Statement of Greg S. Hanson, and Lisa R. Watkins, Hiawatha, Iowa

Child Protection has become an INDUSTRY. The Contract the states entered into for Federal Grant Money was contingent upon states meeting many standards. The threat of cutting off funds if states didn't fulfill all of the requirements has NOT been followed through by the federal government however.

Up until recently these agencies used to fend off any correction or any decision unfavorable to them by saying that the politician was "Against Child Protection". A few congressmen have experienced this McCarthy era like demogoguery from the Child Protection Industry. Now things for their INDUSTRY have gotten bad enough that politicians don't have to fear this tactic of demogoguery as in the past.

I basically don't think ANY government agency should remove kids or reimburse states for removing kids unless there is some VERY serious reason in that individual case to override CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS of a family to be intact.

Much like with Enron, Child Protection has been too much motivated by funding streams and "bean counting" at the expense of ethics, fairness and even responsible handling of money. The main data provided to the federal government to qualify state Child Protection agencies for federal money is in fact generated by ""judgement calls"" made by the agencies themselves, with an urge to grow endlessly. All they have to do is call every case "Imminent Danger" even where they removed a child from their home for "Clutter" or "messy house". The federal government feeds them money for this. Caseworkers are immune from perjury, so they do it a lot.

Hasn't Congress ever noticed that Child Abuse and Neglect is used as one term, CAN, for funding? What most citizens would consider to be real child abuse is about 3% of all child removals. The vast majority of child removals are for neglect, not abuse. Neglect is a large catch all that can range from drug addiction issues to simply "messy house". The percentage of cases where state agencies really DON'T KNOW why the child was removed is the most revealing, a percentage usually higher than the 3%. In other words, statistically, serious child abuse is statistically small enough to hide within the margin of error. Keep in mind that these numbers might be of considerably less utility to the state agencies if the state agencies were not the ones REPORTING these numbers.

Another factor is that if Child Protection were to accuse 1000 parents wrongly, an amazingly large number would find the overbearing corrupt Juvenile Courts just too much to cope with, almost terroristic in their approach, and would surrender completely, seeing the struggle as futile. I personally watched my fiance' get fall prey to what I have dubbed "the stipulation scam" where her own lawyer pushed her to ""stipulate"" without any serious consultation, just 15 minutes of pressure before court. 90+ % of all cases are "stipulated", a term in Juvenile Courts which is comparable to a guilty plea, even thought the Judas lawyer said it was not, and all of the effects are exactly like a guilty plea. ""Stipulations"" are generally not signed and rarely involve a document to consider or time to consider it. My fiance' only agreed to CONSIDER one, but her attorney agreed FOR HER. She never saw a document to consider nor signed any.

A Judges Association in one area openly and outright urged local Family Law attorneys to talk most families into stipulation to save on court time. No reference was made to guilt or innocence, which fits my experience.

Child Protection and Juvenile Court tread on a most precious LIBERTY INTEREST, 14th Amendment right to Family Association, yet the standard of evidence and the constitutional protections in Juvenile Court are INFERIOR to those for a petty theft.

Bottom line: The overbearing system cons large numbers of families into being marked guilty when they are not. Americans are "cowed" into "winning through surrender". Once the "stipulation scam" takes place, Caseworkers "own" the family and are quite used to playing god. For the family to asserting Constitutional Rights at that point angers caseworkers and makes the situation adversarial because caseworkers pretend they don't know they are violating the constitution. Even the caseworker with a Bachelors degree in criminology claimed ignorance of the US Constitution.

For the Federal OR State government to invoke PARENS PATRIAE (Child of the State) they SHOULD have to:

1. Prove at least a reasonable ability to parent. So far government has failed MISERABLY, generally doing WORSE than many of the supposedly failing parents that get children removed from them. It's like the Hog in the wallow calling the Horse dirty.
    
2. Stop calling every little nit-picky thing "Imminent Danger" in order to justify depriving CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS to family integrity. Caseworkers act like Chicken Little making big cases out of small issues, while the sky really IS falling for some other kid. Kids should NOT be removed for clutter or messy house which is a SUBJECTIVE call and could probably be used to describe HALF of all homes, according to a 'Nam Vet ambulance driver I talked to. Don't they have more pressing issues than to be whining that a parents "lived in" home is ""messy""?
    
3. True Judicial oversight. Stop allowing Juvenile Courts to be complete Rubber Stamps for caseworkers. This defeats the entire purpose of Juvenile Court. Juvenile Court exists to keep caseworkers from violating the rights of families and kids. This one-sided rubber stamping and even polarized bias has to stop. They ignore motions from parents for reasonable, basic and required fairness and protection of rights.
    
