The DCF Snitch Network - Ready To Rat Out Your Family
The DCF snitch network - meaning their "child abuse hotline" - is probably the most brilliant idea that the child abuse bureaucrats have ever had. The concept was developed in the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), sponsored by the Marxist Senator Walter Mondale way back in 1974.
The feds said to the states: If you put a child abuse hotline/ mandatory reporting law into effect in your state, and make some other improvements to your state child kidnapping department (DCF), then the feds will pay your state mega-bucks every year to help support the state child protection agency. Every state complied immediately, since it is all about the Benjamins, and Massachusetts was no exception.
The snitch network consists of a "child abuse hotline", explained in more detail below, which requires that all professionals who have anything to do with children, must call if they have "reasonable cause to believe" that a child is suffering from abuse or neglect. If they don't make a report, they can be fined and jailed. All professionals must then also provide a follow-up written report.
By doing this, they have ensured a steady stream of business to the agency. Forever. What a business plan! How could it lose, when it forces a huge group of people to do its prospecting under penalty of criminal prosecution, and forces its customers (parents) to do business at threat of gunpoint.
How a Case Gets Into the DCF System
There are many ways that a case can fall into the clutches of the pillagers at DCF:
Let's look at some of these in more detail:
The Legal Basis - Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 119 Section 51A
Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 119, contains a series of laws which control the grabbing of children out of homes, the investigation of abuse and neglect, and the court procedures for determining whether the state gets to keep your children and how long.
Section 51A of that chapter requires that any professional who deals with children, and has reasonable cause to believe that a child is suffering from abuse or neglect by a caretaker as defined by Mass Code of Regulations 110 CMR 2.00, must report that to the DCF 800 number "hotline", and follow up with a written report.
These professionals include teachers, nurses, therapists, police, clergy, doctors, day care workers, and a zillion other categories. If they don't report, they can be fined and jailed. SO, they report just about anything, for fear of being discovered by the Eye Of Sauron, who can throw them into the fires of Mount Doom.
Other people can also report to the hotline: A nasty neighbor, an angry spouse making a false report to get an advantage in a divorce by using DCF to do her dirty work, an upset relative trying to get revenge, a jilted boyfriend, etc. The statute is set up so that anyone can play DCF for a chump. There is a recently enacted penalty for false reporting, but it is not enforced.
Screen In the Report or Screen it Out
Once a call is made to the DCF hotline, the worker has to decide whether to "screen in" or "screen out" the report. If there any probability that the report is true, they will generally screen it in. However, even if there is abuse, but it is not by a "caretaker", meaning a parent or babysitter, it is screened out. About a third of the total cases called in to the hotline are thrown out at the first screening level, principally because they did not rise to the level of actual abuse or neglect, or did not involve a caretaker.
Once a report is screened in, it then goes to an social worker investigator, in the local area office. Someone there has to decide if it is an emergency, in which case they have only a day to investigate, or a non-emergency, in which case they have two weeks.
Investigation
The investigator is then supposed to do an investigation in accord with the requirements of Section 51B of Chapter 119. That means contacting parents, relatives, teachers, doctors, neighbors, and whoever else could determine whether the report about abuse or neglect is actually true. The investigator then must write a report, called a 51B report (which you should try to get ASAP, to know what you are being accused of.) Please see more information in the section "How DCF Does Administrative Cases."
If the investigator finds actual abuse or neglect, he or she "supports" the report, and an administrative case is opened. If it is serious, they will have a conference with the legal department, and decide whether to get a court order to kidnap the children. If a crime, particularly a sexual assault on a child is alleged, they will make a referral to the local district attorney for criminal prosecution.
If the case does not involve anything serious, they usually leave the children in the home, but open an administrative case, and sternly oversee the home situation. Legal action can be also brought up later if the parents don't comply with the orders of the social worker.
Emergency Removal
If the hotline or someone inside DCF decides that a case is an actual and drastic emergency, usually ones which involve sexual abuse or serious physical abuse, the DCF gather some armed police and go to the victim's house and take the children. Far too many of these removals are done on false allegations of serious abuse, such as from a divorcing parent bent on using DCF as part of the divorce case. The children pay the price for such lax standards on the part of DCF.
