16 year old uses the EAA to demand justice against his father

PRESS RELEASE: For Immediate Release Contact Kathleen Russell: 415-388-9600 
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 kr@centerforjudicialexcellence.org

TEEN MAKES VIDEO PLEA TO D.A. URGING PROSECUTION OF HIS ABUSER
Damon Asks for Protective Order for his 16th Birthday

Monterey, CA Damon, a boy in hiding, has made a video requesting the Monterey County D.A. prosecute his sexually abusive father and grant him a Protective Order for his 16th birthday, so he will finally be safe and can return home. His video can be viewed at: Safe Kids International.

"It's been 10 years since I first reported that my father was sexually abusing me and the family court is still making me go back with him," said Damon, a victim of sexual abuse who is currently living in hiding to escape the abuse. "I'm using social media to spread the word and let everyone know what's happening. I'm hoping Monterey County DA, Dean Flippo, will give me a protective order for my birthday so that I'm able to go back to my home. I really miss my family and friends." 

Although Damon is from San Diego, he asserts that the San Diego District Attorney and Family Court judges have failed to do a proper investigation, have swept his abuse under the rug, and forced him to live with his father. Damon says that the court and his father have threatened to send him to a lock-down behavioral modification center to be coerced into recanting the abuse. So Damon ran away and went into hiding a year ago to protect himself. That is why, although Damon is from San Diego, he wants the case to be heard in Monterey County, where the abuse first occurred at his grandmother’s house.

Along with social media, Damon has used a novel idea, the Evidentiary Abuse Affidavit (EAA). Born out of the Drew and Stacey Peterson case (currently at trial), the EAA was created by violence expert Susan Murphy Milano to insure that the victim’s accounts of assaults would not disappear if she did. It combines videotaping of the victim’s words attesting to the abuse coupled with creative witnessed and notarized legal documents that successfully satisfy legal hurdles often faced in these cases. Damon says he wants his EAA to be used in case he is sent to a lock-down facility, disappears, or is murdered. The EAA is a newly released iPad app making it easy for other teens in Damon’s situation to use. 

Former FBI director, Louis Freeh, when describing the Penn State cover up, said, “I want to remind everyone here, and those watching this press conference, of the need to report child sexual abuse to the authorities.” Damon has asked the public in his video to report his abuse to the D.A.

Barry Nolan of the Boston Daily wrote, “In the Wake of Jerry Sandusky”, in which he observes that one of the recurring themes of the victims’ testimony was “Who would believe a kid?” He uses Damon’s case as an example of how sexual abuse reports are not taken seriously or investigated properly in family courts. Nolan says, “If enough of them come forward and enough of us start to listen, maybe one day one day when the question is asked — who would believe a kid? — the answer will be different.” Damon is hoping the answer will be different for him. 

District Attorney Dean Flippo: Office: (831) 755-5070 Email: flippodd@co.monterey.ca.us 
Richard Ducote, Consulting Attorney: Office: (412) 687-2020 Email: info@ducotelaw.com
Damon’s videos to the public and EAA: Safe Kids International

Is Truth and Reconciliation possible for DCYF?

Sunday, May 27th, was the 55th birthday of "Molly" and "Sarah's" beloved Mami (which is the Swiss-German way of spelling Mommy). One day I hope to find out where she has gone and what she is doing, now that Rhode Island has torn away her daughters. 


When the girls refused to visit their father, he blamed his wife. She had never wanted a divorce until the girls said how much they feared him. Now that DCYF has given the girls to him in another state -- and washed their hands of it -- I wonder if he allows the children to see their mother at all. Or has she returned to Switzerland to make the "torture" (her children's word for it) less painful for them? 


In my years of working with battered women, I have seen many good mothers lose children to abusive ex-spouses. Some mothers went on to accomplish important things--though that was no substitute for raising their own children. Two such stories are told in these books by Dr. Jerri Nielsen at the South Pole: 

and by the Peacekeeping Whistleblower Kathryn Bolkovac: 

Someday we will learn Mami's story as well. 


Today's Providence Journal has this to say (click once to enlarge): 

If the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) is willing to evaluate its own performance in the case of Molly and Sara -- and many other children -- the state must provide a way for us to question this agency with the evidence of abuse by its own staff. We need a genuine process of Truth and Reconciliation to evaluate the way DCYF has abused its power in the past if we are to trust it with such an important job as protecting vulnerable children. 

In honor of Mami on Mother's Day

Spontaneous!

Remembering the bes...

