time, what the long term impact of crack exposure would mean for these children. Another one of my children, born four years before Portia, participated in a long-term study investigating the effects of crack exposure in utero on the child’s development.

By the time Portia was born, this study had not yet been released, but I didn’t need a study to tell me that her needs would be very great; I had real life experience, and the bags under my eyes to prove it!

Portia was born July 30, 1997, two weeks after her big sister’s third birthday. We waited until the baby was born and had a party at our home celebrating both occasions. The birth mother had been allowed a daytime visitation so she came to our home with all of her children, including the baby.

I remember holding Portia and rocking her on the glider chair in my yard. She was the same age as my son when he came to me at two weeks old twenty months earlier, but Portia seemed very different. My son would shake violently, his whole body stiffening up and then relaxing. Portia didn’t do this.

Her body didn’t shake from violent tremors; her breath did not intensify and then slow back into a rhythm of deep, slow breathing. By contrast, her breath seemed very shallow, her skin appeared dusky. My neighbor even commented, “Something is wrong with that baby.” We didn’t know at that time that it was her heart.

On September 19, the social worker called to tell me that Portia’s was being admitted to the hospital and needed surgery on her heart. She asked me if I knew where Faith was because she would need to sign consent forms before her daughter could have the operation. I told her that I wasn’t certain, but I had heard that she might be in Chicago.

My children’s five-year-old brother, the sibling who lived with his father, came over regularly to play at our home. At one point either he or his dad, Leroy, mentioned something about the mom staying with family in Chicago.

The social worker grumbled at the notion that she could be three states away. She asked if I had a number where she could be reached. I didn’t, but I was able to place a call to Leroy and he gave me a possible contact for Faith. When I gave her the number, she mentioned “I could take this before a judge [and obtain consent to perform the surgery], but it is a Friday afternoon”.

“No one wants to do that.”

I wasn’t sure who she meant, “didn’t want to do that”: the judge who would need to sign the paper, the doctor who would need to do the surgery, or her, the child protection worker, who would need to go before the judge.

It struck me as an odd comment, but at the time I was entertaining a gaggle of kids and she needed to get off the phone with me and dial the number I had given her. I wasn’t going to ask her to explain what she meant.

The phone number was a success and Portia’s mother was found. After being told the situation, that her daughter needed this surgery to live and that she needed to sign the consent form for the surgery to be performed, she boarded the next available bus back to the Twin Cities, was taken to the hospital and the paperwork was signed.

She arrived at 2 o’clock in the morning on September 20th; about 15 hours after the doctor said the baby needed surgery.

Portia died shortly after being brought into the operating room. Leroy called me early in the morning and told me that the surgery had been delayed too long. There was no way the doctors could save her at that point.

It is now thirteen years later and even most elementary school kids can tell you that “crack kills.” But beyond the mother’s drug use, could this baby have been saved at any other point along the way? When a child attends daycare, when they are enrolled in school or if they even go overnight to a camp, a parent is required to give consent that medical care can be provided in their absence.

Why is this simple procedure simply overlooked when a child is placed in foster care?

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It is painful to know that children who come from trauma and abuse, are now finding fewer services, more burdened staff, less resources, and inevitably, less chance of finding help in many communities.

Seema points out that a Hawaii program that had serviced 4000 families now services 100, South Carolina now has caseload ratios as high as 60 to 1 in some regions & that nearly half of the abused children murdered in Texas have been investigated by Child Protective Services.

I did know most of the financial problems facing the people and programs created to help abused and neglected children. I also know that eliminating those programs will not save communities any money*.

I did not know that children raised in families with incomes under $15,000 are 22 times more likely to to be abused and I am well aware of the dismal standing of certain states when it comes to how they treat children.

*The articles underlined herein give several perspectives on the near sightedness that has unfortunately captured otherwise clear thinking policymakers for many years now. Until a longer view is adopted, America’s prisons will remain full, its schools troubled, and its streets unsafe.

Seema Jilani’s Article;

By SEEMA JILANI, McClatchy Newspapers
Last update: May 28, 2010 – 6:09 PM
We doctors are a cynical bunch. The novelty of the white coat expires after a short time treating drug addicts, combative schizophrenics and patients whose idea of “how-do-you-do” is threatening a lawsuit. This is to say nothing of conducting pelvic exams, bosses with God complexes and extracting a baseball bat that got stuck up someone’s backside when he “fell on it.”
Few things shock us, but cruelty to children is one of them.

