If you’ve just found out you’re being investigated by child protective services social workers, see What To Do If Child Protective Services Social Workers Are Investigating You and An Attorney’s Advice on Protecting Your Family by Gathering Data.

If you have any dealings at all with child protective services, see: Your Case Notebook: Is It Up To Date?

If you’re facing court dates and need to know how to put yourself in a better position when you get there, see Who Will Prepare Your Case? and the Legal Document Library.

If your child protective services caseworkers are asking you to do things that are not court ordered, or not following state social services regulations, or bending the laws, or not honoring Kinship Care rights, see: Filing for a State Administrative Hearing.

If you’ve got a court appointed attorney who is not helping you win your child protective services case, see How to Make Your Court Appointed Attorney Work for YOU.

If you’re looking for an attorney, sign in here: Lawyer Requests. Also see our list of attorneys: Lawyers Who Take Child Protective Services Defense Cases.

NETWORKING – get support and information, give support to others needing relief from the Child Protective Services system insanity: go to the Fight CPS Message Board Forum.

Also, our Guestbook for the month is always being used.

If you’re looking for help from a Higher Power, we have a section for Prayer Requests. If you’re in contact with a Higher Power, please go there to pray for people in need of divine intervention.

If your case is closed, please help us with the Senator Nancy Schaeffer Memorial Information Project.

Do you have a family rights website or social networking page you want to tell people about? You can post about it here: Your Favorites: Websites, Blogs, MySpace, Facebook, YouTubes, etc. – and there’s also a section of the message board for posting about your websites, or sites you recommend. I celebrate your creativity and want to support your online efforts to help others.

Do not send me email unless you are someone who wants me to remove information from the site, or someone needing help registering with the Fight CPS Message Board Forum. That said, my email link is at the bottom of this page, and at the top of the Forum.

Read the FAQ!!! And the Privacy Policy!!! And my Legal Disclaimer (I am NOT a lawyer!) And my Policy on Copying Things Found on This Site.

And… when you get tired of this site, head on over to the AFRA website for more information about how to fight a child protective services case, activism, and family rights: The American Family Rights Association.

This is the front page of this site, in tag-cloud form:

Two child protective services social workers, an attorney, and five law enforcement officers were sued in 2006 for coercing an Arizona homeschool family to allow unlawful entry into their home, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. The lawsuit is ongoing; this week a judge denied the state’s motion for summary judgment, so now it will be up to a jury to decide whether entry into the Loudermilk home was coerced and unconstitutional.

It started when someone phoned an anonymous tip to a child protective services hotline stating that the new home wasn’t fit for children to live in. Six weeks later two CPS social workers showed up at the door to investigate with two sheriff’s deputies. Entry was denied, and more law enforcement officers arrived on the scene. The family was told their children would be removed if they didn’t allow entry.

They were on the phone with Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) attorney Thomas Schmidt, who advised them to refuse entry. HSLDA wrote, “After an escalating confrontation at the front door that lasted 40 minutes, the social workers, backed by no fewer than four deputies, threatened to take the Loudermilks’ children into custody and place them in foster care if the Loudermilks continued to deny them entry into their home.” (Source)

Assistant Attorney General Julie Rhodes was also on the phone, and she repeated the threat to the HSLDA attorney. Big Mistake, Julie!!!

Under duress, the illegal, unconstitutional entry was allowed. Within five minutes the CPS social workers realized they’d received a false tip, and left. They were probably unwilling to continue with the case because they didn’t want to bother with victimizing parents who had an attorney on the phone! Too much work!

The Loudermilk family consented to the lawsuit filed on their behalf by HSLDA attorneys.

HSLDA has a track record of helping homeschooling families (who have purchased memberships) with CPS related legal problems. In 1995 a similar case was heard in the Federal Court of Appeals, Calabretta v. Floyd. This landmark case ruled that in the 9th Circuit (US Western states) social workers cannot violate the Fourth Amendment. This was already binding case law in Arizona and other Western states when the Arizona caseworkers coerced their way into the Loudermilk home on March 9, 2005.

How many other people does this still happen to? Probably thousands – who are unaware of the laws, and who don’t have a homeschooling attorney to call on the phone. This practice of coercion is totally illegal, immoral, and a violation of a standing court order in Arizona, California, and other Western states.

Here are the rulings from Calabretta v. Floyd as found on the HSLDA website: (1) “…unless there is evidence of an emergency, a social worker and police officer investigating a report of child abuse must have a warrant…” and (2) “…reasonable expectation of privacy of individuals in their homes includes the interests of both parents and children in not having government officials coerce entry in violation of the Fourth Amendment and humiliate parents in front of the children.”

Apparently child protective services social workers in Arizona forgot Calabretta v. Floyd, or perhaps this constitutional violation and coercion technique is still standard operating procedure in many of our counties. Perhaps it is time for these lawless, immoral and/or forgetful government agents to get their hands slapped again.

Source: Judge says threats to confiscate children may be coercion; Homeschool family’s case against sheriff’s office, social services advanced by Bob Unruh, published April 4, 2010 at the World Net Daily website.

