Es su CASA mi CASA? I don't think so; at least it wasn't in our case.

Today I saw that  friend of mine had become a fan of the Facebook Cause that supports the National Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program.  On the National CASA web page I found this quote:  "The joy of being involved as a voice for a child needing a safe and permanent home or helping a family to regenerate and become parents  is like Christmas every time!"—CASA volunteer Freddy W. Baugh writing on National CASA’s Facebook page.  (Italics added)

As a parent who, to this day, still feels very victimized by my family's experience ten years ago in what I can only describe as the meatgrinder of the Child Protective Services - Dependency Court system in Orange County, California, I initially bristled at reading that information.  Not because my friend did anything to intentionally hurt me, because he certainly did not.  I am sure that he is just trying to do something positive for the world and for children. 

My reaction is partly frustration that I still do not know what more I can do other than drumming up support for a wonderfully effective organization, The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, http://www.nccpr.org/ , through my own Facebook Cause, "Getting Child Protection Right".  And it's also partly frustration and, yes, resentment, that despite the presence of a CASA volunteer in our courtroom, no one from CASA ever spoke to me or to my wife.  I wish they had.

Looking at the phrase above, "helping a family to regenerate and become parents", presupposes that a family has stopped being a family and parents have stopped being parents.  But how does that happen?  In our case, it happened because no one in the system bothered to investigate us in any depth prior to taking action to separate parents from children.  It happened becuase there is no CASA that is there for parents.  Oh, of course there is an attorney, but our attorney (or, in our case, attorneys, plural, because of a potential legal conflict of interest between my wife and myself, despite no REAL conflict) were not able to get the court to really see how unbelievably we parents were being mistreated by the system until a hearing that took place some nine months from the time our boys were taken into custody.  NINE MONTHS.  Do you know what effect nine months of nights away from our kids did to the course of my wife's multiple sclerosis?

I feel the pain of parents who write to me through "Getting Child Protection Right".  Their pain is my pain.  No doubt they could use a CASA, too.

I think I'll share this blog entry with my friend.  I think he'll understand.







 

Happy Birthday to Holly, and A Loving Tribute to the memory of Dr. Stanley van den Noort, M.D.

Today is my friend Holly's birthday. She is a physician, wife, mother, cancer survivor. Despite the fact that we have only seen each other one time in our lives, she is a very special friend who came into my life during a most difficult time. We live many time zones apart and before this day passes, I want to send her my heartfelt good wishes on the occasion of her completion of yet one more solar circumnavigation.
Happy Birthday, Holly.

* * *

http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/2009/09/18/legendary-uci-researcher-van-den-noort-dies/57369/

Stan was my wife’s neurologist for almost twenty years, and since I took her to almost all of her visits with him, we became good friends and allies in managing her battle against the chronic progressive nature of MS. He treated her through the remission that accompanied her second pregnancy and the nursing of our baby and watched our two little sons grow up, as we usually brought them to his office at UCI.

One afternoon In 1999, the OC Department of Child Protective Services took our boys from their elementary school in Irvine to Orangewood Children’s Home on allegations of abuse against me and failure to protect against my wife

Three days later, after a CPS in-home investigation and evaluation, which included full disclosure of my wife’s MS and my spousal caregiving and parenting role, we reported for a hearing before an OC pro tem dependency court commissioner after CPS formally agreed in writing that our sons could return home. Our attorney told us that such agreements were rare and only given in those cases where CPS regarded parents highly and judged them as low risk.

At that hearing, after objection to the agreement by an attorney from the contracted law firm representing the children, the pro tem commissioner imposed an additional requirement by court order: “Father not to be sole caregiver of the minor.” (sic)

That order was neither discussed nor debated in open court and no one raised the issue of my wife’s MS and my caregiving role.

That judicial indifference to the presence of the disease of MS in a family and lack of discussion by any of the attorneys present created a situation that made it impossible for us to comply with the court order. There were times when my wife had to lie down for a nap when I was the only other adult at home with the children. I clearly explained that to social workers who visited our home, whose response was that we were therefore in violation of the court order and would consequently lose the children.

I explained the situation to our attorney and implored him to seek a modification of the court order, because MS prevented us from being able to comply. He told me that he attempted to do so, but failed.

The inevitable happened. CPS took our boys away again and this time placed them in a “sibling assessment facility”.

During this time, Stan, who had known our family for some ten years, went so far as to write a letter to the dependency court on our behalf. He knew what kind of parents we were and he was unfailingly supportive. It was incredible to him and to us how lack of awareness of the disease and its effect on a family could be so ignored by officialdom.