If the emergency is slightly less pressing, the DCF can go to court first and present a secret affidavit to a Juvenile Court judge in a secret hearing, where the parents are not there to contest it. The judge will usually issue an order - called a "mittimus" - allowing custody to DCF and giving them authority to kidnap the child. If the court is closed on a night or weekend, or the emergency is actually horrific, they can just go in and take the kids without any delay, and come in the next date the court is open. (DCF Motto: We don't need no stinkin' warrant.)
Either way, these "pulls", as they call them, are often done after hours, so as not to allow the parents to go to court to challenge it. The police and social workers go to the parent's home, demand to be let in, and proceed to pry the fingers of the frightened, crying children off of their mommy and whisk them away.
Once in their clutches, they then take the children to some Gawdforsaken hell hole of a foster home, drug them to the gills, and try to get disclosures about abuse from them. More about that later.
Family Court Order
If in the course of a divorce, guardianship or other Probate and Family Court matter, if the judge believes that a child may be suffering abuse or neglect, that judge can order a care and protection case to be opened right then and there from the bench, or order the children to be brought in and turned over to DCF.
Why Did They Pick on ME?
Who do these vultures pick on? It appears that they target women more than intact families. Why? In this early 21st century, we have an exploding number of woman-headed households. These single parent homes differ by socio-economic situation. Ready for some UN-PC truth? The biggest red flag for DCF is: No father in the home.
Lets look at the origin of woman-headed homes. First, there is divorce. Family Courts award children to the woman most of the time in a divorce, generally 85-90% in most states. Fathers are often reduced to "visitor" status. Children raised without a father act out, and that is how they draw the attention of the Vipers at DCF.
Fathers (good ones, that is) teach children many things that mothers usually do not and cannot. They show them the inner strength of manhood and character. They teach them sports and self defense. They teach them to respect others by how they respect their wives. They teach them self-control, restraint, thrift, hard work, how to integrate into society, and how to be productive, not a sluggard.
Intact families are not perfect, but there is an epidemic of child problems attributed to children of divorce where the father has been kept away. Sociologists deny it, but they deal in theory, rather than seeing the hard realities sitting on the benches in the juvenile court like I do. Most of the kids there have no father.
Take a look at this excerpt from a recent article entitled Married to the State, by the brilliant Stephen Baskerville, which appeared in The American Conservative. Mr. Baskerville is also the author of a book called Taken Into custody, which I highly recommend. His article summed up the argument about the state and fatherlessness:
__________________________
"Children raised without intact families do not as readily absorb concepts such as family privacy, sacrificial love, parental authority, limited government, or civic virtue. For their rules and values come not from parents but from government officials, who have ultimate sovereignty over their lives: courts, lawyers, social workers, forensic therapists, public-school bureaucrats, and police. These are the figures they must obey rather than their parents. Thus children whose authority figures are government officials cannot distinguish the private from the public and come to see the public sphere as a realm not of civic duty and community leadership but of abstract ideology, government funding, professional employment, career advancement, and state power, in whose growth they acquire a vested interest.
"It is no accident that the traditional family is described as patriarchal and that civic virtue traditionally suggested masculinity. It is also no coincidence that fathers are the ones marginalized by family decline.
"Enormous attention has been devoted to the crisis of 24 million fatherless children, a phenomenon directly linked to every major social pathology from violent crime to substance abuse and truancy. Because these ills justify almost all domestic government spending, fatherlessness has resulted in a huge expansion of state power. The Obama administration aims to promote virtue with programs preaching “responsible fatherhood” and nagging men to practice “good fathering.” The Bush administration used similar schemes to argue for the importance of marriage. The result is the same: bewailing other people’s moral failings at taxpayer expense.
Then Baskerville hones in on a key point in the present discussion:
"The single mother does not resist the state’s encroachment. On the contrary, she is our society’s principal claimant on a vast array of state services, without which she cannot manage her children. When the state usurps the roles of protector and provider and disciplinarian, the state becomes the father."
. . . . . . .
"So vast numbers of children now grow up believing from the earliest age that it is normal for government officials to assume control over their family life, to order their parents about as if they were naughty children. This is causing more than social chaos. It is destroying our freedom and our will to defend it."
____________________________
Another source of fatherlessness is that many persons are choosing to not get married, yet have children anyway. Most of these children are born to government-dependent women, who live in areas where most people are government-dependent. Their support comes from the taxpayers, rather than from the family's own hard work and self-reliance.
