Legally Kidnapped

Shattering Your Child Welfare Delusions Since 2007


Thursday, April 05, 2012

SystemSuckology: Understanding Child Abuse Propaganda Month - Part 2: Sitting Around The Campfire Telling Child Abuse Stories

"Dozens gathered to light candles and remember the many victims of child abuse. It was also a night to honor victims who survived like Adam Carbajal."




In the first installment of this series, we discussed the use of National Child Abuse Awareness Month as an excuse to hold a fundraiser.  While I believe this to be the true reason of this month long celebration,  I think it is important to build upon this concept and discuss how they actually sucker these people into giving their money or getting involved.  In order to do this, I have created a list of the most common elements of the hundreds of news stories that will be published  this month, devoted to this Awareness subject, and will continue to add to this list all month long as new elements pop up.  In creating this list, I was able to formulate a kind of arm chair behavioral profile of the typical system suck.  So I will begin this segment with the following question: 

What is a System Suck?

The simple answer to this question is this:  A system suck is one who profits in one way or another from, or makes their living from the legal kidnapping of your children.   There are two types, although both types can be present in one person.  One does it for the money, the other does it to make themselves feel important.  A sort of self gratification.

The more complex answer is one who sells their soul to the child protective industry for money or for self gratification purposes.  In that, these people are very devoted to their cause.  In fact, I think that many of them actually believe the lies that they preach, with the problem being that very few base their beliefs or understandings of the issues on truth or facts.  Most are sold on a line of bullshit, buy it hook line and sinker and loudly preach that which is totally blown out of proportion, skewed to the horrific, and reinforces the one size fit's all nature of the Child Abuse and Neglect labels. 

There are two ways that they do this.  The first is through the presentation of the wrong statistical data, including preaching the number of calls to the child abuse hotline or the number of reports that were investigated last year, while failing to tell you that most of these calls or investigated reports did not result in confirmed findings of abuse or neglect, and failing to report how many cases actually were confirmed.  This is a form of misdirection, lies by omission, whatever you want to call it.

The other thing that they don't tell you is that every case is different in both intent and severity.  For example, the mom who slaps her teenager in the face for telling her to go and f*** herself would be included on the same list where a sicko beat a newborn to within an inch of their life because he/she wouldn't stop crying.  So this is by no means an accurate portrayal of the child abuse issue.   But it does create a sense of urgency in the normal people, who believe that thousands upon thousands of kids in their community are severely abused by monsters among us.

 Last year, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Servicesinvestigated more than 60,000 reports of child abuse and neglect.  - Notice there is no mention of how many of these 60,000 investigated reports had confirmed cases, thus including the innocent in their lies.


"But the alarming trend continues across the country, she says costing society nearly $104 billion a year for health and mental health services and correctional activities."  - and even more when you take into account Child Abuse Propaganda Month fundraising activities. 


This tends to make the problem appear worse than it actually is.  Then again the smaller numbers don't provide as much of an impact.

The second way that they blow things out of proportion is with the gut wrenching horror story, detailing some horrific case of sickening child abuse, triggering some emotional response in or painting a picture in the uneducated mind of the normal human of some extremely rare and severe abuse case, that simply pops into their heads whenever they hear the words. 

Now I'm not saying that these things don't happen, just that they like to present the most extreme cases, thus leading the normal person to think that all cases are as extreme.

"When he was taken away from his parents, he grabbed just one thing: his Nintendo DS.

Sam was removed from a home with no running water, no electricity and mold growing in the refrigerator. He arrived at Calvary Home for Children in Anderson just days before Thanksgiving."

"After nearly three years, the little girl’s name still stands out among those who can’t forget her, the little girl who was a victim of what Chandler police detectives described as the worse case of fatal child abuse they had ever seen."

Morgan County District Attorney Scott Anders talked about prosecuting women who give birth to children with illegal drugs in their system.

In fact, the deeper I dig into this particular topic, the more convinced I am that truest System Sucks are emotion junkies who love sitting around the campfire telling child abuse stories.   I can attest to this further based on my experience in a couple of these anti child abuse Facebook groups, where they share and discuss news stories, all testifying publically to what they would do if that was their kid or what they would like to see done to the parents. 

Both of these examples, however only tell a part of the story,  I'm only stating this now for the sake of explanation, as it will be further explored later, but...  The battle against child abuse has become an epic battle of good against evil.  We can't have a good child abuse story without the tales mighty heroes who ride in on their shiny high horses, preaching all their self-righteous glory to get involved and help save the children!  

"The volunteers go to court with children that have been removed from their homes as a result of abuse or neglect, and they present to the court what is in their best interest," East Texas CASA board president Kristen Ishihara said.

“To the world you might be just one person, but to one person you might be the world.” These words from an unknown source reflect my deepest feelings about CASA: A Voice for Children.

Now to be fair, I will state that a few journalists who write theses articles that I am researching on the topic of Child Abuse Prevention Month, do prefer to use the correct information, but they really are few and far between.  Most do not.  Most are going for the gut reaction as this is how they're going to capture your attention, warm your heart, play the sympathy card and make you feel important as if you're doing more for kids than lining the pockets of the professional system sucks.

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