4. AVENUES OF REDRESS AND CORRECTION that are broken or twisted to be denied in Iowa and other states. These have been required for over ten years, yet have never been implemented, have been twisted or dead ended. When US DHHS Audited all 50 States I don't think they even investigated these three requirements that would assist protection of basic citizen rights, because there seems to be no action to repair these functions in the works. The only way to force the states to honor their ten year old contract regarding these is to stop their money.
    

Yes, they are all about money. State Child Protection agencies have become all about the money, Kevin W. Concannon is infamous for being in charge in Maine when Logan Marr was removed for reasons reminiscent of Rube Goldberg devices, only to end up dead in state care. The foster/adopter was a former Child Protection caseworker who didn't believe in spanking, yet duct taped the girl to a high chair in her basement and duct taped over her mouth. Later when DHS director Concannon left Maine, Iowa hired him to Direct DHS here, actually stating the reason was his ability to bring this state more Federal Dollars for DHS programs. The Governor must not have noticed the revolving account repayment obligations and law suit settlements Maine got saddled with thanks to Concannon.

But several avenues of redress are broken all over?

1. Citizens Review Board, required for over TEN YEARS, each state was to have at least one, and in most cases 3 or more, as review boards over Child Protective Services case problems. These could have provided Hope for families dealing with caseworkers telling BIG LIES as in my families' case. Citizens Review Boards are required over CPS case problems. Not just over Foster Care, but over Child Protection malfunction. Iowa DID have a CRB two years ago which was all loaded with Child Protection workers and contractors, which by the way was against regulations. Now there is NO CRB except over Foster Care. (CRB combined with FC Review Board, now ICFCRB )
    
2. DHHS "PIQ" directive ACYF-CB-PIQ-83-04(10/26/83) directs states to proivide Administrative hearing process to Federal 45 CFR 205.10 standards regarding GRIEVANCES ABOUT SERVICES PROBLEMS Notice the DATE on that DHHS "PIQ" Directive? Kevin W. Concannon, director of Iowa DHS claims that we cannot have access to this process even though we meet the criteria. Concannon clung to some State Law that is inferior to the Federal law, denying us access to this grievance process for reasons which violate the Federal Law. Even though we DID claim to have been denied services in our complaint, he said we could not have access to this process since we were not denied services. Think about this a moment though, This creates a mess where MORE services is better, even if the services are needless, baseless, or in some way malfunctioning or rigged. As he spelled it out, this process could not REMOVE services applied without basis, and of course this process could never address qualitative problems with services, like bias, twisting or misuse. The process as described by Concannon is, effectively, of no use to correct grievous wrongs.
    
3. The US DHHS holds purse strings and are supposed to require that state Child Protection Agencies comply with regulations to provide FAIRNESS and quality of service. The problem is that this is done on a FISCAL basis and DHHS refuses to investigate complaints from individual families about ABUSES BY STATE AGENCIES. DHHS refuses to investigate reports of agency abuses even where a state fails to provide a required corrective process like the Grievance Process on Services Problems. DHHS does not enforce their own PIQ directives to the states, and when the states get reviewed, the festering bad cases don't come to DHHS attention.
   
   This last summer, after Iowa DHS Child Protection failed an audit (every state failed), the state formed a "stakeholders panel" that was to be representative of both insiders (financial stakeholders) and families with a LIBERTY INTEREST stake in correcting DHS. The panel, as I found out, was completely stacked with people who financially benefit from the system as broken as it is. The state propagandized this as their genius and good intention, not mentioning the failed DHHS audit as a reason. The only person on the stakeholders panel who appeared to be a concerned parent e-mailed me back that she "would have to check with her advisors" and never got back to me. That seemed odd. <sarcastic grin> Open meetings to collect public input were held in several places around the state, and a report on these comments was to be made public on a date set ahead of time. Large crowds of angry parents showed up at most of the open meetings and DHS did not make the report on public comments available on the web as promised. The DHS press release guy failed to answer my e-mail asking where this report is.
    
4. Administrative Appeal on Child Neglect and Abuse REGISTRY When we turned in our appeal, Iowa took 100 days to even acknowledge receiving it, gave us 10 days to add more, and told us it was in their work stack. Then we heard nothing for over a YEAR. Then when we brought it up they held up the process waiting for the Judicial Process, which has gone on now with my family for almost 3 years.
   
   If ANY government fails to provide these required protections, they are guilty of emotional and psychological abuse of children and parents, and failure to protect citizens rights to due process. Parens Patriae is NOT just about kids. Our governments make LOUSY parents to citizens in general, why would you trust government with kids?

