TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES: DR. FLETCHER BROTHERS AND FREEDOM VILLAGE LEADING THE WAY

If This Article were not So True it would be laughable
May 3, 2010yvonnemason


TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES: DR. FLETCHER BROTHERS AND FREEDOM VILLAGE LEADING THE WAY

By Rick Kern

The black market teems with the sinister bustle of self-satisfied profiteers as they cash in from the shadows. Among the nation’s most enterprising entrepreneurs, their backrooms, alleys and restaurants host countless underhanded business transactions where the players move in and out like phantoms as they continue to sink to new lows and broker all kinds of seedy deals. Their inventory includes the usual goods and services -old standards such as harlotry, marijuana and other illicit drugs, electronics, bootlegged CDs and DVDs and on and on it goes. If someone wants it, someone else will find a way to sell it -there’s gold in them there cesspools.
And as is typical of even this squalid underside of corporate America, the roost is ruled by the law of supply and demand. But there is an alarming demand for one item so shocking that even the most artful brokers can’t keep the shelves stocked. What is this latest craze sweeping America -break out the Rolaids, sit down and buckle your seatbelts. It is our children. The foster care system is big business and business is booming big across the country. In fact, the cheerful chime of the cash registers has echoed so loud that our neighbors to the north have opened their own franchise, granting their counterpart of the United States’ Child Protection Services, (CPS), benignly dubbed the Children’s Aid Society, (CAS), powers so broad that they out-muscle and eclipse even the sweeping reach of our own Department of Social Services.
Tongue and cheek aside the problem is real, graphic and driven hard by our bourgeoning godlessness, ever declining moral standards and the devastating breakdown of the family. The issues facing Child Protection Services are complex and varied. Like most government agencies, they are under staffed, under funded and over burdened with profoundly consequential problems. Still, there is much more to the mix, but you have to dig down to the bottom of the sewer to get to it. Among those emerging on the local front as a force to reckoned with against these heartbreaking inequities is Pastor Fletcher Brothers, Founder and Director of Freedom Village USA. Established in 1974 the organization has been transforming the lives of troubled teens for some 30 years and catalogs a remarkable anthology of success stories. At any given time the group houses over 150 teens on its sprawling campus and addresses every problem imaginable including drug and alcohol addiction, rebellion, prostitution and even suicide with the love and grit necessary for struggling victims to get their lives back on track. And while Senator Hillary Clinton may not have had Freedom Village in mind when she wrote It Takes a Village, the comprehensive program has revolutionized thousands of shattered lives creating a mosaic of hope and stability among our nation’s traumatized youth that has earned Brothers even the grudging admiration of his many detractors.
Pastor Brothers learned of the widespread problems within the Social Services system by getting up-close-and-personal with the jagged edges of the many lives left shattered by it. They are not statistics that find a home on his desk, but savaged young lives that find a home in his heart. “Don’t get me wrong,” he declares in his typically forceful manner, “we need a system to protect children and there are many wonderful people working within it. But the system that is supposed to be protecting them is now part of the problem, the system’s out of control.”
He should know he has cradled its victims in his arms and brushed their tears away with his hands while crying his own. There are the stories, each more heartrending than the one before it. M, now a 23 year-old Freedom Village resident spent seven years in the system as M’s lesbian mother (along with her lover) was approved to be a foster parent and hosted children in an environment that rats would run from. She suffered every type of cruelty and neglect imaginable as the “foster parents” continually abused drugs and alcohol. According to M the children repeatedly endured beatings, primarily from her mother’s lover, and she was also sexually abused. The refrigerator was kept locked and things only grew worse whenever anyone complained or cried.
M estimates that during the course of her mother’s tenure as a foster parent, Child Protection Services visited their home over 200 times to evaluate the quality of the care being received by the children who resided there. She explains that she would sit on the steps during these visits with ripped clothes, unkempt hair, dirty, bruised and scratched wondering why the CPS workers could not see what was going on.
A, now 19 years-old, had similar experiences including foster parents as an infant who left her alone with only her young brother for two days. She wasn’t changed or bathed regularly and wound up hospitalized as a result of the care (or lack thereof) given her in the state approved home. When she was older she was placed in a foster home where she was continually locked in her room and rarely allowed to do anything. She was beaten frequently and even pushed down the stairs.
The stories reverberate like an aching echo throbbing through life after broken life. There is 15 year-old C who was in eight different foster homes and abused in four of them. And J, also 15 years-old, who spent nearly half of her life navigating the deadly reefs of the foster care system. Of the 26 foster homes she drifted through, J estimates that 17 of them were abusive. The same can be said for Z, aged 17, who endured unspeakable horrors in 17 of the 20 foster homes he lived in.
The nightmares are not confined to Western New York but have polluted the entire system. For example, in Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, a class action lawsuit, Bogutz v. Arizona, was filed on behalf of foster children in 1994. It is emblematic of the alarming scope of sexual abuse of children in state care. The suit charged that more than 500 of an estimated 4,000 foster children had been sexually abused while in state care. The action also alleged, that “the acts and omissions of Defendants were done in bad faith, with malice, intent or deliberate indifference to and/or reckless disregard for the health, safety and rights of the Plaintiffs.”

