Good morning, some of you.

This morning, I looked up “Camilla Cavendish,” who I know covers some Family Law in the UK, and doing so ran across “The Heretical Sex” — which seems to be an Australian men’s rights blog, but has enough pro and con commentary that I decided to let them speak for me today.  

Why?

Because:

LetsGetHonest is busy following the Money Trail, by phone and URL.  

I spent about a half hour on hold today attempting to communicate with the local child support agency about what’s up, and again get coherent instructions on how to log into their new, improved, statewide site. And the status of my case.  Because of their previous failures, in large part, I was at a bus stop (not in my car) anyhow, so I was just redeeming some time, or so I thought.  I’ll spare you the commentary on that conversation.  But not on this URL:

http://www.cdc.gov/od/pgo/funding/CE09-002.htm#SectionIII

Title:

Adaptations of Evidence-Based Parenting Programs to Engage Fathers in Child Maltreatment Prevention (U01)

 United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

Issuing Organization

National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (NCIPC/CDC) at http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/

Background

Parent Training programs are the most promising approach to date to prevent the two most common forms of child maltreatment (neglect and physical abuse).

And the purpose of Child Protection Services was, then . . . . ?  Passing, but failing to consistently enforce laws against child abuse and neglect, or punish people already caught with their pants down sufficiently as a deterrent (see my last post on the judge — OR, Google “Stephen J. Thompson,” a NJ judge.  Former) was . . . . ??

“Specific parenting programs {which ones?} have shown {to WHOM?} efficacy for reducing re-occurrence of maltreatment (Chaffin, Silovsky, Funderburk, Valle, Brestan, Balachova, Jackson, Lensgraf, & Bonner, 2004; Lutzker & Rice, 1987), and for preventing abuse in families where it has not occurred (Bugental, Ellerson, Lin, Rainey, Kokotovic, & O’Hara, 2002; Daro & Harding, 1999; Olds, Kitzman, Cole, & Robinson, 1997). 

Trust my government to solicit people to prevent abuse in families where it has NOT occurred, while ignoring abuse in families where it HAS –and all under the same Federal Agency Umbrella.  This is a current grant.  They also acknowledge that:

“prevention strategies specifically targeting fathers or male caregivers have not been developed or evaluated  (that’s debatable…) . . .

“This is problematic because research has shown that the role of fathers in child maltreatment perpetration is substantial; studies have reported that as many as 48% of maltreatment cases involve fathers as perpetrators. Furthermore, almost two-thirds of male perpetrators were reported as being the only perpetrators, indicating that prevention efforts involving mothers in these cases would not address the areas of need in these families (US Dept of Health and Human Services, 2005).

Note the specific and recent (4 yrs old) cite, buried somewhere in THE largest federal agency in the U.S., 50%+ of the annual outlay, by its own admission.  If the HHS truly believed this, then why are they so liberally funding “promoting responsible fatherhood” programs which end up mom-blaming and child-support reducing, etc.?

My assertion is that if you adopt the right tone of voice (speak like an expert) and can cite at least one publication which has multiple authors (making it appear to have more credence than a single author, say, “Gardner”??), you can shake loose dollars without being noticed.  Those were MY KIDS’ DOLLARS, and my own, and my friends that supported me while the legal system didn’t!  

Never mess with a Mom who has figured this out and whose children are still minors.  That’s unwise!

I plan to remedy the “WITHOUT BEING NOTICED” part.  NO ONE should be able to put forth this rhetoric and be paid for it.  

Again, let’s consider:

“Adaptations of Evidence-Based Parenting Programs to Engage Fathers in Child Maltreatment Prevention “

If your ten-year old can’t make sense of this, then it shouldn’t get funding.

No one should be allowed anywhere near children that thinks, OR talks, like this.  No talk like this should be heard — I allow that there is an Amendment covering the right talk this way — but without a resounding round of laughter.  And dismissal of grant-status.  Good grief:  get real!  Would you trust your life to these theoreticians?  (well, your money has already been entrusted to them, and other similar).

It seems only appropriate to expose details, ridicule if possible, and question how any of us could’ve taken these systems seriously to start with.  