MY OWN FAMILY has been betrayed for almost 3 years by corrupt State officials. The remedy for this bad treatment of citizens probably won't come from the State, and citizens have to beg the Federal Courts to protect them from bad State Government officials. I hear that the Federal Courts are reluctant to protect Citizens Constitutional Rights when it involves reversing bad decisions by state agencies.

The Federal Government needs to take a more active role in correcting bad actions by the state Child Protection agencies in individual cases. Early on in this process, after learning that US DHHS regulations for Child Protection agencies were NOT being followed, my family was thoroughly disgusted to find that US DHHS turned away our inquiries seeking corrective help. The US DHHS does not want to talk to individual families about their case, even when DHHS regulations are being violated badly by the state Child Protection agency.

Privacy laws are being perverted to deny families the CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO CROSS EXAMINE DOCUMENTS USED AGAINST US IN JUVENILE COURT and even into the Iowa Supreme Court. The sophistry used is that we are not CRIMINALLY CHARGED, so we don't get our CONSTITUTIONAL protections! The state only REMOVED A CHILD! Isn't that a LIBERTY INTEREST as serious as a charge of murder?

My fiance discovered that a transcript of a Juvenile Court hearing was "doctored" or altered badly. We had wondered why this short one took an inordinately long time to get to her and was not signed. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled against her request for the original source tape for verification. Imagine being told to proceed into the Iowa Supreme Court with a bogus and unsigned transcript to write the appeal brief from!

The States and the Federal government have failed to protect their own citizens from bad state state actors, run amok Child Protection caseworkers and Rubber Stamp Juvenile Courts who take caseworker lies as absolute truth.

Many Child Protection caseworkers are living out some "Rescue Fantasy" and carry an anti-spanking political agenda even though it is LEGAL in every one of the 50 states. Many of the anti-spankers like to think of or represent judiciously used spanking as BEATING. This ruse does not generally play well outside of their socialist worker circles. If a caseworker doesn't like what they find out about a family that spanks their kids, they can't use SPANKING in court since it's legal within limits in EVERY state, so they they merely accuse the family of clutter or messy house and order Parent Skills classes. Virtually every parent skills class is anti-spanking. AND 90 percent of the parent skills class itself preaches no-spanking. Caseworkers commonly write down clutter or Messy House as catch-all designations, used when caseworkers are suspicious or don't like a parent but they don't have anything on them to make a case.

The HYSTERIA about Child Abuse has to stop and RIGHTS need to be put back on a pedestal. I charge both Fed and State governments with "failure to protect" Citizens Constitutional Rights in the face of the Child Protection INDUSTRY.

YOU IN CONGRESS have not supervised the US DHHS well enough to discover that the states have failed to truly meet the TEN YEAR OLD obligations to fairness and self-correction (4 A,B and D above).

My family has been trampled on for 2 years and 9 months. Yes, we had clutter, but we did not have filth. A witch hunt ensued, caseworkers got caught at terrible LIES. Juvenile Court refused to correct the lies, despite proof. Caseworkers are IMMUNE, so they LIE all the time to have their way. We were refused required Active Participation in FORMATION of Services Plan. This is the list of "services", mini industries or "hoops" that parents are expected to jump through to get their kids back. Services were corrupted, tainted with gossip, fed with false information and in other words twisted to be against us from before we even started. UNFAIR.

I was to go to a Psychological Evaluation, no apparent basis for assigning this service, just a list of ""issues"" made up by caseworkers playing at amateur psychology. One issue was my "need to be the victim" which they eventually removed quietly after the guy who assaulted me plead guilty to a simple assault. (charge should have been breaking and entering, but he's an ally to the state in this.) Later after I went to one session and the psychologist didn't find anything, he said he needed more information from Child Protection. I signed a release, and a stack of Child Protection documents an inch thick was sent to him. I began to ask a LOT of questions about how fair my ""Psychological Evaluation"" was going to be. Too many parents similarly situated have told me that the psychologist reported exactly what the caseworkers WANTED him to report, generally in complete disagreement with the raw data from the standardized tests that they use for this. (Remember Psychology is an ARTS degree.)

My fiance' went to Domestic Violence victim counseling that she was ORDERED into, even though there was never any Domestic Violence between us. It made SOME sense to inoculate her because I had Domestic Violence convictions many years before (I had a severely bi-polar wife years ago). But after Child Protection had their INPUT into this service the counselor became like the grand inquisitor trying to force some deep dark secrets out of her. When my fiance' denied what was in fact false, the counselor though she was "in denial". The counselor told a twisted story that I had pushed the childs "head under water" (was actually a shower spray to rinse off shampoo head that looked like an ice cream swirly) The counselor was trying to guilt and shame my fiance into getting rid of me. Child Protection commonly uses the "divide and conquer" tactic. My fiance' though, had already seen how Child Protection caseworkers LIED, twisted and distorted virtually everything innocent to portray it as EVIL.

