Study after study shows that children in foster care do not grow up to live the most successful and well-adjusted lives. Actually, Instead report after report form the Department of Corrections, the Children’s Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and many other agencies show that foster care is a failed experiment.
Foster care is meant to help vulnerable children and prevent abuse. Instead, reports continue to come in that show that children in foster care are more likely to be abused, 8% more likely to be abused in a foster home, 28% more likely to be abused in a group home. Statistics are staggering, but let’s look at what is happening to children around the world and how it affects their lives. Just one child being destroyed by foster care is too many.
There is no definition for “family”. HHS workers are just now since the passage of the Family First Preventative Services Act in 2018 beginning to see a definition for family in their own handbooks, and most often the definition does not pertain to biological family but rather adoptive and foster families. As of the beginning of 2020, Arkansas had one paragraph at the end of the handbook that pertained to biological family. The rest of the book instructed workers to place children in foster and adoptive placements and gave tips for how foster and adoptive “parents” should deal with situations with the children passing through their homes.
Not only are the HHS handbooks a joke as far as meeting the needs of children, but courts do not have a definition of “the best interest of the child”. This means that it is up to the court actors to decide what is in a child’s best interest based upon their own opinions. There is no scientific evidence to show that the courts are doing what is best for the children.
Instead, court’s often remove children from biological family and place them with complete strangers. Even when children are placed in the same state, they are often placed hours from family members or anyone that they know. Sometimes children are moved out of state. The result is unhappy children being prescribed psychotropic drugs “to help them cope” with their new life and new “family”. The children often end up running away.
Children that runaway brings me to another point. Runaways, especially runaway youth are sometimes found living in uninhabitable dwellings and even though the Department of State says year after year that foster care is a problem, City Reports continue to show that most 60% at the least number, and sometimes as many as 99%) children rescued through trafficking stings were in state custody when they were trafficked.
Foster children lose everyone and everything they know. 80% of foster children are prescribed drugs to help them cope. They runaway. They end up being homeless or trafficked. And for those that do age out, the Department of Corrections shows that about 75% of them will be incarcerated within two years!
Their futures are not that bright! What are some solutions? (1) Localize foster care so that children do not lose everyone and everything they know, (2) place children with family members and even friends of the family so that they remain in familiar areas, (3) shift the funding to pay for family placements so that children do not have to live with strangers where they have to take prescribed drugs to cope, (4) create programs that teach youth how to apply for college (foster children are eligible for free college tuition though only about 2% will ever apply) (5) create programs that help foster children learn life and job skills, (6) get involved with local churches, legislators, and community organization to create peer support groups where foster children can relate with each other. Let them know that they are not alone.
If anyone else has ideas about how we can improve future generations, please let us know in the comments or send and email through the contact page. Thanks. I hope this helps.
Former Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham said, “It was a different time. You didn’t remonstrate with the guy who’s giving you absolution.” (JOSEPH KACZMAREK / AP)
“The abuse scarred every diocese. The cover-up was sophisticated. The church protected the institution at all costs.” Attorney General Josh Shapiro says that two groups are at fault for allowing abuse to continue; “the Catholic Church hierarchy and law enforcement, for sometimes working in tandem to keep the accusations from the public”.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro presented a grand jury report that shows decades of child sex abuse by priests in Pennsylvania and identifies 301 predator priests, and said that not only did church leaders fail, but that law enforcement failed as well.
Police allowed offending priests to walk away free for decades. Though the modest number of 1,000 victims the grand jury recounted suffer emotional, mental, and physical complications caused by the abuse throughout their lifetimes. When abuse happens there is a ripple effect that not only influences that abused person’s life.
Abuse is generational. Abused victims carry the memories of what happened to them every where they go. It affects their decision making, their perspectives, their parenting skills, their jobs, and their relationships with family and friends. They develop trust issues that never go away.
Former Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham says that Pennsylvania police departments are stocked with Catholic police officers that “knew the priests, but more importantly, she said, the priests knew them”. She said, “It was a different time. You didn’t remonstrate with the guy who’s giving you absolution.”
The Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli says that he thinks the public and law enforcement likely “didn’t want to believe priests would sexually abuse children. These cases in that time period probably would have been very difficult prosecutions, word against word”.