By Anne Grant

Book Preview

Healing is a process for survivors of incest

To visit Donna Jenson's website, "What She Knows," and to hear counselors at the Stetson School for Boys tell of the importance of helping children talk about incest, click on the title above, or paste this link in your browser: http://www.timetotell.org/Time_To_Tell.org/Film_Clips.html

Dr. DeFrances to speak at COA Conference

"Molly" and "Sara's" supporters, who convened a community-wide meeting in 2006, wrote scores of letters, and met with the Child Advocate to protest DCYF's handling of this case, never succeeded in bringing the girls back home.

But that case prompted the Parenting Project to meet with DCYF and work with legislators to require the Department to get accredited with the Council on Accreditation (COA). We are delighted to learn that DCYF's director, Dr. Janice DeFrances, will speak at COA's National Conference in August.

COA's mission is to partner with human service organizations worldwide to improve service delivery outcomes by developing, applying, and promoting accreditation standards.

For more about COA, go to their website at
www.COAnet.org

Free training webinars are available at
http://coanet.org/training.html

To read the announcement about Dr. DeFrances, click on the title above, or paste this in your browser:

http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/364877/dbdf2b33e4/1471595639/a75e87bcfa/

Who is Norbara Octeau?

Norbara Octeau and her mother celebrate Summer Solstice in 2013, nine years after her 2004 decision as administrative hearing officer for DCYF set the stage for Molly and Sara to be taken from their mother into state custody in 2006, kept in foster homes and a state shelter, and eventually turned over to their father's sole custody, despite the girls' graphic drawings and protests against his "sausage games." 

DCYF headquarters at Friendship Street, Providence.

Attorney Norbara Octeau works for the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) on contract and hears administrative appeals against that Department. Her 21-page "Decision" (AH/04-55, December 20, 2004) found that "there is not a preponderance of evidence to support the finding of sexual molestation" against "Molly's" father.

Octeau said that she based her decision primarily on evidence presented by Molly's father:

1. printouts of three e-mails and a letter he had written in February 2004;
2. the affidavit of a private investigator he had hired to interview his associates;
3. his testimony; and
4. testimony of DCYF's child protective investigator (CPI) Ann Murphy.

Since the father was the "Petitioner" in this appeal against DCYF, the mother was not considered a party. She and her attorney did not even know of the administrative hearing held on October 12, 2004. Octeau had never seen the woman she vilified in her Decision.

The father and his defense attorney, Lise Gescheidt, attended the hearing, but only one person appears to have represented DCYF:

Child Protective Investigator (CPI) Ann Murphy appeared on behalf of the Department; investigative report #375756 was prepared by CPI Murphy, and references by her in giving testimony at this hearing, but was not offered by the Department as an exhibit. . . . No exhibits were presented by the Department. (Decision, pp. 2-3)

Why did DCYF have no lawyer representing it? And why did DCYF accept Molly's father's emails, letter, and private investigator's report "as full exhibits without objection"--the only exhibits introduced at the hearing?

At this time, DCYF's chief legal counsel, Kevin Aucoin, was responsible to "Enhance communication and problem solving initiatives between the Family Court and DCYF" according to DCYF's "Child and Family Service Plan" (November 2005, p. 52). Parents who turn to DCYF and Family Court to protect their children from abuse complain especially about the role of DCYF's legal department.

(Click on photos to enlarge; click "escape" to return to text.)

Norbara Octeau claimed that this hearing "was held in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act, R.I.G.L. 42-35-1 Et. Seq. and the Rules and Regulations of the Department for Children Youth and Families" (sic) (Decision, p. 2).

With no one to object, Octeau's Decision set forth fifteen pages of errors, hearsay, and speculation as "Facts" that gained a life of their own. For example, Octeau describes the hotline call that opened the investigation "on or about January 2, 2004" (apparently by a nurse practitioner--though Octeau leaves the caller's identity unclear):

The hotline caller disclosed that the child had been brought to her pediatrician by her mother. . . and while there, the mother had told a nurse practitioner that [her daughter] relayed accounts that the Petitioner came into the child's room at night and exposed himself. (Decision, p. 3)

When I interviewed the mother in 2006, she said she had never reported this to the nurse practitioner or anyone else. The child was always consistent that her father played his "sausage games" during the day when they were home alone, her mother at work and her sister at school, and that these experiences were very upsetting to the child and sometimes physically painful.

So it was irrelevant that the father "denied ever having entered his daughter's room at night to masturbate" or that he "explained that the girls share a very small bedroom and that it would have been impossible for him to have encountered [her] while she was asleep while not also waking his older daughter" (Decision, p. 11).

Octeau's Decision includes warning signs that should have alerted any hearing officer with minimal training in sexual molestation. The father acknowledges to CPI Murphy that he "had been sexually abused by his own father in his native country of Switzerland, and the Petitioner's father had been incarcerated as a result" (p. 3).

