This scientific talk on vaccines is suitable for any listener literate enough to understand the notion of concentration. Toward the end (at 48:20), Dr Ayoub shows how vaccine injury perfectly mimics the symptoms of shaken baby syndrome.

• Response by Misty Stenslie, MSW, Foster Care Alumni of America, Deputy Director and our local copy.

The current undue emphasis on confidentiality only masks problems inherent in child protection systems. Public exposure is a necessary step toward fixing these problems. Each year, millions of taxpayer dollars go to support child protective services investigations. Accordingly, the public has a right to know if the laws for the protection of children are being followed and its tax dollars well-spent. Child abuse deaths and near deaths reflect the system's worst failures. Until state laws require the release of accurate and unfiltered information, we cannot identify the fault lines in the system, and cannot begin to fix them.

• Testimony of Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
• Testimony of William Tower, President of the American Family Rights Association
• Statement of Barbara Bryan, Davidson, North Carolina
• Statement of Kevin Hall, Boston, Massachusetts
• Statement of Lisa E. Gladwell, River Edge, New Jersey
• Statement of Gail D. Haymon, Grants, New Mexico
• Statement of Helen Holder, Walton, Kentucky

• Approximately 70 percent of children served in their own homes by children's aid societies live at or below the poverty line;
• 60 percent of children's aid society families are led by single parents (i.e. young mothers) compared to a national average of 17 percent;
• 40 percent of children's aid society service recipients rely on social assistance;
• One in sixteen live in a shelter or are homeless;
• 50 percent of the families are relatively new to Canada from a cultural or racial minority; and
• More Aboriginal children are admitted to care due to attendant issues of extreme poverty, domestic violence, and high suicide rates that are two to five times the national average.

• Statement of James Roger Brown, The Sociology Center, North Little Rock, Arkansas
• Statement of Barbara Bryan, Davidson, North Carolina
• Statement of Lisa Gladwell, River Edge, New Jersey
• Glenna Bible Mullenix, Jefferson City, Tennessee
• Statement of Cheryl Renee Reese, Round Rock, Texas
• Statement of Daniel Allen Roberts, Dunnellon, Florida

• Cynthia Huckelberry, Redlands, California, and Sushanna Khamis, Yucaipa, California
• J Holderbaum, Child Protection Reform, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• John R. Seita, Battle Creek, Michigan

This study by the Evan B Donaldson Adoption Institute and Harvard University shows that most prospective adoptive parents are turned off by the bureaucracy, and do not adopt. It mimics our experience in Dufferin, where upper-crust families have been given the cold shoulder by Children's Aid.

Child protectors get their funding by holding children in their care, then asking legislators to provide funding for them. Moves to genuinely promote adoption would end their funding, and therefore will not occur, no matter how many scholarly studies find ways it could be made to work.

It features experiences from his career in child removal, and a recitation of the uselessness of the foster care system, every assertion backed up with a footnote.

Among those assertions:

A child is more than twice as likely to die of abuse in foster care than in the general population. The rate of sexual abuse in foster homes has been shown to be two to four times higher than in the general population, while physical abuse is three times higher. In group homes, the rate of physical abuse is ten times higher than in the general population, while the rate of sexual abuse is twenty-eight times higher. The high rate of abuse in group homes is due to the frequency of abuse between children. The Los Angeles Times, relying on a 1997 grand jury report, reported that "many of the nearly 5,000 foster children housed in Los Angeles County group homes are physically abused and drugged excessively while being forced to live without proper food, clothing, education and counseling." Reports of long-term residents in New York City's group homes subjecting newcomers to rape, robbery, and assault are common. Also common are reports that girls in New York City's group homes are being pimped out by local gang members.

Besides being endangered while in the state's custody, many, if not most, of the children in foster care were unnecessarily removed from their homes.

Whether or not the child is removed, the family becomes a funding source for a variety of professionals and agencies. It is difficult to "indicate" a report, or find that there is some credible evidence to believe that maltreatment has occurred, without providing services to the family and the child. After a child has been removed, the parents are assigned services that they must complete if they want to be reunited with their children. In 2001, the federal government spent $295 million on such services. The caseworker picks from a menu of "cookie cutter" services which may or may not have any relevance to the family's problems. Services include drug testing, parenting classes, counseling, homemaking, or even the provision of a child's bed. Although these services have been shown to be ineffective, "[t]he issue is no longer whether the child may be safely returned to the home, but whether the mother has attended every parenting class, made every urine drop, [and] participated in every therapy session." Thus, "[t]he agency's service plan usually has little to do with services for the family. It is typically a list of requirements parents must fulfill in order to keep their children or get them back."

The theme of the article compares the treatment of foster children and their natural parents to slaves. Aside from coerced labor, their condition is identical. This view likely has more use as a moral paradigm than as a legal theory that will put an end to wholesale child removal.

Children as Chattel in the original pdf format.