Every so often I run across a news article describing some seemingly over-the-top law enforcement act involving a child, which invariably is described as necessary by officials in order to "protect" either the child or others nearby. Admittedly, many of these news stories seem to make it appear that such actions are justified. But when I began to undertake a quick review of how often such examples occur, I realized that we may be ignoring a pretty large elephant standing in the middle of the room.

Here are just a few recent examples I quickly found. In the aggregate, they seem to suggest a sea-change in the way we are dealing with our children in America.

10-year-old Missouri Boy Handcuffed after "Disruptive" Behavior

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO - A 10-year-old boy is back with his parents after police handcuffed him when he became combative this week at school.

Cape Girardeau police say they handcuffed the boy for his protection and that of the officer who took him to juvenile detention.

Police say the boy faces juvenile court proceedings for assault, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

Police say the boy became disruptive after lunch on Tuesday, and swore at his principal and began punching him. When a police officer was called, the boy began threatening and punching him.

more...

13-year-old girl handcuffed aboard a Pinellas school bus

ST. PETERSBURG - Prosecutors have officially ruled out criminal charges against the 13-year-old girl handcuffed aboard a Pinellas school bus last month.

The decision came after a review of the videotape showing the Nov. 11 incident.

"We found no evidence to support criminal charges," Bruce Bartlett, chief assistant in the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office, said Friday...

The incident happened along a Safety Harbor roadside. Rolon, 43, boarded the bus after a student threw a hard object, believed to be a golf ball, out a window. The object caused a car to swerve and nearly hit Rolon's motorcycle as he drove home from work.

A videotape from the bus shows Rolon walking to the back after Mitchell stands and shouts she was not the student he was looking for. The tape shows Rolon twisting Ashley's arm behind her back and marching to the front.

"I don't play. ... I don't play," he says.

Rolon handcuffed Ashley to the railing in the bus stairwell and continued asking questions. A 13-year-old boy later confessed to throwing the object.

More...

11-year-old boy Handcuffed and Arrested, Later Released

A Joplin police officer involved in the arrest of an 11-year-old boy at an elementary school last year has been fired...

On Nov. 15 of last year, Ward went to Eastmorland Elementary to question an 11-year-old boy about an incident a few days earlier outside a Joplin movie theater. The boy is said to have spit on Ward's son after being teased. Ward questioned the boy in the principal's office, then called Ron Buchanan, a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) officer assigned to the school.

The boy was handcuffed and taken to juvenile authorities, who immediately alerted the boy's parents, saying that they had no jurisdiction over the youth and that he was too young to have been arrested in the first place.

8-year-old girl handcuffed in her classroom by police

According to police, the incident started Tuesday morning while an officer conducted a welfare check on the third-grade girl.

Phoenix police spokeswoman Sgt. Lauri Williams said the girl was reportedly running down the middle of a street and was almost hit by a car.

Williams said that at the request of the girl's mother, the child was handcuffed before the mother drove her to school with the officer following them.

Williams said Friday that she didn't have complete details about the incident but that police were conducting an investigation to see if excessive force was used.

more...

Third-grade Student Handcuffed, Drugged In School

School officials in Arizona are in trouble and parents are seething, after a third-grade girl was reportedly brought to school in handcuffs, then forced to take pills.

"This never should have happened. This child never should have been brought into a classroom full of kids." Parents at a PTA meeting are asking some tough questions after a third-grade girl arrives at school Tuesday in handcuffs.

Teachers watched in horror. "We saw it. We are appalled by it and that is all we could really do."

Tami Davis' little girl is still talking about it. "She told me they brought her in handcuffs, kicking and screaming, then they handcuffed her feet, and we were told not to talk about it, and that's basically what she told me."

Students claim the little girl was so distraught, the school psychologist forced pills down her throat. "I understand medicines were used that were totally illegal and should have never been there..."

An investigation is underway, but there is already some fallout. The principal and psychologist were placed on administrative leave.

more...

Autistic 15-Year-Old Tasered, Arrested At Florida School

FT. MYERS, Fla. -- A school resource officer is being accused of excessive force after using a taser on an autistic student. Now, that boy's mother says a misunderstanding has left her child confused and bruised.

Dennis is autistic and functions at the level of a six-year-old. But at 5'8" tall and 220 pounds, his mother, Susan Caliguri, said he is big but harmless. So she was shocked to get a call from Cypress Lake High School saying he was acting out. When she got to the school, she was horrified.

