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Indian Mother and Attorney wins Award for Fight Against Child Protection Services and Children Civil Rights Abuse
Attorney Suranya Aiyar in Norway. Image from Facebook.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
We have previously reported here at Health Impact News how authorities in India are now providing information to families planning to visit or work in the United States in helping them to avoid having their children kidnapped by Child Protection Services.
The Sunday Guardian reported:
Young Indian couples travelling to the United States on short to mid-term job assignments are increasingly facing the menace of child confiscation by the country's child protection agencies, who wrongly accuse them of abuse. The “child abuse” is determined using the controversial Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) indicator, the veracity of which is contested.
Suranya Aiyar, a New-Delhi based lawyer, who has been providing counsel and aid to Indian families in the US, Norway and other countries to help them get back their confiscated children, recently submitted a “Report on Indian and India-Origin Children Confiscated by the United States Child Protection Agencies” to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Based on her extensive case study of 12 Indian families, who were falsely accused of child abuse, her report sheds light on the US agencies' many biases and flawed methodology. The report wants a travel advisory to be issued to young Indian families moving to the US of possible confiscation of their children as, in most cases, the victim families are not aware of what might goad the child protection agencies to initiate action against them.
Last year (2018) Indian mother and attorney Suranya Aiyar was awarded a laureate by the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NCHR).
NCHR is a human rights organization specializing in advocacy against wrongful child removals by child protection agencies in Nordic countries.
In her acceptance speech, attorney Aiyar appeals to policymakers in India to resist and reject the Western models of child protection.
Such is the sad state of affairs here in the U.S. today, where attorneys and policy makers in other countries must issue travel advisories and warn against child kidnappings by American child protection agencies.
India must say no to Western paradigms of child protection
Image from Facebook.
by Suranya Aiyar
Sunday Guardian Live
Good afternoon and greetings from India to all of you!
Let me begin by saying how touched and honoured I am to receive this award from the Nordic Committee for Human Rights.
Looking at the list of my fellow laureates, past and present, I am doubly honoured.
These are people who have accomplished a lot, and sometimes at great cost, in exposing the wrongful snatching of children by the state in different parts of the world.
For me to find this endorsement of my work among you abroad, to have won your trust and your friendship is very gratifying. There are only a handful of us in each country fighting for justice against child protection services or “CPS” as we call them.
But,
I believe that if we work together, then we will eventually succeed in persuading the public, our governments, and international organisations that CPS in its present form has failed.
This is important not just in your countries, but also in my part of the world.
Here in India, UNICEF, Save the Children and billionaire philanthropist organisations have been lobbying our governments and public influencers to adopt this same mistaken model of child protection.
If CPS can go so wrong, become so corrupt and power-mad in your countries despite your celebrated systems of public accountability, you can imagine the havoc they would wreck in mine.
It must not happen, and you must help us prevent it. You must help us in India save our 440 million children, and their mostly simple, humble parents, the majority of whom live in very difficult circumstances already, and whose only joy is their children.
You must help us stop CPS from poisoning their lives here.
In a way you're already helping. Your work, exposing the problems with CPS in your countries, helps us persuade people here in India to reject this system.
If you win against CPS in your countries, then we win against CPS here. So in a very real sense we are all in this together, and we should join hands internationally in fighting CPS.
We all agree that child abuse is wrong and should be punished.
But due process has to be followed. Without due process, you are at the mercy of state authorities-and that is what makes the difference between a democratic and an undemocratic system.
Due process and a healthy skepticism of all government authority are the distinguishing features of a free society.
But all skepticism seems to vanish when you start asking people about child protection agencies.
What is the reason for this blind spot in the public eye? I think that they simply do not believe that child protection agencies are violating basic human rights; that child protection investigations and trials are unfair and biased and children are being taken from their parents without good reason.
So what can we do about this? I believe we have to do more to show the public that child removals are taking place for reasons falling far short of any common understanding of abuse.
That children are being taken even where there is no physical or sexual abuse, and no issue of drug or alcohol addiction. We have to show, that judges are ordering removals even when they say, in so many words, that the children are loved by their parents and have not faced any abuse or abandonment by them.
To convince people, we need the information about non-physical/sexual abuse removals to come from the government itself. I mean removals such as those for “risk of future emotional harm”, “attachment disorder” and poverty-related assessments of neglect.
Let governments come clean on child protection cases that do not involve physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.
We have some clues from the official data that many, if not most, child protection cases, do not involve physical or sexual abuse.
In Norway, Bufdir's latest report says that “parents' lack of care abilities” and “high degree of conflict in the home” are the two most frequent reasons for children and the young to come into the child welfare system.
But “parental lack of care abilities” can mean anything. The official data has to give us more details to be meaningful. If none of these cases of “parental care abilities” cases involve abuse, then the government needs to say so.
We are told that CPS intervenes only in the most serious cases, but I have seen figures from Statistics Norway in the past, where the annual percentage of physical abuse and sexual abuse was as low as 1.8% and 0.6% of the new cases.
If the same pattern exists for care orders, and not just for the initiation of cases, then we are looking at a situation of widespread removals for non-physical or sexual-abuse reasons.
This places the whole child protection enterprise on an entirely different footing to what governments are telling the public-that this is reserved for extreme cases of abuse.
So we need to mobilise a demand in Norway for meaningful official statistics about the reasons for placing children in care.
For the statistics to be meaningful, and this applies to all countries (not just Norway), there should be a separate heading for the number of cases where there is no allegation of sexual or physical abuse.
There should be a separate heading for the number of cases involving drug or alcohol addiction. There should be clear figures of the cases of separations that are done on purely psychological assessments like attachment disorder or emotional harm.
In the physical abuse category, the figures should state how many cases involved spanking or other mild forms of physical intervention, and how many involved serious violence. These facts will speak for themselves, and they must come from the mouth of the government.
In England, there are no official numbers on the children taken for “risk of future emotional harm” or “parents' failure to co-operate with social workers”.
This is very misleading, because we are seeing care orders where these are the given reasons for placing children in care.
If you look at the numbers in England for children subject to a “child protection plan” [the step prior to taking a child into care], physical abuse cases are at 6% and falling, and sexual abuse cases are at 4% and falling, while emotional abuse and neglect cases are at 30-40% and rising for each year since 2012.
This shows a much greater number of emotional abuse than physical or sexual abuse cases.
If in England, the pattern for “looked after” children is same as that for children subject to a “child protection plan”, then again we are looking at a situation, where the drastic action of permanently confiscating children from their families is not taking place in situations that the public generally assumes it does-such as incest, violence or abandonment-but for the much more questionable categories of emotional abuse and neglect.
We see a similar situation in the USA. US official figures for foster care show a relatively small number of cases, under the heads of sexual and physical abuse-sexual abuse is at 4% and physical abuse at 12% of cases.
The vast majority of cases-61%-are reported in the category of neglect. So again, we are looking at a huge number of cases, that do not involve the kind of physical and sexual abuse that the public assumes, would be the basis of child confiscation by the state.
In England, the data for looked after children is not helpful as it clubs all abuse and neglect cases together under a common head called “abuse or neglect”.
But abuse can mean a range of things, and so can neglect. For the data to be meaningful, abuse and neglect cases have to be separated and then they have to have sub-categorised, so that we can drill down and see what types of behaviors, incidents and home conditions, are being classified by the authorities as abuse and neglect.
What these gaps in the official statistics show us is that the governments in all these countries which are so stubbornly defending their child protection systems, themselves don't really know what CPS is up to.
They don't know about the mushrooming emotional abuse and risk of emotional harm cases. They don't know about the sliding threshold for labeling something as physical abuse or neglect. And they don't know about neglect allegations arising from parental poverty.
In Norway, where the system is heavily reliant on psychological assessments and the theory of attachment disorder, how can the government claim to have effective oversight over Barnevernet when it does not even have Attachment Disorder as a heading in its own statistics about child protection cases?
So I propose we prioritise mobilising opinion on this issue and demand that authorities give clear data on emotional harm and neglect, broken down into meaningful sub-categories as I have discussed earlier.
I will stop here as time is limited. Thank you again to the Nordic Committee for Human Rights for their award. I will cherish this and salute you from India.
To victims of CPS: all my love and solidarity. You are not alone. We bear witness to your suffering. We stand by you to the bitter end.
To my beloved fellow activists, I wish us all good fight! One day victory will be ours. Thank you.
Suranya Aiyar is a New Delhi-based lawyer and mother. The Global Child Rights and Wrong series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in childpolicy.
Read the full article at SundayGuardianLive.com.
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.
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If you know people who are skeptical and cannot believe that medical kidnapping happens in the U.S. today, this is the book for them! Backed with solid references and real life examples, they will not be able to deny the plain evidence before them, and will become better educated on this topic that is destroying the American family.
