I just got an email from Cindy (last name withheld) who subscribed by email to this site’s blog postings. She read my last post - the one about parents and drugs, and had this question, “…Don’t you think it is time that we mandate random drug screening for all CPS workers and contractors?”

That’s so true, Cindy. It is LONG past time. And I believe we can do something about this.

CPS caseworkers and social workers DO need to be tested for drugs. They also need psychological testing. They need to be screened for past legal offenses. They also need to be licensed.

Who agrees with that?

So here’s what we can do. Let’s go to work writing letters to our state legislators asking them to introduce legislation requiring that all CPS employees having any contact with children be investigated for past legal problems, psychologically tested, drug tested regularly, and licensed.

Let’s tell our state legislators that we’ve been victims of bad social workers who should be screened out if they have psychological or drug problems. Any social worker or caseworker that lies in a report to the court is obviously mentally unstable. These people should be weeded out of the social services jobs, just as we wouldn’t want unstable people getting law enforcement jobs.

Tell your state legislators to read the comments on the guestbook pages here on Fight CPS so they can see what a huge problem false accusations are. Nobody tells it better than the hundreds of people who come to this site due to victimization by bad social services agents.

Any suggestions or comments on this writing campaign are welcome.

If you write a letter to your state legislators, you’re welcome to post a copy of it here in the comments section.

Keep it brief and to the point. Your legislators are more likely to read a short letter than one that is many pages long.

LET’S KEEP THE HEAT ON THEM until something is done about this travesty of unstable and incompetent social services caseworkers. Only our state legislators can help us on this one. I’ll remember to bring it up from time to time and hope that many of you will get positive responses from your state legislators that you can share with us.

Is there anyone here capable of drafting sample legislation that we can send to our legislators for consideration? If so, email me at the webmaster link at the bottom of this page.

To find out who your state legislators are, see the Write To Your Legislators page here at Fight CPS. And remember, we’re targeting STATE legislators, not federal.

Write letters - hand written letters will be fine, or type them. Don’t send emails as they are too easily deleted.

Thanks to everyone who takes part in this letter writing campaign.

P.S. - THANKS, CINDY, for the great idea!

…
Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

If your CPS social workers are lying, violating court orders, or just being unreasonable, you might get some relief from their tyranny by contacting your state legislator. I’ve done this many times when dealing with unscrupulous agencies, and each time had a pleasant resolution to my situation.

Let’s go back to how I discovered how effective this could be. Back in the 80’s I was a welfare eligibility worker for the Department of Social Services. Occasionally unhappy clients would contact their legislators, and whenever that happened we’d see the supervisor scrambling to get the case file to take it into the program manager’s office. We knew that these people hated to have anyone call their legislators because then the head of the entire Department of Social Services would get a call from Sacramento where our State Department of Social Services is. In other words, a lot of pressure was applied from the top management because they didn’t like getting these calls! What was even more frustrating to the supervisor was that every time there was a call to a legislator, the client got what she wanted.

A few years back a local Department of Social Services caseworker was harassing me after learning about this site. He came out here four or five times with totally facetious or trivial complaints, such as the accusation that I was homeschooling - something that is legal in all fifty states. After the last time, I decided to take action before he got the bright idea of detaining my children on the basis of the number of complaints he’d either manufactured or followed up on. What I did was to write a letter to this caseworker detailing each of his visits to my family, telling what his reasons were each time and what my response was. I sent him a copy of the letter, and sent a copy to his Program Manager, my county supervisor, a few legislators, and a few newspapers. Maybe a few other people, but I honestly don’t remember who at this point. There was a list of these people at the bottom of the letter, so he knew who was getting it. The state legislator wrote to me telling me he had contacted the head of the Department of Social Services for California. Talk about applying pressure from the top! Then the pressure no doubt reached the local office and I didn’t hear from the guy again for years.

I’ve done similar things regarding other agencies. My experiences with writing to state legislators for help have all been good, and so I’m telling you about it in case anyone wants to try it. If you do, here’s some pointers.

1) Write the legislator a formal letter. Handwriting is OK - it looks authentic. Second best is a typed letter. Worst, and probably useless, is email. I’ve heard that legislators in Washington DC have to delete a lot of email unread because they have no way of processing it. I don’t know if a state legislator would do that, but I wouldn’t trust email. In this case, paper is better.

2) Be sure you use proper spelling and grammar. I know that’s a problem for many people who use this site, but if you know you have a problem then you can ask the local high school English teacher or some other expert for help making the letter look good.

3) Tell the legislator in the first line that you are his constituent. And by the way, you should be sure you’re writing only to legislators that preside over your section of the state. As a constituent you are a person who can vote or not vote for him next time he runs for office.