So, I’ll be back (once I actually LEAVE….).  Here are today’s substitute teachers; they are basically following the same scent, totalitarianism:

They  offer in better writing a foreign flavor (to the U.S.) take on the same old, same old problems of  what in the US we call, at least in some states:

“Family Law, Child Support Enforcement, Parent Education, Responsible Fatherhood, Healthy Marriages, Early Head Start, Violence Against Women, Mediation,** and (a recent one entitled approximately), “Explicating Domestic Violence in the Context of Custody,” (a joint project funded from Office of  Violence Against Women through the “Battered Women’s Justice Project” (BWJP) and a group called “AFCC,” which makes for REALLY odd bedmates if you have reviewed their sites, as I did. The trained family law bloodhound sets to baying, and pointers (like me) set to pointing, on alert when they sniff that stuff…)

**MEDIATION:  The fact that individuals recently the target of sufficient physical abuse, and other kinds, to merit an actual restraining order, have to then go bargain for their own children with the perpetrator, simply because one of them got knocked up earlier, seems singularly ridiculous — except in these venues.  No wonder so many mental health practitioners are making a financial “killing around the place, at least so long as their clients both (with kids) shall live.    

***the AFCC: I say has helped more battered MOTHERS stay trapped in battering relationships, and prolonged the tragedy, trauma, and public waste by keeping more KIDS such as Aliyah, or Alanna (Krause, now grown, you may google the name) in their respective places (of torture) — by “explicating” to such decision-making professionals how families (the new subject matter and market niche, along with children) must be behaviorally modified to understand that what they formerly believed (based on what they were just told by a different branch of the same justice system) is hereby and in THIS venue declared hogwash.  

And that if they both refuse to kneel down, in august respect — and, say, train the kids to believe they were not abused when they were, act like they don’t have post-traumatic stress (hint:  returning soldiers have this) when they really do, and for the matter, dealing with hostility and disbelief when reporting abuse triggers it  — and confess the friendly neighborhood “parenting education” classes will actually make all well again, well, alternately, there’s always jail, or custody-switch followed by no-contact orders, or supervised visitation only, and a variety of Spanish-inquisition-like techniques (emotional/ financial) are all here to teach these incompetents a lesson about who’s in charge.  Kind of like the original abuse was intended to also do. . . .  

and all at their cost (or, alternately, if one is already  broke), taxpayer cost.)

The key words here are “Kneel Down.”  Anything else is jargon, which can be discovered by the scientific method (control experiment) of refusing to kneel.  If you don’t yet properly understand, like little Aliyah, what this action is for, when NOT voluntary, see my last post about the Judge in Texas and the Mom in jail.  

Now, I realize that was a breathless paragraph (not including footnotes).  As a singer, I have pretty good lung capacity, but my run-on style is intentional; intent to convey a taste — just a taste — of the dazzling array of claims, institutions, agencies, and hopemongers that inhabit the courts of distress.

NO WONDER !! this is an arena populated by LOTS of mental health professionals.  I have totally ceased taking words and labels at their face value — there are actually very FEW people I know whose word is good, and next to no actually government agencies whose funding titles actually describe their functional effects.  When in doubt, assume the opposite and you are close to the mark.  We have “degraded” from a literate, literal interpretation of the world by assuming that “words” accurately describe “things,” (or people) to a far more instinctive, contextual, and in fact jungle-style way of life.  Words shift and flex in meaning by a bewildering host of dichotomies:  Us/Them, Expert/Plebian, Fathers/Mothers, (add in a few religions, shake til done, and swallow whole?)

If you read the above quote and think I’m speaking in tongues, drunk, or mad, that means you just ain’t been  baptized (been drenched, quenched, and hung out to dry) by by the tax-payer funded institutions, and not a few nonprofit charities as well.   This is not an experience from which retreat to innocence is possible.  It has all the intensity of a close-up encounter with true religion –and not one’s own, or not at least of the mythical America you innocently thought was minding its own business while you were minding yours.

Well, enough of my glossalalia — I’m not praising anyone here, just putting out the signposts of sound.

 Camilla, and Heretical 

(Click, Hunt, Gather, Examine & Sort for yourselves…)