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Showing posts with label FATHER'S RIGHTS MONEY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FATHER'S RIGHTS MONEY. Show all posts

Sunday, January 6, 2013

HHS FATHERHOOD FUNDS USED IN CUSTODY SWITCHING SCHEMES THAT TRANSFER CUSTODY FROM PROTECTIVE MOTHERS TO VIOLENT AND ABUSIVE FATHERS!

I was speaking to some friends recently who told me that in the Magistrates Court in Hartford, representatives of Fatherhood Initiatives recruit clients right outside the courthouse doors. 
 
What is the purpose of these Fatherhood Initiatives?  Ostensibly, the purpose is to assist fathers in developing their job skills, to encourage them as parents and to provide them with peer support and improve their ability to meet their child support obligations. 
 
However, advocates have discovered a more suspect motivation for these contacts.
 
In a recent article entitled, "A Life Sentence" independent journalist Keith Harmon Snow spoke about how Family Court systems across America are taking children away from fit mothers and handing them over to abusive fathers in record numbers. 
 
The impetus behind this social trend arises from millions of dollars in funds handed over to the States by the Department of Health and Human Services.  I have seen different figures in terms of how much money is involved here, but I would guess that the best estimate is approximately $150 million per year in HHS money that is specifically designated to support fatherhood initiatives, plus around $4 billion designated for the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE).  Particularly advantageous to those interested in taking advantage of this financial windfall, fathers in these programs are not required to adhere to TANF deadlines or work requirements that are normally a standard for accessing these funds.
 
Furthermore, there is very little oversight of this money, which means that such programs have gotten away with using fatherhood funds to assist abusive and violent fathers in custody battles against protective mothers.  These fathers are told that they have two choices -- risk jail for failure to pay child support, or embark on a custody battle to take the children from the Protective Mother and thus eliminate child support altogether. 
 
What would you choose? 
 
Thus, fathers who have had little contact with their children for years, who have physically and/or sexually abused the children and their mothers, often fathers just being released from jail, end up fighting and succeeding in getting custody with the collusion of family court services and mental health professionals. 
 
According to Anne Stevenson, a freelance journalist, since eligibility for these programs is not needs based these fatherhood funds can be distributed not only to low income fathers, but also to middle and upper middle class fathers, even billionaires.
 
The moment a protective mother goes to trial court in order to obtain back child support, or bring financial matters of any kind before family court, these funds get dispersed to the fathers. 
 
High Conflict Divorces are a particularly excellent source of funds for family courts that have been corrupted by fatherhood funds.  High conflict divorces release funds to a broad range of family court services, GALs, custody evaluators and mental health professionals who then get involved in the case. 
 
As columnist Anne Stevenson describes it, the HHS policy of subsidizing the homes and legal battles of unfit, unwilling, and violent fathers has "created a new breed of dangerous Welfare Kings".  In these custody cases, at the beginning "only the offender is sick, but when one violent offender gets custody, the whole family needs treatment.  Consequently, it is also not uncommon for dozens of family court mental health and legal professionals to come onto such a case to sustain an abusive father's deadly custody rights through HHS programs."

The result is that everyone, sometimes even the judges, ends up getting a payoff. 
 
I have avoided discussing this matter simply because of the enormity of this situation.  How do you grapple with such a monolithic violation of the human rights of protective mothers, not only in Family Courts throughout the nation, but also here in Connecticut, in our own communities, right on our front doorsteps! 
 
To grasp the extent of it, try typing variants of the words  "Fatherhood Initiative in Connecticut" into google--you end up with hit after hit. 
 
One of the top results I obtained when I started my investigation on google was the "John S. Martinez Fatherhood Initiative of Connecticut" which operates apparently under the auspices of the Connecticut Department of Social Services. 
 
Under this initiative, according to information sheets the Initiative provides, funds are directed towards assisting fathers in connection to custody.  For example, the sheet "Financing Fatherhood Programs" states that "Welfare funds can be used to assist never-married parents to develop joint parenting plans, develop marriage and relationship building skills, or for mediation services." 
 