"It was a nightmare. They had him handcuffed, his legs were tied, he was on the ground. They had four sheriffs on top of him. I mean, he is bruised down his back, they were stunning him and he was already down. He couldn't do anything," she said.

Susan calls it excessive force, but the Lee County Sheriff's Office said the taser was the only way to calm him down...

School administrators said Dennis got upset after being told not to come to school one day last week. He misunderstood and thought he was in trouble and started throwing papers.

Despite his mother's concerns, Dennis was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.

Abused, drugged and unprotected: Mentally ill children suffer in state-paid centers

At Ohio psychiatric centers, workers molested children, denied them food or gave them alcohol and drugs. Some kids suffered broken bones. Others lived in homes so dirty they urinated on the floor by their beds.

Taxpayers shell out $160 to $1,000 a day for each mentally ill child who lives in these private treatment centers.

But a Cincinnati Enquirer investigation reveals that kids don't always get the help they're promised. Some struggle just to survive.

"You have kids secluded, restrained and injured over and over again," says Carolyn Knight, director of the Ohio Legal Rights Service, a state-funded agency that investigates how children are treated inside facilities.

"It's like Dante's Inferno: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'"

Whether a child ends up in a troubled treatment center or one that helps is largely a gamble, state records and interviews show. A review of the 10 largest facilities statewide shows that conditions were so bad in the past three years that the government ordered three not to admit new children and a fourth to stop putting kids in seclusion.

more...

cavscout
soficrow
Relentless
Benevolent Heretic
DontTreadOnMe
Nikita

Thank you for the compliments concerning my post...

I feel I need to add fuel to the fire, so to speak...

Why is this happening? What has led us down this path? Are we this socially corrupt, or is there something more sinister involved? I have no conclusions yet, but keep reading...

www.conspiracyplanet.com...
Bush Cheney 'Mental Health' For Kids: Take Drugs

At an FDA hearing on the safety of psychotropic drugs on Feb 2, 2004, dozens of tortured parents testified that their children had committed suicide or other violent acts after being prescribed the same drugs being marketed in the Bush-backed pharmaceutical industry schemes aimed at recruiting the nation's 52 million school children as customers.

In July 2003, the Bush appointed New Freedoms Commission on Mental Health (NFC) recommended screening all children for mental illness and
designated TeenScreen as a model program to ensure that every student receives a mental health check-up before finishing high school.

The NFC also has a preferred drug program in place
modeled after the Texas Medication Algorithm Project
(TMAP), that lists what drugs are to be used on
children found to be mentally ill.

The list contains every drug that people complained
about at the FDA hearing, including Paxil, Zoloft,
Celexa, Wellbutron, Zyban, Remeron, Serzone, Effexor,
Buspar, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroqual, Geodone,
Depakote, Adderall, and Prozac.

A Critical Look At The Foster Care System: How Great the Need?

Today, over half a million children are in foster care in the United States. The vast majority of these children have been removed from their homes without legal excuse or justification. Psychologist and author Dr. Seth Farber explains:

Only a small minority of these children have been separated from parents who are dangerous to them. The overwhelming majority have been separated from loving and responsible parents. One does not need to be a child psychologist to realize the devastating effect of removing a child from parents with whom he or she is deeply bonded.

The number of children removed from their homes is staggering, and by many accounts continues to increase. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, for example, confirmed during the 1990s that it removed over 1,000 children per month from their homes.

Do these children really all come from families who are so abusive and neglectful of their children that they need to be removed from their homes?

"The majority of parents who come before our court love their children," explained Denise Kane, Inspector General of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, to a Congressional subcommittee. "Their children look to them with love and seek the attention and nurturing of their parents."

A 1990 study conducted in Illinois by the Chapin Hall Center for Children would bear this out. At least 40% of the children in foster care found the reasons for placement confusing, while one-third of them did not even know why they had a caseworker...

Did these children truly all arrive from abusive or neglectful households? Just as in Illinois, many could safely have been left in their own homes, according to the testimony of Department head Peter Digre.

Under questioning by a Congressional subcommittee, Digre admitted to legislators that about half of the removals of children from their homes in his system are due to poverty, and not abuse or neglect.

"It gets down to those very specific issues about a place to live, food on the table, medical care, and thing like that," he explained, adding, "about half of the families are not physical abusers, not sexual abusers, not people with propensities to violence but simply people who are struggling to keep ends pulled together and are eminently salvagable."

This was too much for a frustrated Congressman Herger, who replied: "Evidently, it is your department's practice to remove children from families in about 50 percent of the cases because they don't have enough money."