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Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
PMID:
PLoS Biol. 2011 Nov ;9(11):e1001205. Epub 2011 Nov 22. PMID: 22131906
Abstract Title:
Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
Abstract:
Synesthesia is a perceptual experience in which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on heritable variants comprising roughly 4% of the general population. Genetic research on synesthesia suggests the phenomenon is heterogeneous and polygenetic, yet it remains unclear whether synesthesia ever provided a selective advantage or is merely a byproduct of some other useful selected trait. Progress in uncovering the genetic basis of synesthesia will help us understand why synesthesia has been conserved in the population.
read more
0 notes
Text
Health Tip: Don't Ignore Changes in Skin Color
-- You should never ignore a change in skin color, especially if you have cancer, the American Cancer Society says.
A change in skin color typically means something's wrong in the body. In people with cancer, it can be due to factors including tumor...
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Text
Indian Mother and Attorney wins Award for Fight Against Child Protection Services and Children Civil Rights Abuse
Attorney Suranya Aiyar in Norway. Image from Facebook.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
We have previously reported here at Health Impact News how authorities in India are now providing information to families planning to visit or work in the United States in helping them to avoid having their children kidnapped by Child Protection Services.
The Sunday Guardian reported:
Young Indian couples travelling to the United States on short to mid-term job assignments are increasingly facing the menace of child confiscation by the country's child protection agencies, who wrongly accuse them of abuse. The “child abuse” is determined using the controversial Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) indicator, the veracity of which is contested.
Suranya Aiyar, a New-Delhi based lawyer, who has been providing counsel and aid to Indian families in the US, Norway and other countries to help them get back their confiscated children, recently submitted a “Report on Indian and India-Origin Children Confiscated by the United States Child Protection Agencies” to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Based on her extensive case study of 12 Indian families, who were falsely accused of child abuse, her report sheds light on the US agencies' many biases and flawed methodology. The report wants a travel advisory to be issued to young Indian families moving to the US of possible confiscation of their children as, in most cases, the victim families are not aware of what might goad the child protection agencies to initiate action against them.
Last year (2018) Indian mother and attorney Suranya Aiyar was awarded a laureate by the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NCHR).
NCHR is a human rights organization specializing in advocacy against wrongful child removals by child protection agencies in Nordic countries.
In her acceptance speech, attorney Aiyar appeals to policymakers in India to resist and reject the Western models of child protection.
Such is the sad state of affairs here in the U.S. today, where attorneys and policy makers in other countries must issue travel advisories and warn against child kidnappings by American child protection agencies.
India must say no to Western paradigms of child protection
Image from Facebook.
by Suranya Aiyar
Sunday Guardian Live
Good afternoon and greetings from India to all of you!
Let me begin by saying how touched and honoured I am to receive this award from the Nordic Committee for Human Rights.
Looking at the list of my fellow laureates, past and present, I am doubly honoured.
These are people who have accomplished a lot, and sometimes at great cost, in exposing the wrongful snatching of children by the state in different parts of the world.
For me to find this endorsement of my work among you abroad, to have won your trust and your friendship is very gratifying. There are only a handful of us in each country fighting for justice against child protection services or “CPS” as we call them.
But,
I believe that if we work together, then we will eventually succeed in persuading the public, our governments, and international organisations that CPS in its present form has failed.
This is important not just in your countries, but also in my part of the world.
Here in India, UNICEF, Save the Children and billionaire philanthropist organisations have been lobbying our governments and public influencers to adopt this same mistaken model of child protection.
If CPS can go so wrong, become so corrupt and power-mad in your countries despite your celebrated systems of public accountability, you can imagine the havoc they would wreck in mine.
It must not happen, and you must help us prevent it. You must help us in India save our 440 million children, and their mostly simple, humble parents, the majority of whom live in very difficult circumstances already, and whose only joy is their children.
You must help us stop CPS from poisoning their lives here.
In a way you're already helping. Your work, exposing the problems with CPS in your countries, helps us persuade people here in India to reject this system.
If you win against CPS in your countries, then we win against CPS here. So in a very real sense we are all in this together, and we should join hands internationally in fighting CPS.
We all agree that child abuse is wrong and should be punished.
But due process has to be followed. Without due process, you are at the mercy of state authorities-and that is what makes the difference between a democratic and an undemocratic system.
Due process and a healthy skepticism of all government authority are the distinguishing features of a free society.
But all skepticism seems to vanish when you start asking people about child protection agencies.
What is the reason for this blind spot in the public eye? I think that they simply do not believe that child protection agencies are violating basic human rights; that child protection investigations and trials are unfair and biased and children are being taken from their parents without good reason.
So what can we do about this? I believe we have to do more to show the public that child removals are taking place for reasons falling far short of any common understanding of abuse.
That children are being taken even where there is no physical or sexual abuse, and no issue of drug or alcohol addiction. We have to show, that judges are ordering removals even when they say, in so many words, that the children are loved by their parents and have not faced any abuse or abandonment by them.
To convince people, we need the information about non-physical/sexual abuse removals to come from the government itself. I mean removals such as those for “risk of future emotional harm”, “attachment disorder” and poverty-related assessments of neglect.
Let governments come clean on child protection cases that do not involve physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.
We have some clues from the official data that many, if not most, child protection cases, do not involve physical or sexual abuse.
In Norway, Bufdir's latest report says that “parents' lack of care abilities” and “high degree of conflict in the home” are the two most frequent reasons for children and the young to come into the child welfare system.
But “parental lack of care abilities” can mean anything. The official data has to give us more details to be meaningful. If none of these cases of “parental care abilities” cases involve abuse, then the government needs to say so.
We are told that CPS intervenes only in the most serious cases, but I have seen figures from Statistics Norway in the past, where the annual percentage of physical abuse and sexual abuse was as low as 1.8% and 0.6% of the new cases.
If the same pattern exists for care orders, and not just for the initiation of cases, then we are looking at a situation of widespread removals for non-physical or sexual-abuse reasons.
This places the whole child protection enterprise on an entirely different footing to what governments are telling the public-that this is reserved for extreme cases of abuse.
So we need to mobilise a demand in Norway for meaningful official statistics about the reasons for placing children in care.
For the statistics to be meaningful, and this applies to all countries (not just Norway), there should be a separate heading for the number of cases where there is no allegation of sexual or physical abuse.
There should be a separate heading for the number of cases involving drug or alcohol addiction. There should be clear figures of the cases of separations that are done on purely psychological assessments like attachment disorder or emotional harm.
In the physical abuse category, the figures should state how many cases involved spanking or other mild forms of physical intervention, and how many involved serious violence. These facts will speak for themselves, and they must come from the mouth of the government.
In England, there are no official numbers on the children taken for “risk of future emotional harm” or “parents' failure to co-operate with social workers”.
This is very misleading, because we are seeing care orders where these are the given reasons for placing children in care.
If you look at the numbers in England for children subject to a “child protection plan” [the step prior to taking a child into care], physical abuse cases are at 6% and falling, and sexual abuse cases are at 4% and falling, while emotional abuse and neglect cases are at 30-40% and rising for each year since 2012.
This shows a much greater number of emotional abuse than physical or sexual abuse cases.
If in England, the pattern for “looked after” children is same as that for children subject to a “child protection plan”, then again we are looking at a situation, where the drastic action of permanently confiscating children from their families is not taking place in situations that the public generally assumes it does-such as incest, violence or abandonment-but for the much more questionable categories of emotional abuse and neglect.
We see a similar situation in the USA. US official figures for foster care show a relatively small number of cases, under the heads of sexual and physical abuse-sexual abuse is at 4% and physical abuse at 12% of cases.
The vast majority of cases-61%-are reported in the category of neglect. So again, we are looking at a huge number of cases, that do not involve the kind of physical and sexual abuse that the public assumes, would be the basis of child confiscation by the state.
In England, the data for looked after children is not helpful as it clubs all abuse and neglect cases together under a common head called “abuse or neglect”.
But abuse can mean a range of things, and so can neglect. For the data to be meaningful, abuse and neglect cases have to be separated and then they have to have sub-categorised, so that we can drill down and see what types of behaviors, incidents and home conditions, are being classified by the authorities as abuse and neglect.
What these gaps in the official statistics show us is that the governments in all these countries which are so stubbornly defending their child protection systems, themselves don't really know what CPS is up to.
They don't know about the mushrooming emotional abuse and risk of emotional harm cases. They don't know about the sliding threshold for labeling something as physical abuse or neglect. And they don't know about neglect allegations arising from parental poverty.
In Norway, where the system is heavily reliant on psychological assessments and the theory of attachment disorder, how can the government claim to have effective oversight over Barnevernet when it does not even have Attachment Disorder as a heading in its own statistics about child protection cases?
So I propose we prioritise mobilising opinion on this issue and demand that authorities give clear data on emotional harm and neglect, broken down into meaningful sub-categories as I have discussed earlier.
I will stop here as time is limited. Thank you again to the Nordic Committee for Human Rights for their award. I will cherish this and salute you from India.
To victims of CPS: all my love and solidarity. You are not alone. We bear witness to your suffering. We stand by you to the bitter end.
To my beloved fellow activists, I wish us all good fight! One day victory will be ours. Thank you.