These children stay with the mother, and the father is either gone, or only a distant shadow and infrequent visitor, if not an intruder in some situations. Domestic violence, drugs, alcohol, and fatherlessness stalk our ghettos and barrios, and it is NOT THE POVERTY that does it. The children grow up to be irresponsible parasites, self absorbed, without a clue as to how to care for others, provide for others, sacrifice for others.
Again, the sociologists have no clue what the illegitimate births are doing to children. In the City of Springfield, Massachusetts, where I live, 70% of the children are born out of wedlock. A society cannot hold together when so many families have no father in the home.
Children without fathers do not learn how to work, to respect others, to integrate into society, to say no to poison music and drugs. Thus, they get in trouble, and the DCF attributes it to neglect by the mother. It is sometimes that, but the more fundamental problem is not having a father.
There is also a segment of mothers who take drugs or abuse alcohol, often because they did not have loving fathers in the home either. They are continuing the bitter cycle of irresponsibly raising their children to be the same way. DCF storms in and blames the mother.
Maybe DCF is right for once.
A System Patterned on Fidel Castro and Hitler
Tyrants like Fidel and Hitler, as well as many others in the modern era, like Mao Tse Tung, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin, were adept at setting up snitch networks. So, Senator Mondale and the Massachusetts DCF had an ample array of examples to show how it is done.
My favorite snitch network happens to be Fidel's system in Cuba, because of its amazing and chilling name - "Committees for the Defense of the Revolution". There, each block had a committee which had to report any anti-government sentiment to the Communist Party. And, whoosh, the person would disappear into Castro's prison system.
How similar is that to today, you ask? Well, if your therapist reports you to the regime, whoosh, your child disappears into DCF's prison system.
Governments have always behaved this way, by the way. King Solomon, wise king of Israel, cautioned thousands of years ago: "Do not revile the king even in your thoughts, or curse the rich in your bedroom, because a bird of the air may carry your words, and a bird on the wing may report what you say." (Ecclesiastes 10:20)
Because we now live in a police state, you must conduct yourself differently. I have written about this in much more detail, about how you can protect your family from the marauders, in the article called, "Why can the State Kidnap Your Child."
The feds said to the states: If you put a child abuse hotline/ mandatory reporting law into effect in your state, and make some other improvements to your state child kidnapping department (DCF), then the feds will pay your state mega-bucks every year to help support the state child protection agency. Every state complied immediately, since it is all about the Benjamins, and Massachusetts was no exception.
The snitch network consists of a "child abuse hotline", explained in more detail below, which requires that all professionals who have anything to do with children, must call if they have "reasonable cause to believe" that a child is suffering from abuse or neglect. If they don't make a report, they can be fined and jailed. All professionals must then also provide a follow-up written report.
By doing this, they have ensured a steady stream of business to the agency. Forever. What a business plan! How could it lose, when it forces a huge group of people to do its prospecting under penalty of criminal prosecution, and forces its customers (parents) to do business at threat of gunpoint.
How a Case Gets Into the DCF System
There are many ways that a case can fall into the clutches of the pillagers at DCF:
- You get reported by a "mandated reporter" in the snitch network, that is a professional who works with children, like a teacher, cop, therapist, nurse, day care worker, etc.
- You get reported by a cranky neighbor or some other lay person;
- A Family Court judge opens a case, based on evidence of alleged abuse;
- DCF Marauders swoop in and kidnap your children in a surprise raid.
- You can be summoned to court, and after a hearing, your children can be taken by court order.
- DCF takes emergency custody when a parent is arrested or injured and unavailable.
Let's look at some of these in more detail:
The Legal Basis - Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 119 Section 51A
Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 119, contains a series of laws which control the grabbing of children out of homes, the investigation of abuse and neglect, and the court procedures for determining whether the state gets to keep your children and how long.
Section 51A of that chapter requires that any professional who deals with children, and has reasonable cause to believe that a child is suffering from abuse or neglect by a caretaker as defined by Mass Code of Regulations 110 CMR 2.00, must report that to the DCF 800 number "hotline", and follow up with a written report.
These professionals include teachers, nurses, therapists, police, clergy, doctors, day care workers, and a zillion other categories. If they don't report, they can be fined and jailed. SO, they report just about anything, for fear of being discovered by the Eye Of Sauron, who can throw them into the fires of Mount Doom.