Under "Building Services to Help Fathers" the information sheet says, "TANF dollars can be used to support a variety of services for fathers--employment assistance, counseling, parenting plans,  mediation, parenting education, substance abuse and domestic violence." 
 
According to Anne Stevenson, what this amounts to is that, for the purpose of switching custody from protective mothers to abusive fathers, those fathers who agree to engage in custody  battles are provided with free attorneys, free housing, free groceries, free car maintenance, gas, and other transportation costs, free healthcare and dental care, plus cash, while having all their child support obligations suspended. 
 
This information sheet further advises "policymakers", which I assume includes legislators, to "use the budget process to direct funding for the development of fatherhood programs and services." In addition, it advises them to "Use TANF funds to make competitive grants to local programs that operate fatherhood programs." and "Direct agencies to use TANF funds to assist fathers." 
 
With all these millions and millions of dollars directed towards supporting fathers, what chance do protective mothers have?
 
And these information sheets caution, "States are not spending millions of dollars in TANF resources" that are still waiting and available.  Plus, not only are there millions and millions of dollars in TANF resources out there that still need to be used, States can tap into more fatherhood funding if they approach other resources like WtW and Title XX block grants. 
 
Can you see that this is so mind boggling that I have delayed reporting on it?  I just couldn't even begin to comprehend such a monstrous situation. 
 
What this does, of course, is make me look back on my own family court case and on the many cases I have discussed on this blog and ask:  Were fatherhood funds behind each of these custody battles?  I have only just begun my investigation of this subject matter, and will continue to write more about it.  But if anyone has a comment and/or any personal experience with this issue, I would be interested in hearing from you.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

KEITH HARMON SNOW'S "SCREW THE BITCH": A QUICK OVERVIEW

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND SEXUAL ABUSE CASES GROSSLY MISHANDLED.

On February 15, 2011 eight year old Max Liberti's behavior was so extreme that his mother, Sunny Kelley, had become desperate. All the evidence indicated that Max was being raped and tortured. At the time, Dr. Eli Newberger, M.D., an expert in child abuse who teaches at Harvard Medical School, heard that Max was having suicidal thoughts. Dr. Newberger was seriously concerned for the boy's life.

Furthermore, Max had become increasingly psychotic and uncontrollable, running around groping adults' privates, singing songs about killing himself, or dissociating, staring off, lost in space, unreacheable by his mother or the other women trying to protect and care for him. Max was hitting himself in the face, and talking about death.

Similarly, Lori Hanrahan faced her own nightmare. Her daughter, Mila, was being raped by her husband. As she explains it, in June 2009 her daughter, Mila, came home with a shredded vagina and experts concluded that her husband, Igor, had raped her.

Both Sunny Kelley and Lori Hanrahan are well respected members of their community. Sunny is a white, middle class, affluent, 38 year-old professional sound engineer living in Southern Connecticut.

Lori Hanrahan is a Professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. Her credentials are impeccable: Over 20 years of work in international development and human rights all over the world. She was a guest on CNN and her op-eds about human rights and sex trafficking were often published in The New York Times.

AUTHORITIES AND FAMILY COURTS COLLUDE WITH SEXUAL ABUSERS TO PERPETUATE THE ABUSE.

"I spent two years in Maine, from 2008 to 2010, where by court order I was forced to traffick my daughter and deliver her to her father." Lori breaks down and sobs over the phone. "They made me traffic my daughter or go to jail."

In Sunny's case, there was a divorce trial which was held over the course of fourteen days in August 2011 with four additional days in October. The end result was that the Judge in the case, Lynda Munro, gave full custody of Max Liberti to his father on a silver platter. Since that time, Sunny has been denied access to her child.

Instead of the protection that they deserved from the legal system, that system delivered both Lori Handrahan's daughter, Mila, and Sunny Kelley's son, Max, to their sexual abusers. Both of these abusers were supported by the courts and appear to be part of sex crime networks. Both mothers are fighting for their children's lives at the expense of their own. They have been slandered, disabused, ridiculed, harassed, ignored, humiliated, threatened and attacked. They have been financially devastated.

