M.C. Moewe: Why police refuse to believe children are in danger

When Are Police Allowed to Do Nothing After a Child is Abducted?

By M.C. Moewe

This is the sixth in a series of articles about the treatment of abused children in the U.S. family court system.

When Jessica Gonzales’ three daughters disappeared while playing in their Castle Rock, Colorado, front yard in 1999, she knew her estranged husband Simon had taken them and they were in grave danger.

Though Gonzales informed the local police that the courts had issued an order of protection against her husband, the police made no attempt to retrieve the children, despite a 1994 Colorado law that required police to enforce such an order when there’s probable cause of a violation. In a 60 Minutes interview six years later, Castle Rock police chief Tony Lane was asked why they didn’t attempt enforcement. He responded, “What safer place can children be than with one of the parents, the mother or the father?”

continue at 

http://stopabusecampaign.com/feature/why-police-can-ignore-child-abuduction

End the Nightmare at Family Court

Leora N. Rosen, Beyond the Hostage Child: Towards Empowering Protective Parents

This clear, readable, and affordable update to Dr. Rosen’s 1996 text, The Hostage Child, focuses our attention on the lifelong harm done to children by family courts and the remedies needed. She identifies specific federal funding streams that have done great damage (for example, the “Responsible Fatherhood Programs” that inspired the deadly rampage by Beltway Sniper John Muhammad from West Coast to East and another by Joshua Komisarjevsky in Connecticut).

This book holds validation for those who have been traumatized when courts removed terrified children from protective parents and gave them to the sole custody of abusers. Dr. Rosen shines a light we need to go forward.

She asserts that alleged crimes of domestic violence and child sexual abuse within the family should never be sent to civil courts that are designed for compromise. She briefly describes five proposed models for change and offers more detail on a sixth, composite model, CARCO (Child At Risk Classification Office) that focuses on a public health assessment of the child’s risk of being exposed to violence or abuse. She uses the acronym TRIAL to represent key elements of CARCO: Training, Reporting, Investigation, Adjudication, and Long-term planning – that are woefully absent from the present practice of adversarial litigation in family court.

Dr. Rosen has performed a huge service by focusing those of us who feel numbed by our own inability to protect desperate children and non-offending parents from the lies of lawyers and psychologists who have reduced them to a profit center. She concludes by urging Congress to use its authority and enact CARCO for the District of Columbia, creating a model for the nation. Federal funding incentives can be redirected to inspire other states to follow suit and to end the nightmare that breeds child abuse at family court.

M. C. Moewe: How government fails sexually abused children

Even though the sexual abuse of children is a crime, such cases frequently end up in family courts and not criminal courts when the alleged perpetrator is a parent. Experts in child protection say this is a problem, but fixing it would require a broad investigation into how abuse allegations are handled criminally at every level of government.

In the United Kingdom, that’s exactly what is happening now.

The discovery of a decades-old pedophile ring catering to prominent British politicians and the elite going back as far as the 1960s has prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to order an unprecedented inquiry into all agencies charged with investigating child sexual abuse — including police, courts and child welfare agencies.

“In recent years we have seen appalling cases of organized and persistent child sex abuse,” Home Secretary Theresa May told Parliament.

If the United States needs a spark for the same kind of self-examination into how allegations of abuse have been tragically ignored, look no further than Omaha, Nebraska, in 1988.

MORE HERE:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/04/1319089/--If-You-Dare-to-Come-Forward-If-You-Dare-to-Talk-Watch-What-Happens#

M. C. Moewe: If You Want Custody Of Your Kids, It's Better to Be a Criminal

They had both lost, one mother in criminal court, the other in family court. But Mary Winkler, convicted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting her husband, got her children back. The other parent never did.

...

When it comes to taking parental rights away from a convicted criminal, courts have checks and balances built into the system. Under federal law, criminal courts terminate parental rights only as a last resort and require reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families.

Family court is another story. ...

MORE: 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/07/1312248/-If-You-Want-Custody-Of-Your-Kids-It-s-Better-to-Be-a-Criminal-Than-a-Concerned-Parent#

M. C. Moewe finally gets to report on judges forcing abused children to live with abusers

U.S. judges routinely force abused children to live with their abusers. But after nearly a decade of trying, I have given up on the mainstream media doing any significant investigations into this ongoing human rights atrocity. My name is M.C. Moewe. I have worked at several newspapers but my last full-time job was in 2008 as the investigative reporter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal. My first day on the job, an editor handed me a stack of files asking me to look into a family court custody case. I was surprised, because as anyone who has worked in a newsroom can tell you, there are frequent calls from distraught parents alleging that the other parent is doing something horrible to their child and no one will help. When that happens ...   MORE:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/13/1306657/-Protecting-Abused-Children-from-the-Court-System

Anne Stevenson does it again, exposing legal abuse in Georgia's child protection industry

ATLANTA, June 26, 2014 — According to court records, throughout 2011-2012, “Jane’s” children (then ages 2 and 7) repeatedly insisted and showed credible evidence to child psychologist Nancy McGarrah, Ph.D and Ann Shannon, LCSW, that that their father made suicidal and homicidal plans with them, that he routinely watched child porn with them and sexually assaulted them during overnight visits.
Read more at 
http://www.commdiginews.com/life/georgia-court-may-have-given-sex-predator-custody-of-child-victims-19453/

In Memory of Anthony, Austin and Athena Castillo

by Eileen King, Executive Director, Child Justice, Inc. 

Congratulations to Cheryl C. Kagan (D) who won the Maryland Primary Election for District 17, defeating Del. Luiz Simmons (D) who was also running for Sen. Jennie Forehand's seat.  

Karmic Justice has been served.

Local Marylanders may remember that on February 25, 2010, before the Md. House Judiciary Committee, Del. Simmons "re-tried" Dr. Amy Castillo's credibility after she testified in support of a bill that proposed changing the burden of proof from "clear and convincing" to "preponderance of the evidence".  

I was stunned and horrified that anyone would try to destroy the credibility of a mother whose fears were absolutely justified and who had suffered the unimaginable loss of her three children.

This material gives you an idea of why this was a very important primary race for Maryland's victims of domestic violence/child abuse and for the state laws that protect them. 

Here is Dr. Amy Castillo's testimony on Feb. 25, 2010:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/pdf/HB_700_Testimony_Amy_Castillo.pdf

You can watch Del. Simmons' questioning here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovz6e1B5EwQ

The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote about HB 700's death here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030601948.html

My March 13, 2010 Op Ed in the Washington Post: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/13/AR2010031301846.html

Del. Simmon's justification for his behavior as well as his characterization of advocates as "zealots": 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/19/AR2010031904328.html

You can hear Del. Simmons attempt to justify his position here: 

http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-03-11/domestic-violence-and-protective-orders-maryland

Another good article from the Ms. Magazine blog:

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2010/05/19/abused-women-in-maryland-arent-lying/

And don't forget this blog:

http://dumpluizsimmons.blogspot.com/2010/03/attention-maryland-you-have-some-pigs.html

There's more of course...but as I said above, this material gives you an idea of why this was a very important primary race for Maryland's victims of domestic violence and child abuse and the laws that protect them. 

Eileen King

Executive Director

Child Justice, Inc. 

301-283-1762 cell

Ignorance Is This Campaign 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfK1xr_rLIYS_1uMOlB4SAw