Suranya Aiyar is a New Delhi-based lawyer and mother. The Global Child Rights and Wrong series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in childpolicy.
Read the full article at SundayGuardianLive.com.
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.
Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America T-Shirt
100% Pre-shrunk Cotton!
Order here!
Medical Kidnapping is REAL!
See: Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America Today
Help spread the awareness of Medical Kidnapping by wearing the Medical Kidnapping t-shirt!
Support the cause of MedicalKidnap.com, which is part of the Health Impact News network.
Order here!
<!--//<![CDATA[
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Support the cause against Medical Kidnapping by purchasing our new book!
If you know people who are skeptical and cannot believe that medical kidnapping happens in the U.S. today, this is the book for them! Backed with solid references and real life examples, they will not be able to deny the plain evidence before them, and will become better educated on this topic that is destroying the American family.
1 Book – 228 pages
Retail: $24.99
FREE Shipping Available!
Now: $14.99
Order here!
2 Books
Retail: $49.98 (for 2 books)
FREE Shipping Available!
Now: $19.99 (for 2 books)
Order here!
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Text
Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
PMID:
PLoS Biol. 2011 Nov ;9(11):e1001205. Epub 2011 Nov 22. PMID: 22131906
Abstract Title:
Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
Abstract:
Synesthesia is a perceptual experience in which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on heritable variants comprising roughly 4% of the general population. Genetic research on synesthesia suggests the phenomenon is heterogeneous and polygenetic, yet it remains unclear whether synesthesia ever provided a selective advantage or is merely a byproduct of some other useful selected trait. Progress in uncovering the genetic basis of synesthesia will help us understand why synesthesia has been conserved in the population.
read more
0 notes
Text
The Cancer Connection: How Dental Health Indicates...
Video Transcript: The Cancer Connection: How Dental Health Indicates Disease Risk
Ty Bollinger: Did you know that there's a connection between oral health and disease risk?
Charlene Bollinger: Join Dr. Stuart Nunnally as he shares more on how your dental health can reveal more serious health problems.
Dr. Stuart Nunnally: And I'm going to talk first about the obvious cancer connection. There is an obvious cancer connection because there are some aspects of dentistry that we need to really be concerned about in terms of a one to one progression of the disease.
And that is this: Did you know that 63% of men in this country, if they have gum disease, advanced gum disease, have an increase chance of prostate [sic] cancer? 63%. From a Harvard Study. And also, just with moderate gum disease, which many of us in this room probably have, 33% have an increased risk of lung cancer. There's a 50% increase in the risk of kidney cancer and there's a 30% increase of blood cancer such as leukemia.
Most of this may not be a direct result of the bacteria or the pathogens that are involved with these, but they set up a constant inflammatory state. And as you know there's just not a disease that we deal with that doesn't have an inflammatory component to it.
This particular man, Gerald Curatola, has just written a book and literally was just released, that deals-and he has distilled the information very nicely there for you to see what kinds of impact dentistry can have on our systemic health. So, I recommend it to you.
Then there's the not-so-obvious cancer connection, and that is the one that most of us in here are familiar with, and that is what in the world do we do if we have a mouth full of these? As you know, these have been debated for years, and quite frankly, I think we had the opportunity as an organization, as an American dental organization, to say years ago,
You know what? We made a mistake. We made a mistake. We never should have put mercury in any form in anyone's body.”
And yet we can't own up to it. We can't own up to it. It's a very, very sad thing, so we continue to do it. And when we don't do it, instead of doing it here, we ship it to some poor country that has no other filling material to use and we ask them to use it.
So, it's hard to believe that even today, about 40% of the dentists in this country are still placing mercury amalgam fillings. Now the sad thing about this is that's 50% mercury. 50% mercury, there's copper 30%, silver, zinc, and tin make up the rest of it. Now in most compounds, when you see that something is 50% or more of the compound you would call it a mercury amalgam filling, but for some reason in this country for years we've called it a silver amalgam filling.
It's time to change. It's time to change and here's what we can do about it.
Well, let's just talk first about a few more facts. First of all, this is the second most toxic element known to man. It's an extremely potent neurotoxin. It's second in toxicity only to plutonium. It's very difficult to think that we would place that in someone's body.
There is no biological barrier. It accumulates in the fetus. In fact, the fetus is a magnet for mercury. When the mom has mercury fillings, or if she's had a vaccine that has mercury in it, the fetus is actually a magnet. You will see higher levels in the tissues of the fetus then you will see in the mom. Of course, it's a depressant and that's one of the reasons why so many people in this country are depressed.
In fact, if you want to depress a laboratory animal or initiate an autoimmune disease, most often it's done in the laboratory with mercury. It almost makes me sick.
I was listening to a radio show the other day and there was a physician on the show, and he said, “Oh no, there is no reason.” The caller called in and said, “Is there any reason for me to have my mercury amalgam fillings removed?” And the physician said, “Of course not. There's no mercury that comes from that material.” Well, the physician has lost and forgotten his ninth-grade chemistry, because the truth of the matter-
And here's the example that he used. I want you to be prepared for this in the future, should you hear it.
He said, “If you take sodium, which is toxic, and you take chlorine, which is toxic, and you combine them together you get sodium chloride. Now, is salt toxic? Is salt toxic?” And the listener said, “Well, I guess not.” And hung up.
Well, the truth of the matter is, the poor physician has lost all sense of his chemistry background, because that's not what happens when you mix metals together. When you mix mercury together with silver, zinc, tin, and copper, it doesn't stay there. It's an amalgam and it leaks out very, very freely to the environment. And the only reason it's really been used, in my opinion, is because it's dirt cheap.
I mean it just takes-there's almost nothing in there that's expensive, it's easy to place, it contributes to cracked teeth. As you saw a while ago, you saw all the frayed edges around those mercury fillings, and what happens is that you chew on one of those for twenty years and finally you fracture off a cusp of your tooth, and then you are destined for a crown. And then you are destined for the root canal that follows and then you are destined for one thing after another as you know.
Ty Bollinger: That's some amazing information on the importance of oral health from Dr. Nunnally.
Charlene Bollinger: If you learned something new, please share this on your social media and let your family know about The Truth About Cancer. Thank you and God bless!
Your oral health can be a direct reflection of what's going on inside your body. Toxic buildup is the root cause of many diseases. Click here to discover how easy it is to detox for health and vitality.
The post The Cancer Connection: How Dental Health Indicates... appeared first on The Truth About Cancer.
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Text
Why the US Is Still Losing Turkey
Reliably narrow definitions of national self-interest continue to drive Turkey and the US further apart.
There's one thing Turkey and the US can definitely agree on these days: Unreliability is now the bedrock of their relationship. It's perhaps not surprising when the two powers are led by notably unpredictable men - US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In the latest antagonism, Erdogan's close adviser, Yasin Aktay, has spoken of the US as a “highly unreliable partner” due to its efforts to safeguard the Syrian Kurdish forces who have partnered with the US in defeating the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.
The criticism is a further illustration of the echo chambers in which diplomacy is being conducted at the moment. Far from seeking to reduce friction (the usual role of diplomacy), such statements are part of the new prickly nationalism that is everywhere in the ascendant.
The most glaring dimension of Aktay's statement is its subjectivity. Trump's announcement in December 2018 of the US troop withdrawal from Syria really did put America's Syrian Kurdish allies in potential harm's way, at the hands of the Turkish army. The recent move to safeguard that ally could be viewed, in fact, as reliability.
But of course, Atkay is speaking from within the echo chamber of Turkish politics. Within that chamber, the US has deserted its NATO ally in favor of a Syrian Kurdish militia with strong ties to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - a movement within Turkey designated a terrorist organization.
His assessment discounts the fact that the threat from IS was very real. The US needed local allies on the ground in order to counter it. Indeed, it was a long time before the Turkish government decided to give the fight against the Islamic State the same priority that it gave the fight against Kurdish groups.
Yet the Turkish displeasure with its NATO ally is not all paranoia and blinkered Turkish nationalism. President Trump has been cavalier in his diplomacy within the international body. He has also been transparently shortsighted in his engagement with the Middle East.
In line with his “America First” policies, Trump was quick to single out IS as a grave threat to be addressed, largely because it had the capacity to impact America itself and American lives. Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, have been far less eager to address Syria's civil war.
From the Turkish viewpoint, this looks a lot like abandonment. The war on its southern frontier has been highly porous. It has deeply impacted Turkey in terms of terrorist atrocities, refugee flows, political destabilization, economic impact and the very real threat of escalation from the Assad regime's allies, Russia and Iran. None of this seems to have moved the US greatly.
Every man for himself
The result is a zero-sum environment in which all the key actors have gradually amassed leaders who see the best strategy as entrenchment and national defense. This may have been led by Russian President Vladimir Putin - the past master of such tactics - but it has been a domino effect.
President Erdogan has veered sharply in the same direction ever since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011. With the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in November 2016, the world's key superpower has followed suit. In the current dispute, the only real losers are likely to be the Kurds.