Behind closed doors, we even pontificate on the need for strict contraception laws. “Birth control should be sprayed into the air,” we muse. “If people want children, they should pass drug tests and home evaluations.” Another of our suggestions is that the government should lace fast food with trace amounts of contraceptives, so that people who eat it occasionally are unaffected, but those who exist on it are sterilized.

Bitter? Maybe. Harsh? Absolutely.

The inconceivable becomes plausible, however, after you see a 9-month-old boy test positive for mommy’s crystal meth and shaken baby syndrome render a 6-month-old girl blind, or after treating the burns on a young girl who was dipped in boiling oil and the cigarette burns on her sister’s back in the shape of a marijuana leaf. When a 13-year-old boy dies from heat stroke because he was chained to a tree overnight, “Proposition McSterilization” starts to make sense.

Three million reported cases of child abuse and neglect result in 2,000 deaths in the United States annually, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Since 2001, 30,000 American children have been killed in their own homes, taken their own lives or been murdered in their own neighborhoods, according to Every Child Matters, a child advocacy group.

Why does the United States lead the world’s richest democracies in child abuse fatalities, with death rates three times higher than Canada’s and 11 times higher than Italy’s?

Now the nation’s and the states’ financial crises are leading to budget cuts to child services in more than 40 states. In Hawaii, Every Child Matters reports, funding for a child abuse reduction program was slashed so much that two years after serving 4,000 families, it can afford to serve only 100. In South Carolina, five state-run homes for children were closed. Child Protective Services is severely understaffed, with caseload ratios as high as 60 to one in some regions.

Nearly half of all the Texas children who are killed by abuse belonged to families that had been investigated by Child Protective Services. In order to keep families united, CPS attempts to place children with safe family members. While its motives are admirable, CPS should put a higher priority on protecting children from monsters than it does on keeping families together.

The single best predictor of child abuse is poverty. Children raised in families with annual incomes of less than $15,000 are 22 times more likely to be abused. One in five American children, more than 14 million, live in poverty.

Budget cuts are taking a toll in California, too. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed discarding the state’s welfare-to-work program, effectively eliminating aid for roughly a million children.

If the most prosperous country in the world can afford to fight two wars, battle terrorism in far-off lands and bail out Wall Street, why can’t it offer its most vulnerable and voiceless citizens anything but bureaucratic red tape?

Seema Jilani is a Houston physician who specializes in pediatrics. A version of this commentary was published in the British newspaper the Guardian. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

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Many people involved in child protection are receiving unfair treatment. This is why I became a guardian – a friend’s adoption problems prompted me to act). Now, as funding drys up and services are restricted or eliminated, results are worsening and more and more people are being mistreated by service providers.

It is easy to blame the teachers, social workers, and guardians ad-litem and argue for the dissolution of the system when we are mistreated by it.

How simple the solution; fire them all, kill the programs, and everything will be improved.

After working with service providers over a twelve year period as a volunteer guardian ad-litem, and knowing how impossible their tasks are, with the training they receive (and don’t receive), the resources they have (and don’t have) and the overwhelming amount of work they are burdened with each day, I know that the rest of us are missing a VERY BIG point.

America’s institutions need support and improvement and not destructive criticism*.

It is because programs are underfunded and and under-supported that training and standards are lower than they should be, which puts under-trained and under-qualified people into high stress positions without adequate training or tools to do the work.

NO, it is we the people that have voted to underfund our schools and social programs (and 35W bridge maintenance) that have created the painful failure we are living with today. The bridge fell in the river for the same reason our schools, jails, and child protection systems are struggling so mightily-we failed to maintain it.

It’s not the lack of commitment from the people that go to work every day trying hard to make a difference in their community and the lives of the children in their classrooms or caseloads (I’m really convinced of this).

It is America’s inability to face the fact that we have created monster problems that will continue to worsen until we support solutions that will fix them (and not just hate on the people doing the work).

Over my twelve twelve years in the system, I have found the teachers, social workers, and guardians, to be a very committed bunch of people. It is hard work and they are attacked from most sectors (troubled parents, the public, the media, and not much support back at the office). Art teachers have wept as they have told me their stories. Social workers on the east and west coast have it really hard when it comes to bad press and not much help back at the office (from comments made to me after the United Nations talk and my research).