(This, too, is inaccurate. The father acknowledged that he and his brothers had been sexually abused by their father. But their father went to prison for abusing disabled boys who were his psychotherapy patients--not for abusing his sons--which apparently remained a family secret. Their father's prison sentence was reported on June 18, 1981.)

In another warning sign that Octeau ignored, CPI Murphy says:

. . . the child had described events with her father using phrases such as "we took a bath together and washed each other all up", "I was in my room playing and Papa came in naked and played with his sausage", "I told him that is not a toy, stop it" and "juice came out of the sausage". [The child] also told the investigator that [she] had complained that "Papa hurt her back and belly and she yelled for her Mom". (p. 4)

Octeau wrote that Murphy "described the child's mimicking of the masturbation act as not something she could have performed unless she had actually witnessed it" (p. 10).

Octeau wrote that the father said he and his daughter "did take a bath together because he wanted to be close to his young daughter" (p. 5, italics added). And that, on the advice of his brother, a lawyer specializing in child sexual abuse, he introduced the concept of "Parental Alienation Syndrome [that] could have accounted for his daughter's disclosure" (p. 14, italics added).

Molly's father had, at first, suggested that either his brother or their father might have molested Molly. The brother, a survivor, and now, a defense lawyer for those accused of sexually abusing children, came to the U.S. to defend his brother. Together they suggested that their father might have molested Molly. Their next line of defense was to blame Molly's mother.

Four years earlier, in 2003, the brother had given Molly's father this article describing the theory of "parental alienation" that blames mothers for coaching their children to accuse fathers of sexual abuse:

Octeau recognizes the Petitioner is on a campaign to find information in his defense on the Internet. She writes that the two brothers' arguments did not persuade the DCYF investigator, the police, or the pediatrician. But she finds them credible.

She focuses on hearsay and speculation that Molly's father presented about his wife and the journals she kept for her children--which the police had examined but did not consider significant.

Nevertheless, without ever seeing the journals herself, Octeau writes:

The journals were apparently a record of information meticulously gathered by the mother about the alleged abuse during the time frame of the investigation. (p. 19, italics added)

The mother had kept journals for each daughter from birth--not to record abuse, but to remind them of good memories.

Instead of insisting on seeing those journals and questioning the wife directly, which Octeau could have done, the hearing officer merely overturned the investigator's finding and made her own remarkable "finding:"

This Hearing Officer finds [the mother's] behavior and conduct . . . to be highly unorthodox and rather suspicious given the marital discontent existing at the time. This maternal behavior casts a shadow over the reliability of the child's statements and, therefore, closer scrutiny of the circumstances surrounding the child's disclosure should have been pursued. (p. 20)

Octeau's Decision offers information that appears ironic in light of the ongoing strategy to vilify Molly's mother. For example, Octeau writes: "CPI Murphy further noted that this multilingual child was hard to converse with because during speech she continually mixed together various languages" (p. 5).

It is easy to comprehend that a traumatized child without even the terminology to describe upsetting sexual behavior would struggle for words. But this, too, became a basis for DCYF staff later to punish Molly's mother whenever she responded to her children in Swiss-German. By then, the entire Department had fallen into line behind Norbara Octeau and seemed to accept the father's defense strategy that his wife used Swiss-German to "coach" the girls against him.

Who is Norbara Octeau? I kept googling her name. In April 2007, I found her online article, "Are the Rhode Island Family Courts against Fathers?"--apparently published to attract fathers to hire her as their divorce attorney .

With not even a pretense of judicial restraint, Octeau sarcastically mocks the “pedestal of holy motherhood.” In another article, she writes that mothers’ “traditional roles . . . elevate their argument to a pedestal which still elicits a knee-jerk reaction to the hallowed image of mother and child.”

I sent a copy of her article with a letter to DCYF director Patricia Martinez on April 20, 2007. Nearly five months later, Director Martinez responded. She ignored the question of Octeau's clear bias, offered no evidence of special training, and defended the hearing officer as “a seasoned attorney” who has conducted more than one hundred administrative hearings for the Department.

According to online state payroll records, attorney Norbara Octeau still works as a hearing officer for DCYF. (The average amount paid to 34 DCYF contractors on December 12th, 2011, was $1,387, but Norbara Octeau received $15,437, by far the largest check of all.)

In 2007, Kevin Aucoin responded to the Parenting Project's Access to Public Records request:

DCYF Administrative Hearing Officer Stephen Morris has not sent any further data from his review of the administrative hearing files. The numbers Aucoin provided do not include findings that were expunged from their records after three years. This rule allowed "Molly's" father to win custody of her in 2007.