4) Keep it short! One page is sufficient. Three paragraphs, better. When I wrote the letter I mentioned above, I sent the entire three page letter I’d sent to the social worker, but the cover letter to the legislator was only three very short paragraphs. The letter will probably be read by a staff member who doesn’t have a lot of time to wade through many pages of case information. They want to know your specific complaint and needs, and will be able to process it and act on it quickly. It wouldn’t hurt to attach any evidence you may have on hand.

You will probably get a letter back from the legislator’s office telling you whether or not they took action on your complaint. They are there to watch out for their constituents, so in most cases they’ll try to do something to help. They need to know when the laws they make aren’t being followed properly. They can’t change a court order, but if a CPS social worker is violating a court order or in any way breaking social service regulations, they can probably do something to create change. After getting your letter, you might want to write back and thank them for helping.

We have two months before the next election. Do you know who’s running for public office in your state?

The only way to get bad child welfare laws changed is to get better legislators in Washington DC. We need to know how our legislators voted on child welfare issues in the past, and to either contact them for clarification of their opinions on our issues, or use their voting record to show that they’re either for or against families.

After we verify their stance on child welfare issues, we need to take this information to the public. There are thousands of people in your area who have been harmed by CPS agencies, who would like to know who not to vote for. It is up to us, each individually, to campaign for or against the people we want in office.

Find out who is running for office, and tell them what you need as a commitment for family preservation in order to vote for them. Attend meetings, town halls, and campaign functions where you can speak out about the dangers of child welfare. Write letters to editors of papers in your state telling people who to vote for if they are tired of worrying about CPS showing up at their doors and snatching their children.

It is really up to us to do this. I’m hoping that people with other ideas along these lines will brainstorm with me in the comment area. What can we do to get the right people into public office?

I received notification of this in email today (Thanks Charlie Wittman!)

YOUR URGENT ACTION IS NEEDED on a bill quickly moving through Congress called “The Mother’s Act” (H.R. 20) that calls for pregnant women to be screened for mental disorders and new mothers to be screened for “postpartum depression,” resulting in their being prescribed dangerous antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs. A Senate Bill and a House Bill were introduced this year. The House Bill is right now in the Energy and Commerce Committee and a vote is expected within days, whereupon it will go to the House floor next week. The bill provides more appropriations for NIH to conduct research into “postpartum depression” and biological treatments (drugs).

To protest this bill, write to your legislator.
You can do so easily here: The Mother’s Act

I see this as a way to implement The New Freedom Act, forcing psychological testing on all women who become mothers in the USA. CPS workers will probably have access to these screening results and children will most likely be taken from parents either on the basis of screening results, or because mothers decide not to take medications prescribed as a result of these tests. This act opens the way to massive abuse of child-bearing women in the United States, and their children. Please urge your federal legislators to vote against this bill.

One of the biggest crimes of child welfare is that federal funding starts when children are ripped out of their homes and placed in foster homes. Counties want that federal funding - apparently enough to destroy childhoods. Far from being child protection agencies, they run child exploitation agencies - a cash cow for financially ailing counties.

When a simple fix would work, why destroy the entire family?

I’m always reminded of a family that posted their caseworker report to the alt.support.child-protective-services newsgroup a few years back. Four children were ripped from their parents and placed in foster homes for a year, maybe more, because the parents needed to buy a new fan and a child safety gate for their indoor stairway. These items would have cost less than one hundred dollars, but social workers devastated that family and placed the children in foster homes costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

LEGISLATORS: How can you let this happen? I mention one isolated case, yet this needless family destruction is happening to thousands of families. Millions of dollars are being wasted in this country on foster care and so-called child welfare “services”.

Connecticut has come up with a partial solution - to provide what they call “flex funds” which social workers can apply for to help families with various needs such as rental payments and transportation.

More of this type of social work is needed.

SOCIAL WORKERS: Focus on helping families by providing what they need. Tearing families apart over trivial needs is cruel and inhumane, and will scar the children forever. It is not child protection to traumatize them needlessly. Be reasonable!

Source: Study: Problems Follow Foster Care - MIT Professor Says Those Taken From Families Are At Risk For Lives Of Crime, Unemployment, Teen Pregnancies By Charles Proctor for the Courant, published July 29, 2007.

It always astounds me when people come onto this site, say I’m not doing the right thing, and suggest some other thing I should be doing to help change the CPS system.

For example, today I checked the comments for this site and found a comment from Darrin who thinks I should be tracking down a man I’ve never met, whose name I don’t know, to get more information before posting something about a news article.

Sorry, Darrin. I don’t have time. Do it yourself if you think it needs to be done.

Then I came across Carla’s message about creating a new child protection system. Great idea, but again, I don’t have time. I think Carla should do it because after all, it is her idea.

