The Worst Interest of the Child

From the reviewer of the above named book

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….

Activist Post

I perused some of the cases from Snow's blog post to give a better understanding of what is going on in Connecticut , which is his focus, and other states

From his blog...link below

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.

Continued below

Another case in the same article

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.

Link

The above is just a very minimal part of a long article involving only 2 cases, one in Maine and one in Connecitcut.

Below is from another blog post

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)

CPS is a horror period, and the courts don't always do the job they should.

You know that just as often as they decide against loving mothers, they also default to placing children with unfit mothers because there is bias against fathers?

Not only that, but there are too many times you read stories about children who "fall through the cracks" and are killed or horribly abused by one or both parents while CPS goes on to take children away from loving parents who simply question one doctor and want a second opinion or who allow their children to play outside a little too far away from the house for a neighbor's comfort.

a reply to: ketsuko

Agree with everything you said.

The author above, a man, is saying that some states are going to the extreme for father's rights. He mentions a book called Screw the Bitch
based on a men's movement

It seems everyone is so reactive they go from one extreme to the other. It should be clearly about the children...NOTHING ELSE.

However, there seems to be more going on here than father's rights.

a reply to: liveandlearn

It wouldn't surprise me. Just like everything in government and bureaucracy, there is a lot of potential for abuse and a lot of little tinpot dictators looking to make their mark on the system by making everyone else's lives hell.

a reply to: liveandlearn

Yep, and they also receive government funding for every child that they place in foster care. Most social workers are undertrained in spotting actual abuse, and incentivized to pull kids. There is little in place to actually keep kids with their families and teach families how to cope with issues they may be having. Statistically a child brought up in even a dysfunctional home has a better chance for a productive, stable life than a child placed in foster care; but screw the statistics. Even worse, this is institutionalized to the point that health care professionals (among others) are trained to alert DCS at even the slightest whiff of suspicion. Most of these professionals aren't qualified to spot abuse either.

I'll tell you what, the local CPS/DCS went around with me when I was a 17 year old mother and in the end, the social worker lost her job and the department head was transferred over that crap. 13 years (yes 13 years) later they tried to tangle with my sister and they backed the hell off once they figured out that I was involved. The REMEMBERED me, I'll tell you what.

a reply to: liveandlearn
This article came up in my newsfeed this morning, and I gave it a good read. Children are, and have always been a commodity. As parents we refuse to believe this, but to the social workers, child advocates, lawyers, judges...it's cha ching in the wallet. The worse the outcome for the child the more they can be involved, and the more money coming in. Just like any business, you want repeat customers. the only upgrades, are that police and jailguards get their hands in the cookie jar once the child grows up. Family court is the epitome of "anything you say can and will be used against you. "

a reply to: AccessDenied

That's so true, and it's what so many people don't get when they think the government is there to "help" us.

All those agencies there for our good? They get paid and make their bonuses based on how many people are in their system, so it does them NO GOOD to NOT have people in their system. Welfare? Not designed to help you get out. If you got out, they wouldn't have people on their books, in their system. Bye-bye bonuses. CPS? No one in their system ... there goes the end of year budget increase and the bonus. They might even end up laying someone off.

No, they need to suck people in and keep them there. That means they need to meddle with you and yours and they don't really care about what's in your best interests or helping you get out of the system.

Those bureaucracies are blood suckers in the worst way. On one hand, they take our taxes, on the other, they suck the life out of the people they were sold to be helping.

I always thought CPS was gov. funded. Had no idea that they charged exorbitant fees to the people seeking help. Beyond the fees, it is claimed by the author, that most cases in Ct. are returned to the abusive parent (usually the male) and the blame, usually some past irrelevant issue, placed on the mother.

Here is a case from this year in Connecticut

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.

According to the author their is an inordinate amount of cases