How to Destroy Someone's Life or They called me a child pornographer

Miraculously we got our kids back in very short order, however the bureaucrats wouldn't give us the slightest scrap of documentation that the event had ever taken place (and this remains true til now). And needless to say, we received no apology either (at best they were all "just doing their jobs", just like concentration camp guards).

I have nothing good to say about the arbitrary, condescending, totalitarian bureaucrats/"advocates", or the (CA) legislators who wrote such one sided laws ("for the children", no doubt) giving these petty tyrants their obscene powers. I guess many reading this will think "necessary collateral damage by wonderful, diligent state employees pursuing the greater good"; all well and good until _you_ are the ones in their crosshairs: then we'll hear what kind of tune _you_ sing about the glories of the state when you are deprived of due process among other things.

I hated to write that. Snarky it was. Of course most of the cases these folks work are really sad -- I have family that work there.

But it's a blunt instrument, and politicians have decided that anything to do with kids gets "special" treatment. I know of about a dozen good people who have had run-ins with these guys. None of them were guilty of anything bad, yet all of them went through hell. (this list includes me) I also know (from my family members who work there) of really bad people who keep their kids through atrocity after atrocity. Very sad.

EDIT: Just guessing, but it's almost like the closer to upper-middle class you are, the more likely you are to be a victim of CPS-gone-wild. The really poor crackheads don't give a shit, so CPS charges them and shuffles them through the system. Nobody has resources for these kids, so they go back to mom and/or dad. The really rich have a platoon of lawyers descend on CPS (and they have political connections). It's the poor schmucks who have the energy and wherewithal to screw around with CPS (probably in a useless attempt to save their reputation) that get dragged through the dirt.

Some things have improved in recent years. The incidence of bad therapy leading to false memory syndrome has been reduced, and with it the rate of false accusations. (There are also now improved odds for abused kids to be able to get information on what abuse is actually like, rather than getting detailed, unrealistic fantasies.) Others are worse. For instance in Miami the rule that sex offenders have to live at least 2500 feet from any school means that about the only place they could live was under a particular bridge. (As of April this year they have been transferred elsewhere, but which elsewhere that is I'm not sure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offen... for more.)

I would be the last to trivialize abuse or its very real problems. But there is a world of difference between 50 year olds going after prepubescent kids and 19 year olds who dated 16 year olds. And there is little to be gained from treating them all like lepers. Certainly less than could be gained if we, for instance, took some of the energy that goes into following up on almost certainly bogus reports and instead put it into improving the foster care system.

On the other hand, the US has one of the most sexualized tweens and teen-agers I have ever seen, go to the Mall or the local movie house on a Friday and you would be shocked at how girls dress (and how their parents let them dress like this). And if that doesn't shock you, watch the movie Thirteen.

Outside the US nudity is not so taboo. In my daughter's kindergarten (a nice private school in Southeast Asia) boys and girls share the same bathroom, with no private stalls, and no door on the entrance. Everyone sees everything -- passers-by included. Meanwhile, in the US, nudity is synonymous with sex, and good people have to worry about things like this.

The state taking my kids is actually my worst parental nightmare--even beyond all the accidental and criminal bad things that could happen. I'm a very good parent (you'll have to take my word, I guess), but I'm not conventional. And I know all it takes sometimes is a little misunderstanding.

Everything you say (and/or write) may be used against you.

Have a nice day :)

On the other hand, the author is a journalist, exactly the people who are the cause of this type of witch hunt. If you would leave out the prologue of the story, and make it into a story where the accusations actually were true. Then noone would have blinked about what happened. If they were treated any other way, there would have been a public outrage.

Think about the officers handling this case. There is absolutely zero incentive for them to handle this case differently. If the accused turn out to be guilty, then they better have handled this case with the utmost seriousness. Any leniency can possibly lead to a scandal. And media love childmolesting scandals, so the officers will be part of a nation if not worldwide scandal. They will be singled out, their mistake will be broadcasted for the whole world to see, and they effictively lose their job.

If people turn out to be innocent, psyches have been damaged, it's bad but they'll get over it. More importantly, maybe a complaint will be filed, they will have done the right thing within the rules, and case is closed.

Anyways, we finally had had enough and we asked them to leave. I notified his brother of this an his brother had had enough as well, fearing for his two nieces the brother called DCF on them and started an investigation in an attempt to get the girls and provide them some stability (they where in and out of school, watched their father do drugs, and eventually watched him OD - more on that latter).

So, after that the crazy wife calls DCF on every family, that had kids, that they stayed with. So we end up getting cops and a DCF agent knocking on our door, conveniently at 11PM, a time when any dirt bag would be doing their nightly supply of drugs and we get this condescending attitude while we are being read a list of charges being levied against us. My father is there, because he is helping me install a wood floor in my living room and the DCF agent gives me a condescending lecture about unsafe environment for children (I answer well that is why we are doing it while they are in bed). She looked at me and asked what is going on here like it was some illicit activity.