I have experienced and written about the huge mistakes made and the great pain to all involved because of our failing institutions, but to listen to people demanding the destruction of the guardian ad-litem program instead of improving it, would leave children with absolutely no voice in an already cold and overwhelming system.

Foster and adoptive parents face a complicated system with unpredictable results due to the institutions we continue to band aid together to cope with the growing problems we are facing. The people I’ve met are sincere, many of them poor and trying to help children and their community with very limited resources and very troubled children. Many communities are barely able to make life tolerable for foster children. This may explain the recent statistic that 80% of youth aging out of foster care are leading dysfunctional lives.

To blame social workers when a baby is found in a dumpster is wrong. The case loads the American public demands social workers carry and the scarce resources that are available for struggling families and children explains why the vast majority of violent crime committed by youth came out of under 4% of Ramsey county family (A.C.E. study) and 90 percent of the youth in juvenile justice have come through the child protection system (according to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz). It also explains why American girls have among the highest STD and preteen pregnancy rates in the world.

Blaming Teachers for failed schools in like holding police officers accountable for the criminal in the squad car. Until children are ready to learn, we are making educators managers of out of control children, not teachers. The amount of Prozac, Ritalin, and other psychotropic medications proscribed to American youth (without therapy) is astronomical. Teachers would be astounded if they knew the data.

It is up to us who are working for positive change that we recognize who are friends are and quit throwing rocks at them.

Here are some positive suggestions, please add more through the comment section;

1) Program accountability (make programs measurable) I have suggested the highly successful Social Solutions program that has been required by Kaiser Permanente and is getting a foothold at CASA California. It was invented by a social worker that wanted service providers to be paid like baseball players. And it works incredibly well to track all the changes in outcomes based measurements. It should be used everywhere.

2) Legislation in all states is 20 years behind the problem. We the people are the only ones that can change this. Reaching out to progressive states for the types of legislation being proposed is my suggestion. Keep in mind, this nation tries 150,000 youth as adults each year, just quit executing juveniles (those who committed crimes as juveniles) and locking up juveniles for life).

3) How are judges trained to handle child protection cases in your community? Is there an understanding of how this court needs to work (it is not traffic court).

4) Are services coordinated in your community, or are they a jumble of people that don’t talk to each other providing a mismash of poorly defined resources to very troubled people?

5) Raise the level of understanding and attention to the issues; speaking/writing/media. Do something to alert people to the issues. No change can come until people understand more and see a need for change.

6) Better models for adoption and foster care (let’s make a list; http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2010/04/11/adoptees-have-answers-and-lots-of-questons/

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2010/03/24/national-child-protection-training-center/

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2010/01/23/a-program-worth-repeating/

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2010/01/23/the-evidence-is-in/

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2009/12/14/new-york-meet-missouri/

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/2010/01/13/child-well-being-network-a-model/

International conversation; Share your thoughts please

*This is what hate radio does (there is nothing constructive about it – all about tearing down, and no ideas for making things better) please don’t get in the habit, this is destroying our nation.

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Minnesota became the first state to host an official gathering of its orphan train riders and their families with an event that took place on July 1, 1961 with nine attendees. This event was organized by two women who discovered later in life that they had ridden the same orphan train to Minnesota as young children. This fall the Minnesota Orphan Train Riders of New York, the official Minnesota orphan train riders organization, will celebrate its 50th reunion, honoring the 11 surviving Minnesota riders and recognizing the many thousands of others who arrived in Minnesota during the Orphan Train Era. Adoptees Have Answers will also celebrate these amazing nonagenarians on Saturday, June 19, 2010, from 2:00 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Minnesota History Center (cosponsor). For more information about the event, contact Anne Johnson at 612-746-5122 or ajohnson@mnadopt.org

History of the (Minnesota) Orphan Train Riders of New York
Website: www.orphantrainridersof minnesota.com

Immigration
In 1853 the United States began evaluation of railroad routes to the Pacific, sending mapping announcements to Europe and the rest of the world.

Praises went forth, inviting people to come to American and obtain “free land.” As a result, the United States received a large number of immigrants.

Steamship agents and railroad companies attracted the rest with descriptions of “the land of opportunity.” Port cities became overcrowded, with assorted jobs filled by cheap labor. New York City had the largest influx of immigrants. Many made long overland journeys, but countless others stayed in the city.

A host of urban ills, including poverty, disease, alcoholism, job competition, and lack of resources led to instability and desperation.

