Repeated childhood trauma does cruel things to children. Things that never go away. Those things (behaviors/thoughts/self-harm/suicide) can be managed with help. Without help, depression, pain and sadness often become overwhelming.
CASA MN Newsletter (Guardian ad Litem News & Updates)
MN Senior Judge Lyonel Norris has stated that, “…an all employee model can create an institutionalizing effect upon a child”. I would add “an even greater” institutionalizing effect upon a child”.
Recent KARE11 reporting brings full circle the events, sadness as MN Supreme Court ruling
allows Child Protective Services to be held responsible for Eric Dean’s death.
FIND YOUR CASA here – CASA’s around the U.S. If you are not listed, send me your info and we will include it. Thank you Sai Yang and Century College for your research and writing on this page.
These CASA guardian ad-Litem articles have been gathered from around the nation.
Find out what the other 975 CASA’s from around the nation are up to.
Last year, more than 76,000 CASA and guardian ad litem volunteers helped more than 251,000 abused and neglected children find safe, permanent homes, according to casaforchildren.org. Volunteers are everyday citizens who have undergone screening and training with their local advocate program.
Volunteer to help KARA maintain this page; info@invisiblechildren.org (do you know an active or retired GAL that might have time to gather guardian ad-Litem news?)
All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children
All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children Please donate now and support these pages & 1) Our documentary on the needs of at-risk children and breaking the cycle of abuse 2) Our second book, a collection of micro-bios following at-risk children through their journey Accepting all donations, small and large. Their lives will not…
Sharing KARA news/videos/articles with your social media and networks – the more people become aware of how serious a problem child abuse is in America & how broken our child protection systems are, the more pressure will be put on legislators to support the people, programs and policies that work.
KARA needs dollars, subscribers (members), volunteers & promotors to make this happen.
Become part of the KARA grassroots army – share our information widely to promote programs, policies & the people striving to improve the lives of abused and neglected children.
ttps://www.linkedin.com/company/kids-at-risk-action-k-a-r-a-childrens-rights-advocacy-network/
Add your insights and concerns to these important conversations and let’s raise awareness and concern for abused and neglected children
Follow Governor Dayton’s Budget and Child Protection Task Force News at Safe Passage for Children of MN links below;
Performance Mode
Work Group Meetings Update
Governor Dayton’s Child Protection Budget
Report on Governor’s Task Force and Work Group Meetings (Jan 14)
While I’m optimistic that these concerned people are working on improving services and strategies for abused and neglected children of Minnesota, it is painful to read the continuing sad news being reported about overwhelmed social workers, class action lawsuits, inadequate safeguards, and growing caseloads. It frightens me to think about how much (or how little) can be changed by one task force in one year within a system that handles sixty thousand children annually on a limited budget and imperfect systems. What happens next year?
If we valued children or even just understood the economic impact of under-served abused and neglected children passing through our schools, communities, courts, and in the end, juvenile and criminal justice systems, things would be different. Basic math proves the extraordinary costs to communities of failed schools and children unable to graduate on a trajectory to dysfunctional lifestyles and another generation of troubled families with more abuse and neglect.
Early childhood programs are a great investment in our communities and our children. Both the kids and our communities deserve better. Support the CASA guardian ad-Litems in your community & give children a voice.
Even preschoolers are getting suspended from U.S. public schools — and they’re disproportionately black, a trend that continues up through the later grades.
8 month old Brandon Schaible died of treatable pneumonia because his parents don’t believe in medicine.
This is not as rare as one would hope. In Idaho, 144 children have died in the Followers of Christ Church due to lack of medical care. Religious shield laws are everywhere (does your state have them?
Idaho makes it legal to deny children medical care (including to death). In Oregon 15-month-old Ava Worthington. 16-year-old Neil Beagley. 8-month-old Alayna May Wyland. 9-hour-old David Hickman died that way. Below are articles related to child death due to religious practice and the legal underpinnings (further down) that make withholding medical treatments from children legal.
