This is Really Hard to Believe

[babylonsister]

This is Really Hard to Believe
By Barry Nolan
Thursday, 15 January 2009 09:14


http://discuss.epluribusmedia.net/files/images/jennifer+my+dad+threw+my+mom+at+a+wallaa.JPG
A child's drawing of when her father threw her mother against the wall

This is really hard to believe. I am sitting in a room filled with women who were beaten, and violated in terrible ways. The room is not in Bosnia, or some far flung third-world hell-hole. I am in a function room in a hotel in Albany at the Battered Mothers Custody Conference. <1>

Many of the women around me are sobbing now, as a child tells her story. “My father beat me” she begins. Well, she is not a child now actually, but she is a child to me. She is a poised, attractive young woman named Jennifer Collins <2> who is a survivor of child abuse and of a Child and Family Court System that betrayed her and her brother, just as it betrays children across this country every day when it orders children to live full time with an abusive parent.

I know you do not believe me. And that makes me realize that this is the experience that these women who surround me have all had. No one believes them. No one believes this can happen. <3> But it does. Sometimes this happens despite voluminous evidence, eyewitnesses and medical records that the child has been beaten, even raped and sodomized by a parent seeking custody. Sometimes the courts do this even if the parent seeking custody has been convicted of, or admitted to domestic violence or sexual assault. I know you don’t believe me. But you would believe Jennifer if you were here.

It is a strange world in Child and Family court. For instance, even as much energy in the wider world goes into efforts to make certain that sex offenders have no access to children, that they can’t live near a school and walk near a playground, in this odd little corner of our judicial system, courts routinely order children to “reunite” with a sexual predator parent who hurt them. All in the name of “family re-unification”.

http://discuss.epluribusmedia.net/files/images/zachary+dad+hitting+mom+in+front+of+usx.JPG
My dad would get mad at my mom and beat her. - Zachary - 11

I know this sounds impossible. It is against all common sense. This is America after all. But come sit here with me, and listen to this woman/child tell her story. She has “aged out” of the system and is no longer under the thumb of a court that tells her she must be silent. There is a whole group of courageous kids <4> like Jennifer who are old enough now to tell their story to you, face to face. Jennifer’s story is a pip. And it is pretty typical.

more...

http://thejournal.epluribusmedia.net/index.php/component/content/article/36-opinion/228-this-is-really-hard-to-believe

[lostnotforgotten]

1. A Country's Worth Can Be Measured By How It Treats The Least of Its Citizens - America Fails Them

My sympathies!

[stillcool]

2. It's a taboo subject..

within the family, and outside of it.

[pipi_k]

3. Oh, I believe it...

I lived it, as a child.

My mom gave me an 11th birthday party and didn't even bother to hide the hand/finger marks on her neck from when my father tried to choke her a day or two before.

One time my father hit her in the face with a beer bottle, breaking her jaw, which had to be operated on, and wired together.

She threatened him with a hot iron and threw hot tomato soup at him in the kitchen.

He hurled his dinner plate at her across the room.

And one time, after they had an argument and she was telling me and my two younger sisters to get some stuff together so we could leave, he threatened to "put the first one who moved through the wall".

They fought that way until I was about 13, when they got a divorce.

Oh yes...I believe it.

[Political_Junkie]

4. K & R

Happens all too often.

[ThomCat]

5. They way we treat our children has been broken

in so many ways, but I'm at a loss to know how to contribute to a solution. :(

How do we keep kids away from violent and predatory parents? How do we know reliably who the violent and predatory parents are, without the mechanisms for knowing becoming corrupted by money and sexism?

How do we keep parental disputes from turning into false allegations, or filter out those false allegations?

How do we protect the children? :cry:

I really wish I know. I'd be willing to volunteer a whole lot of time towards this if I know what to do. If I knew how...

[handmade34]

6. we must believe it...

so more can be done to change it. I provided sheltering to abused women and their children for some time when I lived in Vermont. No easy answers, only that we are all responsible for each other....

[Faygo Kid]

7. Hell, that's my childhood memory, and it's from the late '50s.

Drunken Dad beating Mom, cops at the house. My younger brother and I - single digits in age - cowering behind the couch, or in bed with Mom behind a locked door while the SOB tried to beat it down.

Thank God for neighbors who called the cops. You're right - the story is typical. And ongoing.