Sometimes families were left with little choice but to abandon their children to the city streets.

The New York Children’s Aid Society was under the auspices of the Brace Farm School, the Industrial Schools, and Newsboys Lodging Homes. Charles Loring Brace and friends founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1853-54. Brace saw orphaned, half-orphaned, and runaway children become waifs of the city.

Envisioning new lives for these destitute youngsters, Brace devised a plan to send them away from overpopulated city streets to find family homes in the West. He believed the West had “many spare places at the table of life” and a wholesome atmosphere in which to raise children. This excellent plan was not totally satisfactory for all children. Some went to good homes, but others were instead mistreated. Upon arrival, children were grouped upon stages, on station platforms, in town halls, or on wooden boxes, and prospective parents were asked to choose a child by personal viewing.

Thus, the phrase put up for adoption became known. Boys may have had their muscles examined as potential farm laborers. Similarly, teeth, stature, and visible medical issues were considered.

The New York Foundling Hospital

In 1869 Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbons and the Sisters of Charity founded the New York Foundling Hospital. Crime seemed to follow poverty, and the most monstrous crime of all was infanticide. The Sisters were child savers, too, but reserved safekeeping to infants and young children.

The Foundling Hospital’s children usually aged between one and six years, rode on trains affectionately called “baby trains,” “mercy trains,” or “baby specials.” This organization sent nearly as many children west as did the Children’s Aid Society. The New York Foundling Hospital and the Children’s Aid Society were two of the largest East Coast agencies placing children in the West.

Indentured Application

The New York Foundling Hospital commissioned prospective parents to apply for a child in advance. Clergy and city officials announced the need for
family homes to local parishes and citizens. Prospective parents could specify the age, gender, hair and eye color they sought in a child.

The New York Foundling Hospital carried an indenture system formulating a contract requiring parents needed to clothe, educate, and provide financially for the child until the age of eighteen. The form essentially guaranteed room and board in exchange for labor. A child could be sent back to New York if placement
proved unsatisfactory. The expectation was that the contract could be dismissed in favor of adoption.

Seventy Five Years of Orphan Trains between 1854 and 1929 over 250,000 children from the urban East Coast, predominantly New York, were placed on what became known as “orphan trains.” This one-way trip was designed to relocate homeless, neglected, and abandoned children to points west across America. It was the largest mass migration of children to take place in American history.

Minnesota Reunions

Minnesota was the first state to carry out a gathering of Orphan Train Riders on July 1, 1961. Mary Buscher of Breckenridge, MN and Marie Lenzmeier of Wahpeton, ND discovered they were orphans from New York, and had traveled across the United States to find a new family home.

The women thought, “if there are two of us, how many more shells in the ocean can we find? Decidedly, the women placed an ad in several newspapers throughout the Midwest inviting others like themselves to a meeting at the Metropolitan Building in Wahpeton, ND. Nine individuals arrived to get acquainted and
exchanged life stories.

The group was unanimous in making the choice of subsequent meetings. The second meeting of Orphan Train Riders was held on June 16, 1962 in Wahpeton, ND. Thirty-five members were present. Letters arrived from
nearly every state in the United States expressing a connection to life as a foundling from New York. Mary Buscher (Breckenridge, MN) was elected president; Carmella Keaveny (Tintah, MN) was vice-president, and Marie Lenzmeier (Wahpeton, ND) secretary/treasurer.

And so the meetings continued, attendance grew, and a familiar family unit took shape yearly. The location of gatherings and choosing a name for the group often changed, and members competed for bringing their new found Orphan Train family to each attendee’s prospective city.

The group called themselves, Reunion of the orphans coming from the New York Foundling Hospital, New York Foundling Group, New York Foundling Orphans, and in 1997 entitled themselves as the Orphan Train Reunion.

The last name held until 2005 when the name changed to (Minnesota) Orphan Train Riders
from New York. The reunions are open to riders, descendants, friends and any interested persons who like to attend.

In 2010, Minnesota will mark their 50th Orphan Train Reunion. A conservative number of four million descendants originate from someone who was an Orphan Train Rider.

Today, approximately 140 Orphan Train Riders survive in the United States. c Renee Wendinger

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http://www.invisiblechildren.org/our-book/

An informative & compelling look at the shameful treatment of vulnerable children, how it impacts our communities, and what we can do about it.

Listen, Read. Pass it on (a great gift).

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