RE: What Gives Our Government the Right to Take Our Children?
If you believe that, what would you think of requiring the following BEFORE a child could be taken:
The parents of said child must be formally charged with a criminal complaint claiming actual crimes against the parents of the child. (battery, molestation, etc... no taking kids because a parent did something non violent)
The parents must be convicted in a court of law with a jury trial (no plea bargains allowed... as plea bargains are used to bring trumped up charged and get people to accept conviction rather than take the chance of spending the rest of their life in a prison)
Would it be too much to ask that actual child abuse occur before a child is torn from their family and given over to strangers somewhere?
There probably are scenarios where a parent should lose their child... in such cases it shouldn't be hard to prosecute them for crimes against the child and get a conviction.
Maybe even allow temporarily (one day at most) taking a child IF a real case can be made and the child is in serious jeopardy. Note that a real case can only be made (as a matter of law) if the following are true:
A police officer directly witnessed the crime, OR
Someone is willing to come forward with sworn testimony that is reviewed by a judge and deemed to be enough to issue a warrant for arrest.
The sworn testimony is very important because it gives the accused someone to bring suit against should it turn out that their testimony was false.
This would protect children AND parents.
It would also account for the "immediate danger" claims. If no one is willing to put themselves on the line and make an accusation that they can be sued over then there is likely no immediate danger.
Realistically, better a child suffer on occasion than to have entire families ripped apart, children abused by those not related to them for money, and children "lost"... which is what we currently have.
I smell a bill that simply wants to be pushed through the legislature... but don't know off the top of my head whether this would be a state issue or a federal issue.
Either way, a possible way to start turning these things around would be to
Work together to come up with something (like the above) that almost everyone could support (republican, democrat, libertarian, green, etc.), not necessarily to be the beginning and the end but rather a huge step in the right direction.
Take the result and turn it into a potential bill... and then try to get people to contact their representatives to get it proposed. (and, if a state issue, to work on initiatives if your state has them)
Publicly showcase those who support and/or are willing to propose said bill
Publicly showcase those who oppose it
Publicly showcase the terrible things that are currently happening to show people why something needs to change.
And, of course, when contacting representatives ask them not only to potentially support it but also what reasons, if any, they might have for not supporting it.
From the looks of it, @markwhittam is already working on trying to organize around this.
YES! YES! Right now whoever makes an accusation against you for harming your child is kept secret. In any criminal case, you are allowed to know who accused you. But not when they rip your family apart and kidnap your child.
A good friend of mine told me how her child was stolen by the system (put in foster care) because someone accused her husband of sexually abusing the girl. They never knew who made the claim based on what evidence, so they could not properly counter the claim.
When they finally got to have it all heard out in court, a court clerk made a mistake and instead of crossing out the accusers name, she crossed out the Social Workers name. That is when my friend found out that the accuser was a neighbour that had been trying to get her to sleep with him. She kept saying no, and she made it clear that she was married and would never cheat on her husband. So this horrible man decided to accuse her husband of sexual abuse of a child just to get the husband out of the picture.
It is utterly disgusting. On top of that, the community turned against her husband, and her for staying married to him, because they believed that he was a sexual deviant.
They did eventually get her daughter back, and the judge told off the social workers for how horribly they handled the case. They would never have gotten the daughter back if the judge had believed the charges.