The Turkish government position has ossified. It cannot easily roll back on its war with the Syrian Kurdish militia now. The US position is more fluid. As President Trump as demonstrated, Washington is quite capable of dropping the Syrian Kurdish militia.
The reason the US government has so far stepped back from leaving the Syrian Kurds at the full mercy of other powers in Syria is not altruism. The Syrian Kurds merely offered the right guns for hire at the right time. But to drop them would hand valuable power to US adversaries.
In the cases of Russia and Iran, that would stick in the craw of the US administration. The irony is, as things stand, the other “adversary” who would clearly benefit is a country - Turkey - that is supposed to be an erstwhile NATO ally and a bulwark in the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.
The post Why the US Is Still Losing Turkey appeared first on Fair Observer.
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Text
Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
PMID:
PLoS Biol. 2011 Nov ;9(11):e1001205. Epub 2011 Nov 22. PMID: 22131906
Abstract Title:
Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
Abstract:
Synesthesia is a perceptual experience in which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on heritable variants comprising roughly 4% of the general population. Genetic research on synesthesia suggests the phenomenon is heterogeneous and polygenetic, yet it remains unclear whether synesthesia ever provided a selective advantage or is merely a byproduct of some other useful selected trait. Progress in uncovering the genetic basis of synesthesia will help us understand why synesthesia has been conserved in the population.
read more
0 notes
Text
Indian Mother and Attorney wins Award for Fight Against Child Protection Services and Children Civil Rights Abuse
Attorney Suranya Aiyar in Norway. Image from Facebook.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
We have previously reported here at Health Impact News how authorities in India are now providing information to families planning to visit or work in the United States in helping them to avoid having their children kidnapped by Child Protection Services.
The Sunday Guardian reported:
Young Indian couples travelling to the United States on short to mid-term job assignments are increasingly facing the menace of child confiscation by the country's child protection agencies, who wrongly accuse them of abuse. The “child abuse” is determined using the controversial Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) indicator, the veracity of which is contested.
Suranya Aiyar, a New-Delhi based lawyer, who has been providing counsel and aid to Indian families in the US, Norway and other countries to help them get back their confiscated children, recently submitted a “Report on Indian and India-Origin Children Confiscated by the United States Child Protection Agencies” to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Based on her extensive case study of 12 Indian families, who were falsely accused of child abuse, her report sheds light on the US agencies' many biases and flawed methodology. The report wants a travel advisory to be issued to young Indian families moving to the US of possible confiscation of their children as, in most cases, the victim families are not aware of what might goad the child protection agencies to initiate action against them.
Last year (2018) Indian mother and attorney Suranya Aiyar was awarded a laureate by the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NCHR).
NCHR is a human rights organization specializing in advocacy against wrongful child removals by child protection agencies in Nordic countries.
In her acceptance speech, attorney Aiyar appeals to policymakers in India to resist and reject the Western models of child protection.
Such is the sad state of affairs here in the U.S. today, where attorneys and policy makers in other countries must issue travel advisories and warn against child kidnappings by American child protection agencies.
India must say no to Western paradigms of child protection
Image from Facebook.
by Suranya Aiyar
Sunday Guardian Live
Good afternoon and greetings from India to all of you!
Let me begin by saying how touched and honoured I am to receive this award from the Nordic Committee for Human Rights.
Looking at the list of my fellow laureates, past and present, I am doubly honoured.
These are people who have accomplished a lot, and sometimes at great cost, in exposing the wrongful snatching of children by the state in different parts of the world.
For me to find this endorsement of my work among you abroad, to have won your trust and your friendship is very gratifying. There are only a handful of us in each country fighting for justice against child protection services or “CPS” as we call them.
But,
I believe that if we work together, then we will eventually succeed in persuading the public, our governments, and international organisations that CPS in its present form has failed.
This is important not just in your countries, but also in my part of the world.
Here in India, UNICEF, Save the Children and billionaire philanthropist organisations have been lobbying our governments and public influencers to adopt this same mistaken model of child protection.
If CPS can go so wrong, become so corrupt and power-mad in your countries despite your celebrated systems of public accountability, you can imagine the havoc they would wreck in mine.
It must not happen, and you must help us prevent it. You must help us in India save our 440 million children, and their mostly simple, humble parents, the majority of whom live in very difficult circumstances already, and whose only joy is their children.
You must help us stop CPS from poisoning their lives here.
In a way you're already helping. Your work, exposing the problems with CPS in your countries, helps us persuade people here in India to reject this system.
If you win against CPS in your countries, then we win against CPS here. So in a very real sense we are all in this together, and we should join hands internationally in fighting CPS.
We all agree that child abuse is wrong and should be punished.
But due process has to be followed. Without due process, you are at the mercy of state authorities-and that is what makes the difference between a democratic and an undemocratic system.
Due process and a healthy skepticism of all government authority are the distinguishing features of a free society.
But all skepticism seems to vanish when you start asking people about child protection agencies.
What is the reason for this blind spot in the public eye? I think that they simply do not believe that child protection agencies are violating basic human rights; that child protection investigations and trials are unfair and biased and children are being taken from their parents without good reason.
So what can we do about this? I believe we have to do more to show the public that child removals are taking place for reasons falling far short of any common understanding of abuse.
That children are being taken even where there is no physical or sexual abuse, and no issue of drug or alcohol addiction. We have to show, that judges are ordering removals even when they say, in so many words, that the children are loved by their parents and have not faced any abuse or abandonment by them.
To convince people, we need the information about non-physical/sexual abuse removals to come from the government itself. I mean removals such as those for “risk of future emotional harm”, “attachment disorder” and poverty-related assessments of neglect.
Let governments come clean on child protection cases that do not involve physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.
We have some clues from the official data that many, if not most, child protection cases, do not involve physical or sexual abuse.
In Norway, Bufdir's latest report says that “parents' lack of care abilities” and “high degree of conflict in the home” are the two most frequent reasons for children and the young to come into the child welfare system.
But “parental lack of care abilities” can mean anything. The official data has to give us more details to be meaningful. If none of these cases of “parental care abilities” cases involve abuse, then the government needs to say so.
We are told that CPS intervenes only in the most serious cases, but I have seen figures from Statistics Norway in the past, where the annual percentage of physical abuse and sexual abuse was as low as 1.8% and 0.6% of the new cases.
If the same pattern exists for care orders, and not just for the initiation of cases, then we are looking at a situation of widespread removals for non-physical or sexual-abuse reasons.
This places the whole child protection enterprise on an entirely different footing to what governments are telling the public-that this is reserved for extreme cases of abuse.
So we need to mobilise a demand in Norway for meaningful official statistics about the reasons for placing children in care.
For the statistics to be meaningful, and this applies to all countries (not just Norway), there should be a separate heading for the number of cases where there is no allegation of sexual or physical abuse.
There should be a separate heading for the number of cases involving drug or alcohol addiction. There should be clear figures of the cases of separations that are done on purely psychological assessments like attachment disorder or emotional harm.
In the physical abuse category, the figures should state how many cases involved spanking or other mild forms of physical intervention, and how many involved serious violence. These facts will speak for themselves, and they must come from the mouth of the government.
In England, there are no official numbers on the children taken for “risk of future emotional harm” or “parents' failure to co-operate with social workers”.
This is very misleading, because we are seeing care orders where these are the given reasons for placing children in care.
If you look at the numbers in England for children subject to a “child protection plan” [the step prior to taking a child into care], physical abuse cases are at 6% and falling, and sexual abuse cases are at 4% and falling, while emotional abuse and neglect cases are at 30-40% and rising for each year since 2012.
This shows a much greater number of emotional abuse than physical or sexual abuse cases.
If in England, the pattern for “looked after” children is same as that for children subject to a “child protection plan”, then again we are looking at a situation, where the drastic action of permanently confiscating children from their families is not taking place in situations that the public generally assumes it does-such as incest, violence or abandonment-but for the much more questionable categories of emotional abuse and neglect.
We see a similar situation in the USA. US official figures for foster care show a relatively small number of cases, under the heads of sexual and physical abuse-sexual abuse is at 4% and physical abuse at 12% of cases.
The vast majority of cases-61%-are reported in the category of neglect. So again, we are looking at a huge number of cases, that do not involve the kind of physical and sexual abuse that the public assumes, would be the basis of child confiscation by the state.
In England, the data for looked after children is not helpful as it clubs all abuse and neglect cases together under a common head called “abuse or neglect”.
But abuse can mean a range of things, and so can neglect. For the data to be meaningful, abuse and neglect cases have to be separated and then they have to have sub-categorised, so that we can drill down and see what types of behaviors, incidents and home conditions, are being classified by the authorities as abuse and neglect.
What these gaps in the official statistics show us is that the governments in all these countries which are so stubbornly defending their child protection systems, themselves don't really know what CPS is up to.
They don't know about the mushrooming emotional abuse and risk of emotional harm cases. They don't know about the sliding threshold for labeling something as physical abuse or neglect. And they don't know about neglect allegations arising from parental poverty.
