#child welfare

[illnessfaker]

this makes me want to maul someone like look up mother-daughter emotional incest or enmeshment and then get back to me on how "emotionally vampiric" teenage girls are compared to the massive amount of damage you can do to your kids as an emotionally insecure parent whether that emotional insecurity is your fault or not. die.

[pro-birth]

No woman should die in childbirth.

No child should die from abortion.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The largest First Nation in British Columbia by population has voted to take over authority of child and family services for its residents. Results of a vote held by the Cowichan Tribes show 83 per cent of the 416 citizens who cast ballots were in favour of the new law that would prioritize supports to keep children with their families or place them with relatives or in other Indigenous homes. Negotiator Robert Morales, who helped develop the new law, says the vote represents a significant step in the self-determination of the Cowichan people and the ability to decide what's in the best interests of their children. The Cowichan Tribes — which has about 5,300 members and is based on Vancouver Island — have been negotiating for years with the federal and provincial governments on what the transition will look like.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[alwaysbewoke]

i guess we're starting to see why the gop want to outlaw abortion smfh

[brandyschillace]

There are no words…

[jewishevelinebaker]

Facts dont care about your feelings until facts say that hitting your children teaches them that violence is ok and facts say that children are more likely to be harmed by family members than strangers and then its personal anecdotes about why hitting is ok and teaching children about sexual abuse in schools isnt

[ladymazzy]

She Just Had a Baby. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade. | Time

CW for everything in this story

As ever, marginalised people - Black, indigenous, immigrant, poor, gender non-conforming, minors and disabled - are disproportionately affected by unjust reproductive legislation

Trauma upon trauma

[fosterwhat]

There was the potential (again) that Henry would be placed with us. His current placement is done for very valid reasons. DCFS just does not communicate. So I’ve been wondering for the past 3 days if he was maybe going to show up. Finally got a message that they are “not inclined” to place with me and are working to persuade current foster family to keep him until reunification, so he doesn’t end up somewhere random. But he wouldn’t end up somewhere rabdom! He’d be here, which is exactly what the current placement requested alongside me…

The manipulation of those who are in system is appalling. Some day I will write a tell all book and name names. Because it’s specific individuals who are doing this out of spite, hiding behind the system. I am so mad.

There was just another child death reported because of their ineptitude, but they do nothing to change. DCFS was supposed to put a safe reunification system into place in 2019. Never happened. Now they plan to reunify Henry in a couple weeks, even though there have been recent police responses for the very reason he was removed. There is no system of protection for these kids. No way for foster parents to go higher-up and actually be heard. Everything is managed by DCFS, and they close ranks.

[tieflingkisser]

“A stunning betrayal” Gavin Newsom vetoes bill protecting trans kids in California

California governor Gavin Newsom, at odds with his fellow Democrats, has vetoed AB957, a bill that had been passed with overwhelming support in the state legislature. The bill was written to protect the health, safety, and welfare of transgender and non-binary children by classifying the lack of lifesaving parental affirmation of a child's gender as one of multiple factors that could be grounds to possibly lose custody of a child. 11th District Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, a Democrat and the bill's author, told CBS News: "no one is out to force your kids to be anything they shouldn't be. It's about really protecting children who are caught up in the family court system from a parent that is antagonistic or non-affirming." Experts have agreed that parents refusing to affirm a transgender or non-binary child's gender are engaging in child abuse. According to The Trevor Project: "family acceptance of LGBTQ youth is associated with positive mental health (Ryan et al., 2010), whereas higher rates of family rejection are associated with the opposite. For example, young adults from highly accepting families attempt suicide at significantly reduced rates compared to those in low accepting families (31% versus 57%) (Ryan et al., 2009)."

[fenrislorsrai]

Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)

Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.

His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says.

Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.

Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.

Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)

When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.

The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.”

When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.

The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.

After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.

When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.

“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.”

She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.

She shakes her head. “It’s a lot.”

Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.

Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected.

[illnessfaker]

y'know what i don't see talked about a whole lot in the midst of discussion around age gaps and child exploitation, and the fact that yes, children or minors otherwise should have supportive adults in their lives outside of their family or people with authority over them (because the family an authority figures are the primary sites for child abuse)?

the fact that you can 100% have very inappropriate boundaries with a child or someone underage that are purely emotional/mental vs. just concerning ourselves with the sexual or physical (though there are plenty of sexually inappropriate boundaries that don't look like typical sexual abuse due to their purely mental or emotional nature.)

like, the fact that "i had to talk some 30 year-old 'friend' of mine online out of a suicidal episode when i was 12" (and often times this comes with an implication that they barely had the capacity to manage their own mental problems at the time, were actively being abused at home, were actively self-harming, etc.) appears to be such a common anecdote is disturbing.

