Majority of cases w DSS NOT maltreatment

written by Nev Moore. Massachusetts resident & CPS reformer.

http://www.massnews.com

This Isn’t Really Happening at DSS…You’re Exaggerating’
DSS Abuses are painfully real, and hidden by media silence
By Nev Moore

When the public reads about parents who claim that their children were taken by
DSS without any abuse taking place, most people are skeptical. It’s only
natural to think; "There must be more to it…"

After all, these kinds of things — government agents forcing their way into
people’s homes, abducting children based on no evidence, children stolen and
sold. Well, those kinds of things only happen in other countries, right? They
don’t happen here! This is a democracy, based on freedom, law and justice.
In this country people have rights.

We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights. We have protections, dammit! We
assume that before a child is forcefully removed from his home, the police must
have been called to investigate an act of abuse to the child, an act inflicted
with the intent to cause harm. Assault & battery. Beatings. You might assume
that the parents you read about have been charged with something. After all,
they must have had to do something for DSS to be called. Right?

That’s the way I used to think, too. The fact is that these parents are
rarely charged with anything at all. Meaning that there is no police
involvement, no evidence of any crime having been committed whatsoever, and no
charges pressed. You must be convicted of a crime to lose your driver’s
license, but you can lose your children simply because a neighbor or social
worker doesn’t like you.

A large percentage of reports of child abuse are made vindictively by
disgruntled neighbors, perhaps in the course of some type of neighborhood
dispute. Others are retaliatory actions in bitter divorce & custody battles. A
disgruntled employee whom you fired could call DSS, or someone whose romantic
interest you rejected, or some busybody who witnessed you yell at your child in
the grocery store or swat them on the bottom, or your new date’s
ex-girlfriend or boyfriend. Or, any sad, pathetic, lonely person who has
nothing better to do than try to cast their own pain onto others. The fact is
that any mentally unstable busybody can file a report of suspected child abuse.

So, why wouldn’t such obviously faulty reports be screened out? Many of them
are. Out of the three million filed per year, over two million are screened out
eventually. (Meaning that over two million parents a year are falsely reported
for child abuse in this country.)

But when an agency is rewarded financially, based on their numbers, with
intense federal pressure to increase the numbers, the motivation is to create
clients by any means possible.

Majority of Cases Not Maltreatment
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services documents that around 68% of all
substantiated cases do not involve child maltreatment. Well, you might ask,
what the heck do they involve then? The majority (55%) are due to "deprivation
of necessities" due to poverty. So, if your electricity gets shut off, you may
lose your kids.

Others are "emotional maltreatment" which is: "denial of child’s wishes" (now
there’s a can of worms!), "immature parents," "failure to individualize
children and their needs," and "parentifying the child" (letting child help
with chores, do dishes, help prepare meals or help with younger siblings.) So,
if you thought that you were being a good and responsible parent by teaching
your children tasks and to be helpful, self-sufficient and competent, I guess
you might be a little surprised to learn that you, too, are a child abuser.

Other supported child abuse reports are typically for school absenteeism, head
lice (which they usually get in school), diaper rash, not sending a snack or
mittens to school, "parents argue in front of child," leaving kids in the car
for a second while you run into the store, "risk of homelessness," unsuitable
housing, leaving kids with a teenage babysitter, messy house/house "too neat,"
mothers being "overnurturing," or any scrape, bruise, bump, or injury
inevitably incurred in the normal course of childhood play.

Christians and homeschoolers are frequently targeted. Christians are accused of
having "religious mania" due to bi-polar disorder. Homeschoolers are trying to
isolate their children to hide the bruises. If you have a little boy who is a
good all-American Huck Finn, beware! I remember when my 22-year-old son was
little. We had a farm in Oregon, and he was a tree climber/explorer from the
time he could stand. If he wasn’t 40 feet up in some tree, then he was
climbing on a tractor or crawling through a bee’s nest. He had a pony as
stubborn as he was who bucked him off frequently. He had a semi-permanent egg
in the middle of his forehead and bruises and scrapes all over. I think his
knees stayed scunned until he was about 17. We spent so much time in the ER
that they jokingly said they were building him his own cubicle with his name on
a brass plaque.

Boy would I be in trouble if he were little in today’s America. If the school
wants your kid on Ritalin and you refuse, you could be reported for "medical
neglect." But if you take your adventurous or sickly child to the emergency
room too often, you most definitely will be reported for "suspected child
abuse." You could even be charged with "Munchaussen Syndrome by Proxy." If you
aren’t familiar with Munchaussens, it’s the new rage. Parents are accused
of deliberately injuring their child or making them sick because they like the
attention they get spending so much time in the hospital. If you have a child
who wets the bed or a daughter who is prone to yeast or urinary tract
infections, you may find yourself charged with sexual abuse, even though yeast
or UTI’s are commonly caused by careless toilet hygiene, antibiotics, or a
diet high in carbohydrates.

Did you ever take any cute pictures of your kids in the bathtub? Or running
through the sprinkler nude or the traditional bear skin rug pictures? Those are
now reported to DSS by film developers as suspected sexual abuse. I see many
nudie baby pictures in television and print advertising, including from
BeechNut and Gerber. But, if you take them, you could be reported. I know two
little girls in DSS custody who like to do the hula dance to the opening music
of the TV show "Home Improvement." DSS reported that doing the hula dance was
"sexualized behavior" that led them to believe the girls might have been
sexually abused by their father. (Suspicion naturally falls on the father
rather than any other party.) Stemming from the hula dance the girls were
forced to have sexual abuse evaluations at ages 4 and 6. They were questioned
ad nauseam and exposed to anatomically correct dolls. They were taught about
sex by the child savers and their innocence was removed forever. (Just in case
you are wondering how DSS ever saw the girls’ hula dance while they watched
"Home Improvement," they were in a women’s shelter due to temporary
homelessness and the shelter staff thought the dance was "suspicious
behavior.")