This reminds me that not long ago John told me I should focus my efforts on getting more funding for foster children. Yeah, right… like I would ever do that! Foster parents already get lots more than welfare recipients, and they keep complaining. Don’t get me started on that one! If John thinks that’s the answer to all CPS problems, then John should do something about it.

We all are led by our hearts, to do what we think is right.

Back in October 2000, my heart told me to start this site. I’ve been struggling with this site for almost seven years now, and with trying to help people going through one of the most emotionally devastating events of their lives. And every time I hear about CPS injustice tearing a family apart, it takes a toll on me. I’m constantly upset by things I read on this site - for example what RJ just wrote about his infant being taken by a CPS agent at the hospital because his fiancé mentioned that she’d been depressed when she was 13 or 14. What teenager hasn’t? Why does that mean a firstborn child should be taken from its loving mother? This stuff really haunts me and grabs at my heart.

Many times it isn’t easy for me to bear - which is why I’ve left the message board here in the loving hands of other advocates and activists who want to help counsel people going through CPS hell. That is what their hearts tell them to do, and I’m so grateful for anyone doing anything to help change this inhumane system of cruelty to families. I don’t need or want to be the center of attention here. I’m only doing what my heart led me to do seven years ago, and I know it isn’t right to stop doing it yet. So here I am, still, after all these years.

Which brings me to the point of this article, which is that we all should listen to our hearts and our consciences, and take whatever actions we feel appropriate for the highest good of all involved. If your heart tells you to advocate for families one-on-one, then do it. Don’t expect me to - as that’s not what my heart tells me to do. You do your thing and I’ll do my thing. And hopefully if we all work on doing our heart-inspired tasks, together we can make huge changes in the world.

One person can’t do it all. Don’t even try… this problem is way too big for that. But do your own small part, just as I’m doing my own small part. And don’t think that this site is the ultimate family rights site. If your heart is telling you to create another one, there’s a reason for that! Maybe it is the right thing to do! Don’t hold back. Everyone has talents and capacities that can be drawn upon to help fight CPS and make this world a safer, healthier place for families. Do your own small part and don’t worry about what others are doing, and don’t be like Darrin, Carla and John, and try to tell others what they should be doing. That’s not helpful at all.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you. And I want to tell you what I’ve been doing lately.

It may surprise some people like the three I just mentioned, but I don’t spend all my time working on this website. I hold down a part-time job in my community, and I own two small businesses that are barely profitable… but they keep me busy. I live in an extremely low-budget cabin in the Klamath National Forest, which I rent. I’m not a lawyer and currently don’t work in the legal profession at all. I have a boyfriend I dearly love who expects me to spend a huge part of my time with him. I’m a 55-year-old woman (boyfriend is 56) and I still have one child at home, plus four adult children. My youngest is almost 18 and so soon, for the first time in 35 years, I’ll have no minor children to take care of. Also I have no grandchildren which considering the work I do on this site, could be a divine blessing and protection.

For the last few days my home has been threatened by a forest fire. I live in far-northern California, in a small town called Happy Camp. I came home from my birthday trip to the coast on Saturday night to find that there was a forest fire blazing on the hill next to the forested hill I live on. One of my part-time small businesses is the Happy Camp News site which I’m grateful to say, is in the process of being sold so I won’t have to keep working on it. But this week I’ve been posting articles about the fire, doing interviews, etc. plus I had to remove all my valuables from my home and pack everything, because it seemed that evacuation was imminent. At this point the fire is less intense, however that could change again. So all this stuff is going on, plus I’m still going to work where our workload tripled because of the huge numbers of fire fighters present in our town at this time.

Then I came in here and saw messages from Darrin and Carla, and well, this article is the end result. I don’t need anyone telling me what to do with my time, or saying I’m not doing enough by providing this site, some simple legal information, and a message board for people to connect on. This is what my heart leads me to do, and I’m doing it.

I know that most of the people who come to this site appreciate what I’ve done here. I’m sorry I’m not able to do one-on-one counseling and legal help, but I really don’t have the time or stamina, and like I said, hearing the sad stories affects my heart, and it is nearly more than I can bear at times. I’m a very sensitive person and I love you all.

I don’t want you to stop writing about your heartaches here - because I want the people that matter to come here and read these things. I want CPS workers to stop by and read what we think of their tactics for destroying families. I want foster parents to know that many of the children they are hostage-holding for the government are taken unfairly from innocent parents. I want legislators to come here and realize the CPS system is horrible, unjust, and inhumane. I want them to know that they must be the ones to take the lead, by writing laws to end this system of cruelty in our country. I want lawyers to know that if they aren’t defending their CPS clients actively and aggressively, they are doing a disservice, and are (in my opinion) frauds to be taking on clients they can’t or won’t defend properly. I want them to have the heart to do what must be done in court to safeguard family rights.

