AddMe.com, Search Engine Submission and SEO
The "72 Hour Hearing"
A Cruel Mockery by DSS
If DSS takes your children, the law requires the court to schedule a hearing within 72 hours, where you can prove that they should give your children back. That 72 hours includes weekends, so if they snatch them late Friday (their favorite time, because the court isn't open), they technically must give you a hearing late Monday. They don't.
The DSS Dirty Tricks machine usually goes into overdrive at these hearings, because if you win, they have to give your children back to you.
72 Hours or 72 Days
Their first tactic is to delay the hearing as long as possible, to get the disclosures from you and your children they need to put on their case. Courts accommodate, and often extend the hearing past the date required by law. The bright side of this illegal dirty trick is that you, too, get more time to prepare.
Waive the 72 Hour Hearing, and
Wave Goodbye to Your Children
Many DSS lawyers will urge you to waive the 72 hour hearing. DO NOT DO IT, unless you perpetrated serious abuse. You must go on record as opposing the DSS taking your kids. If you do not, it can be used against you later, and you give up the only chance you will have for a full year to try to get your kids back.
The divide and conquer strategy works very well for the DSS at these hearings. If they can get the spouses and their lawyers to go at each other at this early stage, instead of fighting the REAL enemy (DSS), they easily win. Tell your lawyer to fight in collaboration with the other lawyers, so your kids may come home.
The Judge Will Ignore The Actual
Legal Standard
The legal standard for DSS keeping your children is in Mass. General Laws, Chapter 119, Sections 24 and 29C. The DSS usually fails to prove their case, but the Judge will let them keep your children anyway. To keep custody of your children, the DSS must prove that:
1. They have made "reasonable efforts" to prevent or eliminate the need for removal of a child from the home prior to stealing the child. They rarely do. (Section 29C)
2. The child is "suffering from serious abuse or neglect or is in immediate danger of serious abuse or neglect." (Section 24) This means wounds, broken bones, burns, starvation, or the like. It does not mean spanking or psychic harm.
3. Removal continues to be "necessary to protect the child from serious abuse or neglect". (Section 24)
If DSS takes your children, they will keep them a year, and try to adopt them out - They earn up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per child taken, and keep a lot of cronies in work.
Child Abuse is a very serious issue that alot of kids have to go through, and even yourself growing up!
But we as parents have to have the right to mold our children, with boundaries, punishment, curfews, responsibilities, and in some childs eyes ( I know I hear it more than I want) WE ARE MEAN!
Yes in their eyes we are. But we are the parent and they are the child. We have the miracle of creating a human being and molding and sculpting him/her into whatever their imaginations can dream. But we instill that into them as well...
With the role of current DFCS/CPS/DHR standards and procedures as they are, with no public recognition, families continued to be devasted needlessly. The media won't touch it. The public does not believe it. The government, HA HA, won't seem to realize it is the next epedimic. They are allowing this to happen and saying it's ok and if you screw up we have a saftey net to catch you.
Child abuse can be the most devastating event a family may ever face. Even when found innocent of these charges, friends, neighbors and employers may have been contacted and interviewed, and the stigma of being falsely branded a child abuser often remains. Douglas Besharov, the original director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, explained this process in during his 1987 testimony before the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families:
Unfortunately, the determination that a report is unfounded can only be made after an unavoidably traumatic investigation that is, inherently, a breach of parental and family privacy. To determine whether a particular child is in danger, case-workers must inquire into the most intimate personal and family matters. Often, it is necessary to question friends, relatives, and neighbors, as well as school teachers, day care personnel, doctors, clergymen, and others who know the family.
"These programs are the largest, and often the most controversial, complex and challenging of any programs administered by the department," writes Daniel M. Stone, Director of the Virginia Beach Department of Social Services.
"More than 21 social workers and supervisors respond to about 444 reports of suspected child abuse each month. Investigators must go into homes, schools and neighborhoods to talk with children who have reportedly been abused and with the adults who have allegedly abused them."
The toll of an investigation on a family can be high, writes Dana Mack of the Institute for American Values, noting that the investigation can last as long as six months.
"Typically, caseworkers will enter a home for the first time at an odd hour, with no previous announcement, giving no information about the nature of the charge held against the family, nor who has made it," writes Mack. The homes of accused families are always checked, with refrigerators opened and the bathrooms inspected.
"Neighbors and school personnel are questioned about the family, particularly about the reputation, behavior and habits of the parents," writes Mack, noting that it is not unusual in some jurisdictions for child welfare workers to enter homes in the middle of the night, stripping children naked and probing their genitals for evidence of abuse.
Writing in the professional journal Social Work, Elizabeth Hutchinson argues that the costs of mandatory reporting laws far outweigh the benefits, and that greater emphasis needs to be placed on the development of family preservation programs. Hutchinson describes the long-term impact such an investigation may have on a family:
Investigation of a report of child maltreatment is not an innocuous intrusion into family life. By the time an investigation is complete, the family has had to cope with anxieties in both their formal and informal support systems alerted to state suspicion of their parenting. Even if the report is expunged from the central registry due to lack of substantiation, it is seldom expunged from the mind of the family--or from the memories of persons in the support system.