My wife’s MS definitely worsened under the stress caused by the emotional pain of having our boys taken away. Stan did what he could to help us. He was a wonderful physician and a great friend. Our boys finally were allowed to come home ten and one half months later and the court finally dismissed the dependency case in December, 2000.

Through relapses, remissions and exacerbations, Stan was always there. He got my wife into a late-stage clinical trial for Copaxone after her body rejected beta interferon, and she remains on that injectable medication today. That may be the reason she is not in a wheelchair full-time after some thirty years of living with MS.

Stan was a wonderful clinician and researcher, a great professor and dedicated dean. But to us, he was a beloved healer and friend, advocate and ally, and rock of support. We have missed him for the two years since his brain injury, and now we will miss him forever.

May his memory be a blessing to all who knew and loved him, and may our story be of comfort to his family, especially his beloved wife, June.

Getting Child Protection Right

It's been some time since I've posted here. In the interim, my kids got me to join Facebook. Shortly thereafter, I established a Cause there with the same name as the title of this post. One purpose of that cause is to raise funds for The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a non-profit corporation based in Northern Virginia, whose executive director is Richard Wexler.

When we were in the meatgrinder of the CPS system, I really wanted someone to help us get out of it, and naturally I went to the Internet for information. But now, with the benefit of the passage of time, I know that the real solution to how we, as a society, handle issues of child abuse and neglect must come on the policy level that will influence state legislators to take the action necessary to make the reforms that children and families so need and deserve.

Here in California, where state finances are in turmoil, this could be an opportunity for reform ideas to take root. If there could be a non-governmental alternative to addressing cases of child abuse/neglect, one involving extended families, friends and support communities, what a different experience children and families in crisis would have.

So What's a Father to Do?

I've found quite a few websites relating to the struggles parents have had in dependency court. It's certainly understandable how the pain and frustration of the experience leads people to seek a place where they can vent their feelings and maybe figure out a way to either "get back"at the beast that bit them or help others stay out of the meat grinder of the CPS system. One thing that is common to all of these websites is that the parents believe that they have been wronged.

I am wondering whether there are any serious academic studies of dependency court cases. Given that these cases are confidential, any studies would no doubt have to de-identify the parties involved. The first thing it would be interesting to know is just what percent of petitions filed against parents by the state are contested by the parents, and what percent are not. When we had our very first hearing, I wanted to contest the allegations of the petition. I was certain that if my wife and I had the opportunity to explain our side of things, someone in a position of authority would certainly listen to reason, realize that the whole matter was a huge mistake and dismiss it at once.

Boy, was I naive.

Child Protection Reform

After our boys were taken away from us by CPS in 1999, I began to search the Internet for information that might help us to get them back. One of the websites that I found was that of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org. That organization advocates for systemic reform to policy makers and legislative bodies but does not deal with individual cases.

A helpful website was created by Suzanne Shell.  After reading it, I purchased a copy of her book, Profane Justice. Although my belief system differs from Suzanne's, I found her practical approach to be very helpful guidance. I was very impressed with her efforts to train family advocates and to proactively let people know what they needed to know in order to protect themselves from systemic abuses.

One thing that most impacted my family's situation was the administrative law flavor of dependency cases. Neither fish nor fowl, dependency court was different from both criminal court and civil court, where, presumably, rules of evidence apply and hearsay can only be admitted under certain exceptions to the exclusionary rule. In dependency court, social workers were free to include whatever they wanted to in their reports, without regard to hearsay.  Not only were inaccuracies and untruths included, many of their written statements were highly objectionable from a legal standpoint.  Nonetheless, those reports were admitted wholesale into evidence.  I found that the court typically accepted whatever the Department of Social Services said as truth, without question.  Thus, once accused in the allegations of a filed petition, parents were treated as guilty until they could prove themselves innocent.

Consequently, the first things I recommend are that the burden of proof be shifted and the standard for proof be changed.  These cases should require the state to prove guilt, and to do so by virtue of the standard of, at a minimum, clear and convincing evidence.  This is NOT just a preponderance of the evidence, but clear and convincing evidence.

Next, the mandated reporter provision in the law regarding the reporting of suspected cases of child abuse and/or neglect needs to be eliminated.  Allowing teachers, coaches, etc. no discretion to make a reasoned assessment before reporting cases to CPS is one of the things that caused us to end up in the meat grinder.  It was all so needless.  Once the ball started rolling, though, there was no way to stop it.