Still, they have fought back on behalf of their children, but the more they have fought the more the system has restricted hammered and punished them. Every move they have made has brought further retaliation upon them. And they are not alone. It is the same story for Susan Skipp (Tittle v. Tittle), Sandra McVicar (McVicar v. Buggy), Marlene Debek (Bhatia v. Debek), Lisa Foley (Foley v. Foley), Elizabeth Richter (Richter v. Richter), and many more.

Yet, unlike some protective mothers who now live on the streets or in their cars or committed to mental health asylums, mothers like Sunny Kelley, Lori Handrahan, Susan Skipp, Sandra McVicar, Marlene Debek, Lisa Foley and Elizabeth Richter have not succumbed to the institutionalized corruption and criminality served on them in an effort to silence and destroy them--and deliver their children to the abusers. They are broke; they are exhuasted; they are depressed and disillusioned: How can society have let them down so badly? And yet, they are courageous beyond belief. And they are still fighting.

Some mothers have taken the law into their own hands and attempted to flee. For example, the documentary film "No Way Out But One" tells the story of Holly Collins, a protective mother persecuted by the family court system for trying to protect her children. A family court ignored Holly Collin's complaints of sexual and domestic violence, and the physical evidence of serious child abuse, and gave full custody of her children to her abusive ex-partner. Holly Collins became an international fugitive when she fled the United States in 1994 and became the first U.S. citizen to gain asylum in the Netherlands.

In January 1993, Linda Wiegand, a resident of the State of Connecticut, found out that the father of her second son, Thomas Wilkinson, had sexually abused her older child Ben as well as Thomas. Even though there was overwhelming evidence that the children had been sexually abused, it was not enough evidence for the Connecticut Family Court System. Thus, in January of 1994, Linda Wiegand disappeared with her children. Then in July 1996 Wiegand was found and arrested in Las Vegas, and both children were delivered to their abuser.

THE MEDIA IS SILENT.

Every effort to get media exposure for these two women's stories--whether through the New York Times or Nightline or the Associated Press, or CBS-affiliated local TV stations like WABI in Portland, or regional papers like the Portland Herald Press or the Hartford Courant--was initially met with great interest as journalists and bureau chiefs recognized "hot" stories. After a short time one promise of imminent and certain publication after another turned into refusals to return phone calls or emails. Threatened or silenced by someone, the "hot" stories went cold.

While Sunny Kelley ad most other protective parent's stories of judicial abuse and destruction remain disbelieved, unheard and unknown, Lori Handrahan's efforts to save Mila have resulted in a very high profile case garnering national atatention--thanks to the internet and the outrage of thousands of people across the country. Still major social netowrking media--Twitter and Facebook and others--have also censored Lori and Mila's story.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

The roads to these mothers' hell are virtually the same, and they are unique only in particulars, not in generalities. Each year, tens of thousands of families across America are being ripped apart through Family Courts and private profiteering, protecting and growing trafficking in women and children in America.

Investigations have uncovered a web of corruption involving state agencies from Connecticut to Maine, from Georgia to California. Investigations have involved FBI agents, but as often as not the FBI is part of the problem, not the solution and information delivered to the FBI is suppressed, ignored or used against the people trying to defend children and mothers from abuse.

The problems with Family Courts pervade all levels of the federal and state systems, and no United States citizen are immune: rich and poor are exploited, only differently. At the root of the problem are these central truths:

1. The five billion dollar a year budget of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) provides a black hole of funding that filters millions of dollars down to "gatekeepers" posted to key positions in Family Courts, State Agencies, Law Enforcement, and affiliated non-profit organizations that have learned to milk the system;

2. Over the past 40 years, the destructive 'Father's Rights movement has evolved into a hydra that has overtaken judicial systems and social services, and it now uses them to persecute mothers and destroy families according to the otherwise reasonable dictate that access and visitation with both parents is in 'the best interest of the child';

3. The United States is both a domestic and an international hub for a trillion dollars a year sex industry trafficking in women and children.

Of course, it is not only women and children who are abused--across the nation, good men and good fathers are waking up to the national epidemic of pedophilia and sex trafficking involving federal and state governments and officials, and the horrors of 'Family Courts'.

READ ON.

For more information on these matters, please locate the more lengthy article at the following link: