I took your advice and started a FightCPS Facebook Fan Page.

Just received this in email:

The Congressional Education and Labor subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities is conducting a hearing on the reauthorization of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) tomorrow, November 5th.

You can reach the subcommittee members by calling the capitol switchboard, at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to one of the following Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities members:

Carolyn McCarthy, Chairwoman
Todd “Russell” Platts, Ranking Member
Yvette Clarke
Howard P. “Buck” McKeon
Robert C. “Bobby” Scott
Brett Guthrie
Carol Shea-Porter
David P. Roe
Paul Tonko
Glenn “GT” Thompson
Jared Polis
George Miller
Judy Chu

Let’s make those phones RING

More information - this link was sent to me by LawDoll (Leesa) - thank you!
American Humane Testifies for Reauthorization & Expansion of Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Plus Increased Use of ‘Differential Response’ and Other Approaches

Update: Watch the archived webcast of this hearing: Preventing Child Abuse and Improving Responses to Families in Crisis

… THANKS TO ALL WHO MADE CALLS. PLEASE KEEP THE NUMBER AND KEEP CALLING THESE PEOPLE …

Today, July 16, 2009, this site passed the “one million visits” milestone… There were 587 visits to the site today, so far, and the one millionth took place 121 visits ago.

I don’t know who you were, but thank you for coming by!

The site has been online since October 2000… so this was a long time coming. Almost nine years!

FightCPS now has a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/fightcps.

If you are on Twitter, you’re welcome to leave your link in the comments here.

Mother’s Day has been sad for me for years now. Without fail I always think of caring parents who are suffering because their children are being kept from them. Then I remember the years when my two oldest daughters lived with their father and I never, ever heard anything from them on Mother’s Day… nor did they want to talk to me at any other time. The youngest still has Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) though now she’s 28 years old. She refuses to communicate with me and thinks I’m a really, really, really bad person. (My oldest daughter recovered and realized she’d been brainwashed.)

I know a lot of you are thinking, “When my child is eighteen he/she will come see me again.” But for many of the sad, suffering parents, that never happens because of PAS.

(More about PAS/Read: What is the child’s part in PAS?)

So… for those of us with children in foster care or adoptive homes, or living with another family member or an ex-spouse… for those of us who never get to hear “Happy Mother’s Day” from their much loved children… I have a few suggestions.

1. Love yourself. Seriously, if your child won’t express love to you, find reasons to love yourself anyway. All human beings are born to be inherently lovable, and you’re one of them. Take time today to list your good qualities and praise yourself for them.

2. Here’s something that cheered me up back then when my daughters weren’t calling me. I found a big Mother’s Day ad/announcement/appreciation printed in the Oakland Tribune, and cut it out and put it on the refrigerator. It was cheerful and it really made me feel better even though it didn’t come from the two children I wanted to hear from. Those of you blessed with artistic creativity can probably get the same effect by making a card for yourself.

3. Pray for the children. They are victims just as we are. While it is true they probably aren’t calling because they don’t remember or realize it is a special day, it is also true that their handlers (whoever controls them) aren’t going to remind them to call as any truly decent person would. This isn’t your child’s fault. They are being trained to be disrespectful to their mother and to treat her like dirt. They get good reactions from the people they live with whenever they are cruel towards us.

4. Take a walk today and look at all the flowers blooming. Clear your mind from the sad thoughts and remember that life renews itself and there’s plenty to love about being alive in this world.

5. Don’t quit living, learning, and growing. You’ve had a terrible shock, and are living with trauma. But don’t let that destroy your life. Look toward your own interests and hobbies. Do things that make you happy. It is all about self-care. Yes, the thing you wanted to do (mothering) was cruelly ripped from your arms and your heart will hurt over this for many years to come… but we must learn to live with the trauma and recover from it. And we must use the time away from our children to do good things for ourselves.

A big hug from me to all suffering, lonely, traumatized mothers on this Mother’s Day 2009.

I’m grateful that I’ve spent twenty years as an activist exposing America’s sick child welfare system to the light of day.

I’m grateful for the emails and comments I received telling me how much this site has helped. Those testimonials mean a lot to me and always will.

Twenty years ago this month, my fourth child was born in Central California. Before I could leave the hospital a social worker visited my room to talk to me about my history of being battered by my child’s father. Later I learned that while I was there I nearly died, and during that time my child’s father threatened the doctor, so he decided to report us to CPS. I had to leave my baby in the hospital because she was premature, and on the day she was released a social worker picked her up and left a slip of paper on my front porch.

Only a few days later I learned what it was like to go into Juvenile Court to be given a social worker’s report filled with lies. That was the day I realized that our justice system was broken, that social workers could lie and nobody cared - and that they could get away with perjury. That was the day I started learning that our Constitution doesn’t apply in Juvenile Court and that I couldn’t have a jury trial. That was the day I started realizing how ineffective public defenders are for child welfare victims.

Okay - it has been twenty years. I am one of the very lucky ones who fought back, found an activist to help me, and who succeeded in getting my child home again (after eight months of separation.) Lucky me. But I was traumatized to an extreme - not only by my shock at the injustice of the child welfare system, but also by my family’s non-support, my need to cope with being a battered woman, and the end of my relationship with the man who battered me.

Trauma takes a long time to wear off, and twenty years later — honestly, I’m still dealing with it!

When this happened to me I was working as a welfare worker in the same Department of Social Services that contained the CPS agency that attacked and lied about me. I was sickened to learn that my employer allowed these vile social workers in the CPS unit to perjure themselves, violate regulations, and be rude to young, traumatized, suffering parents. My thought was that if they were doing this to me (another DSS employee) WHAT WERE THEY DOING TO ALL THE YOUNG PARENTS WITH LESS EDUCATION AND MONEY THAN ME? I was appalled. Shocked. Disgusted. I wanted to do something to help other parents going through this wretched system of injustice, and from the time my case closed in 1990 until now, I’ve been doing what I could when I could.

My main goal at first was to expose, expose, expose. I wanted the public to know what was going on in the social services department. I was fortunately led to a local weekly paper with a similar goal - to expose local government corruption. I wrote some articles. I contacted some child welfare victims and helped a few of them to file for State Administrative Hearings. I burnt out - and needed to turn my attention to raising my two youngest children - both preschoolers at that time.

Next I started a computer bulletin board service (BBS) via the FidoNet network. Anyone here know about FidoNet? I did that for five years and during that time contacted a few child welfare victims including the woman who wrote Don’ts and Do’s When Falsely Accused… she lived nearby and we got together quite a few times. When her case closed she moved out of state.

The internet got my attention next. I was handicapped by my finances - I was unable to afford a worthy computer for quite a few years. I learned to do some webdesign, and in 2000 started the Child Protection Reform Yahoo Group (which I’ve since given away) and next I created Fight CPS And Win - now simply called FightCPS. I’ve been developing this site since October 2000 - almost nine years.

Here’s the bad news (or maybe it is good news) . . . I’m ready to do something else with my life. I feel my most important goal here has been fulfilled. That goal was to expose the system to the American public. I feel that has been done, and that we’ve reached CRITICAL MASS in that now many people are speaking out about the injustice including wonderful state legislators in Georgia and Washington. Also the news media, especially television news, is speaking out to expose the system. That didn’t happen back when I started my activism, twenty years ago. Back then even child murders in the foster system were not carried in the news media, so I’m excited when I see television news commentators exposing CPS injustice. There are also multiple developing websites to cover this issue on the internet now, many more than when I started, and I see the seeds of greatness in some of them. Very exciting stuff! So I know that when I leave, there will be others to take my place and fill in the gaps. My mission here is complete.

I will always feel as I do about the crazy, unjust, and cruel child welfare system. I have not changed but I have other things to do now. I have no more children under age eighteen. I need to focus on other things in my life now.

I don’t know what will become of FightCPS.Com — and am considering all the options at this point. I won’t leave this month or next, but I’m sure by the end of 2009 I’ll no longer be doing this. Therefore I’m ready to hear from other activists or advocates who feel able to own and maintain this website. This will require someone to move the entire site to another server, so I’m looking for someone with confidence and competency in the web skills arena. It also requires someone with outstanding writing skills.