In our case, the injury that lead to our boys being taken away was a black-and-blue mark left behind after an accidental bump on our younger son's forehead.  And even more ridiculously, on that particular morning, we had costumed our son as Thomas Alva Edison, for he was to present a book report on a biography of the inventor.

My wife fashioned a costume that came close to the depiction of Edison on the cover of the book, and I went so far as to put gel in his hair and part it right down the middle, as in the style worn by Edison.  When I did so, it uncovered that black-and-blue mark on his forehead that had otherwise been hidden by the straight hair bangs that normally fell down to his eyebrows.


Now, I ask:  would I -- or would anyone -- have done such a thing if they had any inkling that they might be accused of child abuse?

For all of you out there who either are parents or were once a child yourself (and I hope that covers everyone!), I must ask whether you or your child ever bumped your head by accident.  Let me see a show of hands, please.  O.K, looks like about half of you, if not slightly more. So if a child has a bump on his head, should teachers be mandated to report that to CPS or should they be allowed the discretion to try to find out what happened?

I am convinced that had we been given the opportunity to meet with the mandated reporter, she would have realized that what was suspected child abuse was clearly the result of our son having accidentally bumped his head, an incident that his parents had absolutely nothing to do with.  In fact, our son did not even remember at first how he did it.  Only later did he recall the details of what had happened.  It was entirely innocent and accidental, and no one else was involved.   

That was just the tip of the iceberg for us.  So many other things could have been done to prevent the case from going forward if only some reasonable efforts had been made to do a thorough investigation of our family. I'll go into that topic in a subsequent post.

In Memory of Gary Proctor, Esq.

My wife and I met Gary Proctor in April, 1999, shortly after our two boys, then 10 1/2 and 8 years of age, were taken into custody by Orange County Child Protective Services. My wife is disabled as a result of secondary progressive multiple sclerosis; I’m her primary caregiver.

The two of us were in shock over this.  At our first court appearance, we were both represented by the same attorney but were advised that we should have separate counsel. I sought a referral and someone gave us Gary's name; he ended up representing my wife.  In reality, we both worked closely with him as we had no emotional or familial conflict, just one that was a legal technicality.

Our initial reaction to the situation was to reach out to just about everyone we knew and who knew us both as individuals and as a family: our family doctor; my wife’s MS neurologist; the kids’ pediatrician; our clergyman; our neighbors and friends and fellow soccer moms and dads; my fellow choir members; and family and children’s therapists we had seen off and on for several years. We asked each of them if they'd be willing to write a letter to the Department of Social Services (DSS), vouching for us as parents and telling what they knew of our family life.  The response we received to our appeal was warm, empathetic, and universally supportive, and we hoped that the information our network of letter writers provided would give the DSS sufficient background and community contacts to allow them to do whatever they needed to in terms of investigation to realize that there was no reason for our children to be away from us.

That effort went over like a lead balloon with the social worker assigned to our case.  Officially, the petition filed in dependency court alleged that I had abused our kids and that my wife had failed to protect them from my abuse.  I had been taking our older son to see a therapist in weeks prior, and after our first involvement with DSS, I went to see him myself, because I needed to vent my feelings.  His words ended up being pretty much my experience:  “When those people get a hold of you, it’s just as if they’ve thrown a bucket of s*** on you and you have to try to get it off.”

  

I really wanted to fight the allegations, but Gary told me that doing so would likely only make things worse.  As an attorney, I had a hard time accepting what he was telling me, but as he tried to explain, and as I found out in short order, dependency court was a far different animal from criminal or civil court.  Parents against whom petitions had been filed in dependency court did not have the due process rights or protection against the admission of hearsay evidence that they would have had in civil or criminal court. 

I found it very Kafkaesque. My late in-laws, both refugees from Nazi Germany, found no small similarity in our experience to some of the ones they knew of from their own young lives during the 1930s.

We learned that "reunification" was the stated goal of the DSS in our case, and that in order to get to that point, we had to fulfill the requirements of a document called our 'case plan'.  Essentially, the case plan was a series of hurdles we had to clear in order to get our kids back.

With Gary's help and our willing cooperation,  we followed the case plan to the letter, and as aggressively as possible.  Gary introduced us to a private psychologist known to the dependency court who began seeing us and who administered a variety of psychological tests. We did everything mandated by the case plan:  completed  every class, saw every therapist — and quickly!  Because at the end of every day, after it got dark and we found ourselves getting ready for bed, we'd cuddle and say goodnight but carry within each of us a deep, painful heartache.  There was nothing we wanted more than to have our boys back home and for us all to be together. 