I will be doing a series of articles to answer questions asked in a comment posted on March 26, 2010.

This question was asked by a social worker who is upset because I’m giving defense information publicly to people who may be guilty of child abuse.

…

Q: How does your website weed out those who post their rants on here that ARE the guilty ones?

A: This may surprise you, but parents, guilty or not, have a right to information that will help them present themselves in court in the best possible light. Those that are innocent are more likely to get their children returned than those that have actually committed some form of child abuse.

This website doesn’t have to weed out child abusers from falsely accused people. That’s something the judges should be doing. The focus of this site is to provide victims of injustice with information on how to present their cases better in court. They need this information because court appointed attorneys usually do not do an adequate job of protecting family rights.

Since you’re involved with the CPS system as a social worker, you’re surely aware that social workers are trained to present their case in court with a comprehensive report. The caseworkers who write these reports have done so dozens or even hundreds of time and are expert at doing so. In the caseworker corner is an experienced county attorney. They’ve ripped hundreds of families apart – so they’re good at what they do.

On the other side of the courtroom is a confused parent with an attorney who is working for the county he’s supposed to be defending the parent against. This is a clear conflict of interest. These county-paid attorneys are known to help convince the confused parents to sign guilty pleas regardless of whether or not they are adequately good parents. The parents usually know nothing about what to expect or how to defend themselves. Thus the parents give up their right to a trial without ever realizing they have that right!

Once the plea deal is signed, the parents are forced into a service plan that ranges from intrusive and inconvenient, to abusive and detrimental to the family’s well being. For example, many CPS victim parents have lost their jobs because of service plan scheduling conflicts that caseworkers force upon them.

Many if not most of the lawyers these parents have don’t do a thing to help their clients who are taken advantage of in court, and in fact, serve the counties more than they serve their clients.

Furthermore there’s a huge issue with lack of regard for constitutional rights in juvenile court. A criminal accused of murder is given more rights than a parent in juvenile court, where there’s no right to a jury trial, no opportunity to face the accuser, no press and public allowed, and usually, no adequate representation. Constitutional rights are suspended in these cases, ostensibly “for the children.” But obviously it isn’t for the children at all. It is to imbalance the justice system and push through a family destruction agenda thrust on us by whatever evil power is creating the abusive federal child welfare laws.

Because constitutional rights are not allowed in juvenile court, virtually every parent processed through that system, guilty or not, is a victim of injustice. Every single one of them!

Obviously there’s an imbalance here. Parents are used and abused by this legal system and their children are often unjustly placed in foster homes when they could be home with their parents who love them. This is traumatic for both parents and children. And who is there to help, to explain the way the system works, and to show them what they can do to present their cases better in court?

Well, that’s where my site comes in. I give a few suggestions for being proactive participants in their cases, and show them how to get their court appointed attorneys to work for them rather than for the county.

Now if you, as a social worker, have any REAL evidence of child abuse, you can present that in court at a trial. However you rarely do that. In fact, it seems that most CPS victims are run through the system by a coercive court appointed attorney who convinces them to sign a guilty plea and give up their right to a trial. The bait? “Do you want to get your children home sooner? Sign or the judge will be upset with you. etc.” Therefore no EVIDENCE is presented in court, most of the time. That makes your job easy and the parents and children miserable. Of course ‘miserable’ is an understatement. We’re talking about seriously traumatized people whose families have been attacked.

It simply isn’t fair.

If you have real evidence, no child abuser will escape the system. However if your evidence isn’t convincing, the parents should get their children and their life back. And that’s how it should be.

It isn’t up to me to decide who is and who isn’t a real child abuser. I’m just here to help balance the scales of justice a little bit for those falsely accused parents who are lucky enough to (1) find this site, and (2) learn and apply a bit of legal self-defense. If child abusers find the site and use my ideas, I trust that the legal system and any actual evidence you have will suffice.

The UN Treaty on Children’s Rights seems to be designed to destroy parental rights. According to Michael Farris, chairman/lawyer of HSLDA, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Obama administration may seal our fate by accepting this treaty, giving more rights to children than to parents. When all parental decisions are subject to being reviewed by the state, we may be prevented from homeschooling, training our children in our religion of choice, or discipline. I can already imagine kids (especially teenagers) using this treaty to complain about being grounded or otherwise disciplined.

HSLDA is a Christian homeschooling organization. Though I’ve never been a Christian, HSLDA won a place in my heart for pursuing limitations on CPS investigators’ actions, forcing them to honor our 4th Amendment rights. HSLDA also recommends and pursues independent homeschooling rights which are vital to the well-being of the homeschooling movement, because independent homeschooling allows children to learn in freedom rather than be molded into conformity by state government school laws. Conformity destroys initiative, innovation, and imagination.

This treaty has already been accepted by every country in the UN except the United States and Somalia.

Michael Farris is also the president of ParentalRights.Org, where an article lists Twenty Things You Need To Know about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC or simply, CRC.)

Source: The New World Disorder: United Nations’ threat: No more parental rights; Expert: Pact would ban spankings, homeschooling if children object, by Chelsea Schilling, published on February 5, 2009 by World Net Daily.