if you ask me the whole "children aren't your therapists" thing isn't exclusive to parent-child relationships. it's the responsibility of grown, emotionally-capable adults (not all adults are emotionally-capable, which isn't a moral judgement - if you don't feel you're emotionally equipped to support children then i'd rather you not go against that feeling i think, and simply not everyone is going to have the faculties to do that kind of thing even with self-work) to provide a sense of emotional and physical safety to children in their community rather and not the other way around. this is why it's also important to work on cultivating a sense of community and mutual support among adult peers vs. the individualistic capitalism-driven mentality of "fuck you, i got mine" and people who look at human connection as a transactional thing where your friend asking you to help move furniture for them or something is "demanding too much labor" which apparently seems to be a thing (that isn't to say there aren't situations where an exploitative imbalance is actually present, including in an emotional sense.)

in other words, when thinking about not further traumatizing and disenfranchising children more than they already are, then you can't just think about things purely in terms of the sexual or physical. idk if that's somehow controversial to say but if it is that's kinda concerning lol.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Three northern Alberta First Nations have signed an agreement with the federal and provincial governments to be responsible for their own child welfare systems. The chiefs of Loon River First Nation, Lubicon First Nation and Peerless Trout First Nation gathered Tuesday with members of their communities and representatives of the federal and provincial governments to celebrate the agreement. "Today there is hope, hope that we can begin to truly heal intergenerational trauma that has impacted our children for too long," said Chief Gilbert Okemow of Peerless Trout First Nation, which is about 500 kilometres north of Edmonton.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[alwaysbewoke]

when you combine this with the efforts to extend retirement age to 70 and over, it's very clear that our politicians, but specifically gop conservatives, are hell-bent on sacrificing the population at the altar of capitalism. they want us to start working earlier and to work longer into our lives, all while not paying a living wage and raising the price of just about everything. it is the continuing evil of capitalism run amok.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Anti-government agitator Ammon Bundy must pay an Idaho hospital more than $50 million for defaming it and targeting it with protests while it cared for an associate’s grandson—who was taken into protective custody after child welfare officials determined he was malnourished.

In March of last year, Bundy was arrested for trespassing outside of St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center, where 10-month-old “Baby Cyrus” was being treated. The then-gubernatorial candidate organized a week-long protest, claiming Cyrus was “medically kidnapped” over a “missed non-emergency doctor’s appointment.”

Two months later, St. Luke’s hospital filed a defamation suit against Bundy and Diego Rodriguez, the child’s grandpa and an activist in Bundy’s far-right People’s Rights Network (PRN). The complaint also named their companies, including Rodriguez’s Freedom Man Press, which posted Baby Cyrus “kidnapping videos.”

A jury delivered its verdict on Monday: Bundy, Rodriguez, and their companies would owe $26.5 million in compensatory damages and nearly $26 million in punitive damages.

Erik Stidham, an attorney for St. Luke’s, told jurors he thought the hospital deserved at least $16 million. “My hope is that you will look at this and you will deter (Bundy) in a way that he hasn’t been deterred yet,” Stidham said in closing arguments, according to the Idaho Statesman. He added that Bundy’s and Rodriguez’s entities were a “massive ugly machine built to make money and radicalize people.”

Known for armed standoffs with law enforcement, Bundy was a consistent no-show throughout the legal proceedings. In April, a judge issued a default judgment against Bundy and Rodriguez for failing to respond to the suit, leading Bundy to put out an emergency alert that falsely claimed cops surrounded his home and that beckoned his PRN disciples to show up to defend him.

As a result of the default, jurors in the two-week trial were tasked with deciding what damages Bundy and Rodriguez owed to the hospital system. They heard testimony from doctors and administrators about the men’s mob stoking fear among patients and families in the emergency room, and Life Flight pilots refusing to land at the facility, fearing shots from the armed crowd on the ground.

One pediatrician told the jury about the danger she believed Baby Cyrus was in: He allegedly couldn’t sit up, had a distended stomach and sunken eyes. “In my opinion, if he had been allowed to go home with his parents and continue on the trajectory he was on, he would have died,” Thomas testified, according to the Idaho Statesman.

Another doctor testified that Rodriguez’s website called her a “child trafficker,” and that she believed her family's safety was in jeopardy because of the online attacks.

“Today’s verdict is a moment of real accountability for Ammon Bundy and his reckless campaign against St. Luke’s,” said Lindsay Schubiner, Programs Director at the Western States Center, who was among the groups monitoring extremism to celebrate the outcome.

“His decision to target St. Luke’s and to use inflammatory, dishonest rhetoric about the hospital’s actions endangered both staff and patients. This verdict shows that the courts have the ability to treat this kind of threat with the seriousness it deserves.”