Morganelli was criticized after Stephen T. Forish was acquitted on charges of soliciting sex in 1998 when Monsignor prosecuted the case. “I was criticized big-time for bringing that case”. Eight years later, Forish was again charged with soliciting sex from strangers. He died awaiting trial in that case.
Shapiro, through a spokesman, declined to discuss law enforcement’s role in allowing abusive priests to get away without charges.
One of the most egregious missed opportunities by law enforcement involved the
Rev. Thomas Bender, who served at St. Francis Orphanage in Orwigsburg in 1972 said “the case where a state trooper found Bender with a high school-age boy, both with no pants on, in a car was reported by another trooper, who also was a deacon in the church”.
Monsignor Anthony Muntone’s report to Bishop Thomas J. Welsh of the Allentown Diocese stated that “the first trooper gave Bender a lecture and sent him on his way”. Welsh received another complaint about Bender in 1984.
One victim that Bender repeatedly raped years had to be hospitalized for a drug overdose and psychiatric problems. The church had to pay the civil and criminal complaints. Bender was convicted in 1988 and again in 2006. He is now 84 and lives in the Lower Macungie Township.
Robert Masters who in 1964 was the Beaver County district attorney took it on himself to block Rev. Ernest Paone’s arrest. Paone molested young boys and illegally used guns with “even younger parishioners,” as early as 1962. Masters wrote in an Aug. 4, 1964, letter to Pittsburgh Diocese Bishop Vincent Leonard, “I have, in order to prevent unfavorable publicity, halted all investigations into similar incidents with other young boys”. Paone was allowed to transfer to dioceses in Nevada and in California even though more complaints were coming in at the time.
Forty-one years later the grand jury found other accusations. The grand jury asked Masters why he deferred to the bishop’s request to keep Paone’s misconduct under wraps. Masters stated, “Probably, respect for the bishop. I really have no proper answer”.
Paone supported Masters political career. In 1989, Masters who is now 87, was hired as solicitor for Beaver County’s Children and Youth Services. He was fired in 2018 when county commissioners learned of his record through the grand jury’s report.
Richard Long, the executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association says, “It’s not acceptable for a district attorney or anyone in law enforcement to be overly deferential to any institution or any group,”
Carbon County District Attorney Richard Webb, who died in 2016, refused to prosecute Rev. David Soderlund who was instead assigned to posts outside of Carbon County. While serving at St. Joseph’s in Summit Hill during the 1980s, the Allentown Diocese received three complaints about Soderlund. One investigation revealed findings of child pornography, “including an image of Soderlund masturbating a 12-year-old boy”. Master “had assured him if the parents would not make an issue of the matter, he would not prosecute”.
Soderlund was sent to Our Lady of Hungary in Northampton, which has an elementary school. In 1987 he was accused of soliciting sex from young boys again. Soderland was removed from ministry in 1989 and the priesthood in 2005He moved to Wyoming where he was arrested for possession of child pornography in 2009. He was sentenced to two to five years in prison.
In 1978 the prosecutor allowed a diocesan attorney to intimidate a mother and her two children that were sexually molested by Rev. Anthony Cipolla of the Pittsburgh Diocese. The woman said, “They’re pushing the district attorney around or this guy is ignoring the district attorney, and the district attorney is not sticking up for us. He isn’t telling them, you know, Hey, don’t talk to them kids like that or Don’t talk to that woman like that. He just let him say whatever he wanted to do, and he did. And he intimidated us really bad.” Out of fear because of the intimidation the woman dropped the charges against Cipolla.
Cipolla went on to abuse more children. Current Beaver County District Attorney David J. Lozier said he believes the complaint came when the case was beyond the statute of limitations.
“Terry McKiernan, a director of Bishop-Accountability.org maintains a database of accused clergy. His notes show that from a 1967 phone call uncovered during the 2002 investigation into the Diocese of Manchester, N.H. a Catholic police chief leaving his job urged the church to remove a problem priest, Donald Osgood, who hadn’t been charged. The chief feared “the whole thing might blow sky high” if a non-Catholic chief succeeded him, the notes say.” Osgood was named in at least four civil lawsuits that later were settled.
“The bishops spend a lot of time schmoozing with the people in power who can help them or hurt them” McKiernan said. “Reports like these give a feel for the hand-washes-hand kind of thing that really was going on.” The 2016 grand jury report on the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese noted several instances in which law enforcement took the side of the church over priests’ victims.
