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Originally Posted by bella99
 4. Lastly, if you decide to make the call, you can do so anonymously, and even if you don't, it's ALWAYS confidential. For all anyone needs to know, the doctor called or the school called or a neighbor or extended family member, etc. I work in foster care and when calls are made on the foster parents and/or biological parents, even if we aren't involved in the particular situation or are the ones that made the call, we CAN NOT tell the parents who made the call. . |
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Originally Posted by Latte Mama
I just wanted to say that it was very brave of you, Shenjall, to post that. May your familly have peace & love.
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Originally Posted by bella99
Thyra,
CPS calls are meant to be confidential. I've been to numerous trainings about them (as I am a mandated reporter), and they stress that over and over again. As a mandated reporter, I (and your doctor), can not make an anonymous call, because we have to make the call specifically as a mandated reported, and provide our information. In fact, when non-CPS caseworkers document information, we aren't even allowed to mention any kind of CPS call/involvement. But even when we call, although our information is taken down, it can not be provided to the A lawyer should not be giving that information to their clients AT ALL, whether the report is indicated or unfounded. Your entitled to the report, but not the identity of the source and not anyone who may have provided assistance or information for the actual investigation. That information is supposed to be redacted from the copy of the reports provided to you and your attorney. What your attorney did was illegal and obviously the State Central Registry screwed up in not removing the identifying information. You can find the exact procedural information at the OCFS website. And in NY, calls made to the hotline that are not accepted for investigation are deleted from the system, there's no record of them kept at all. Calls that WERE accepted for investigation, but were determined unfounded are recorded in the system with some information, but are primarily treated as if they don't exist. |
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Originally Posted by Veslemor
I don't know if anyone's still looking at this, but clearly I have a lot of thank yous to send out. I'm sorry that I'm too exhausted to refer back and thank you individually- please know that I have appreciated the support and candor. I thought you all might like to give yourselves a pat on the back for the following: There is no CPS listed in my phone book. White pages say to check the gov't section, and that one says nothing. So I called the sheriff's dept to ask who I should call (the mother has now explicitly refused to comply with any counseling). So a report was filed and deputies have been dispatched and the whole deal. What I was feeling here in the beginning (judged) was actually a good preparation for what I encountered with the Man. When I told them that I Had called when it happened, they checked into it and said they found a CPS report that was filed a few days later under my name but that the report was empty.
The two things that really suck are that they insist on wanting to interview H (using bodily terminology), and they still haven't given me any clear picture of what the process of getting A into counseling is. So that's where I'm at. |
Just so you know what this has the potential to turn into, I had some similar issues with my stepson and son. The age gap is similar with my stepson being 10 at the time, and my son being 7 at the end of a 3 yr. stretch of abuse. We have not had to deal with the sexual abuse in our home, though my stepson did sexually assault his 8yr. old sister in his mother's home. This child was endlessly physically abusive to my own son. He had done things like kick him in the face hard enough to knock his two front teeth loose, threw him on the ground outside and was kicking him as hard as he could in his ribs, endlessly lie to get my 3 children in trouble. With my youngest son, when he was only 9 months old my stepson would call him to his room down the hallway. When my son would crawl to the end of the hall and grab the door frame to try and stand up, my stepson would slam the door on his fingers, suprisingly never braking them. My daughter who was about 18months old started having bruises all over her body which when asked we found out that he had been beating on her whenever they were alone. I tried multiple times to involve the police, which by the way is useless because there is no law protecting children from other children. Whenever we would address his aggressive ways with his mother she would tell him what he was doing was ok and we had no right to punish him for what he was doing. We had him hospitalized when he started threatening to tie us all up in our sleep and light the house on fire so he could watch us burn to death. His mother managed to get him out of that and convince him yet again that his behavior was ok and somehow we were wrong for trying to get him help. Initially he had lived with us, and once we had him hospitalized child protective services stepped in and threatened to remove my three kids from the house because we were unable to protect them from him. He was sent to live with his mom (in another state) who of course never addressed his behavior. About a year later we moved to the same state my husband's ex lived in, and in time were convinced (somehow) that things were getting better. This is when the majority of the abuse happened with my oldest son. We had the child again hospitalized for threatening to kill us all, by way of the sheriff's office (because you can not have a child put in the hospital without the permission of the custodial parent without law enforcement). There was a hold placed on him due to the statements he was making to the doctors and officers about his intent. After this hold was up, the hospital had convinced us that he had been stabilized on meds and was doing much better. The night he was released, it was during my husband's visitation, that day we watched him closely with the kids, and he seemed to be doing much better. That night however, after we put everyone to bed, he climbed up on my son's bed while he was sleeping, got on top of him and held a pillow over his face. My son woke up and managed to fight him off. My stepson rushed back into his bed, and my son being too scared to get up layed there and came to tell no one. The next day we had no clue what had happened, and continued on like normal. Around midafternoon, we caught him wrapping a hose around my son's neck and trying to strangle him. At this point my husband immediately caught what was going on and stopped the situation. We called the hospital and were told to bring him back. With no appologies, the hospital readmitted him. His mother refusing still to admit he had problems took him from the hospital against medical advice and managed to have us investigated for abuse for having him placed there initially. This of course resulted in nothing, and we were told that we were not to allow the child in our home again by both CPS and the sheriffs office both. We decided to have a short visit with my stepson to find out what was going on after he was released, at which point he looked me in the eyes and told me with a grin that the only thing he was sorry for was not successfully killing my child. We tried desperately to understand what was going on with him to no avail. He did however go home to his mother's and convince her that we had "interogated" him, at which point she again got CPS to investigate my husband and I, again finding NOTHING!! This is really just a quick brief run down of what we have endured as a result of this child, but please beware if your stepchild is really intent on hurting your child, no matter how hard you try, you can't be everywhere. When it comes to your own child, your best bet may be to keep your stepchild away at all cost (even your marriage). My oldest child now has PTSD and extreme anxiety and insomnia as a result of his stepbrother's doing. If I had it all to do again, I would have done everything in my power to keep my stepson away from my children before he had the chance to hurt them. Even with all that he did, as a child under the law, he can not commit a crime and therefore was never punished in anyway for what he has done to my family.
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