While Bundy and Rodriguez haven’t stepped foot in court, they’ve publicly commented on the controversy since the case was filed. “I’ve tried everything I could to make peace with St. Luke’s executives” and their attorneys, Bundy said in one February video, in which he shows off a pile of legal mail. “But they’ve rejected every offer of peace, every token of peace that I’ve offered to them. And they’ve actually come after Diego and I even harder.”

The lawsuit reveals St. Luke’s hospital sought punitive damages, and an award of at least $250,000 to each of the plaintiffs—which include a hospital executive, doctor, and nurse practitioner—from each of the defendants. If granted, Bundy, Rodriguez and their companies would have been on the hook for $7.5 million in damages.

“So what did these people do to earn this money, to deserve this money? Well, they participated in taking Baby Cyrus from his loving and caring parents,” Bundy said in his video. “And what did Diego and I do to deserve everything we own and more stripped from us? Well, we said bad things about them for taking Baby Cyrus away... things that were exposing them.”

Bundy then went on to conflate offerings of gender-affirming care for children at St. Luke’s to the hospital’s treatment of Cyrus, and noted St. Luke’s received millions from donations and COVID relief funds. “And what are they using it for?” he said. “They’re using it for things like child sex changes and to pay high-dollar attorneys to come after their political enemies.”

On July 10, the day the civil trial began, Bundy posted a letter to a new judge presiding over the trial. “Please, do not give rich and powerful people false justification to destroy my life,” Bundy wrote. “Please do not sanction a war that may end in innocent blood and require others to bring justice upon those who are responsible for shedding it.”

“May God bless you with the strength to do what is right and to let the consequences follow,” he concluded. “In the sacred name of Jesus Christ I write this letter.”

The conflict with St. Luke’s had become so antagonistic that Bundy was accused of threatening process servers and local deputies who delivered court papers, and one doctor expressed concern that witnesses would be too intimidated to participate in the case.

In his February video post, Bundy warned followers that St. Luke’s was trying to have him arrested. While a judge issued a warrant for Bundy in April over alleged witness intimidation, authorities never came for the 47-year-old provocateur. The Gem County sheriff, in a letter filed on the docket, said he didn’t want to risk deputies’ safety “over a civil issue.”

At one point, Bundy even appeared to threaten a standoff over the legal battle. “They’re probably going to try to get judgments of over a million dollars and take everything they have from me,” Bundy told one local news site in December. “And I’m not going to let that happen. I’m making moves to stop that from happening. And if I have to meet ’em on the front door with my, you know, friends and a shotgun, I’ll do that. They’re not going to take my property.”

For his part, Rodriguez challenged St. Luke’s lawyers on his Freedom Man website, writing that he was giving them “the chance to win in the court of public opinion.”

“You can win my public apology. You can win my retractions. You can get the pages on my website that you want taken down, REMOVED without a judgment or legal order. You can even get $50,000 for St. Luke’s right now. All you have to do is show the world where I have published any FACTUALLY inaccurate information, as I’ve already stated,” Rodriguez wrote.

But the hospital evidently wasn’t going to be cowed by far-right extremists.

In a fourth amended complaint, St. Luke’s argued that Bundy and Rodriguez were aiming to “benefit financially” and boost their political brands by launching a “knowingly dishonest and baseless smear campaign” against it. This campaign, the suit alleges, “claimed Idaho State employees, the judiciary, the police, primary care providers, and the St. Luke’s Parties engaged in widespread kidnapping, trafficking, sexual abuse, and killing of Idaho children.”

The lawsuit argued that Bundy and Rodriguez used Cyrus’ case “to spread their lies and further their agendas,” as they portrayed themselves as “crusaders” against their manufactured “state-sponsored child kidnapping and trafficking ring.” The men, according to the suit, directed their followers to dox and harass St. Luke’s employees.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez is accused of lying to followers about Cyrus’s care, claiming the baby had a “100% clean bill of health” when authorities took him into custody and that his parents had only missed one doctor’s visit. He also falsely claimed a St. Luke’s pediatrician had reported the parents to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.

The trouble began when Bundy and his flock entered the hospital’s ambulance bay at around 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday in March, the complaint says; they began cursing at staff and police, blocking patients’ access to the facility and filming the episode for social media.

“Recognizing that Bundy’s followers were growing more numerous and menacing, a hospital supervisor tried to reason with Bundy and deescalate the situation,” the complaint says. “For the benefit of those there to film him, Bundy responded by accusing the supervisor of kidnapping and then demanded that he give Bundy the Infant.”

“Bundy knew full well he had no legal authority to make that demand because he had no parental rights over the Infant.”

