Child Protective Services, CPS, has devastated and destroyed hundreds of thousands of families in America during the last thirty years leaving a trail of broken hearts, broken dreams, and shattered childhoods.
Rather than helping families, government agents have used unconstitutional laws in Juvenile Court to rip children away from their loving parents, break asunder God-given, natural, parent-child bonds, and adopt the children of the grieving out to others who profit financially with large monthly adoption subsidy payments.
Child Protective Services must be stopped! The law that started this, CAPTA, must be repealed. We must work tirelessly to inform the public of this very dangerous travesty of justice. We must keep faith knowing that if there is a God, there is an answer and a way to end this heartache.
Child Protective Services Agents - please come to your senses! Family destruction on false or trivial grounds is wrong, reprehensible, and inhumane.
Fosterers - be aware that for the money you get you are holding much-loved children away from their grieving families while the parents are forced to perform a service plan that is anything but a service to them. I call this hostage holding for the government. This is not kindness - to help misguided government agents destroy family relationships and break loving bonds.
CPS workers and fosterers - I ask that you now give up these unworthy professions and find something more dignified to do with your lives. Let the children of the innocent return to their homes where they are truly valued, adored, and loved by the parents God gave them.
Family rights are God-given rights. And they should not be ignored or postponed. Every moment these loving parents and children spend separated from one another is a torment beyond what anyone should ever have to bear.
It is unworthy of human dignity to allow this terrorism and torture of families to go on without saying something, speaking out, and trying to make a change.
Site mission: To provide information and support for families attacked by Child Protective Services and child welfare agents, especially those families facing false or trivial accusations of child abuse or neglect; and for researchers working to protect natural family rights.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Florida judges can approve the adoption of foster children even when child protection workers object, the state Supreme Court ruled in a decision that will reshape how endangered kids are placed in permanent homes.
In a unanimous 14-page opinion Wednesday, the high court said judges could overrule the Florida Department of Children & Families in cases of children who were placed in the agency's care due to abuse or neglect by their birth parents.
The decision is a victory for a woman identified in the case as B.Y., who moved to Palm Beach County in 2002 to care for her daughter's three children. The department had taken them, but a judge ruled to let B.Y. adopt them over agency objections. The department appealed.
"The department, like every other non-parent involved in an adoption proceeding, cannot unreasonably thwart an otherwise beneficial adoption," Justice Raoul G. Cantero III wrote in a concurring opinion.
The court's ruling said state law does not make it mandatory that the agency have final approval in adoption cases involving foster children.
Agency officials declined to discuss the ruling, saying agency attorneys hadn't studied the opinion.
The decision is a setback for child welfare administrators, who have argued strenuously in recent years that they have sole authority to determine the living arrangements of children in their care.
The position has placed the agency at odds with some family and dependency court judges, who have occasionally disagreed over how best to find a permanent home for abused or neglected children.
Agency officials had argued before a lower court judge that while B.Y. had passed an initial home study and appeared to be a good caretaker, they were worried she was not financially capable of adopting. She was living in YWCA temporary housing after moving to Florida.
"The department seemed to equate the temporary nature of the housing program with instability, and argued that the risk of B.Y. becoming financially unable to care for the children prevented its consent to the final adoption," Justice Peggy Quince wrote.
"With the nature of B.Y.'s housing being the only obstacle expressed by the department for permanency, the trial court made a finding that it was in the children's best interests to finalize the adoption," she wrote.
Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A pair of Oregon foster parents suspected of sexually abusing teenage males placed in their care were captured by Mexican authorities in Puerto Vallarta and returned to the United States, the U.S. Marshals Service said. Jim Chester Lyman, 63, and Fidelfino Llena Garcia, 49, of Portland, were apprehended last week after meeting with Mexican immigration officials to update their visas, the marshals office said. Authorities said an Oregon juvenile probation officer, Michael Lee Boyles, deliberately placed male juveniles in the couple’s Portland home so the boys could be sexually abused. One of Boyles’ alleged victims filed a $20 million suit against the state of Oregon earlier this year, charging Boyles assaulted him at least 50 times beginning when he was 14 years old.
By CRAIG SCHNEIDER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 11/08/04
Georgia's child welfare system often places children in Fulton and DeKalb counties in dangerous foster homes, where they frequently live in crowded conditions and receive inadequate health care, an advocacy group's study says.
"Foster children in these counties are still simply not safe," said Ira Lustbader, associate director of Children's Rights Inc., a New York advocacy group that is suing Georgia to improve its child welfare system.
The group examined case files of more than 100 foster children in the care of the state Division of Family and Children Services in 2004. It randomly chose 62 children who had been in the system no more than 18 months and 62 who were waiting to be adopted.
The study found that one in every three children waiting to be adopted had suffered abuse, neglect or harmful conditions in foster care. It also found that caseworkers often failed to report or follow up on allegations of mistreatment.
DFCS officials did not return several telephone calls seeking comment Monday. Department of Human Resources Commissioner B.J. Walker has said DFCS is working its way out of a crisis that was caused in part by a shortage of caseworkers and foster homes.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Sonny Perdue, Loretta Lepore, said efforts have been made to improve the system. Teams have been sent in to help address problems in Fulton and DeKalb, she said, and the governor this year signed into law a Foster Parents Bill of Rights to improve communication between foster parents and the state.
Tom Morton, president of the Child Welfare Institute, a Duluth-based nonprofit consulting firm, said that not enough has been done.
Morton agreed that many problems can be traced to overburdened caseworkers. "With very large caseloads, workers don't have the time to get to everything," he said. "That's a reality."
The study found that nearly half the children in the system for 18 months were living in homes with more than six children. In addition, the study said, nearly half the children did not receive required monthly visits from their caseworkers. The study describes a 13-year-old boy who entered foster care in 2001 and who was not visited for six months.
"It reflects a system so overburdened and mismanaged that workers can't do the job they want to do," Lustbader said.
He said the state does a poor job of reuniting foster children with their parents and a poor job of getting children adopted into new families. Many of the children in the study had been waiting more than four years to be adopted, Lustbader said.
Red flags were also raised regarding health care. Of the foster children with no more than 18 months in the system, more than one-third had not received a physical examination within the first 30 days of coming into care. And more than one-third had not received an annual physical exam.
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