California lawmakers have voted unanimously to order an audit of the
state’s powerful Department of Child Protective Services after testimony
from parents who stunned their representatives with testimony of
atrocities.
“It’s the most helpless feeling in the world when this happens to
you. It feels like there is no hope left. I have not seen my daughter
since December… she doesn’t even look like the same child any more.
There is nothing in her eyes. She looks hopeless and there is just
nothing I can do…”
That was from Dr. Ruby Dillon, whose daughter, Alexis, was removed from her family 16 months ago.
The audit plan passed the committee unanimously, and now the
California state auditor, who has subpoena powers, will investigate CPS.
Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who sponsored the bill and organized
parents to speak about their experiences, said it’s a good step forward.
“Now we are going to be able to pull back the veil and see what
happened, what went wrong so that we can then gather data on how to fix
it.”
Donnelly says a lot has gone wrong.
Child Protective Services is supposed to help children and families
overcome stressful events in life, and stay together and healthy. But
there are families who say that CPS does anything but that.
Family members testified before the legislative hearing that CPS
actually has worked to destroy, not restore, their families. And others
suggested there was a profit motive in the situation.
The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) is the federal
law that prompts most state and local legislation and funding for child
protective services.
CAPTA was a federal mandate enacted in 1988. It directed that Health
and Human Services Administration for Children and Families provide
grants to communities for child abuse prevention programs. It mandated
that states implement child abuse laws on their own, in order to qualify
for massive funding and federal grants that will match and reward those
on the state level.
This experimental federal mandate, backed by significant funding, was
intended to keep more families together. However, the National
Coalition for Child Protection (NCCPR) reports that the results of CAPTA
are quite different than the original intention. NCCPR says that CAPTA,
in fact, disrupted more families, and has made life for children in
this experimental government program much, much worse.
NCCPR says that the failings of today’s child welfare system “can be
summed up by the very rationalization often used to justify the way it
works today, an approach that can be boiled down to ‘take the child and
run.’”
The parental rights group says that foster care is a bad answer to
the suspicion of a problem. Their studies indicate that abuse in foster
care is “far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the
general population.”
They say orphanage abuse rates are even higher, so that is not the
answer, either. NCCPR maintains that its research indicates that in
most, but not 100 percent of cases, the best scenario is that the family
remains intact until “due process” takes place.
That is not the way states are handling many cases today. One recent
example is the Nikolayev case that has made national headlines.
On April 24, Alex and Anna Nikolayev took their young child, Sammy,
to Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento, Calif., with flu-like
symptoms. Baby Sammy was born with a heart condition, and they knew he
would need surgery eventually.
While he was there, the Nikolayevs witnessed a nurse giving him
antibiotics – something doctors later confirmed should not have
happened.
Shortly afterward, they were told Sammy needed immediate open-heart
surgery. Already questioning the treatment their son was receiving, they
decided to seek a second opinion before putting their child through
such a risky procedure.
They were told, “You can leave the hospital, but your baby cannot.”
The Nikolayevs decided to take Sammy to another hospital, despite the
hospital saying they could not do so. Police and CPS agents showed up
at the second hospital under the belief that Sammy was in danger. After
seeing that the mother was pursuing medical care for her son, they
concluded that the child was not in danger.
But that would not be the last the Nikolayevs heard of CPS.
The next day, Child Protective Services showed up at the Nikolayev
home with five armed police officers. The mother, a German immigrant,
was skeptical of government and
captured the incident on video.
One officer can be heard saying, “I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist, and don’t fight me, okay?”
Donnelly said he felt compelled to act, as a father, and as a legislator.
“The footage is frightening for parents everywhere to think that your
children might be confiscated should CPS disagree with your parental
instincts. It’s chilling to think that a government agency can take your
child right back to a hospital that you as a parent have lost faith in,
but it happened.”
Donnelly began demanding answers.
In a letter, he asked Sheri Heller,
director of California’s Department of Health and Human Services, which
oversees CPS, to account for how this was allowed to happen.
Heller responded that she couldn’t share that information with an
assemblyman, unless a judge ordered her to do so. Donnelly responded,
“It has become clear that CPS answers to no one, but this abuse of power
cannot be tolerated.”
“I’m hearing all kinds of stories about children being horribly
abused,” said Donnelly, “and CPS does not rescue the child from that
imminent danger, which is why they have this immense power in the first
place.”
The mother in the case, Anna Nikolayev, told WND that since that day, Sammy had a doctor’s appointment and is doing very well.