Cops arrested Bundy about a half hour later for refusing to move. After his release from custody, Bundy quickly began to publicize his confrontation and later beefed up a “false narrative” about St. Luke’s, the lawsuit states. (Bundy took a plea deal in the trespass criminal case, receiving a $1,000 fine and suspended 90-day jail sentence.)

The lawsuit lists a slew of defamatory statements from Bundy and Rodriguez, including that the hospital was “world famous” for “killing people” and “stealing babies from their parents” and that it forced Cyrus to ingest a “toxic poison.” Bundy also allegedly claimed that St. Luke’s had targeted the baby because of Bundy’s objection to COVID “corruption.”

The hospital argues the duo’s stunt disrupted its operations and harmed staff and patients. According to the suit, the men called on their devotees, many of whom were armed, to protest in front of the hospital for a week before Cyrus was released. Rodriguez “became a daily presence,” holding press conferences outside the building, the complaint says.

Rodriguez would go on to solicit $115,000 in donations by falsely claiming the hospital was “performing unnecessary medical tests and treatments” to prolong the baby’s time in the hospital and extort the uninsured parents, the lawsuit continues. (The hospital, however, claims that Medicaid covered Cyrus’s bills and his family “never paid anything for and owe nothing for the care” received at St. Luke’s.)

Bundy’s campaign allegedly caused St. Luke’s to go on lockdown for more than an hour and for patients to be routed to other facilities. The followers also flooded St. Luke’s phone lines and email accounts with menacing communications and death threats.

But the alleged smears didn’t stop after Cyrus went home. St. Luke’s argues that Bundy and Rodriguez continued to capitalize on the episode, creating a group called “People Against Child Trafficking” and holding a rally where they further defamed the hospital, comparing its employees to “feudal lords” practicing “primae noctis.”

The complaint highlights the men’s possible financial windfall in their war against the hospital, noting that Bundy generates funds “by marketing himself as an anti-government, quasi-religious leader” through his 60,000-member PRN and uses at least two corporate entities: Dono Custos, Inc. and Abish-husbondi. Inc.

“The potential revenue to Bundy is significant,” the lawsuit says. “If each member of PRN annually contributes just $50 to Bundy through Dono Custos, Bundy could pocket more than $3,000,0000 [sic] per year.” It adds that entities owned by Bundy and Rodriguez received money from Bundy’s gubernatorial campaign.

As for Rodriguez, the complaint adds, money streams in through his Freedom Tabernacle, “which purports to be a church but is used as an entity to receive contributions, dues, or payments from members of PRN.” According to the legal filing, the church requires “members ‘tithe’ 10% of their earnings.” Another of Rodriguez’s entities, Power Marketing, hawks “three-day ‘training’ courses” for $15,000 per student.

“In fact, even after the Infant was returned to the Infant’s parents,” the suit alleges, “Rodriguez and Bundy have continued to exploit the Infant by incessantly marketing the Infant and his likeness through social media and alternative media to promote PRN, Bundy in campaign advertising, and Rodriguez and his multiplicity of sales schemes.”

[jewishevelinebaker]

[olowan-waphiya]

About ICWA

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was enacted in 1978 in response to a crisis affecting American Indian and Alaska Native children, families, and tribes. Studies revealed that large numbers of Native children were being separated from their parents, extended families, and communities by state child welfare and private adoption agencies. In fact, research found that 25%–35% of all Native children were being removed; of these, 85% were placed outside of their families and communities—even when fit and willing relatives were available.

At the time, not only was ICWA vitally needed, but it was crafted to address some of the most longstanding and egregious removal practices specifically targeting Native children. Among its added protections for Native children, ICWA requires caseworkers to make several considerations when handling an ICWA case, including:

Providing active efforts to the family;

Identifying a placement that fits under the ICWA preference provisions;

Notifying the child’s tribe and the child’s parents of the child custody proceeding; and

Working actively to involve the child’s tribe and the child’s parents in the proceedings.

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Protect ICWA

The Protect ICWA Campaign was established by the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the National Congress of American Indians, the Association on American Indian Affairs, and the Native American Rights Fund.

Together, we work to serve and support Native children, youth, and families through upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). The Campaign works to inform policy, legal, and communications strategies with the mission to uphold and protect ICWA. Sign up for the Protect ICWA newsletter Follow @protecticwa on Instagram Follow @protecticwa on Twitter

U.S. Supreme Court Asked to Review Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals En Banc Decision in Brackeen v. Haaland ICWA Case

Following a decision in Brackeen v. Haaland Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) case from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals en banc (reviewed before all sitting judges within the federal circuit), four of the parties in the case filed petitions asking the United States Supreme Court to review the decision.

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https://www.change.org/p/protect-the-indian-child-welfare-act