Reporting on this, the Parenting Project noted that DCYF:

1. fails to track cases of credible sexual molestation;
2. fails to assure that its hearing officers perform their duties in an objective and neutral manner;
3. uses a nationally discredited, unscientific “theory” called “parental alienation syndrome” (PAS) to overturn credible charges of molestation; and
4. works as a team with privately paid contractors (lawyers, assisted by clinicians) who rely on secrecy, delay, and misinformation to win family court custody cases for their clients in ways that harm children.

The Parenting Project's 2007 "Press Advisory" is posted online here:
http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/therapeutic-jurisprudence-in-Rhode-Island.pdf
(Paste this in your browser.)

WPRI shows how sex offenders win on appeal

Tim White's story at WPRI reveals the way convicted sex offenders are succeeding in getting Special Magistrate Patrick Burke to reduce their status as sex offenders without ever hearing from the victims of their crimes.

This is exactly what happened in the administrative review process at the Department of Children, Youth and Families when DCYF hearing officer Norbara Octeau overturned the finding against "Molly" and "Sara's" father. (An outline of that case appears at the January 12, 2012, post below, "Eight years ago," with detailed information in prior posts.)

Tim White's story is here (click on the title above, or paste this in your browser):
http://www.wpri.com/dpp/target_12/target-12-sex-offenders-winning-on-appeal

I will post additional documents regarding Norbara Octeau and the bias she revealed.

Cost to Orange County, CA, of lying social workers: $10.6 Million

The total cost to Orange County of a case in which a jury found that two social workers lied to take away a woman’s daughters is $10.6 million, according to a new audit.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year declined to hear the county’s challenge to a 2007 jury award of $4.9 million to the Seal Beach woman, Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick. With interest on that amount plus her attorney fees, the total payout by the county was $9.6 million. In addition, the county incurred another $1 million of its own legal costs in the case.

Photo of Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick

For more on the County's response to this award, go to
http://taxdollars.ocregister.com/2012/01/19/cost-to-county-of-lying-social-workers-10-6-mln/146871/

Eight years ago

Late in 2003, three-year-old "Molly" angrily complained about her father's "sausage games." What the State of Rhode Island did to Molly and her older sister "Sara" in the years that followed outraged their neighbors, who convened a community meeting and asked the Parenting Project to investigate. By 2009, we set a goal that finally began coming to fruition this week, when Governor Lincoln Chafee's new director of the Department of Children, Youth and Families, Janice DeFrances, confirmed that DCYF is beginning an assessment as its first step toward getting accredited.

In 2004, DCYF's frontline staff properly helped Molly and Sara by referring them to counselors at Day One.

When DCYF indicated their father for sexual molestation, his defense attorney appealed. The father first blamed his own father, a psychiatrist and convicted pedophile who had sexually abused his own children. But Molly insisted the offender was her father.

Next, he blamed his wife for "alienating" the girls against him--which did not explain how Molly could re-enact male masturbation and draw a graphic portrait of her father.

A year after Molly's complaint, DCYF's legal department flipped the case at an administrative hearing where the father was the plaintiff, and DCYF was the defendant. Since the girls' mother was not a party to this proceeding, DCYF never informed her of it. She was not present when DCYF's administrative hearing officer ruled that the father was credible, while the mother (whom the officer had neither met nor questioned) was not.

She ruled that the mother's alleged demeanor made Molly's complaint unbelievable. (Over a year later, the hearing officer revealed her own strongly worded bias against mothers on the Internet, where she was seeking men as divorce clients.)

The father's defense attorney's friend became guardian ad litem, who orchestrated the case at Family Court, searching for clinicians who would blame the mother in order to remove the girls from her and their lifelong home in 2006. DCYF sent the girls to a foster mother who told them their mother had mental problems, which was completely untrue.

Distraught there, the girls went to their next foster home and then to a state shelter in another city at enormous expense to tax payers.

The father's defense team needed time--three years until his indication for sexual molestation could be expunged. Finally the Court turned the girls over to their father in another state and limited all contact with their mother.

The DCYF legal department's fear of lawsuits has led the agency to fail many other children. Family Court gives enormous authority to guardians ad litem who have close ties to defense attorneys and judges. The Court's confidence in unreliable psychiatric "evaluations" and its use of gag orders to intimidate protective parents has vastly increased the damage, so that the truth is rarely found within this costly system.

As DCYF begins its process toward accreditation, the General Assembly and Family Court are grappling with entrenched problems throughout Rhode Island's child-protective system.

For more about this, paste this link in your browser:
http://custodyscam.blogspot.com/2012/01/praising-architects-of-change.html

While we honor the leaders who are working on these issues, we also must praise the three-year-old who would not be quiet about the behavior that made her feel so angry and frightened.