“He is gaining, weight,” she giggled, “he is even getting a little bit chubby!”
But in her case, a hearing has been delayed for 60 days, and she worries.
“The fear is that they might walk in my house and ask questions again to try to prove their case…(to make them) look good.”
She said that the worst thing that could happen is that “in 60 days
(if) he hasn’t gained weight, they could say, ‘oh, she’s probably not
holding him the right way, not feeding him correctly…’”
She said that she and her husband “always, always worry about that.”
Her hope is for quick resolution, but the court has ordered eight
more visits, inside and outside of their home, before CPS makes a
decision whether or not to continue their investigation of the family.
Orange County CPS spokesperson Ann Broussard said that she had “no
comment” on the Baby Sammy Nikolayev case. But she described the
scenario whereby CPS says it is entitled to take children without a
warrant:
“We regularly bring police. Sometimes police call us. The
term is exigent. If there is imminent danger to the child we do have
the legal right, if it is deemed. There would be a social worker on
site; they would consult with their supervisors, and the authorities.
Often we are called by a hospital. They are mandated reporters. So is a
school district.”
Such cases are not isolated. Another, making headlines in Orange County, contends that CPS testified in defense of the abuser.
There, Ruby Dillon’s 7 year-old daughter was removed from her family due to a custody battle, and has been held for 15 months.
Dillon accuses the father of sexual abuse that she says she has on
tape. Bryan Claypool, her attorney in the case (who is suing CPS for $1
million per month), contends that CPS does not want the custody battle
between the estranged spouses to end because it wants to profit off of
the case.
According to a local CBS affiliate, Claypool commented that,
“Simply
put, the more children that are removed from a household (whether
lawfully or not) the more money that flows to CPS through state and
federal funding.”
Claypool further alleged that CPS is more motivated to protect its
$2.2 billion budget than it is focused on child safety and adoption
efforts. He calls it a “legal kidnapping.”
Claypool told WND the institutionalized corruption goes much deeper,
and farther than the cases he represents. “Every word we have said we
can back up,” he said.
CPS declined to comment on the case.
And yet another case alleged that two young girls were taken away from their mother based on a social worker’s fabricated story.
Deanna Fogarty won a $4.9 million judgment against Orange County,
which ultimately paid $11 million after losing appeals all the way up to
U.S. Supreme Court.
Orange County has never admitted to any wrongdoing although the court
found the social worker involved had filed false reports and suppressed
evidence that would have cleared Fogarty. That same employee was later
promoted to supervisor in charge of training other social workers.
Appeals court justice William Bedsworth wrote in his opinion, “the
evidence adduced at trial obviously caused both the jury and the judge
to conclude not only that something seriously wrong was done to
Fogarty-Hardwick in this case, but also that the wrongful conduct was
not an isolated incident.”
Fogarty told WND the case destroyed her life, and that no amount of
money changes that. She has become a volunteer spokesperson for the
cause, because she says that
“child abuse has become an industry that
actually pays states to legally abduct your children and put them up for
adoption.”
She continued,
“Counties can bring in big dollars for each child in
foster care. Lack of accountability allows unbridled access to this
revenue creating more incentive to remove children from their families.”
She notes that these kinds of profits are hard to resist for these CPS workers, and also the foster parents.
Broussard declined comment on the case.
Fogarty warned other parents that something as minor as a trip to the
ER, or a scrape that a school finds suspicious, can mean the family
devastation that she endured.
“The minute CPS is involved or the second the EMTs are called, parents are already labeled as child abusers,” said Fogarty.
“Can you believed this happened in America?” Donnelly said.
“Instead of protecting kids at risk,” Donnelly says that, “CPS has
become a rogue agency that is stealing kids away from good parents and
returning them to bad ones and needs to be investigated and reformed. We
cannot allow a government agency to exercise unlimited power in
complete secrecy.”
He said the heart of the dispute really is “who is … in control of
your child’s health care? If you don’t like a doctor’s decision, and
seek a second opinion, could this nightmare happen to you? I’m afraid
this is a foreshadowing of things to come as the government becomes more
involved in health care.”
He said the problem in nationwide, too.
In Connecticut, he said, judges and court workers are accused of
setting up businesses, then ordering children before the court to
patronize those vendors, and families are ordered to participate in
organizations where judges sit on the board of directors.
*The posts made in this blog are of our opinion only*
Without Prejudice UCC 1-207