“Jurors learned of a serial predator, Monsignor Francis McCaa, through a 985 meeting between then-Bishop James Hogan and the county district attorney’s office where Hogan agreed to send McCaa for treatment followed by a reassignment. McCaa, who died in 2007, was reassigned to serve as a hospital chaplain in Martinsville, W.Va. As the grand jury looked further into McCaa’s case, it learned that Cambria County Judge James T. Kiniry, then an assistant prosecutor in the district attorney’s office, carried out the deal with Hogan.” Says Tim Darragh of The Morning Call.
In 2016, Kiniry said “the church was given more authority over its members back then”. “You have to understand this is an extremely Catholic county. … Back then, the diocese moved the problem. That’s just how it was”.
Cardinal John Krol’s office managed to keep a police detective from reporting that Rev. Francis X. Trauger sexually assaulted Krol’s own 14-year-old son in 1982. The cardinal’s assistant said, “Convinced of our sincere resolve to take the necessary action regarding Fr. T., [the victim’s father] does not plan to press any charges, police or otherwise”.
“The asset these guys had was their word was golden,” Morganelli said. “They don’t have that anymore.”
The Lakota Peoples Law Project says that the American Association of Adoption Attorneys filed six federal lawsuits in six different states and that Judge O’Conner struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act declaring that “it is an unconstitutional violation of the Equal Protection Act and stated that it racially discriminated against white people because they gave preference to Indian people or Indian children”.
“The issue has been appealed to the United States Supreme Court and it’s likely that they’re going to take up the case of the Indian Child Welfare Act, so this is part of an across-the-board assault that Trump and McConnell have packed the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and they have upheld the anti-voting rules and regulations in Texas. They’ve upheld the ban on abortions. They’ve upheld the ban on gay marriages, and it’s now reached down even into going after a 47-year-old Indian Child Welfare Act that the white lawyers happen to have objected to because they’re making they’re making approximately $100,000 a piece for every one of the Indian children that they adopt out to a white couple”, stated Daniel Sheehan from the Lakota Peoples Law Project.
Here at Minding Hearts will never see us complain about the abortion ban because that prevents babies from being born and oftentimes causes the mother’s life to spiral out of control too, but to say that the Indian Child Welfare Act discriminates against white people brings up issues. Adoption is not the blessing that states make it out to be. Less than 3% of adopted children ever go to college. Many are placed on psychotropic drugs to “help them cope”. Sometimes before they are even a year old.
In 2018, while President, Trump passed the Family First Preventative Services Act that is supposed to be in place now and requires states to place children with family members first. The Indian Child Welfare Act states much of the same, but also requires that children removed from their biological parents and taken into states custody has to be placed with someone from their own tribe.
For Judge O’Connor to say that placing children with their own extended family where they are not denied the right to own heritage is absurd! More children are trafficked in the United States than anywhere else in the world. City reports show that between 60% to as many as 99% of the children rescued in sex trafficking stings were in state custody when they were trafficked. The Department of State every year in their Trafficking In Person Report reports that foster care is a problem and that trafficker’s prey on vulnerable children in foster care and children that run away. Children in foster care are more likely to run away, and when they are taken out of their neighborhoods and away from the people and places that they know, they are more likely to fall victims to traffickers. So what Judge O’Connor is doing is not “in the best interest of the children”.
Whether we agree on abortion or not I hope that we agree that keeping families intact whenever possible is the best thing that can happen for a child and for society as a whole. I plan to keep my eyes on this lawsuit and follow Judge O’Connor’s decisions and I hope that you will too. We cannot continue to destroy our own children. Let the tribes take care of their own and let the rest of the American families and families around the world take care of their own. Children are far better off with family than they are with complete strangers. Children are better off in their own communities with people they know and trust than they are when states take them off to far away places where they do not know anyone and cannot find their way back. Children just want to go home! States cannot even justify about 90% of removals!
The home where Dequan and Latrisha Greene fostered and killed Charlie Garay. 2734 Broadway in Rotterdam. Photo by Peter Barber. Dequan Greene faces second-degree murder charges.
A lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Albany County says that “The agencies ignored repeated red flags and bypassed established procedures, leaving Charlie in the care of at the home of Dequan and Latrisha Greene for months longer than he should have been and even bypassed procedure to initially place him there.