In Norway, where the system is heavily reliant on psychological assessments and the theory of attachment disorder, how can the government claim to have effective oversight over Barnevernet when it does not even have Attachment Disorder as a heading in its own statistics about child protection cases?
So I propose we prioritise mobilising opinion on this issue and demand that authorities give clear data on emotional harm and neglect, broken down into meaningful sub-categories as I have discussed earlier.
I will stop here as time is limited. Thank you again to the Nordic Committee for Human Rights for their award. I will cherish this and salute you from India.
To victims of CPS: all my love and solidarity. You are not alone. We bear witness to your suffering. We stand by you to the bitter end.
To my beloved fellow activists, I wish us all good fight! One day victory will be ours. Thank you.
Suranya Aiyar is a New Delhi-based lawyer and mother. The Global Child Rights and Wrong series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in childpolicy.
Read the full article at SundayGuardianLive.com.
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.
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Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
PMID:
PLoS Biol. 2011 Nov ;9(11):e1001205. Epub 2011 Nov 22. PMID: 22131906
Abstract Title:
Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people hear colors and taste words?
Abstract:
Synesthesia is a perceptual experience in which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on heritable variants comprising roughly 4% of the general population. Genetic research on synesthesia suggests the phenomenon is heterogeneous and polygenetic, yet it remains unclear whether synesthesia ever provided a selective advantage or is merely a byproduct of some other useful selected trait. Progress in uncovering the genetic basis of synesthesia will help us understand why synesthesia has been conserved in the population.
read more
0 notes
Text
Indian Mother and Attorney wins Award for Fight Against Child Protection Services and Children Civil Rights Abuse
Attorney Suranya Aiyar in Norway. Image from Facebook.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
We have previously reported here at Health Impact News how authorities in India are now providing information to families planning to visit or work in the United States in helping them to avoid having their children kidnapped by Child Protection Services.
The Sunday Guardian reported:
Young Indian couples travelling to the United States on short to mid-term job assignments are increasingly facing the menace of child confiscation by the country's child protection agencies, who wrongly accuse them of abuse. The “child abuse” is determined using the controversial Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) indicator, the veracity of which is contested.
Suranya Aiyar, a New-Delhi based lawyer, who has been providing counsel and aid to Indian families in the US, Norway and other countries to help them get back their confiscated children, recently submitted a “Report on Indian and India-Origin Children Confiscated by the United States Child Protection Agencies” to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Based on her extensive case study of 12 Indian families, who were falsely accused of child abuse, her report sheds light on the US agencies' many biases and flawed methodology. The report wants a travel advisory to be issued to young Indian families moving to the US of possible confiscation of their children as, in most cases, the victim families are not aware of what might goad the child protection agencies to initiate action against them.
Last year (2018) Indian mother and attorney Suranya Aiyar was awarded a laureate by the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NCHR).
NCHR is a human rights organization specializing in advocacy against wrongful child removals by child protection agencies in Nordic countries.
In her acceptance speech, attorney Aiyar appeals to policymakers in India to resist and reject the Western models of child protection.
Such is the sad state of affairs here in the U.S. today, where attorneys and policy makers in other countries must issue travel advisories and warn against child kidnappings by American child protection agencies.
India must say no to Western paradigms of child protection
Image from Facebook.
by Suranya Aiyar
Sunday Guardian Live
Good afternoon and greetings from India to all of you!
Let me begin by saying how touched and honoured I am to receive this award from the Nordic Committee for Human Rights.
Looking at the list of my fellow laureates, past and present, I am doubly honoured.
These are people who have accomplished a lot, and sometimes at great cost, in exposing the wrongful snatching of children by the state in different parts of the world.
For me to find this endorsement of my work among you abroad, to have won your trust and your friendship is very gratifying. There are only a handful of us in each country fighting for justice against child protection services or “CPS” as we call them.
But,
I believe that if we work together, then we will eventually succeed in persuading the public, our governments, and international organisations that CPS in its present form has failed.
This is important not just in your countries, but also in my part of the world.
Here in India, UNICEF, Save the Children and billionaire philanthropist organisations have been lobbying our governments and public influencers to adopt this same mistaken model of child protection.
If CPS can go so wrong, become so corrupt and power-mad in your countries despite your celebrated systems of public accountability, you can imagine the havoc they would wreck in mine.
It must not happen, and you must help us prevent it. You must help us in India save our 440 million children, and their mostly simple, humble parents, the majority of whom live in very difficult circumstances already, and whose only joy is their children.
You must help us stop CPS from poisoning their lives here.
In a way you're already helping. Your work, exposing the problems with CPS in your countries, helps us persuade people here in India to reject this system.
If you win against CPS in your countries, then we win against CPS here. So in a very real sense we are all in this together, and we should join hands internationally in fighting CPS.
We all agree that child abuse is wrong and should be punished.
But due process has to be followed. Without due process, you are at the mercy of state authorities-and that is what makes the difference between a democratic and an undemocratic system.
Due process and a healthy skepticism of all government authority are the distinguishing features of a free society.
But all skepticism seems to vanish when you start asking people about child protection agencies.
What is the reason for this blind spot in the public eye? I think that they simply do not believe that child protection agencies are violating basic human rights; that child protection investigations and trials are unfair and biased and children are being taken from their parents without good reason.
So what can we do about this? I believe we have to do more to show the public that child removals are taking place for reasons falling far short of any common understanding of abuse.
That children are being taken even where there is no physical or sexual abuse, and no issue of drug or alcohol addiction. We have to show, that judges are ordering removals even when they say, in so many words, that the children are loved by their parents and have not faced any abuse or abandonment by them.
To convince people, we need the information about non-physical/sexual abuse removals to come from the government itself. I mean removals such as those for “risk of future emotional harm”, “attachment disorder” and poverty-related assessments of neglect.
Let governments come clean on child protection cases that do not involve physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.
We have some clues from the official data that many, if not most, child protection cases, do not involve physical or sexual abuse.
In Norway, Bufdir's latest report says that “parents' lack of care abilities” and “high degree of conflict in the home” are the two most frequent reasons for children and the young to come into the child welfare system.
But “parental lack of care abilities” can mean anything. The official data has to give us more details to be meaningful. If none of these cases of “parental care abilities” cases involve abuse, then the government needs to say so.
We are told that CPS intervenes only in the most serious cases, but I have seen figures from Statistics Norway in the past, where the annual percentage of physical abuse and sexual abuse was as low as 1.8% and 0.6% of the new cases.
If the same pattern exists for care orders, and not just for the initiation of cases, then we are looking at a situation of widespread removals for non-physical or sexual-abuse reasons.
This places the whole child protection enterprise on an entirely different footing to what governments are telling the public-that this is reserved for extreme cases of abuse.
So we need to mobilise a demand in Norway for meaningful official statistics about the reasons for placing children in care.
For the statistics to be meaningful, and this applies to all countries (not just Norway), there should be a separate heading for the number of cases where there is no allegation of sexual or physical abuse.
There should be a separate heading for the number of cases involving drug or alcohol addiction. There should be clear figures of the cases of separations that are done on purely psychological assessments like attachment disorder or emotional harm.
In the physical abuse category, the figures should state how many cases involved spanking or other mild forms of physical intervention, and how many involved serious violence. These facts will speak for themselves, and they must come from the mouth of the government.
In England, there are no official numbers on the children taken for “risk of future emotional harm” or “parents' failure to co-operate with social workers”.
This is very misleading, because we are seeing care orders where these are the given reasons for placing children in care.
If you look at the numbers in England for children subject to a “child protection plan” [the step prior to taking a child into care], physical abuse cases are at 6% and falling, and sexual abuse cases are at 4% and falling, while emotional abuse and neglect cases are at 30-40% and rising for each year since 2012.
This shows a much greater number of emotional abuse than physical or sexual abuse cases.
If in England, the pattern for “looked after” children is same as that for children subject to a “child protection plan”, then again we are looking at a situation, where the drastic action of permanently confiscating children from their families is not taking place in situations that the public generally assumes it does-such as incest, violence or abandonment-but for the much more questionable categories of emotional abuse and neglect.
We see a similar situation in the USA. US official figures for foster care show a relatively small number of cases, under the heads of sexual and physical abuse-sexual abuse is at 4% and physical abuse at 12% of cases.
The vast majority of cases-61%-are reported in the category of neglect. So again, we are looking at a huge number of cases, that do not involve the kind of physical and sexual abuse that the public assumes, would be the basis of child confiscation by the state.
In England, the data for looked after children is not helpful as it clubs all abuse and neglect cases together under a common head called “abuse or neglect”.
But abuse can mean a range of things, and so can neglect. For the data to be meaningful, abuse and neglect cases have to be separated and then they have to have sub-categorised, so that we can drill down and see what types of behaviors, incidents and home conditions, are being classified by the authorities as abuse and neglect.
What these gaps in the official statistics show us is that the governments in all these countries which are so stubbornly defending their child protection systems, themselves don't really know what CPS is up to.