Other people can also report to the hotline: A nasty neighbor, an angry spouse making a false report to get an advantage in a divorce by using DCF to do her dirty work, an upset relative trying to get revenge, a jilted boyfriend, etc. The statute is set up so that anyone can play DCF for a chump. There is a recently enacted penalty for false reporting, but it is not enforced.
Screen In the Report or Screen it Out
Once a call is made to the DCF hotline, the worker has to decide whether to "screen in" or "screen out" the report. If there any probability that the report is true, they will generally screen it in. However, even if there is abuse, but it is not by a "caretaker", meaning a parent or babysitter, it is screened out. About a third of the total cases called in to the hotline are thrown out at the first screening level, principally because they did not rise to the level of actual abuse or neglect, or did not involve a caretaker.
Once a report is screened in, it then goes to an social worker investigator, in the local area office. Someone there has to decide if it is an emergency, in which case they have only a day to investigate, or a non-emergency, in which case they have two weeks.
Investigation
The investigator is then supposed to do an investigation in accord with the requirements of Section 51B of Chapter 119. That means contacting parents, relatives, teachers, doctors, neighbors, and whoever else could determine whether the report about abuse or neglect is actually true. The investigator then must write a report, called a 51B report (which you should try to get ASAP, to know what you are being accused of.) Please see more information in the section "How DCF Does Administrative Cases."
If the investigator finds actual abuse or neglect, he or she "supports" the report, and an administrative case is opened. If it is serious, they will have a conference with the legal department, and decide whether to get a court order to kidnap the children. If a crime, particularly a sexual assault on a child is alleged, they will make a referral to the local district attorney for criminal prosecution.
If the case does not involve anything serious, they usually leave the children in the home, but open an administrative case, and sternly oversee the home situation. Legal action can be also brought up later if the parents don't comply with the orders of the social worker.
Emergency Removal
If the hotline or someone inside DCF decides that a case is an actual and drastic emergency, usually ones which involve sexual abuse or serious physical abuse, the DCF gather some armed police and go to the victim's house and take the children. Far too many of these removals are done on false allegations of serious abuse, such as from a divorcing parent bent on using DCF as part of the divorce case. The children pay the price for such lax standards on the part of DCF.
If the emergency is slightly less pressing, the DCF can go to court first and present a secret affidavit to a Juvenile Court judge in a secret hearing, where the parents are not there to contest it. The judge will usually issue an order - called a "mittimus" - allowing custody to DCF and giving them authority to kidnap the child. If the court is closed on a night or weekend, or the emergency is actually horrific, they can just go in and take the kids without any delay, and come in the next date the court is open. (DCF Motto: We don't need no stinkin' warrant.)
Either way, these "pulls", as they call them, are often done after hours, so as not to allow the parents to go to court to challenge it. The police and social workers go to the parent's home, demand to be let in, and proceed to pry the fingers of the frightened, crying children off of their mommy and whisk them away.
Once in their clutches, they then take the children to some Gawdforsaken hell hole of a foster home, drug them to the gills, and try to get disclosures about abuse from them. More about that later.
Family Court Order
If in the course of a divorce, guardianship or other Probate and Family Court matter, if the judge believes that a child may be suffering abuse or neglect, that judge can order a care and protection case to be opened right then and there from the bench, or order the children to be brought in and turned over to DCF.
Why Did They Pick on ME?
Who do these vultures pick on? It appears that they target women more than intact families. Why? In this early 21st century, we have an exploding number of woman-headed households. These single parent homes differ by socio-economic situation. Ready for some UN-PC truth? The biggest red flag for DCF is: No father in the home.
Lets look at the origin of woman-headed homes. First, there is divorce. Family Courts award children to the woman most of the time in a divorce, generally 85-90% in most states. Fathers are often reduced to "visitor" status. Children raised without a father act out, and that is how they draw the attention of the Vipers at DCF.
Fathers (good ones, that is) teach children many things that mothers usually do not and cannot. They show them the inner strength of manhood and character. They teach them sports and self defense. They teach them to respect others by how they respect their wives. They teach them self-control, restraint, thrift, hard work, how to integrate into society, and how to be productive, not a sluggard.
Intact families are not perfect, but there is an epidemic of child problems attributed to children of divorce where the father has been kept away. Sociologists deny it, but they deal in theory, rather than seeing the hard realities sitting on the benches in the juvenile court like I do. Most of the kids there have no father.