Charlie and his 5-year-old sibling were removed from their biological parents and placed in the Hellish placed in Schenectady County foster home by Albany County Department of Social Services in September 2020 where they were ignored and abused until Charlie was dead. Of course, none of the parties profiting from this child’s preventable death will comment. Lorraine Silverman is the attorney bringing the lawsuit.
The lawsuit names multiple employees in both counties including case workers, supervisors and a CPS intake specialist, employees from the St. Anne Institute, a counselor, case manager and social worker.
Allegations include:
Employees did not interview and assess the two children’s needs.
Officials knew that Latrisha Greene was running an unlicensed day care out of her home.
Latrisha hurt children and placed them in a dog crate as punishment.
The state did not follow procedures and policies to certify the Green’s as a foster placement, nor did they ever check on the children in the home.
The state failed to respond to multiple calls that would have prevented Charlie from being killed.
The foster parent certification process was never properly completed even though Dequan Greene acknowledged fasting as a “self-care practice,” and stated that he had a short temper, and both Latrisha and Dequan Greene indicated their parenting styles were authoritative.
The state “failed to warn” (the murderous people that they paid to kill Charlie) the foster parents that Charlie was on complex medications and that he suffered from complex issues even though the killers said they did not want children with issues several times.
The Greens were never trained to manage, care for, and parent foster children who had the medical and other conditions.
The weekend the children were supposed to be in the Hellish foster placement turned into three agonizing months for the children.
Albany County called for an extension and advised lied saying that the Greenes wanted to keep the children in the home. Schenectady County agreed.
The children missed appointments.
“From the start of the foster care placement … the defendants did not make the required visits, assessments, evaluations, referrals, and checks to determine if they were properly and safely placed in the Greene foster home”.
In October, Latrisha Greene reported a behavioral issue but no one from the state would talk to her about it.
Latrisha Greene asked that the children be removed for a variety of reasons. One reason included that she did not have sleeping accommodations for the children.
“Rather than remove the children, Albany County asked Schenectady County whether one of the children could sleep in a walk-in closet. Albany County also recommended placing the other child in the basement”.
Schenectady County employee indicated that Charlie could not sleep there, and Albany County lied saying that it would remove the children the next day. They never showed up.
Albany County even sent an emergency removal 10-day letter Oct. 22, 2020. “Following that letter, Albany County DCYF and Schenectady County CFSO deliberately, willfully and intentionally chose to keep the infants in the Greene foster home”.
Albany County “bullied” Schenectady County and Latrisha Greene to keep the children. Schenectady County never visited the home again.
After missing several appointments and using Covid as a reason for not having the children in school, on Dec. 6, Latrisha Greene indicated the children were sick with the flu and she could not allow “in person” visits, but the counties did not require documentation.
Four days before Charlie was murdered, Albany County caseworkers showed up at the home to drop off a door alarm for a bedroom of one of the children.
“The children were beaten with sticks or switches, hands struck with pots and pans, made to do wall sits, force fed, had their mouths filled with food as punishment, food withheld, hit in their stomachs with jugs, sprayed with cold water, forced to take cold showers, pushed down, choked, confined to a dog cage as punishment and denied medical care and schooling”.
The lawsuit also alleges that Dequan Greene stomped on them.
“The surviving child suffered a torn frenulum, swollen lip, bruising to the torso and face, ear and bruising and scarring to the neck and bruising to the pelvis, among other injuries.
Charlie died from blunt force trauma that severed his liver.
“If the defendants had acted properly and had complied with their obligations and duties … the children would have never been placed with Latrisha Greene and Dequan Greene. The children even if wrongfully placed, would have been removed before they were beaten, abused, and murdered.”
Dequan Greene’s attorney says that Dequan claims that Charlie died by “choking”.
Latrisha Greene does not face charges in Charlie’s death.
ASFA is the adoption and safe families act set up by Hillary Clinton in 1997. ASFA is set up under CAPTA which is the child abuse and prevention act of 1974 and is set up under the Mondale Act of 1974. CAPTA will tell you how the system is set up. ASFA will show you the money. Also, look up “adoption incentive payments“. From Analee Bobbitt;
Let’s break something down as far as Title IV-E goes. The Department makes a TON of money off our kids when they remove them. Incentive based kidnapping is the real plague in the states. I’ll use numbers based on where I live. First, they receive the report. Doesn’t matter how true or false it is. It’s their foot in the door to your livelihood. They’ll create a false claim of immediate danger because Title IV-E must have proof of a “Service plan” and they have to show reason for removal. Once removed the department gets paid $3k/child and $4k if they are disabled or handicapped.
That’s only within the first month. Afterwards, they take the children to doctors, psychologists, and therapists under their grant and pay. They claim one child as 3 to triple the money back on their efforts. Once again, libel and slander. Not to mention coercion and collusion.
Lastly, they put them into foster care such as emergency foster facilities or foster homes. No check are made for the welfare of the children so practically ANYTHING could happen to our babies and they exercise plausible deniability, yet won’t investigate the claims of the children or yourself if you find out.
The foster facility gets a check for $3k/mo per child. This is suppose to go towards food, medical and clothes. Yet time and again we see children with dirty or worn clothes, dirty faces, bruises and so on.
You may be wondering how much does 1 state’s “Department” gets out of all of this? Our state got $2.2 BILLION in August of 2020 alone!!! Scary huh? Sadly I’m sure it’s more in some other states but this is the real truth! Look it up. I’m sure you’ll find it. We need to protect our children from these kidnappers and abusers and speak out!!!
Contact your Senators, mayors, governors and all public officials about the corruption they are Blowing through their absolute refusal to act!!! Tell your Senators to REPEAL the Adoption and Safe Families Act and to return our children!! Remember these children are the future of our nation and if we give up now the future is lost! Speak out! BE HEARD!! DON’T GIVE UP!! ~ Annalee Bobbitt
“Even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.” Isaiah 43:7
Unfortunately, not everyone defines morals the same way and not all scientists look at the same moral compass. A few years ago, I looked at Karen Moxom’s Mind Over Matter Project that is moving beyond implanting chips in people who are paralyzed or missing a limb to implanting chips in addict’s brains to change their behaviors (Moxon, K, Ph.D., Ignacio Saez, Ph.D., and Jochen Ditterich, Ph.D., 2019). What I found disturbed me, and leads us back to moral and ethical questions about how technology should be used.
Karen Moxom speaking about her Mind Over Matter project stated that “Technology in neuroscience will soon let us simply think about something we want our computers to do and watch it instantaneously happen” (Moxon, et al., 2019). As the technology, she is working with becomes more available and safer to use there are also ethical questions to ask about when the technology is appropriate to use and how it should be used in the future.
The technology can change someone’s life that is missing an arm or a leg by decoding algorithms of recorded neuron activity to carry out the patient’s intention to move. There is also a theory that the device will work with memory patients that suffer from Alzheimer’s or be able to change an addict’s decision-making process so that they make better decisions.
Besides deciding how to use the device, there are also cost and inequality concerns because the device will be costly. Another concern is that no one knows what the societal impact of being able to plug thoughts into a computer will be. She did not mention any of those things in her reports.
The definition of “personhood” may need to be changed to make the experiments legally ethical. Technology has taken off so fast that there are not ethical guidelines in place to refer to when ethical questions arise. One idea that some scientists have determined will solve ethical problems involves changing the definition of “personhood”.
Moxon’s study from 2015 intended to establish genuinely causal relationships between neurophysiological activity and behavior shows brain-behavior causality can be achieved by disrupting neural activity with an external intervention and observing the consequent change in behavior. The study shows in neurorobotic BMI, brain-behavior causality is not between the brain and the body, but between the observed neurophysiological activity within the brain and an external device outside the body.
Possibilities are endless and there are numerous studies about how neural coding in the interface can be used to change behavior. They all show how beneficial the technology can be to someone that is missing a limb or suffering from paralysis or Parkinson’s disease but do not say much about the possible adverse effects of using the device.
“Who makes these judgments and how?”
R&D is crossing the line in genetic modifications. Science is always going to seek answers. Scientists are inquisitive beings that will always have more questions about how humans and other things are made and how to improve them. Addictions is a field with little scientific data to base any decisions on. Addicts are often misunderstood and are rarely cared for. Most addicts end up in jail and there are experiments happening that raise ethical questions, but the big question about Moxom’s work is who gets to decide how a person is supposed to think and behave?
To link that back to genetic modifications, who gets to decide what the perfect human is? Will we ever have eyes blue or brown enough? Will humans ever be the desired look? with the desired personality?
Who’s desire? It cannot be a matter for either science or society alone to decide. We as a culture have to decide what we will and will not accept as morally and ethically acceptable. Will we allow the definition of personhood to be changed so that scientist’s work does not legally violate human rights?
When considering genetic data healthcare professionals have to consider what data needs to be collected and how it should be analyzed and used. We also have to be careful with labels because words count and they can hurt. Patient’s lives can easily spiral out of control if they receive the wrong treatment or no treatment at all. Someone may become depressed or financially stressed, and that can lead to more problems with a person’s health.
Low self-esteem about a known genetic characteristic might lead someone to think that they cannot be a good parent or that they can only have children that are physically and mentally disabled. Do we as a society believe that if someone does not look like or think like us that they should not be born?
Adoption and fostering is an alternative that many people with physical disabilities choose to take out of fear that giving birth to a biological child will create a person who’s life will not be successful and appreciated. While many children do need homes and people that they can trust, do the genetically challenged people that want children think that by choosing to adopt and foster that they are receiving the “perfect child” because of the way that the child looks? That adoptive person will end up being disappointed because most orphan children have already suffered unthinkable trauma that looks cannot cover-up.
Jiankui’s work creating genetically enhanced babies was condemned because he deceived vulnerable patients into using a risky, untested procedure with no medical justification (Sample, 2019). No one knows yet how the baby’s lives will turn out to be, but he was arrested and jailed for creating them.
Society needs to be more aware of how our thoughts and actions affect others. Genetic enhancement can be life-saving such as with treating memory problems before a patient develops Alzheimer’s, or to cure blood disorders, cancer, blindness, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases. Genetic screening can be used by doctors to detects pre-existing genetic characteristics. The goal for most medical scientists is to create a healthier society.
Gene editing can be done to prevent diseases, cure diseases, and to change or improve physical appearance, metabolism, and physical capabilities. Mental faculties such as memory and intelligence can also be genetically enhanced. Foods can be genetically modified and created!
Ethical guidelines that are in place, but that have to be thought about again and again include: Beneficence is a foundational moral principle that means that doctors have a moral obligation to make decisions based on what is best for the client and to set their own needs aside to focus on the needs of the clients throughout the relationship. Fidelity is a moral principle that pertains to the importance of building relationships based on trusts. On agreeing to participate in a research project, participants are entrusting themselves to the researcher who has an obligation to protect each participant as much as possible from any harm as a result of participating in their research.
Most genetic enhancements probably are for the good of the patient, but then there are other processes and procedures that may cause more harm. The entire mind, body, and spirit of each patient would have to be evaluated to assess how appropriate a genetic enhancement will be. In doing so I hope that doctors will remember that we are all made by God and in his image.
References
Moxon, Karen, Guglielmo Foffani, (Brain-Machine Interfaces beyond Neuroprosthetics, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, Retrieved From,), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.03.036
A look at the “Right To Lie” case where Mom got $9.6M and then, the daughter sued Orange County.
Child Protection workers costs taxpayers billions every year in lawsuits that most people are completely unaware of, and would be outraged about if they understood. I found Kathlee Arthur a few years ago in my research on the subject. Kathlee Arthur is a woman from Washington State who advocates nationally for foster children and their biological families. She informed me about the “Right To Lie” case that at the time she was using to raise awareness to legislators to show how devastating it is when social workers get away with lying on the stand to keep children separated from their biological families.
Deanna Fogerty-Hardwick lost custody of her minor children, Preslie and Kendall. Deanna Fogerty-Hardwick filed suit and won. Later, her daughter Preslie filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against the County and employees of the SSA. In 2011, a jury awarded Fogarty-Hardwick $4.9 million in damages. Orange County then appealed the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court at the taxpayer’s expense. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. During that time though, interest and additional attorney fees were racking up the costs that Orange County was charging taxpayer’s to fight for the “Right To Lie”. The total payout came to $9.6 million. The county also incurred an additional $1 million for its own legal costs on the case. None of the social workers that fought were ever held accountable for lying in court to destroy the family. None of the people making the decisions to fight for the right to lie in court ever had to pay out of their own pocket to make that argument.
Preslie showed the courts that the social worker employees acting under color of state law maliciously used perjured testimony and fabricated evidence to secure her removal from her mother and that the state abused it’s power when it violated her Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights to her familial relationship with her mother. Federal appellate court No. 15-55563 D.C. No. 8:13-cv-01390-JLS-AN opinion affirmed that Orange County is not immune from liability when workers perjure themselves to adopt a child out to complete strangers.
The ruling issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is based on the same events that caused a jury to award Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick $9.6 million from Orange County in 2011 after she alleged that social workers used fabricated evidence to cause a court to remove her two daughters from her custody for six and a half years! The district court denied absolute and qualified immunity to the individual defendants.
Preslie’s complaint targets conduct well outside of the social workers’ legitimate role as quasi-prosecutorial advocates in presenting the case. The court concluded that Beltran v. Santa Clara County disposes of the issue. In Beltran, the court held that social workers are not entitled to absolute immunity from claims that they fabricated evidence during an investigation or made false statements in a dependency petition affidavit that they signed under penalty of perjury, because such actions are not similar to discretionary decisions about whether to prosecute. The court also concluded that defendants’ use of perjured testimony and fabricated evidence in court in order to sever Preslie’s familial bond with her mother was unconstitutional. In this case, Preslie has produced more than sufficient admissible evidence to create a genuine dispute as to whether her removal from her mother’s custody violated her clearly established constitutional rights, and defendants’ case for qualified immunity from these charges is not supported by the law or the record. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment. (Justia, Hardwick v. County of Orange, No. 15-55563, 9th Cir. 2017)
The County could be on the hook to pay out once again. Still, California’s social worker employees that are fighting for the right to lie in court have not been held accountable for perjuring themselves. Those workers did not lose their jobs, go to jail, or spend any money out of their own pocket. Instead, after trying to destroy this family completely and then lying about it, they get to spend money they can access that we put in the Social Security Fund for retirement and disabled people. And Congress let’s state employees get away with this every day.
“No official with an IQ greater than room temperature in Alaska could claim that he or she did not know that the conduct at the center of this case violated both state and federal law,” Judge Stephen Trott wrote in the opinion. “Perjury is a crime under both federal and California state law, as is the knowing submission of false evidence to a court. … Because they are supported by the record as a whole, we construe the facts Preslie offers in support of her allegations in the light most favorable to her.”
Hardwick’s allegations are the same as her mother’s. In 2000, Orange County Social Services agents Marcie Vreeken and Helen Dwojak fabricated testimony “that (Fogarty-Hardwick) had caused her daughters to skip a mandatory visit with their father, when in fact the problem was caused by a visitation monitor.”
Hardwick said that there are other lies that the social workers delibertly and maliscously told the court; when they said that Fogarty-Hardwick had turned her daughters against their visitation monitor and when they told the court that Fogarty-Hardwick had told her children that their father was trying to take them away from her.
Thankfully the court disagreed with the assertion that Orange County attorneys argued that it was not clearly established in civil court at the time of the events in question that in situations such as Hardwick’s, those involved had “the right to be free from deliberately fabricated evidence.”
Orange County officials have maintained that its social workers never wronged Fogarty-Hardwick or her family. Neither employee was disciplined and Vreeken was later promoted to a position in which she trains other social workers. County records show Vreeken was still employed in 2015, when she earned $132,466 in total compensation. County Supervisor Todd Spitzer said that social workers often face difficult decisions when deciding when and whether to separate a child from their parents and that it was important for those employees to know that the county backs their decisions. “Social workers have an immense responsibility to protect children, and I’d much rather have a social worker err on the side of taking a child from the home than leave a kid where there might be suspected child abuse,” Spitzer said. “It’s a delicate balance, and social workers needs to know that if they do that the county will back them up.”
I have to disagree that social workers are lying In court to protect children. They are lying in court to get away with destroying the very people they are created to serve. I hope others will consider this case and seriously ask themselves if anyone should ever have a right to lie about another in court.
It is time to stop the foster care to prison pipeline.
We have to stop the foster care to prison pipeline. There are people sitting in jails and mental hospitals that do not even know who their family is or where they came from and public defenders and social workers “drop the ball”. Leaving them there with no one to advocate for them, and do you want to know how it almost always ends? It almost always ends in solitary confinement until they kill themselves or a jailer loses it and kills them.
