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.
