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I’ve been writing about the abuses going on in adult guardianship proceedings now for over ten years. Details regarding the physical and financial abuse of seniors and disabled are nothing new to me. One might have thought I would have been prepared for The Worst Interests of the Child, by Keith Harmon Snow. But I was not.
“This book is about the organized crime of Family Courts in the United States,” writes Snow in the preface to this book. Keith Harmon Snow is an award- winning journalist, photographer and writer who has worked in 45 countries. He worked as a journalist accredited with the United Nations Observer Mission in Congo (MONUC), as a human rights investigator for Genocide Watch, and as genocide investigator for the United Nations in Ethiopia.
Snow, however, does not plumb the depths of the federal involvement in the trafficking of children through Family Courts. He appears to be aware that the problem may extend up to the national level when he writes:
We do not want and we do not need any more secretive investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, or the Attorney General of the United States, because it seems they cannot be trusted….
A five month investigation reveals an epidemic of violence and corruption facilitated by Family Courts in the United States. Children all over the United States are being taken from their protective mothers and delivered to abusers. Behind this epidemic of judicial abuse are organized networks involved in racketeering and corruption, channeling and disappearing billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers money every year. Insurance companies are being defrauded by medical and mental health professionals rewarded handsomely for producing quack studies that criminalize loving mothers and protect abusive fathers. With clear evidence of racketeering and corruption, high court judges and insider lawyers use and abuse the Family Courts system to destroy protective mothers and deliver life sentences of suffering to innocent children. Rich, poor, middle-class... No child in America is safe.
As I write this story, the family court system has already delivered Sunny Kelley's son and Lori Handrahan's daughter to alleged sex abusers who appear to be part of sex crime networks. Both mothers are fighting for their children's lives, at the expense of their own. They have been slandered, abused, ridiculed, harassed, ignored, humiliated, threatened and attacked. They have been financially devastated.
Hell for Lori Handrahan came in the form of her daughter Mila being raped by her husband. Like most mothers entrapped in the family court system, Lori Handrahan never technically lost custody of her daughter. "In June 2009 my daughter Mila came home with a shredded vagina and Igor [husband] was substantiated with raping her," says Lori Handrahan. "The courts did nothing. Mila was 2 years old at the time."
"The state of Maine has trafficked my child Mila," Lori Handrahan told me, in January, right before the court forced a gag order upon her and shut down her web site. "There's a massive cognitive dissonance and denial about child trafficking by the U.S. public. This happens in India and Africa but it can't be happening here. The cover in America is child custody."
Lori and Mila's case also involves corruption within the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including the illegal naturalization of Ukrainian and Russian nationals who have stolen Mila away from her loving mother.
Consider the case of Kimberley Wigglesworth, a young mother whose boyfriend savagely beat her newborn six-week old son in 2009. "When I came home from work that day my son was crying differently. When I picked him up I knew something was wrong. His arms went limp to the side. No bruises, no marks, no nothing. I took him to the hospital."
While the boyfriend eventually confessed to police to punching and throwing the infant, DCF began a process of criminalizing the mother. "When I told the hospital that I don't want the father near my baby they said 'he's got rights -- you need to contact DCF or the police." The DCF began probing Kimberley Wigglesworth's history, and before long they had scheduled her for a drug test and a visitation with her child, who remained in intensive care, on the same day."
"I have never used drugs in my life," said Kimberley Wigglesworth, who was traumatized by the events that soon unfolded. "But because they learned that I was sexually assaulted as a child suddenly I was an unfit parent. They dragged me into court saying I have PTSD and severe mental illness. I realized the first Friday I was in court that DCF had taken my baby and they did not intend to give him back. Even the baby's attorney stood up in court and said "This is a good mom and she deserves to have her son back."
DCF harassed and punished Kimberley Wigglesworth, and her story is only unique because she is a middle class mother who fought to get her son back and won. The odds and prejudices are so heavily stacked against low-income families that trafficking children into foster homes is a multi-billion dollar business.
When Susan Skipp’s daughter Gabrielle truthfully disclosed[3] that her father assaulted her family, Susan was ordered to use the majority of her income to pay the fees of various court appointed professionals she could not afford. Attorney Mary Brigham was appointed as the children’s GAL, and Dr. Kreiger[4] and Dr. Horowitz[5] were appointed to assess the family and provide them with therapy. A court issued an order forbidding Susan from speaking to the children about the litigation, seeking domestic violence support for them, or “disparaging” the father who allegedly assaulted them.
As GAL (Guardian Ad Litems), Brigham billed the children’s home at a rate of $300 per hour to represent the children’s wishes and best interests. Billing records show that between September 2010 and November 2011, she billed over 196 hours, including only five meetings with the children.[6] It’s impossible to tell whether the children met with Brigham alone, how long these meetings were, or what was said.
Invoices show during this period, Brigham’s time was largely spent talking to other providers who barely knew the children or recently met them, emailing unnamed parties, speaking to Dr. Tittle and his attorney, and talking about billing matters. Susan was also charged for the time Brigham spent drafting, filing, and successfully prosecuting motions, including as many as three motions she personally filed seeking to hold Susan in contempt for nonpayment of GAL fees.Susan says that last July, Judge Robert Resha held her in contempt, then threatened to incarcerate her if she refused to immediately liquidate her teacher’s retirement pension to pay Brigham $20,000 in fees.
Read more at www.commdiginews.com...
There is an account somewhere I can no longer locate that speaks to all the benefits to those in the child custody system beyond what is posted above.
Not since the Boys Town Case back in the 80's, I think it was, have I been so disgusted. I carried a belief that it still went on but this seems to know no bounds, it is just protected by corrupt laws and psychopaths.
All the talk about UK but the US is just as complacent. You have to read all of the article from a previous book "A Life Sentence" to grasp some of this.
Repeating the link
To make a clarification...the only part about the current book is from the reviewer. Other info that is specifically from his blog is about his previous book "A Life Sentence"
It would be great if some of the researchers here could add to this or refute with references other than gov sources.
I don't think I will let this one go. Any of us could become the victim of this system in some way.
Lord knows what would have happened if I had spoken up to someone besides my mother to even the minor offenses by a couple of stepfathers.edit on 8-1-2016 by liveandlearn because: (no reason given)
Nineteen-year-old Adrianne Oyola walked in to Judge Barry C. Pinkus's courtroom in late June with no legal representation and a daunting task: to convince a judge that she and her infant son needed protection from the child's father.
A civil court judge had previously granted her a temporary restraining order against ex-boyfriend Tony Moreno, now charged with murder in 7-month-old Aaden Moreno's death, after she alleged in an application that Moreno had pushed her around and threatened her life and the child's.
In front of Pinkus, 12 days after the temporary order was granted, and with Moreno also in the courtroom, Oyola said there was some physical violence and that Moreno violated the temporary order. But she said Moreno's abuse was more psychological than physical.
Pinkus denied Oyola's request for a permanent restraining order. On July 5, six days after the restraining order was denied, police said Moreno threw the baby off the Arrigoni Bridge into the Connecticut River. Moreno jumped over the railing and survived, despite suffering serious injuries.