Such investigations may involve repeated and relentless interrogations of children, and a battery of psychological testing for both the parents and their children. These tests are often conducted by a parade of court-appointed psychologists and therapists.
Notes author Thomas Sowell, somewhere between 2 million and 3 million allegations of child abuse and neglect tie up the nation's hotlines every year. Of that number, 60 per cent are deemed false and dropped.
Of the remaining 40 per cent that lead to investigations, writes Sowell, about half eventually are dismissed, "but not before children have been strip-searched, interrogated by a stream of social workers, police officers, and prosecutors, psychologically tested, and sometimes placed in foster care. Such actions usually occur without search warrants, parental consent, court hearings, or official charges -- and often solely on the basis of the anonymous telephone call."
The emphasis used to be on keeping a family together, said Ms. Josey, of the local DFCS. But the focus is now on the best interest of the child. Sometimes, though, hot line callers don't give enough information for a caseworker to work with, she said. "Anytime there's a bad outcome it's a bad outcome, and the system has to look at itself," said Lee Bultman of the Medical College of Georgia Hospital and Clinics' family intervention services. No one wants a bad outcome, but detecting child abuse is not a science, he said. The problem is that the system is broken, underfunded and understaffed, Mr. Bultman said. The federal government has said that child protective services has reached a maximum number of abuse and neglect reports and that the situation is only getting worse, Mr. Bultman said, but the number of caseworkers remains the same. Amanda Lang, a child advocacy volunteer, says the answers lie in community involvement and a DFCS office willing to accept the help. "It seems easier to accept the fact that it's a critically flawed system than to do something about it," Ms. Lang said. Volunteers can help and make a difference for children in state custody, she says.
What A Parent Can Do To Fight False Allegations Of Abuse.
Unfortunately, you cannot do as much as you would really like to do to fight DSS yourself, except to AVOID doing the wrong things. You can learn about many of those wrong things, and about DSS dirty tricks, on this MassOutrage web site, and the linked sites. However, even if you learned it all, that is only the beginning.
Knowing the things you can learn here, simply doesn't give you the whole scope of the process. Courts and lawyers have made it so complicated (probably to keep a lot of their buddies employed) that very few people even inside the system completely understand the process and all its legal requirements.
In sum, fighting DSS is so hard, so technical, and there are so many pitfalls, that you are better off to work with a good lawyer rather than try it yourself. There is just so much to fighting one of these cases, that it is about like doing brain surgery on yourself to try it alone.
So. . . .
1. Get a good lawyer.
The single biggest ingredient in fighting the DSS menace is to get a good lawyer. What is a good lawyer? Here is the list of qualities I would look for:
- Hates the DSS;
- Committed to parental rights over government power;
- Knows the DSS law, regulations and policies;
- Will stand up to DSS social workers and judges, not collaborate with them;
- Is YOUR lawyer only, and is not being paid by the state;
- Will work with, not against, your spouse's lawyer to get your kids back, if appropriate;
- Respects you;
- Respects the Constitution and other founding documents;
- Does not think lawyers are God, and will work WITH you, not talk down to you;
- You trust him and he trusts you. You are both going to take a blindfolded walk down the plank in the dark, so you better trust each other.
2. Work with your lawyer.
The most important thing you can do to get your children back, in addition to avoiding falling into any of the DSS dirty tricks, is work with your lawyer to help him or her get your kids back. How?
You can help review the DSS record, which is very tedious, to look for any evidence you can use against DSS. You can make a chronology, or a time line of all the major events so far, so that the lawyer can get a clear overview of your case. You can pay the poor guy, so he can endure the endless days and nights of attention to your case. You can be patient with the delays, knowing that it is not your lawyer, but DSS and the Court, who have caused them.
You can do everything he tells you in the way of counseling or drug testing or parenting classes, so that he can go back to DSS and report that you have been a good little boy or girl. You can clean up your act, if it isn't: Straighten up your house, your heart, and your life.
You can attend every visitation that your child's kidnappers allow, without fail, even though they will cancel the visits any time they feel like it for any selfish reason. (Irony - they often cancel to care for their own child). You can smile (though gritted teeth) at your child's captors, and work with them. Never, never show your anger, even though the social worker may deserve to fry in the lowest part of Hell.
Listen to your lawyer. Trust your lawyer. If you can't, get a new one. Even if you have a state appointed lawyer, due to lack of finances, fire him if he does not work for you. If he is laughing it up with DSS, fire him. Most lawyers who do this work actually like DSS because they get a lot of work from it. Me - I'd be very happy to be put out of the DSS business tomorrow, if they were abolished.