Take a look at this excerpt from a recent article entitled Married to the State, by the brilliant Stephen Baskerville, which appeared in The American Conservative. Mr. Baskerville is also the author of a book called Taken Into custody, which I highly recommend. His article summed up the argument about the state and fatherlessness:
__________________________
"Children raised without intact families do not as readily absorb concepts such as family privacy, sacrificial love, parental authority, limited government, or civic virtue. For their rules and values come not from parents but from government officials, who have ultimate sovereignty over their lives: courts, lawyers, social workers, forensic therapists, public-school bureaucrats, and police. These are the figures they must obey rather than their parents. Thus children whose authority figures are government officials cannot distinguish the private from the public and come to see the public sphere as a realm not of civic duty and community leadership but of abstract ideology, government funding, professional employment, career advancement, and state power, in whose growth they acquire a vested interest.
"It is no accident that the traditional family is described as patriarchal and that civic virtue traditionally suggested masculinity. It is also no coincidence that fathers are the ones marginalized by family decline.
"Enormous attention has been devoted to the crisis of 24 million fatherless children, a phenomenon directly linked to every major social pathology from violent crime to substance abuse and truancy. Because these ills justify almost all domestic government spending, fatherlessness has resulted in a huge expansion of state power. The Obama administration aims to promote virtue with programs preaching “responsible fatherhood” and nagging men to practice “good fathering.” The Bush administration used similar schemes to argue for the importance of marriage. The result is the same: bewailing other people’s moral failings at taxpayer expense.
Then Baskerville hones in on a key point in the present discussion:
"The single mother does not resist the state’s encroachment. On the contrary, she is our society’s principal claimant on a vast array of state services, without which she cannot manage her children. When the state usurps the roles of protector and provider and disciplinarian, the state becomes the father."
. . . . . . .
"So vast numbers of children now grow up believing from the earliest age that it is normal for government officials to assume control over their family life, to order their parents about as if they were naughty children. This is causing more than social chaos. It is destroying our freedom and our will to defend it."
____________________________
Another source of fatherlessness is that many persons are choosing to not get married, yet have children anyway. Most of these children are born to government-dependent women, who live in areas where most people are government-dependent. Their support comes from the taxpayers, rather than from the family's own hard work and self-reliance.
These children stay with the mother, and the father is either gone, or only a distant shadow and infrequent visitor, if not an intruder in some situations. Domestic violence, drugs, alcohol, and fatherlessness stalk our ghettos and barrios, and it is NOT THE POVERTY that does it. The children grow up to be irresponsible parasites, self absorbed, without a clue as to how to care for others, provide for others, sacrifice for others.
Again, the sociologists have no clue what the illegitimate births are doing to children. In the City of Springfield, Massachusetts, where I live, 70% of the children are born out of wedlock. A society cannot hold together when so many families have no father in the home.
Children without fathers do not learn how to work, to respect others, to integrate into society, to say no to poison music and drugs. Thus, they get in trouble, and the DCF attributes it to neglect by the mother. It is sometimes that, but the more fundamental problem is not having a father.
There is also a segment of mothers who take drugs or abuse alcohol, often because they did not have loving fathers in the home either. They are continuing the bitter cycle of irresponsibly raising their children to be the same way. DCF storms in and blames the mother.
Maybe DCF is right for once.
A System Patterned on Fidel Castro and Hitler
Tyrants like Fidel and Hitler, as well as many others in the modern era, like Mao Tse Tung, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin, were adept at setting up snitch networks. So, Senator Mondale and the Massachusetts DCF had an ample array of examples to show how it is done.
My favorite snitch network happens to be Fidel's system in Cuba, because of its amazing and chilling name - "Committees for the Defense of the Revolution". There, each block had a committee which had to report any anti-government sentiment to the Communist Party. And, whoosh, the person would disappear into Castro's prison system.
How similar is that to today, you ask? Well, if your therapist reports you to the regime, whoosh, your child disappears into DCF's prison system.
Governments have always behaved this way, by the way. King Solomon, wise king of Israel, cautioned thousands of years ago: "Do not revile the king even in your thoughts, or curse the rich in your bedroom, because a bird of the air may carry your words, and a bird on the wing may report what you say." (Ecclesiastes 10:20)
Because we now live in a police state, you must conduct yourself differently. I have written about this in much more detail, about how you can protect your family from the marauders, in the article called, "Why can the State Kidnap Your Child."