Category — AmericanFamilyAlliance

For seven years after the child-abuse case I had been involve in was closed and my children restored to me, I worked with parents involved in child abuse. As an advocate who believed Child Protective Services (CPS) removes an excessive number of children from their homes, including mine, struggling with other parents charged with child abuse was the most discouraging. I soon realized why parents were generally ignored during the processing of their situations or their parental rights were removed entirely.

Even my own co-parent became a problem in my effort to reunite our family. He continued to declare that “no one can tell me how to raise my children,” although our children were removed from school without our knowledge and put in out-of-home placement. After our cases were separated, I was able to move more smoothly and quickly through the system.

The day after my children were restored to me, I launched a child-abuse prevention program called “American Family Alliance.” It was a not-for-profit, boot-strap collection of volunteers funded entirely by our welfare, retirement and disability checks. When we began, we were full of great intentions and willingness, but had no idea of the challenges which lay ahead, nor of the struggles we would encounter with CPS and the parents.

The first adventure into our outreach efforts was a questionnaire we handed out at a church picnic. My associate and I had very carefully chosen the wording for what we thought would fit the educational level of our target clientele. To our dismay, when we retrieved the questionnaires, the forms were all blank. We found out that none of the people could read or they had very limited ability! The lesson we learned that day was very important and our expectations were colored by our being more sensitive to the status of most of the people with which we would be working.

I am not implying that all parents involved in child abuse are illiterate. To the contrary, there is no profile to which “child abusers” can be limited. Those who are determined to be inappropriate or dysfunctional regarding the care of their children fall into every social status. But because we chose to work primarily with parents who were determined by CPS as members of the “Underclass,” or those on the lowest social rung, our experiences were colored by that designation.

Nevertheless, in our work we found that the greatest stumbling block to achieving our goals of helping parents recover their children was in the parents’ attitudes. They were either very scared and submissive, and not willing to confront “the system;” or belligerent and stubborn. The latter were not open to any change which would facilitate restoration of their parenting privileges and the release of their children from foster care.

Many parents simply gave up under the weight of CPS because of its ability to use the courts, police, media and other elements of authority and influence to seek out and destroy their resolve to recover their children. This was true particularly of parents who are not aware of their rights. Unfortunately, those parents would often hinder their efforts, as well as ours, by standing in their own way.