In Sacramento, California, child protective services caseworkers removed an estimated 400 children per month during the late 1990s--up from previous levels of 200 per month. Authorities reviewed cases that in some instances stemmed from five-year-old reports, conducting random sweeps of homes late at night without search warrants.

The majority of the children removed in these midnight raids have not necessarily been abused or neglected, rather they are determined to be "at risk" of abuse or neglect at some point in the future...

Half the children now in foster care could safely be in their own homes if proper services were provided. Now, the federal government spends eight times more on children in foster care than on services to keep children out of foster care.

...

The inability on the part of many child protective services caseworkers to differentiate between poverty and neglect is a major contributing factor to the continued inappropriate removals of children from their homes, argue many system critics.

Close to 85 per cent of the cases agencies label as neglect are actually poverty cases, says Trevor Grant, former Director of Social Services of the New York City Child Welfare Administration, and removing children from their homes is often the safest course of action for a caseworker to take:

For the most trivial reasons families are destroyed. If the furniture is broken down or the house is messy, CWA workers will remove the child. When in doubt, the safest practice for the workers is to remove the children and then to file neglect charges that never have to be proved in court...

In Los Angeles, lawyers at the office of Public Counsel reviewed every abuse and neglect petition filed in the county during one week in 1987. They found 30% of the petitions to be so groundless that they should never have been filed at all.

Two years later in Seattle, Washington, the Governor's Commission on Children came to the same conclusion, finding that 30% of the petitions filed were for children who did not need to be in foster care.

In Illinois, researchers for the Child Welfare Institute in Atlanta examined cases in three Illinois cities in 1994, conducting interviews with parents, foster parents, and caseworkers. Again, the researchers reached exactly the same conclusion. Reports the Chicago Tribune:

The Child Welfare Institute determined that in one-third of the cases, there was absolutely no reason for the children not to be home with their parents. The children were in foster care for the protection of their caseworker, not for their own safety...

The Philadelphia Daily News reports that a recent study sponsored by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation concluded that for every 1,000 children placed in the state's care, only 30 were victims of actual abuse.

...

According a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, lengthy interviews conducted with children and parents from 200 randomly sampled cases revealed no surprises. Parents who were separated from their children felt they had been unfairly separated. As for their children, the article continues:

At least 80% of the children, asked to name three wishes, mentioned that they wanted to be with their mother or father. Many tended to believe that the separation was their fault.

Not only are child protective workers quick to tear children away from their families, but they are slow to return them as well.

HOW SAFE THE SERVICE?

A recent TIME Magazine article references a troubling report commissioned by the Reagan Administration during the late 1980s, which concluded:

Foster care is intended to protect children from neglect and abuse at the hands of parents and other family members, yet all too often it becomes an equally cruel form of neglect and abuse by the state.

In the State of California, two San Diego County Grand juries would echo these concerns, finding that: "Professionals working in the field of child abuse voiced strong concerns that the children removed from abusive homes were being abused again by a system designed to protect them."

A Santa Clara County Grand Jury reached similar conclusions, having determined that children often face greater risks in its existing foster care program than they do in their own homes:

Sometimes, foster care placements are made that are just as abusive, if not more so, than the home from which the child was removed. The Grand Jury learned of placements where sexual and physical abuse took place. There was even a case where the infant died.

In Washington State, a blue-ribbon Governor's task force concluded:

The effect of our present foster care system is disastrous. Children are moved from one foster home to another, their school attendance is disrupted and health care needs often go unmet. They are sometimes exposed to abuse by other children in care...

During a recent two year period, one foster child died on average every seven and a half weeks in the state of Arizona. Four of them were reported as having been "viciously beaten to death" by their foster parents...

Just how many abuse and neglect related incidents actually occur in foster care is difficult to determine, given the child protection agencies apparent unwillingness to investigate them. It becomes nearly impossible with confidentiality laws shielding child protection agencies from public scrutiny...

According to an Associated Press investigation, in nearly half the states, cases take years to come to completion as agencies repeatedly fail to investigate abuse reports in a timely fashion, find permanent homes for children, or even keep track of those children under their care and custody...

...the state of Florida had managed to lose track of nothing less than 500 of its foster care children...

Since August of 2002, officials in the states of California, Tennessee, and Michigan have disclosed that hundreds of children are similarly "missing" from their foster care systems...

The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services reported in August that 740 foster children were missing from its system...

Shortly thereafter, Michigan foster care officials announced that 300 foster children were missing from their foster care system....

Read this account: THE LOST CHILDREN