As might be expected, the problems related to foster placements in Arizona are not confined to sexual abuse. Like the victims at Freedom Village, studies have shown that during a 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,” (Jeff Jacoby, “Catastrophe in Foster Care,” Boston Globe, July 18, 1995).
Similar tragedies have been reported from every corner of the country. Both Tai Aguirre, Executive Producer and host of Talk Radio’s Could YOU Be Next and The Charlotte World, an alternative news publication that publishes more stories each week than any other alternative news outlet, are among the media sources that have covered the disgraceful government sanctioned abduction of one year old Shaday Fasinro. The outrage occurred on Dec. 15, 2000 when social workers and police officers came into the couple’s home in the evening and took the terrified baby away. Aguirre quotes Yinka Fasinro the child’s distraught father on his web site, (www.couldyoubenext.com), “Agents from the Department of Social Services and police pushed their way in and forced our baby from our arms.”
According to Angie Vineyard’s disturbing story in The Charlotte World, the travesty was driven not by abuse or neglect that had been carefully investigated and documented, but by Yinka and Vanessa Fasinro’s religious convictions which “led them to a vegetarian diet, breast-feeding, and skepticism about vaccinations for their baby.” “These same convictions also led social workers to their door,” Vineyard reports, “who took their baby from them.” Interestingly, the couple is reported to embrace the Christian faith and Yinka is not Mr. but Rev. Fasinro, reflecting mounting concerns that a disproportionate number of Christians are finding themselves in the Department of Social Services’ crosshairs. Ms. Vineyard also covered a related, glaring scandal in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina that explains the how the well-intentioned system feeds off of itself in the hands of corrupt men.
A Charlotte World exclusive entitled The Fight For Spencer, was prefaced by the ominous warning, “Across the Carolinas, Christian families are battling local departments of social services for custody of their children and other basic parental rights.” Vineyard wrote, “After battling the Department of Social Services (DSS) in court for an entire year, a Christian couple has finally been given full custody of their oldest son. A hearing judge for the clerk of Mecklenburg County Superior Court ruled on February 19 that 18-year-old Spencer should immediately go home with his parents, Jack and Kathy Stratton.” The Strattons were allegedly victims of not just a deeply flawed system, but of Richard “Jake” Jacobsen, a predatory Director of the Department of Social Services (DDS) in Mecklenburg County who is accused by some of running an unthinkable money-making scam by franchising the very children he has been hired to protect. “There is a government run and sponsored black and interracial child slave trade operation in Mecklenburg County in which black and interracial children are illegally kidnapped from their parents, labeled “special needs” because they are black or interracial and then held for years in state custody while Mecklenburg County collects an estimated $30,000 to $150,000 per child per year,” claims the Family Rights Association on their web site. “We have first hand documentation of this racketeering operation because we are an interracial couple whose 10 children were illegally kidnapped from another county on January 30, 2001 by this Mecklenburg County cartel.” The charges continue, “The man hired to run this multi-billion dollar operation is Mecklenburg DSS Director Richard “Jake” Jacobsen, a man who was removed from the same position as DSS Director in San Diego, California in 1992 after two Grand Juries found his administration guilty of stealing children and committing other atrocities in San Diego.”
If the allegations are on target it is just another grim reminder that no system can be greater than the integrity of those who staff it. In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act a provision intended to expedite the removal of endangered children from perilous living conditions. Additionally, it provided financial incentives to states to encourage them to find adoptive or other permanent homes for foster children, especially those with special needs.
Under the “Adoption Incentive Payment” section of the act, a state can receive as much as $4,000 for adopting out a child. Under a subsequent provision, technical assistance is offered “through grants or contracts?to assist states and local communities to reach their targets for increased numbers of adoptions.” This financial assistance can be used to expedite the termination of parental rights and “encourage the fast tracking of children who have not attained 1 year of age into pre-adoptive placements.” Technical assistance is also appropriated to the courts to the tune of a whopping $5,000,000 for each fiscal year.