They don't know about the mushrooming emotional abuse and risk of emotional harm cases. They don't know about the sliding threshold for labeling something as physical abuse or neglect. And they don't know about neglect allegations arising from parental poverty.
In Norway, where the system is heavily reliant on psychological assessments and the theory of attachment disorder, how can the government claim to have effective oversight over Barnevernet when it does not even have Attachment Disorder as a heading in its own statistics about child protection cases?
So I propose we prioritise mobilising opinion on this issue and demand that authorities give clear data on emotional harm and neglect, broken down into meaningful sub-categories as I have discussed earlier.
I will stop here as time is limited. Thank you again to the Nordic Committee for Human Rights for their award. I will cherish this and salute you from India.
To victims of CPS: all my love and solidarity. You are not alone. We bear witness to your suffering. We stand by you to the bitter end.
To my beloved fellow activists, I wish us all good fight! One day victory will be ours. Thank you.
Suranya Aiyar is a New Delhi-based lawyer and mother. The Global Child Rights and Wrong series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in childpolicy.
Read the full article at SundayGuardianLive.com.
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.
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Indian Mother and Attorney wins Award for Fight Against Child Protection Services and Children Civil Rights Abuse
Attorney Suranya Aiyar in Norway. Image from Facebook.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
We have previously reported here at Health Impact News how authorities in India are now providing information to families planning to visit or work in the United States in helping them to avoid having their children kidnapped by Child Protection Services.
The Sunday Guardian reported:
Young Indian couples travelling to the United States on short to mid-term job assignments are increasingly facing the menace of child confiscation by the country's child protection agencies, who wrongly accuse them of abuse. The “child abuse” is determined using the controversial Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) indicator, the veracity of which is contested.
Suranya Aiyar, a New-Delhi based lawyer, who has been providing counsel and aid to Indian families in the US, Norway and other countries to help them get back their confiscated children, recently submitted a “Report on Indian and India-Origin Children Confiscated by the United States Child Protection Agencies” to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Based on her extensive case study of 12 Indian families, who were falsely accused of child abuse, her report sheds light on the US agencies' many biases and flawed methodology. The report wants a travel advisory to be issued to young Indian families moving to the US of possible confiscation of their children as, in most cases, the victim families are not aware of what might goad the child protection agencies to initiate action against them.
Last year (2018) Indian mother and attorney Suranya Aiyar was awarded a laureate by the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NCHR).
NCHR is a human rights organization specializing in advocacy against wrongful child removals by child protection agencies in Nordic countries.
In her acceptance speech, attorney Aiyar appeals to policymakers in India to resist and reject the Western models of child protection.
Such is the sad state of affairs here in the U.S. today, where attorneys and policy makers in other countries must issue travel advisories and warn against child kidnappings by American child protection agencies.
India must say no to Western paradigms of child protection
Image from Facebook.
by Suranya Aiyar
Sunday Guardian Live
Good afternoon and greetings from India to all of you!
Let me begin by saying how touched and honoured I am to receive this award from the Nordic Committee for Human Rights.
Looking at the list of my fellow laureates, past and present, I am doubly honoured.
These are people who have accomplished a lot, and sometimes at great cost, in exposing the wrongful snatching of children by the state in different parts of the world.
For me to find this endorsement of my work among you abroad, to have won your trust and your friendship is very gratifying. There are only a handful of us in each country fighting for justice against child protection services or “CPS” as we call them.
But,
I believe that if we work together, then we will eventually succeed in persuading the public, our governments, and international organisations that CPS in its present form has failed.
This is important not just in your countries, but also in my part of the world.
Here in India, UNICEF, Save the Children and billionaire philanthropist organisations have been lobbying our governments and public influencers to adopt this same mistaken model of child protection.
If CPS can go so wrong, become so corrupt and power-mad in your countries despite your celebrated systems of public accountability, you can imagine the havoc they would wreck in mine.
It must not happen, and you must help us prevent it. You must help us in India save our 440 million children, and their mostly simple, humble parents, the majority of whom live in very difficult circumstances already, and whose only joy is their children.
You must help us stop CPS from poisoning their lives here.
In a way you're already helping. Your work, exposing the problems with CPS in your countries, helps us persuade people here in India to reject this system.
If you win against CPS in your countries, then we win against CPS here. So in a very real sense we are all in this together, and we should join hands internationally in fighting CPS.
We all agree that child abuse is wrong and should be punished.
But due process has to be followed. Without due process, you are at the mercy of state authorities-and that is what makes the difference between a democratic and an undemocratic system.
Due process and a healthy skepticism of all government authority are the distinguishing features of a free society.
But all skepticism seems to vanish when you start asking people about child protection agencies.
What is the reason for this blind spot in the public eye? I think that they simply do not believe that child protection agencies are violating basic human rights; that child protection investigations and trials are unfair and biased and children are being taken from their parents without good reason.
So what can we do about this? I believe we have to do more to show the public that child removals are taking place for reasons falling far short of any common understanding of abuse.
That children are being taken even where there is no physical or sexual abuse, and no issue of drug or alcohol addiction. We have to show, that judges are ordering removals even when they say, in so many words, that the children are loved by their parents and have not faced any abuse or abandonment by them.
To convince people, we need the information about non-physical/sexual abuse removals to come from the government itself. I mean removals such as those for “risk of future emotional harm”, “attachment disorder” and poverty-related assessments of neglect.
Let governments come clean on child protection cases that do not involve physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.
We have some clues from the official data that many, if not most, child protection cases, do not involve physical or sexual abuse.
In Norway, Bufdir's latest report says that “parents' lack of care abilities” and “high degree of conflict in the home” are the two most frequent reasons for children and the young to come into the child welfare system.
But “parental lack of care abilities” can mean anything. The official data has to give us more details to be meaningful. If none of these cases of “parental care abilities” cases involve abuse, then the government needs to say so.
We are told that CPS intervenes only in the most serious cases, but I have seen figures from Statistics Norway in the past, where the annual percentage of physical abuse and sexual abuse was as low as 1.8% and 0.6% of the new cases.
If the same pattern exists for care orders, and not just for the initiation of cases, then we are looking at a situation of widespread removals for non-physical or sexual-abuse reasons.
This places the whole child protection enterprise on an entirely different footing to what governments are telling the public-that this is reserved for extreme cases of abuse.
So we need to mobilise a demand in Norway for meaningful official statistics about the reasons for placing children in care.
For the statistics to be meaningful, and this applies to all countries (not just Norway), there should be a separate heading for the number of cases where there is no allegation of sexual or physical abuse.
There should be a separate heading for the number of cases involving drug or alcohol addiction. There should be clear figures of the cases of separations that are done on purely psychological assessments like attachment disorder or emotional harm.
In the physical abuse category, the figures should state how many cases involved spanking or other mild forms of physical intervention, and how many involved serious violence. These facts will speak for themselves, and they must come from the mouth of the government.
In England, there are no official numbers on the children taken for “risk of future emotional harm” or “parents' failure to co-operate with social workers”.
This is very misleading, because we are seeing care orders where these are the given reasons for placing children in care.
If you look at the numbers in England for children subject to a “child protection plan” [the step prior to taking a child into care], physical abuse cases are at 6% and falling, and sexual abuse cases are at 4% and falling, while emotional abuse and neglect cases are at 30-40% and rising for each year since 2012.
This shows a much greater number of emotional abuse than physical or sexual abuse cases.
If in England, the pattern for “looked after” children is same as that for children subject to a “child protection plan”, then again we are looking at a situation, where the drastic action of permanently confiscating children from their families is not taking place in situations that the public generally assumes it does-such as incest, violence or abandonment-but for the much more questionable categories of emotional abuse and neglect.
We see a similar situation in the USA. US official figures for foster care show a relatively small number of cases, under the heads of sexual and physical abuse-sexual abuse is at 4% and physical abuse at 12% of cases.
The vast majority of cases-61%-are reported in the category of neglect. So again, we are looking at a huge number of cases, that do not involve the kind of physical and sexual abuse that the public assumes, would be the basis of child confiscation by the state.
In England, the data for looked after children is not helpful as it clubs all abuse and neglect cases together under a common head called “abuse or neglect”.
But abuse can mean a range of things, and so can neglect. For the data to be meaningful, abuse and neglect cases have to be separated and then they have to have sub-categorised, so that we can drill down and see what types of behaviors, incidents and home conditions, are being classified by the authorities as abuse and neglect.
What these gaps in the official statistics show us is that the governments in all these countries which are so stubbornly defending their child protection systems, themselves don't really know what CPS is up to.
They don't know about the mushrooming emotional abuse and risk of emotional harm cases. They don't know about the sliding threshold for labeling something as physical abuse or neglect. And they don't know about neglect allegations arising from parental poverty.
In Norway, where the system is heavily reliant on psychological assessments and the theory of attachment disorder, how can the government claim to have effective oversight over Barnevernet when it does not even have Attachment Disorder as a heading in its own statistics about child protection cases?
So I propose we prioritise mobilising opinion on this issue and demand that authorities give clear data on emotional harm and neglect, broken down into meaningful sub-categories as I have discussed earlier.
