The Court System takes your Kids and Claim you are neglectful and now this

If you have ever had to face this, you will understand what I mean but if you have never had to face this then take a few minutes, go to a juvenile court waiting room and just sit there listening to the stories.  There are truly some horrific stories about child endangerment and neglect but there are also those stories that are fabricated and are so very far from the truth.  For those stories that are true, it is quite understandable why outside forces step in and attempt to give all children a shot at a decent life but for those stories that are discovered early enough in the process to lack credibility but are still push because of someone’s lack of conscientious or just plainly hate to be wrong, this is more than just a travesty of justice, it is downright criminal in its own right.

You are notified that your children will be removed from your home for an offense that never took place but because they have those who appear to be carrying a grudge or clearly short-sighted in their endeavor to make a name for themselves, you find yourself sitting in a courtroom with a court-appointed attorney whose only job is to pretend to represent you so that all look legit on paper and in the minds of those who now know that the case is a lie.  You are reprimanded by a judge who has never set eyes on your before, telling you all about how much of a terrible person you are and calling out all your faults right there in open court.  You have the State’s prosecutor sitting high on their soap box claiming that the state can do a better job of raising your children than you can and in their corner you have all those gathered around the tables including your own public defender supporting that idea.  Because no one really cares what you think or whether you are guilty or innocent, you feel like the underside of a shoe and there seems to be nothing you can do.  Your children are removed and you are given tasks to do in order to prove to them that you deserve your children back.  What God has joined together, let no man put asunder but I guess this is only in marriage.  God blessed you with your kids but a court filled of strangers can erase all that.  You are held accountable for your crime of neglect so my question is who holds the state accountable when they commit the same crime?

There is an article titled “A New Effort to Rescue Runaways in Chicago” written by Mitch Smith for The New York Times.com and in it he reports that “a team of Cook County sheriff’s deputies starts each morning in a small office in the juvenile court building here, poring over a list of children missing from state-run foster care and group homes and searching for clues to their whereabouts.  Most of those missing are teenagers, some with medical or emotional problems, or in trouble with the law. Many have run away before. Nearly all are wards of the state — minors for whom the Illinois government has been assigned legal guardianship. Those factors make the work of this team, the Child Protection Response Unit, both challenging and urgent. If the youths are not found quickly, the deputies say, there is a risk that they will end up exploited by gang leaders or pulled into the sex trade.  In Illinois, hundreds of the roughly 15,000 children in state care are reported missing every year, and often little effort is made to find them, critics of the state child welfare agency say. A scathing state audit found that child welfare officials sometimes took days to file paperwork on missing youths and notify the proper authorities.  “If any parent had a child that was missing for an hour, a half-hour, they’d be on the phone with the police, there’d be an all-points bulletin, they’d be on the news, they’d have search parties going on,” said Sheriff Thomas J. Dart of Cook County, a former state legislator and a longtime critic of Illinois’s child welfare system. Searches for teenagers who ran away from state-run care, on the other hand, were treated with less urgency.  The Illinois audit found that roughly 3,000 children vanished on about 28,000 separate occasions over a two-year period, though the report cautioned that the data had limits and that not all of the children were runaways.  In Illinois, the state Department of Children and Family Services, which has had at least seven leaders in the past three years, has come under frequent criticism. Efforts are underway to improve the reporting system for missing children and dangerous conditions in its group homes, examples of which were chronicled by The Chicago Tribune. Run-down housing and harsh treatment can make running away seem like an attractive idea, the sheriff’s deputies said.”

Image having to try as hard as you could to instill some sort of integrity, honor and discipline within your child.  Trying so desperately to keep them out of the street even if it means planting them in front of the TV or a computer but finding out that this is not enough for a bunch of strangers who truly have no idea of the trials and tribulation you have endured.  All they see is just another case of people not living as those who makes the laws see fit or like those with the same issues raising their children as you do but have the resources to avoid theirs being taken.  Your child is lost to you and you have yet to appease the “masters” and win your children back, then learning that now your precious child, a bigger part of you is lost to those very same streets and often times gone forever.  The State took possession of your most precious gift granted to you by God and lost it to the very same forces that you worked so hard to protect them from.  Who is the neglectful parent now and why is there not a system that holds them accountable for the damage to your child’s life that they caused?