So we did not cooperate with ""services"", asking over and over for them to be repaired, made fair and not RIGGED. We were told, even yelled at to just do the services, and threatened with Termination of Parental Rights.

When we found old documents from the very same Child Protection Agency showing that there was never any sexual abuse even HINTED at, we showed these documents to a contract Social Worker first.

Then I showed them to the caseworker who fabricated the lie that I had a ""Sex Abuse History"". He verbally acknowledged that they did indeed disprove his sworn-to assertions in his affidavit to court.

But STILL, to this day, nobody has corrected the ""Sex Abuse History"" fiction.

- Juvenile Court here has refused many MOTIONS to correct the ""Sex Abuse History"" and refused hearings to correct it The exculpatory old documents were attached as exhibits.

- Iowa Department of Human Services refuses to correct it. (All the way up the chain of command, Director and Governor even)

- You would THINK that Social Workers should have ethical requirements to demand that proven falsehoods harming a family should be corrected, even if the Social Worker has to "bite the hand that feeds them" by urgently requesting that Iowa DHS correct the fictional ""Sex Abuse History"".

- You would EXPECT contract Social Workers to have a duty to the TRUTH, especially when known falsehood harms a family. Apparently however, pleasing the state agency caseworkers and getting their state contract renewed is more important than demanding that a PROVEN FALSE fabricated ""Sex Abuse History"" be corrected. Lutheran Social Services is the LARGEST contract provider of Social Workers in the world, yet, even after seeing exculpatory documents their Social Workers refused to ask Iowa DHS to correct the proven false ""Sex Abuse History"".

- DHHS doesn't take complaints in individual cases of state agency abuses of families. Regardless of circumstances.

The Jackson family starvation case recently caught the attention of Congress, but there have been large numbers of much less sensational cases that have done harm to massive numbers of families, partly because of the problems with OVERSIGHT and CORRECTION processes that are not working properly.

PAYING states to get kids out of Foster Care only enabled them to REMOVE more needlessly and reward their friends who seek to adopt, like the woman who killed Logan Marr. Paying states to get kids adopted out only revved up a meatgrinder that has destroyed healthy families with relatively MINOR problems.

I personally feel that the vast majority of children removed probably should NOT have been removed.

Child Protection Caseworkers have treated my family as criminals, when in fact, no criminal law was broken. The more the caseworkers get proven WRONG in some cases, the more irate and vindictive they become. We had a caseworker who moved a visit into the Child Protection "fishbowl room" for vindictive reasons. Then she looked for any complaints she could make about parenting skills. The complaint she wrote up IN COURT was that the mother was asking her daughter to spell words that were ""too difficult"". The words the caseworker actually complained about were "exoskeleton" and "Hubble Space Telescope".

Not only was that caseworkers comments an intrusion into the mother's Constitutional right to direct her child's education, but the child's first grade teacher had assigned the word exoskeleton about a year earlier. The child had previously been tested as reading and spelling at a level YEARS ahead of her age group in school, and was in an Extended Learning Program in school.

That would be a better way to reduce clogged and not functional Foster care systems. Stop FEEDING so many children to Foster Care homes. Stop the STATE's financial incentive to juggle kids in Foster Care, AND the incentives for people to BECOME Foster Care providers for financial reasons. (As with the Jackson family in New Jersey.)

Why are there so many incentives to REMOVE kids, Terminate Parental Rights, and place kids in Foster/Adoptive situations? Where are the financial incentives for Child Protection agencies to REUNITE families?

Please quickly force states to repair the required avenues of redress (4 A, B and D above), and please direct US DHHS to cut the money if states fail the ten year old obligations even one day more. Iowa is still showing no signs of honoring those OLD requirements, much less the new requirements that Congress and the President made law on June 25, 2003. What good will the Protecting Families and Children act (HR14 S.342 HR3839 Keeping Children and Families Safe Act President signed into law June 25, 2003) do when the previous TEN YEAR OLD requirements are still not met? Why wasn't the money cut off BEFORE, if not for the political demogoguery and political fears of smear tactics?

A Federal District Judge in Illinois is angry because Child Protection changes he ordered 12 years ago have still not been implemented. Another one, Federal Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer in the Dupuy case declared the Illinois Child Protection system to be UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The agencies are so corrupt that they refuse to do the right things, drag feet with STUDIES costing millions, and DARE you in Congress to cut their precious funding.

I say stop the flow of "blood money" to Child Protection. Withhold funding to state Child Protection agencies until they fulfill their contractual obligations to provide those safeguards of families, 4 A, B and D above, agreed to ten years ago, in exchange for the money.