Gary made an important strategic recommendation.  The initial caseworker assigned seemed to have a personal vendetta against us (against me, in particular) and was making things very difficult.  Maybe it was because of all of those letters our supporters had submitted that she was having to read.   In any event, Gary thought it would be best to postpone our next hearing for just long enough a period that DSS would assign a new caseworker.   While such a move might initially delay things, Gary thought that the delay would be well worth it if we could rid ourselves of that particular caseworker.  So we took his advice, and he was right.  The next case worker assigned was much less hostile, and I was more convinced than ever that Gary knew exactly what he was doing.

Seven months passed.  Thanksgiving was approaching and we were hearing talk from our case worker about the possibility of the first “extended visit” with the boys – unmonitored and unsupervised — perhaps even an overnight stay. For those seven long months, every last one of our visits and phone calls with the boys had been very limited and monitored by DSS. 

We'd been asking for a joint therapy session with the kids and their assigned therapist -- one of the last remaining hurdles for us to clear in our case plan -- but that had not yet been scheduled.  The one positive development thus far had been a recent formal ruling by our Referee (the acting judge in dependency court).  He had ordered the DSS to liberalize visitation rules, as they had been so very restrictive for so long.

Needless to say, we were very excited about Thanksgiving and hopeful that soon our family’s long nightmare would be over.  For the first time since that awful day in April, we were feeling some hope and optimism.

On Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thankgiving, I was driving and had just stopped in a line of cars at a red light.  All of a sudden, I was rear-ended by the car in line behind me as it was struck by a moving car that had failed to stop.  After a moment of shock, I turned off my ignition and got out of the car.  

I was in the process of exchanging insurance information with the other drivers when my cell phone rang.  The voice on the other end introduced herself as a supervisory social worker.  I did  not recognize her name as we had never met before.  She explained that she was calling to inform me that as the result of something that had transpired during the boys' therapy session (she would be no more specific than that), she had to cancel our scheduled visit with the boys for Thanksgiving, and informed me further that as a result of what had taken place in therapy, the DSS was going to seek a reversal of the Referee's recent order for liberalization of visitation rules!!!

That news hit me much harder than the car behind me in line had done.  I couldn't imagine what possibly might have taken place in the boys' therapy session that would lead to this.  When I asked her what had happened, she told me that she really couldn't discuss that with me at the present time, but that this action on her part was necessary.  I really could not believe that something like this was happening, and as the thought crossed my mind of having to call Jacqui and tell her this, I did everything I could to plead with her to not take that action until after Thanksgiving except get down on my knees in the middle of Fairview Blvd.  But my plea fell to the asphalt and shattered in fragments.

I imagined myself as a little mouse being toyed with by a big, powerful cat, and I dreaded calling my wife with this news, but I did. When we went to bed that night, the room was filled with even worse heartache than we had felt the first night the boys had been taken away, if that was even possible.

What, in heaven’s name, could have happened in that therapist’s office?

The following week, I got a hint. The new caseworker told me that it had something to do with the words “Wet Willy”.

Wet Willy?  What was she talking about?  I was completely clueless.

The first call I made was to my attorney.  I left him a pretty strange message asking whether he had ever heard about something called "Wet Willy".

When he got back to his office he returned my call, but said he was sorry and really couldn’t help me; he didn’t know what it meant either.  But there were a number of people milling around where he was, so he called out, “Does anyone here know what ‘Wet Willy’ means?”

I heard some noise in the background, as some younger people in his office called out to him and then demonstrated for him one meaning of the words. Turns out that a "Wet  Willy" is a child’s prank, where one child wets a finger with saliva and then sticks it in the ear of an unsuspecting victim, wiggling it around to inflict a most unpleasant sensation. 

O.K., so now I knew what “Wet Willy” meant.  But I still couldn’t understand how such a thing could have caused the DSS to cancel our Thanksgiving visit and want to restrict us once more to supervised visitation.

It was not until we finally had our first meeting with the boys' therapist that we got the whole story.  During a session in her office, our sons had been playing with marbles on a carpeted floor when one of them said to the other, “That looks like ‘Wet Willy’!”  The therapist asked them what “Wet Willy” was.  Our older son replied, “Oh, you wouldn’t understand.” 

Although she didn’t push it any further to find out what exactly they were talking about, she assumed that it was something sexual!!! Since a “Willy” can be a euphemism for male genitalia, then, of course, a “Wet Willy” must be… oh, my God.

We sat there incredulous, speechless.  Now I realized why our Thanksgiving visit had been canceled. The allegations against us were about to take a very ugly turn for the worse.