Most applaud the spirit of the law, to move children from foster homes into permanent adoptive placements thus establishing a greater level of stability. But the obvious danger is that the very governing state agency entrusted with protecting children from dangerous environments and working with parents to reunite their families, is also given fat bonuses by the federal government if they push to terminate parental rights and increase their adoption numbers. The counter productive potential of the kick-backs in the hands of unprincipled men is obvious and lend plausibility to the sinister allegations against the Mecklenburg DSS Director. Talk Radio’s Could YOU Be Next? also covered the Stratton nightmare on its web site, saying “A sworn affidavit by witness Gaston County Patrol Officer Jeannette Seagle states that “there was no need for the removal of the children.”
South Carolina apparently got gold fever and joined the rush as well. The Charlotte World also reported in a feature, Christian Family Ripped Apart that “with virtually no warning, the Greenville Department of Social Services came into Bill and Debbie Rettew’s home, removed 15 of their 18 children and placed them in foster homes.” The family, which was so talented and exemplary that Bill Rettew was named Father of the Year, (an honor reportedly bestowed by the South Carolina Attorney General), and invited to appear on Focus on the Family to meet Founder and president Dr. James Dobson and sing on his weekly radio broadcast. And while such an excessive seizure begs countless questions, in light of the federal incentives the internal dynamics of the Rettew family shed no small light on the subject. As the Charlotte World explains: “Having given birth to Will and Autumn, now 32 and 24, the Rettews felt strongly that it was their Christian mission to care for children others might not want. So they became foster parents and eventually adopted multi-racial kids and children with medical problems. Every one of their adopted 18 have physical, emotional or mental disabilities. The reasons the children were taken into DSS custody remain unclear since Family Court Judge Amy Sutherland placed a gag order on the Rettews and DSS officials, prohibiting them from discussing the case.”
In an article entitled, The Real Abuse, appearing in” National Review, (April 12, 1993), psychologist and author Dr. Seth Farber lamented “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.”
But what if those children were not only ruthlessly and unnecessarily stripped from their homes, but subsequently placed in same-sex households! WorldNetDaily.com ran a blockbuster expose last summer that loosely probed the probability of gay couples being supplied with children from heterosexual parents through the Social Services system (posted July 1, 2004). “The vast majority will come, because they already do come, from pre-existing heterosexual families,” wrote Stephen Baskerville. “In Massachusetts,” he continued, “Forty percent (40%), of the children adopted have gone to gay and lesbian families,” according to Democratic state Senator Therese Murphy.”
According to Pastor Brothers, Child Protection Services can, through the extremely broad powers granted them, be on your doorstep demanding your children based upon an anonymous complaint. And the way the system works, the agency removes the children first (to get them out of harm’s way), and asks questions later. However, the questions asked and the way they are posed can be insidious causing the protracted placement of your children into the foster care system until the truth can be ascertained and addressed by an overburdened court system. But by then the damage is done, potentially causing emotional damage and financial ruin for children and parents who incur costly legal expenses fighting the system to regain custody of their kids.
In her Parents Guide to the System, Cheryl Barnes, National Director of CPSWatch, a grassroots watchdog that advocates on behalf of victims of the SSD, notes some of the creative ways CPS workers “stack” their affidavits. The petition may read, “there’s a hole in the kitchen floor” when the truth is “there’s a tear in the linoleum.” Or the petition will read, “child was covered with bruises” when the truth is “the child has minor scrapes and bruises on shins from climbing trees.” And in an Oscar winning spin the petition reads, “home was piled to the ceiling with clutter,” when the truth is that “the parents were packing to move.”
The courts may be doing their jobs returning sixty to sixty-five percent (60 to 65%) of the children to their homes after declaring that the complaint (which can be a two-minute anonymous phone call remember) is Unfounded. However, Pastor Brothers notes that some seventy percent (70%) of those return on mind-altering drugs, usually prescribed via DSS physicians/mental heath professionals to help the children who have been traumatized because they have been torn from their homes and forced to live with strangers. In San Antonio, Texas the figure was closer to eighty-five percent (85%) according to an investigative report done by a television station there.
His counsel, “The average Christian doesn’t know their rights,” he says. “The minute you let the Department of Social Services in your house you’re surrendering your rights as a parent, you’re letting the Devil in your house.” Accordingly, he has begun an aggressive thrust to enlist Christians in Pre-Paid Legal Services, a bourgeoning program that offers a complex of attractive legal services for extremely reasonable fees. For more information about Freedom Village USA, one of the finest foster care facilities in New York State, call them at: 1-(800) 842-8679.

WORD NEWS
Christian News Buffalo, NY

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