This site has thousands of links pointing to it. It ranks well in the search engines. For that reason, I don’t want to just dump it. I worked hard to make it rank well so that people in need of help could easily find us. I think it is a valuable site for that reason, and that it would be a shame to just close it down. I really want someone else to take it over, love it, develop it, and leave it on the web as a beacon of hope to whoever goes to Google and types in “child protective services”. It is the only anti-CPS site that shows up in the first page of search results.

Anyhow, if you’re someone who could take on this project and make it work, please contact me. I’m interested in hearing from you. My webmaster email link is at the bottom of this page. Please note that if I don’t know who you are, that’s a problem. I don’t want some government-paid disinformation agent to take over this site and subvert its purpose. Getting the right person for site ownership is more important than any other consideration at this point.

Yes, I moved things around a bit…

The recent comments are now in the right-side column under the navigation links.

Yesterday I received an email from someone who had been accused of child abuse in Oregon. It was a former foster parent. I have always placed information from news articles onto this site when it involves abuse of foster children because I want to show that children placed in CPS custody are not necessarily safer than children in their natural homes. In fact I believe it is established that children are worse off in foster homes even when there are serious problems in their natural family homes. (This of course has nothing to do with the rare actual severe physical abuse cases that do require intervention by law enforcement officers.)

The man who wrote to me yesterday was accused of abuse against a foster child four or five years ago. Since then he’s made major changes in his life and now has custody of his children. He objected to having his name on my site and said it was harmful to his children. I am aware that foster parents are as likely to be falsely accused of abuse as are natural parents–perhaps even moreso because they intentionally (stupidly, in my opinion, in their desire to ‘do something nice for children‘) place themselves within the scope of child protection authorities and subject themselves to children who have been harmed and corrupted by the system. Sorry to say some of these children do make false accusations because that’s what they’ve been trained to do by evil systemites.

When I received this man’s email I immediately removed his name from this site. I left the article with the child’s information, but I have no reason to leave criminal accusations against innocent people, and he should not have his name on the internet in this context if he is innocent…. just like 90% of the people on CPS’s evil Central Index lists should not be maligned by being named there, myself included.

…

If YOU have found your name on this site, and you are innocent of charges that were brought against you, please email me at the email address found at the bottom of every page. The email link is also at the top of the forum pages. I respond to my emails asking for removal of information. This site is now eight years old and I’ve got a ton of information here - most of which I don’t even remember at this point. If you want your information removed, do what this wise man did - SEND ME THE LINK to the information you want removed. That makes it 100 times easier for me to do a rapid information removal.

I also remove comments people made here that they no longer want on the site - but again, I need the links!!! If you find anything on this site that shouldn’t be posted, you are welcome to contact me about it. Your privacy and well being are important to me.

I strongly encourage parents having CPS troubles to use a fake name or handle when posting here. Also disguise your exact details. This is a public forum.

Sorry to say, I’m forced to shut down the chat room due to excess use of system resources.

The server was down for a few hours today. This was not due to the government retaliating against this site… it was about a nameserver change, and the problem has now been taken care of. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone here.

I’m reading through your recent comments tonight. Only 51 left to go. I’m thrilled to read about Susan’s upcoming appearance on the Dr. Phil show. At the same time my heart is breaking along with yours when I read the sad stories of families being ripped apart. I’m also feeling gratitude at the many comments posted here to help others who are suffering.

As I read, I think about articles I should write. So many questions need to be answered. So many hearts need comfort. Laws need to be explained, along with court procedures and documents. Parents need to be warned about the deceitful ways of CPS agencies. Teachers and other mandated reporters need to be informed that when they call CPS, they are potentially putting children’s lives and happiness in danger.

Where should I start? What needs are the most important? Will you give me your opinions? Can you offer ways in which you could help? I am always open to getting new ideas and new projects started.

A day I waited for, with a sense of expectancy and joy, has come and gone. It was my youngest child’s eighteenth birthday.

As you know, with that birthday passed, my children can no longer be victims of an agency that pretends to protect them. I no longer have to worry about that knock at the door, with a government agent investigating my children and home.

I am free.

As God wills it, none of my children have children, so there are no worries about grandchildren being kidnapped. All of my children have chosen to be childless up to now, and it is a relief to me because now I can pursue family rights activism without worrying about CPS government agents wanting to retaliate against my family.

Is that cool, or what?