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 ­ 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 ­ 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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