Enough said. Thanks for reading, and I’ll post more sometime when I’ve got more time on my hands for publicizing the details of all the injustice CPS does to harm children and families. That seems to be my lifework, which my heart draws me to. I’m here for you as much as I can be, and wherever else I am, you know I’m totally on your side, hoping for all good things to happen in your lives.

The featured topic of the July 23, 2007 issue of The New American magazine is “Families Separated By The State.” Attorney Greg Hession has a feature article in this magazine, titled, “This Is Child Protection?”

The magazine is available for sale for only $2.95 - 2007 New American Back Issues - though you can read Hession’s article online: This Is Child Protection?.

Hession writes about the terror of a government child-snatching home invasion, the snitch network, the court process, statistical evidence, and what can be done about it. He concludes, “Change will likely come only when its cruelties have been exposed, and the public reaffirms that raising children is the responsibility of families, not the state.”

I have been working to expose CPS cruelty for eighteen years now. With the advent of the internet, the word is getting out much better than before. Every one of you who builds a website, or starts a new MySpace or Squidoo Lens, or other similar type of page explaining what CPS does to families, or who goes onto a parenting message board and tells people the truth about CPS, is helping to get the word out. Please keep up the good effort. Write letters to the editors of newspapers. Write to your state and federal legislators. Keep the heat on CPS and the cruel system of family abuse. That’s one of the best ways of seeking change.

Children are better off when left in troubled homes, and not detained in state custody foster homes.

Joseph Doyle Jr., an economics professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management did a study on foster children compared to children living in troubled homes, funded by the National Science Foundation. He used the analytic tools of applied economics to discover that “…children on the margin of foster care placement have better employment, delinquency, and teen motherhood outcomes when they remain at home.”

PLEASE, social workers, legislators, everyone. LISTEN. Most kids are better off when left in their natural family homes. If you care about children, if you want them to have good lives and turn out to be happy, productive citizens, don’t take them away from non-abusive parents.

Doyle’s study tracked more than 15,000 children in Illinois from 1990 to 2002. He chose Illinois because they provided the statistics he needed. He screened out extreme cases of abuse and concentrated only on children whose cases could have gone either way (remaining in their family homes, or going to foster homes).

A July 3, 2007 USA Today article by Wendy Koch states, “Studies . . . show that the 500,000 children in U.S. foster care are more likely than other kids to drop out of school, commit crimes, abuse drugs and become teen parents. . . . His research has shown that this holds true even when foster kids are compared with other disadvantaged youth.”

In conclusion, Doyle wrote: “With the child welfare system affecting so many children who appear to be at high risk of poor life outcomes, it would be useful to know whether abused children benefit from being removed from their families. The analysis here uses the effective randomization of abuse investigators, who differ somewhat in their tendency to have children placed in foster care, to estimate causal effects of placement on longer-term outcomes. Children assigned to investigators with higher removal rates are more likely to be placed in foster care themselves, and they are found to have higher delinquency rates, along with some evidence of higher teen birth rates and lower earnings.”

Thank you, Joseph Doyle Jr., for doing this study.

Sources:

Joseph Doyle Jr. - click on his research link and you’ll see a link to the paper he wrote about his study.

Kids Gain More From Family Than Foster Care - from the MIT News Office

Study: Troubled homes better than foster care - by Wendy Koch, for USA Today

“The system is maxed,” Patrick Crimmins said. “The system as designed, depending on your point of view, either cannot or will not absorb more children.”

Because foster care providers refuse to house hundreds of foster children, the children are forced to sleep in hotels or even in CPS offices.

Rather than admitting that far too many of the children in the state’s custody have been unjustly and unfairly taken from viable and loving parents, Crimmins, who is spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, blames the current crisis on a law that allows foster parents to refuse children, and on the children themselves, some of whom are labeled “severely disturbed”.

Are the children “severely disturbed” because they’ve been unfairly ripped from loving parents? Are they “severely disturbed” because of childhood mental illnesses that the parents were trying to control when they lost custody? What’s the story behind having so many homeless “severely disturbed” children in the state’s care?

I’d be disturbed too if I was taken from my parents by state-paid ‘do-gooders’ and forced into homelessness with strangers. And do they really expect children to take this kind of abusive treatment, and remain calm? What does this say about our society that we allow such cruelty to exist against the most helpless citizens, the children?

Meanwhile Texas legislators may pass laws forcing foster care providers to take children they don’t want.

“Allowing providers to pick and choose among foster children and the services they deliver undermines the entire foster care system,” Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn said, adding, ”It also puts caseworkers in a bind when contractors can dictate which children they will serve.”

Source: Kids sleep in CPS offices after foster-care rejection