When we next saw Gary, we told him the story.  He was just as incredulous as I was, but he remained silent and just shook his head.  My reaction entirely.  But what he said next began to give us hope again.

"These people are being hyper-vigilant with you. We have to see if we can make the Referee see that."

At our next visit with the boys, an unsupervised one, I asked them if they could tell us what "Wet Willy" means.  Rudy gave me funny look, then they looked at each other and both started to laugh.  "What was so funny?" I asked.

Without my offering a word of explanation, they already knew exactly the reason for my question. 

It seemed that during one session in the therapist's office, our younger son, who had recently turned 9, was playing with some marbles on the carpeted floor.  At one point, his older brother noticed something and said,  “Hey, that looks like Wet Willy!”

I asked what they had said to the therapist when she asked what "Wet Willy" was, and our elder son said that he had told her, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Then he said to us, “You know that little kid in the drop of water?  The one on clothes and stuff?” That’s Wet Willy.” 

What he was referring to was a corporate logo.  It's a stylized cartoon caricature of a little boy inside of a drop of water, and it's used on a line of skateboards and children's active wear owned by a company called Worldwide Industries. That was the “Wet Willy” that got in the way of our Thanksgiving plans -- an image composed out of a certain configuration of marbles on the rug of the therapist's office.  A good name for this story would be: How Wet Willy Stole Thanksgiving.  

 True to form, the DSS filed a motion with the court to reverse the previous order liberalizing visitation. Gary planned to contest it, and knowing what we now knew about Wet Willy, oh, how we looked forward to that hearing!  It was to be the first time in ten months that we would have the opportunity to testify about how we had been treated by DSS.  

Gary had subpoenaed the boys' therapist, but she remained outside in the hall while we were called to testify in opposition to the DSS' request.  After our testimony, the therapist was called.  She entered the courtroom and Gary had her called to the witness stand.  I don't think she saw the license plate of the truck that was about to hit her.  You can imagine what happened.  She told the court the “Wet Willy” story and her interpretation of things.  When Gary examined the witness, he asked whether she knew of any alternative explanations for the expression, and she did not.  He asked whether in her conversations with anyone at the DSS, anything other than a sexual reference for the term had been discussed. No.  With that, she was dismissed as a witness.

Gary then took some time to make a brief statement about what had transpired in this case.  He listed every single item on the DSS' case plan and the dates that we had completed them, the private psychological evaluation that we had voluntarily undergone and paid for out of our own pockets, and then summarized the scrutiny we had been subjected to by the DSS as nothing other than unjustified and arbitrary hyper-vigilance. 

Gary then asked the Referee to deny the DSS’s motion and reaffirm the liberalized visitation order.  That's what the Referee did, and that is what finally led to our boys coming home on what was called a “trial visit” in February, 2000.  I didn’t know this at the time, but Gary later let me know that he had trained the attorney who was the Referee in our case.

From that time on, the boys remained home with us.  Finally, in December of 2000, the case was dismissed by the court and the DSS got to consider our family one of its “success stories”.  The department case plan had been fulfilled, the family was reunited on a trial basis after ten and one-half months of separation, and now would remain reunited. 

For my wife and me, it had been ten and one-half months of emotional agony, financial strain (I’d had to resign from a job under the stress I was experiencing) and my wife's stress definitely affected her MS, as several of her symptoms worsened during that time.  We were a family that should never have been put through such a traumatic experience in the first place.

The dark cloud of this experience had one lustrous silver lining.  Incredibly wonderful and selfless friends in our own community, one family that has known us since our eldest’s first birthday party and another that has known us almost as long volunteered to be first and second in line to be foster parents for our boys.  Our sons were moved to the first family's home after two months in a "sibling assessment facility", and they remained there until they were allowed to come home.  Although we were not allowed to see or have a telephone call with our boys without a monitor being present, and although we had to remain at arm's length from our friends who were serving as foster parents, when our boys moved to our friends' home for foster care, they also returned to their neighborhood school and their circle of friends.  That was a blessing.  A major blessing.  And we are forever grateful to these wonderful people.

I am absolutely certain that without Gary’s knowledge, skill and expertise, our forced separation would have continued for far longer, and our story might not have had such a happy ending.

I had not been in touch with Gary for some time, and it was a terrible shock to pick up the newspaper and read of his death. I tried to imagine how the debilitating back pain coupled with the recent events at his law firm pushed him to such an act.

I’m sure there are countless stories of families like mine that Gary helped. He will be missed by many.

To his wife, daughter and son I wish much healing.

My family and I will be forever grateful for what Gary did for us.