Didn't see him from age 10 to 22. Not a dime in child support, of course. Then saw him once, when he called out of the blue. Went to see him. Didn't see him again, until 6 months later when he died of a heart attack, and I got the call to ID him in the morgue. That was it. Took his possessions out of a flophouse in Detroit. About $20 in his wallet, and it was loaded with pictures of my brother and me as little kids. That was his life. He chose it. Just damn.

I prefer to recall Mom, who raised two boys as a single Mom, and sent them both through college. You know, the "single Mom" that Ann Coulter devotes her new "book" to hating.

That's enough personal stuff. Looking forward to Tuesday.

[BobTheSubgenius]

8. I have two friends who are field workers in what many of you know as CPS.

They are frustrated, appalled and heartbroken beyond belief. Their entire "mission" seems to consist of shuffling pieces around the chessboard until they age out. It's no wonder that this occupation has such an incredible rate of burn-out.

"Family reunification" is a stated goal, and often goes the way described above. There is also now a "new" (a year or so) mandate at an "above all other considerations" priority to place children in racially-appropriate temporary settings. Needless to say, this has added a new layer of problems by further tying the hands of people like my friends, and is VERY often at the expense of the child and sometimes beyond the bounds of belief.

In one case I know of, it resulted in an infant being placed with a woman who is both an alcoholic and a schizophrenic. However, she was the only "qualified" emergency foster placement they could find on short notice. A couple of weeks later, when it was deemed that a supervised family meeting should happen, (as a first step to fam. rec.) she refused to produce "her" child.

And so it goes...

[sojourner]

10. in what state is such a person qualified to be a foster parent?

I work in a private non-profit foster family agency and the person you describe could NEVER be certified to care for children!!

[ejpoeta]

9. i never saw my father hurt my mother, but i remember him trying

to push me down the stairs. and i remember being knocked against the wall when i tried to stop my dad from taking the phone we had hidden behind my dresser. our only way to call anyone. he thought we were conspiring to take my little sister away from him. he was in a bad place then, though.

my husband watched his father beat his mother. bob's mom was not allowed to leave the house without bob's dad or bob and/or his brother. she was not allowed to have a driver's license. she died a few years ago, burned in a campfire while they were living in a camper in florida. both druggies and alcoholics.

my sister represents kids in cases like child abuse and such. i am very proud of how she has worked to help kids in bad situations.

[LiberalEsto]

11. I worked for CAP, Child Assault Prevention

for a year. We did workshops in elementary and nursery schools teaching little kids techniques to protect themselves a little bit, and if that failed, to tell on the person bullying, physically assaulting or sexually abusing them. After the workshops we would do one-on-one meetings with any kids who wanted to talk to us.

Sometimes kids would reveal their horror stories of abuse to us. We were trained in how to respond to the kids and how to report this to Child Protective Services. After we'd filed our own internal reports, our role was done. I worried myself sick about what would happen to these poor children afterward. I have little faith in CPS, the family court system, or the foster care system, and I often wondered whether a child was going to be placed in a worse situation, or abused by family members for telling on them.

If only there were safe places for these children, and effective laws to keep them safe. Unfortunately it is not a priority in our society. Bombing Iraqi children seems to take a higher priority.


Blessings of healing to all of you who have survived childhood abuse.
:grouphug:

[tavalon]

12. I don't just believe

I was one of them. I've been through about 10years of therapy to become a somewhat whole human being. We fail our children far too often.

[northernlights]

13. my eldest sister once told me

she remembered, as a toddler, being picked up by her hair and bounced off of walls by my mother. She took the brunt of the abuse as my mother's "favorite." I alternated between neglect, physical abuse and mental abuse, except for a short stint as her favorite when my musical talent emerged. It took her about 3 months to kill any interest in learning music.

I idealized my father because he never hit us. It took many, many years of therapy, and many more years of life, to understand how he betrayed us by, worse than allowing her to beat us, blaming us. We were bad. We made her do it.

When I was very young, they got us baby chicks for easter. My sister's chick found its sad way into the washing machine. My mother listened to it frantically cheeping and stood there laughing as it was scalded/drowned to death. And then repeated the story, still laughing, just as "chit chat" to whomever.

I took the brunt of her abuse starting at age 14, when both my sisters had moved out. At that point, they started going away for weekends and locking me out in the street. Again, I considered my father a "hero" because after the 2nd time he would leave a ladder hidden in the tall grass in the backyard so I could climb in through a 2nd story window.

Sick, pathetic fucks and everybody just looked the other way.