In a related article: Speaking of the foster care to prison pipeline….PBS interviewed Ken Mascara, the sheriff of St. Lucie County in Florida.
Ken Mascara has been the sheriff of St. Lucie County in Florida for the past 20 years. He has seen funding for mental health facilities plummet, and as a result, more and more mentally ill patients end up languishing behind bars. Now, he gives his Brief But Spectacular take on making county jails safer, and smarter.
It is going to take everyone, a village, the legislators, the governors, the presidents, and every day people like you and me to make the world a better place for foster children. As some of you already know from my past reports, more than 80% of the children placed in foster care are “prescribed psychotropic drugs to help them cope”. Once they age out statistics show that 75% of the aged-out youth end up incarcerated within two years. Often because they did not have access to the drugs they were prescribed as children, and they turn to street drugs. They have no family to support them. Most of the time family times are severed and children are moved away from anyone and everything they know. We have to do better!
The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Texas announced in a statement that a grand jury indicted David Pettigrew, 48, and Chad Michael Rider, 46, on charges of conspiring to sexually exploit children. Pettigrew was also charged with transporting child pornography.
Pettigrew was the head pastor of Denison Church of the Nazarene, a board member of a foster parent association, a father of adopted children, a crossing guard, and a substitute teacher at Neblett Elementary. Pettigrew is also married to an unnamed school teacher who is a mandated reporter!
The FBI compiled data that shows that of the nearly 25,000 runaways reported to NCMEC in 2017, one in seven were likely victims of child sex trafficking. Of those children, 88 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing. In 2017 alone, NCMEC’s Cyber Tip line, a national mechanism for the public and electronic service providers to report instances of suspected child sexual exploitation, received over 10 million reports.
Matt Agorist from the Freedom Thought Project explored further and wrote a chilling Report that shows that 88% of missing sex trafficked children come from US foster care system (Matt Agorist 2018) and that other governmental organizations have corroborated this horrifying trend. In a 2013 FBI 70-city nationwide raid, 60 percent of the victims came from foster care or group homes. In 2014, New York authorities estimated that 85 percent of sex trafficking victims were previously in the child welfare system. In 2012, Connecticut police rescued 88 childrenfrom sex trafficking; 86 were from the child welfare system.
Whitney Manning, a grandmother in Virginia that advocates for foster children and raises awareness to mental health issues recently visited Washington D.C. where she met the “Grandmother of all advocacy for foster children”, Kathlee Arthur and many other advocates and family members that came together to ask for child welfare reform and to defund ASFA which is the 1997 adoption and safe families act. Kathlee Arthur explains how ASFA targets poor children and does not offer services to other children that may need them. She goes onto explain how this has created the fostercare to prison pipeline.
I also did some further research on how states could be supplying 88% of sex trafficked minors and found that the United States Department of State even reported that the United States foster care system is a problem. The 2019 Trafficking In Persons Report from the Department of States (TIP) says,
“In the United States, traffickers prey upon children in the foster care system. Recent reports have consistently indicated that a large number of victims of child sex trafficking were at one time in the foster care system.”
The 2021 TIP Report states that individuals in the United States vulnerable to human trafficking include: children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, including foster care; runaway and homeless youth; unaccompanied children; individuals seeking asylum; American Indians and Alaska Natives, particularly women and girls; individuals with substance use issues; migrant laborers, including undocumented workers and participants in visa programs for temporary workers; foreign national domestic workers in diplomatic households; persons with limited English proficiency; persons with disabilities; LGBTQI+ persons; and victims of intimate partner violence or domestic violence and that some U.S. citizens engage in extraterritorial child sexual exploitation and abuse in foreign countries.
Foster and adopted children are dear to my heart and they are our most vulnerable citizens. Once children enter the foster care system and other juvenile facilities, their contact with their own family and the people they know is severed through court processes. Often times foster and adopted children are moved out of state where they are not familiar with their surroundings and can easily get lost and fall into the hands of sex traffickers if they run away, which they often do. One solution that could be considered legislatively is localizing foster care in a way that children never have to lose all of their family and friends and so that they remain in places that are familiar to them where they can get to someone that they trust and will confide in when things go wrong. Too often children that are severed from their families feel unwanted and lost in this world. We can do something to change that.
Hearts and Minds 