How Did DSS Get Into It?
How did DSS get so far removed from child abuse? They operate by following
something called the "Clinical Model." They see themselves as "clinicians." In
other words, they use psychology as the basis for intervention. No, they are
not qualified or licensed as psychologists. But, even if they were, I do not
feel that psychology can be a basis for social service intervention. Why? Well,
because as human beings the nature of the beast is that we are all walking
balls of pathology. If you go in search of pathology, you are going to find it.

There is no such thing as a "normal" rating. If you’re too "normal," then
that’s abnormal. No one can "pass" a psych evaluation and get a piece of
paper that says: "This person tested as normal." Psychology is a soft science,
meaning that it is comprised of theory and interpretation. As opposed to a hard
science such as forensics, biochemistry, or medicine where results are proven
based on concrete facts and evidence (i.e., x-rays, DNA, blood chemistry). By
using the Clinical Model, anything can be interpreted to mean whatever the
interpreter wants it to. How convenient. And how very dangerous when the
interpreters may have "issues" of their own or be motivated by money to produce
a certain result.

Using the Clinical Model, DSS does not take children based on inflicted
injuries or evidence of a crime of child abuse. Rather, they use the behaviors
of the child to "prove" that there is some sort of hidden abuse occurring in
the home. I think that most of us humans who are actually from this planet, and
were children ourselves once, know that all children act up at various times,
and in various ways.

We earthlings call this: normal human behavior. Children play, children have
tantrums, children threaten to hold their breath until they get what they want,
little boys used to dunk little girls pigtails in inkwells. We don’t always
know what causes human behavior. Behavior could be due to neurological causes,
or genetic, or bio-chemical. There is no expert in the world who can
definitively state what causes any particular behavior unless it is a result of
physical brain damage. Maybe we don’t always have to find a reason or someone
to blame.
But, with the Clinical Model any behavior of the child can be used to "prove"
that the child has been abused by the parents. (It only works for parental
abuse.) Therefore, if your child is shy or just well behaved, that is
documented as "fearful and withdrawn." If they are active and noisy they are
"acting out their inability to verbalize the trauma." If they run to their dad
and climb up into his lap, they are "identifying with the aggressor." If the
child says his parents never hurt him, he is "in denial" and "protecting the
abuser." If children say they love their parents, then they have the Stockholm
syndrome. Or even more stupid: parents are told by social workers, "All abused
children say they love their parents so their parents won’t hurt them
anymore."

Nothing is just normal, predictable human behavior. If children are outgoing,
quiet, placid, disobedient, too obedient, neat, messy, loud, easy-going or
temperamental Â* everything has some deep, dark, obscure "meaning" that
"proves" the parents have committed some type of hidden abuse and thus supports
the DSS theory that all parents are inadequate and abusive.

Children Must Be Raised by State

Therefore children must be raised by the State.

To build an airtight case, DSS provides "proof" supplied by junk psychologists
who work for them. DSS holds multi-million dollar contracts with privately
owned "counseling" agencies. Many of them work exclusively for the business
that comes from DSS. Their very existence is dependent on DSS. It orders
clients to attend their own contracted vendors, sends a referral sheet to the
agency basically outlining what they want the reports to say, and the
whore-psychologists provide the "proof" needed by DSS. Most of this is billed
to MassHealth (Medicaid).

If you came into contact with DSS initially due to poverty reasons, like your
electricity being shut off or "risk of homelessness", then you must have
counseling to find out why you are poor. God forbid the government could own up
to playing a role in poverty and social problems. This method allows the
politicians to feel alleviated of any responsibility for people’s problems
and allows them to cast the blame on the citizens for being so dysfunctional
and stupid to become poor.

David Gill, one of the nation’s leading child abuse researchers, and one of
the first to question the Clinical model, writes: "Whatever problems which are
actually rooted in societal dynamics are defined as individual shortcomings or
pathology, their real sources are disguised, and interventions are focused on
individuals…and the social order is absolved by implication from guilt and
responsibility and may continue to function unchallenged in accordance with
established patterns."

Richard Wexler writes: "Why does the Medical (Clinical) Model persist in the
face of so much evidence to the contrary? Probably because it confers enormous
prestige on the child-savers. Rather than being glorified welfare workers
trying to get a poor family’s electricity turned on, the Model transforms
child savers into doctor-like experts on the cutting edge of ‘treating’ a
‘syndrome.’" It feeds the egos of the narcissistic and allows those who
are haunted by their own feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy to feel
powerful by dominating others, unchecked. Armed with the Clinical Model, social
workers, politicians and the public can remain comfortably free of any feelings
of responsibility or guilt: it’s the parents’ fault Â* they are "sick." If
you can convince yourself that this is so, then you need not feel guilty about
the enormous harm done to children by placing them in foster care; you may be
able to convince yourself that it is the "lesser of two evils." Richard Gelles,
former director of the University of Rhode Island Family Violence Research
Program states that "We have created a child protective system designed to cure
symptoms that in many cases do not exist."

Social Workers Are ‘Superior’

When the first social workers hit the streets in the late 1800s, they were
mostly Christians and Jews and were helping those who needed some assistance
over a rough spot.

Now, they are pseudo-psychologists with a little knowledge of sociology and
child-care. They are no longer just helping those who need a hand. They are far
"superior" to those people they meet.

They are foot soldiers in the movement to have the state control the children,
not the parents.
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descriptors; DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES, MASSACHUSETTS, CPS, CHILD
PROTECTIVE, FOSTER CARE, CHILD ABUSE, CHILD NEGLECT, SPANKING, DCYF, DHS, ACS,
NEW ENGLAND