I will stop here as time is limited. Thank you again to the Nordic Committee for Human Rights for their award. I will cherish this and salute you from India.
To victims of CPS: all my love and solidarity. You are not alone. We bear witness to your suffering. We stand by you to the bitter end.
To my beloved fellow activists, I wish us all good fight! One day victory will be ours. Thank you.
Suranya Aiyar is a New Delhi-based lawyer and mother. The Global Child Rights and Wrong series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in childpolicy.
Read the full article at SundayGuardianLive.com.
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.
Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America T-Shirt
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Order here!
Medical Kidnapping is REAL!
See: Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America Today
Help spread the awareness of Medical Kidnapping by wearing the Medical Kidnapping t-shirt!
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The cognitive advantages of synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space.
PMID:
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2014 ;31(7-8):545-64. Epub 2014 Oct 10. PMID: 25300202
Abstract Title:
Better together? The cognitive advantages of synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space.
Abstract:
Synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space (TNS synaesthesia) is thought to have costs and benefits for recalling and manipulating time and number. There are two competing theories about how TNS synaesthesia affects cognition. The"magnitude"account predicts that TNS synaesthesia may affect cardinal magnitude judgements, whereas the"sequence"account suggests that it may affect ordinal sequence judgements and could rely on visuospatial working memory. We aimed to comprehensively assess the cognitive consequences of TNS synaesthesia and distinguish between these two accounts. TNS synaesthetes, grapheme-colour synaesthetes, and nonsynaesthetes completed a behavioural task battery. Three tasks involved cardinal and ordinal comparisons of temporal, numerical, and spatial stimuli; we also examined visuospatial working memory. TNS synaesthetes were significantly more accurate than nonsynaesthetes in making ordinal judgements about space. This difference was explained by significantly higher visuospatial working memory accuracy. Our findings demonstrate an advantage of TNS synaesthesia that is more in line with the sequence account.
read more
0 notes
Text
Indian Mother and Attorney wins Award for Fight Against Child Protection Services and Children Civil Rights Abuse
Attorney Suranya Aiyar in Norway. Image from Facebook.
Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
We have previously reported here at Health Impact News how authorities in India are now providing information to families planning to visit or work in the United States in helping them to avoid having their children kidnapped by Child Protection Services.
The Sunday Guardian reported:
Young Indian couples travelling to the United States on short to mid-term job assignments are increasingly facing the menace of child confiscation by the country's child protection agencies, who wrongly accuse them of abuse. The “child abuse” is determined using the controversial Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) indicator, the veracity of which is contested.
Suranya Aiyar, a New-Delhi based lawyer, who has been providing counsel and aid to Indian families in the US, Norway and other countries to help them get back their confiscated children, recently submitted a “Report on Indian and India-Origin Children Confiscated by the United States Child Protection Agencies” to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Based on her extensive case study of 12 Indian families, who were falsely accused of child abuse, her report sheds light on the US agencies' many biases and flawed methodology. The report wants a travel advisory to be issued to young Indian families moving to the US of possible confiscation of their children as, in most cases, the victim families are not aware of what might goad the child protection agencies to initiate action against them.
Last year (2018) Indian mother and attorney Suranya Aiyar was awarded a laureate by the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NCHR).
NCHR is a human rights organization specializing in advocacy against wrongful child removals by child protection agencies in Nordic countries.
In her acceptance speech, attorney Aiyar appeals to policymakers in India to resist and reject the Western models of child protection.
Such is the sad state of affairs here in the U.S. today, where attorneys and policy makers in other countries must issue travel advisories and warn against child kidnappings by American child protection agencies.
India must say no to Western paradigms of child protection
Image from Facebook.
by Suranya Aiyar
Sunday Guardian Live
Good afternoon and greetings from India to all of you!
Let me begin by saying how touched and honoured I am to receive this award from the Nordic Committee for Human Rights.
Looking at the list of my fellow laureates, past and present, I am doubly honoured.
These are people who have accomplished a lot, and sometimes at great cost, in exposing the wrongful snatching of children by the state in different parts of the world.
For me to find this endorsement of my work among you abroad, to have won your trust and your friendship is very gratifying. There are only a handful of us in each country fighting for justice against child protection services or “CPS” as we call them.
But,
I believe that if we work together, then we will eventually succeed in persuading the public, our governments, and international organisations that CPS in its present form has failed.
This is important not just in your countries, but also in my part of the world.
Here in India, UNICEF, Save the Children and billionaire philanthropist organisations have been lobbying our governments and public influencers to adopt this same mistaken model of child protection.
If CPS can go so wrong, become so corrupt and power-mad in your countries despite your celebrated systems of public accountability, you can imagine the havoc they would wreck in mine.
It must not happen, and you must help us prevent it. You must help us in India save our 440 million children, and their mostly simple, humble parents, the majority of whom live in very difficult circumstances already, and whose only joy is their children.
You must help us stop CPS from poisoning their lives here.
In a way you're already helping. Your work, exposing the problems with CPS in your countries, helps us persuade people here in India to reject this system.
If you win against CPS in your countries, then we win against CPS here. So in a very real sense we are all in this together, and we should join hands internationally in fighting CPS.
We all agree that child abuse is wrong and should be punished.
But due process has to be followed. Without due process, you are at the mercy of state authorities-and that is what makes the difference between a democratic and an undemocratic system.
Due process and a healthy skepticism of all government authority are the distinguishing features of a free society.
But all skepticism seems to vanish when you start asking people about child protection agencies.
What is the reason for this blind spot in the public eye? I think that they simply do not believe that child protection agencies are violating basic human rights; that child protection investigations and trials are unfair and biased and children are being taken from their parents without good reason.
So what can we do about this? I believe we have to do more to show the public that child removals are taking place for reasons falling far short of any common understanding of abuse.
That children are being taken even where there is no physical or sexual abuse, and no issue of drug or alcohol addiction. We have to show, that judges are ordering removals even when they say, in so many words, that the children are loved by their parents and have not faced any abuse or abandonment by them.
To convince people, we need the information about non-physical/sexual abuse removals to come from the government itself. I mean removals such as those for “risk of future emotional harm”, “attachment disorder” and poverty-related assessments of neglect.
Let governments come clean on child protection cases that do not involve physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug or alcohol addiction.
We have some clues from the official data that many, if not most, child protection cases, do not involve physical or sexual abuse.
In Norway, Bufdir's latest report says that “parents' lack of care abilities” and “high degree of conflict in the home” are the two most frequent reasons for children and the young to come into the child welfare system.
But “parental lack of care abilities” can mean anything. The official data has to give us more details to be meaningful. If none of these cases of “parental care abilities” cases involve abuse, then the government needs to say so.
We are told that CPS intervenes only in the most serious cases, but I have seen figures from Statistics Norway in the past, where the annual percentage of physical abuse and sexual abuse was as low as 1.8% and 0.6% of the new cases.
If the same pattern exists for care orders, and not just for the initiation of cases, then we are looking at a situation of widespread removals for non-physical or sexual-abuse reasons.
This places the whole child protection enterprise on an entirely different footing to what governments are telling the public-that this is reserved for extreme cases of abuse.
So we need to mobilise a demand in Norway for meaningful official statistics about the reasons for placing children in care.
For the statistics to be meaningful, and this applies to all countries (not just Norway), there should be a separate heading for the number of cases where there is no allegation of sexual or physical abuse.
There should be a separate heading for the number of cases involving drug or alcohol addiction. There should be clear figures of the cases of separations that are done on purely psychological assessments like attachment disorder or emotional harm.
In the physical abuse category, the figures should state how many cases involved spanking or other mild forms of physical intervention, and how many involved serious violence. These facts will speak for themselves, and they must come from the mouth of the government.
In England, there are no official numbers on the children taken for “risk of future emotional harm” or “parents' failure to co-operate with social workers”.
This is very misleading, because we are seeing care orders where these are the given reasons for placing children in care.
If you look at the numbers in England for children subject to a “child protection plan” [the step prior to taking a child into care], physical abuse cases are at 6% and falling, and sexual abuse cases are at 4% and falling, while emotional abuse and neglect cases are at 30-40% and rising for each year since 2012.
This shows a much greater number of emotional abuse than physical or sexual abuse cases.
If in England, the pattern for “looked after” children is same as that for children subject to a “child protection plan”, then again we are looking at a situation, where the drastic action of permanently confiscating children from their families is not taking place in situations that the public generally assumes it does-such as incest, violence or abandonment-but for the much more questionable categories of emotional abuse and neglect.
We see a similar situation in the USA. US official figures for foster care show a relatively small number of cases, under the heads of sexual and physical abuse-sexual abuse is at 4% and physical abuse at 12% of cases.
The vast majority of cases-61%-are reported in the category of neglect. So again, we are looking at a huge number of cases, that do not involve the kind of physical and sexual abuse that the public assumes, would be the basis of child confiscation by the state.