State Rep Gail Finney says whacking children is about restoring parental rights (along with the rights of teachers and other caregivers) and not child abuse. I guess that depends on how you define abuse. Imagine letting other people whack your child and leaving bruises.
Kansas already allows whacking children without leaving marks, but that just doesn’t pass Gail’s smell test. She wants to see red.
Gail has vowed to continue bringing it up if it doesn’t make it this year. Kansas ranks 36th among the states in child death & 29th in juvenile incarceration according to Geography Matters, Child Well-Being among the states.
Class action lawsuits get results where legislators don’t (Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, D.C., New Jersey, Mississippi) Proving that it’s not who is your senator, but who is your attorney. Whatever it Takes.
From Oklahoma News on 6 12,27.13,
Oklahoma is one of 14 states sued by child advocacy group Children’s Rights. The federal class action lawsuit was filed back in 2008, claiming children in state custody were in danger, because the system wasn’t doing enough to protect them.
The state has spent millions fighting it. With the trial just two months away and a judge denying the state’s last two efforts to get the case thrown out, DHS is now considering settling the suit.
According to Children’s Right’s website, their lawsuits have led to $2 billion in additional funding for child welfare systems.
The hoped-for goal in all such cases is that parents repair the damage in their lives and get their children back. The hoped-for goal is that the children no longer need a guardian ad litem.
By taking the children on outings, Melchiorre worries that he could give them things that their parents couldn’t match. It also could enforce their perception of Melchiorre as a kind of surrogate grandpa who will be in their lives forever, when their parents may not even want that. He’s not about to hurry them off to Disney World. “It’s a fine line,” he said, “you don’t want to overstep.”
Suzanne Parker, guardian ad litem program director, said she’s gratified to hear that Melchiorre has concerns. “I love it when we have people who really think how their actions affect others,” she said.
She wishes she had more like him. She’s trying to find 400 new volunteers.
Because the State refused to spend the $500 to do a basic background check on his father before assigning dad custody, even though dad had a court order in an adjacent state forbidding him from being around young boys because of what he did to them and even though dad had spent 2/3’s of his adult life in prison, Andy (the child) was taken from a loving foster home to spend 4 years (from 4 to 7 years of age) sexually abused, beaten and starved by his biological father. From 4 to 7 years old, Andy was left alone in an apartment for days at a time without food or drink, tied to a bed.
Bruised from head to toe when dad finally brought him to school (at 7 years old), placed into child protection services and not treated for mental health issues, Andy became a very disturbed young man.
Prozac, Ritalin, & other psychotropic medications, multiple suicide attempts and intermittent months of sporadic & very expensive “suicide watch” therapy (including airplane trips to emergency facilities) & group homes were the State’s underfunded, misguided attempts to manage a terrifically damaged beautiful young boy were too little and too late.
Andy has been a ward of the state now for 16 years & will most likely remain a ward of the state for the rest of his life.
If he lives to 60, he could be a 10 to 20 million dollar burden to the state, without calculating any amount for his violence, the people he hurts, & the damage he does.
It is a very rare child that can walk from traumatic abuse into a classroom and just “be normal”. The biology of trauma means physiological change happens. Before a human being can proceed to the next level of growth, like sitting for 8 hours a day in a classroom & passively soaking in lesson after lesson while interacting normally with other children, adults, and figures of authority, real healing needs to happen.
I have seen very competent extremely committed foster and adoptive parents come unglued when faced with the insanity shown by 5, 7, and 9 year olds who have been tortured. The World Health Organization defines torture as “extended exposure to violence and deprivation”.
All of the 50 children I worked with as a CASA volunteer had “extended exposure to violence and deprivation” (about half of them had been sexually abused, some as young as 2).
Read and listen to the important issues raised on this blog while supporting our efforts to “get the word out”.
Pass it onto your friends & ask the library to carry it. This information has been kept under wraps for far too long.
Buy or sample the INVISIBLECHILDREN audiobook
Best wishes from the team at Kids At Risk Action