In England, the data for looked after children is not helpful as it clubs all abuse and neglect cases together under a common head called “abuse or neglect”.
But abuse can mean a range of things, and so can neglect. For the data to be meaningful, abuse and neglect cases have to be separated and then they have to have sub-categorised, so that we can drill down and see what types of behaviors, incidents and home conditions, are being classified by the authorities as abuse and neglect.
What these gaps in the official statistics show us is that the governments in all these countries which are so stubbornly defending their child protection systems, themselves don't really know what CPS is up to.
They don't know about the mushrooming emotional abuse and risk of emotional harm cases. They don't know about the sliding threshold for labeling something as physical abuse or neglect. And they don't know about neglect allegations arising from parental poverty.
In Norway, where the system is heavily reliant on psychological assessments and the theory of attachment disorder, how can the government claim to have effective oversight over Barnevernet when it does not even have Attachment Disorder as a heading in its own statistics about child protection cases?
So I propose we prioritise mobilising opinion on this issue and demand that authorities give clear data on emotional harm and neglect, broken down into meaningful sub-categories as I have discussed earlier.
I will stop here as time is limited. Thank you again to the Nordic Committee for Human Rights for their award. I will cherish this and salute you from India.
To victims of CPS: all my love and solidarity. You are not alone. We bear witness to your suffering. We stand by you to the bitter end.
To my beloved fellow activists, I wish us all good fight! One day victory will be ours. Thank you.
Suranya Aiyar is a New Delhi-based lawyer and mother. The Global Child Rights and Wrong series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in childpolicy.
Read the full article at SundayGuardianLive.com.
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com.
Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America T-Shirt
100% Pre-shrunk Cotton!
Order here!
Medical Kidnapping is REAL!
See: Medical Kidnapping: A Threat to Every Family in America Today
Help spread the awareness of Medical Kidnapping by wearing the Medical Kidnapping t-shirt!
Support the cause of MedicalKidnap.com, which is part of the Health Impact News network.
Order here!
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The cognitive advantages of synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space.
PMID:
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2014 ;31(7-8):545-64. Epub 2014 Oct 10. PMID: 25300202
Abstract Title:
Better together? The cognitive advantages of synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space.
Abstract:
Synaesthesia for time, numbers, and space (TNS synaesthesia) is thought to have costs and benefits for recalling and manipulating time and number. There are two competing theories about how TNS synaesthesia affects cognition. The"magnitude"account predicts that TNS synaesthesia may affect cardinal magnitude judgements, whereas the"sequence"account suggests that it may affect ordinal sequence judgements and could rely on visuospatial working memory. We aimed to comprehensively assess the cognitive consequences of TNS synaesthesia and distinguish between these two accounts. TNS synaesthetes, grapheme-colour synaesthetes, and nonsynaesthetes completed a behavioural task battery. Three tasks involved cardinal and ordinal comparisons of temporal, numerical, and spatial stimuli; we also examined visuospatial working memory. TNS synaesthetes were significantly more accurate than nonsynaesthetes in making ordinal judgements about space. This difference was explained by significantly higher visuospatial working memory accuracy. Our findings demonstrate an advantage of TNS synaesthesia that is more in line with the sequence account.
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5 Week Electronic Beam Radiation Therapy (Cyber Knife)
Diagnost with PC in August of 2018 after trending PSA. MRI supported diagnosis then confirmed by biopsi. Gleason Score of 8 (4+4). Being treated at MSKCC in NYC. All additional scans (Bone and Pet) have the cancer localized only to the prostate - good news. Started hormonal therapy (Fermagon) on October 21, 2018. MSKCC's approach is 12 months hormonal blockade, HDR Brachytherapy, 5 week session M-F eletronic beam radiation therapy (EBRT) - total 25 sessions. Side affects from the hormal blockade are mainly hot flashes - routine and random, general malaise, and of course ED. PSA at the start of hormonal blockage was 5.3; now 1.4 (3 months). Testosterone at the start of blockade was 225; now 22; they want it under 11. Just completed HDR Brachytherapy on 1/9/19. Will undergo Simulation on 1/21/19 to get lined up for the EBRT. A little tired and still have pain in the perineum, but no incontinence issues. Begin EBRT on 2/4/19 M-F for 5 weeks. Sorry it took so long to get to this question: has anyone undergone 5 week EBRT (Cyber Knife) and if so what type of side affects did you experience? Still working at age 65 and was wondering about fatigue and or other issues.
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The Cancer Connection: How Dental Health Indicates...
Video Transcript: The Cancer Connection: How Dental Health Indicates Disease Risk
Ty Bollinger: Did you know that there's a connection between oral health and disease risk?
Charlene Bollinger: Join Dr. Stuart Nunnally as he shares more on how your dental health can reveal more serious health problems.
Dr. Stuart Nunnally: And I'm going to talk first about the obvious cancer connection. There is an obvious cancer connection because there are some aspects of dentistry that we need to really be concerned about in terms of a one to one progression of the disease.
And that is this: Did you know that 63% of men in this country, if they have gum disease, advanced gum disease, have an increase chance of prostate [sic] cancer? 63%. From a Harvard Study. And also, just with moderate gum disease, which many of us in this room probably have, 33% have an increased risk of lung cancer. There's a 50% increase in the risk of kidney cancer and there's a 30% increase of blood cancer such as leukemia.
Most of this may not be a direct result of the bacteria or the pathogens that are involved with these, but they set up a constant inflammatory state. And as you know there's just not a disease that we deal with that doesn't have an inflammatory component to it.
This particular man, Gerald Curatola, has just written a book and literally was just released, that deals-and he has distilled the information very nicely there for you to see what kinds of impact dentistry can have on our systemic health. So, I recommend it to you.
Then there's the not-so-obvious cancer connection, and that is the one that most of us in here are familiar with, and that is what in the world do we do if we have a mouth full of these? As you know, these have been debated for years, and quite frankly, I think we had the opportunity as an organization, as an American dental organization, to say years ago,
You know what? We made a mistake. We made a mistake. We never should have put mercury in any form in anyone's body.”
And yet we can't own up to it. We can't own up to it. It's a very, very sad thing, so we continue to do it. And when we don't do it, instead of doing it here, we ship it to some poor country that has no other filling material to use and we ask them to use it.
So, it's hard to believe that even today, about 40% of the dentists in this country are still placing mercury amalgam fillings. Now the sad thing about this is that's 50% mercury. 50% mercury, there's copper 30%, silver, zinc, and tin make up the rest of it. Now in most compounds, when you see that something is 50% or more of the compound you would call it a mercury amalgam filling, but for some reason in this country for years we've called it a silver amalgam filling.
It's time to change. It's time to change and here's what we can do about it.
Well, let's just talk first about a few more facts. First of all, this is the second most toxic element known to man. It's an extremely potent neurotoxin. It's second in toxicity only to plutonium. It's very difficult to think that we would place that in someone's body.
There is no biological barrier. It accumulates in the fetus. In fact, the fetus is a magnet for mercury. When the mom has mercury fillings, or if she's had a vaccine that has mercury in it, the fetus is actually a magnet. You will see higher levels in the tissues of the fetus then you will see in the mom. Of course, it's a depressant and that's one of the reasons why so many people in this country are depressed.
In fact, if you want to depress a laboratory animal or initiate an autoimmune disease, most often it's done in the laboratory with mercury. It almost makes me sick.
I was listening to a radio show the other day and there was a physician on the show, and he said, “Oh no, there is no reason.” The caller called in and said, “Is there any reason for me to have my mercury amalgam fillings removed?” And the physician said, “Of course not. There's no mercury that comes from that material.” Well, the physician has lost and forgotten his ninth-grade chemistry, because the truth of the matter-
And here's the example that he used. I want you to be prepared for this in the future, should you hear it.
He said, “If you take sodium, which is toxic, and you take chlorine, which is toxic, and you combine them together you get sodium chloride. Now, is salt toxic? Is salt toxic?” And the listener said, “Well, I guess not.” And hung up.
Well, the truth of the matter is, the poor physician has lost all sense of his chemistry background, because that's not what happens when you mix metals together. When you mix mercury together with silver, zinc, tin, and copper, it doesn't stay there. It's an amalgam and it leaks out very, very freely to the environment. And the only reason it's really been used, in my opinion, is because it's dirt cheap.
I mean it just takes-there's almost nothing in there that's expensive, it's easy to place, it contributes to cracked teeth. As you saw a while ago, you saw all the frayed edges around those mercury fillings, and what happens is that you chew on one of those for twenty years and finally you fracture off a cusp of your tooth, and then you are destined for a crown. And then you are destined for the root canal that follows and then you are destined for one thing after another as you know.
Ty Bollinger: That's some amazing information on the importance of oral health from Dr. Nunnally.
Charlene Bollinger: If you learned something new, please share this on your social media and let your family know about The Truth About Cancer. Thank you and God bless!
Your oral health can be a direct reflection of what's going on inside your body. Toxic buildup is the root cause of many diseases. Click here to discover how easy it is to detox for health and vitality.
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