They make us wake the kids up, and then they make them disrobe to see if they have any marks and take them on the back porch to ask them questions. Right before that, I asked if I needed a lawyer and the cop told me they are not needed in these situations.

Anyway, they told us we had to be at the court house for a urine test at 8AM the next morning. To which we complied after calling a lawyer once they left the night before.

In the mean time, I call the brother and tell him and his mother what happened. He, his sister and their mother calls the agent handling the case of his brother and tells her that their has been a false report that was used to victimize another person as a form of retaliation. He pretty much has to threaten the lady to contact the DCF agency in my town, which she finally does.

So, pretty open and shut right, nope. I ask our agent if she has been in contact with the (now network) of agents investigation false reports on everyone that has ever let these people stay with them and she tells me that she cannot confirm or deny it due to the fact that she has to protect the anonymity of the reporter but that our case was in active investigation, because they found items of concern in our house (If they provided half the case work diligence that they do to protect the anonymity of a random caller, we would have never been in this mess).

The items of concern was a pot pipe in the room that the family stayed in. I did not allow drugs to be used in my house and the brother clearly described the pot pipe to them as he had seen his brother pipe before, so there was no doubt that this pipe belonged to a known drug addict that lived in that room. Still no go, so now we are being investigated not for child abuse, as the original allegation claimed, but drug abuse, so they go through my medicine cabinet and catalog every pill bottle I have.

Then the drug test come back, and I come back positive for a controlled substance, Alazopram, I have had panic attacks since I was about 10 years old and have been under a doctors care for that long. They know this but feign like they don't.

They then decide to contact my doctor and volunteer the information that I am being investigated for drug abuse and then show up on my door to inform me that I will have to attend mandatory drug classes and enter a rehab facility or they will bring it before the judge. My lawyer called their bluff because they knew I had a prescription for the medication because they interviewed my doctor. Yet when they came to my house they acted like they must have missed the pill bottle with my name on it and asked to see it again. They looked at it for all of .2 seconds and then said well since you have a prescription it is probably best that we go ahead and close the case.

DCF gets brownie points if they can get you entered into some social program if they cannot build a case to get a conviction. They will do everything in their power to do so.

In my case they had a blatant case of their system being used to victimize someone else and instead of upholding justice they saw an opportunity to score a win due to poor circumstances (me not finding a pipe in the closet when we cleaned the room). They would have railroaded me if they could have with no concern as to right and wrong. I feel so bad for those who do not have the resources to retain a lawyer. Nevertheless like the article states the stain remains even after the case is closed. I always wonder if my doctor secretly thinks that I am a drug addict now. I was in a state of fear that my medicine for panic attacks would not be available to me due to the political risk of having me as a patient.

I feared having my children taken away and believe that they had pushed me past the point of breaking. If they had taken my children I believe at that point I could have hurt myself or others. To be innocent with the truth so obvious and to have people ignore it makes you feel victimized and it makes you want to victimize the ones that are doing it to you. I think that is probably the one time in life that someone or some thing had driven me to the edge of sanity. I love my children more than anything in my life and I started to have crazy thought of having to protect my children at all costs. It was insane and they had no regard for the human wreckage they where leaving in their wake.

Fortunately, I held it together, my lawyer, just like the one in the article, constantly reminded me that if I displayed aggression they would use it against me. If I snapped and went postal they would use it against my wife and I would no longer be here to help my wife and children navigate that mess. And if I just killed myself that I would be a coward that left my wife and kids to fend for themselves. It is hard for a man because he has a natural instinct to protect his family and to have to quell that instinct in times of extreme stress when people are truly trying to attack your family is difficult to say the least.

In the end the case was closed, DCF thought they where going to get out quick and quite when they where rebuffed with my prescription, but my lawyer had one last volley with them, in which he insisted that it be noted on our file that the report be marked as a false report. They tried to resist but he threatened civil action against the agency and they relented. I requested the file and on the last line it states subjects request that this be labeled a false report. To the very end they cannot see the victimization that they did.

Anyway, like the article said it fades into a bad memory but leaves you always looking over your shoulder. The part that I am most bitter about is that I asked the agent as she was leaving, are you guys going to bring charges against them for filing all of these false reports. To which she said well the agency dose not really do that, with the case load we don't have time to chase false reports.

The man that we tried to help ended up overdosing 2 months later. The children where never taken from them because they complied with the mandated social programs that DCF required them to do so that DCF could get their check mark. They sent him to a welfare doctor that gave him methadone and klonopin (a stronger relative of the medicine that I take, which they had no issue with their doctor prescribing to a known drug addict), he took too much of both one night and died. His 8yr old and 5y old daughter found him the next day.

EDIT: forgot to mention, wife was pregnant and had baby during the investigation to which they showed up at the hospital to decide whether we could take our new born child home or not.

This is the key takeway - and the thing that really needs to change.

In this case, like some many others, the process really broke down at that point.

But it is incredibly difficult, I imagine, to make such a call. If it later turns out you just let a child pornographer go free you will be proverbially screwed; both by the LE services and the media. We ask completely the wrong people to make these choices; inexperienced officers with a lot to lose if they make the wrong call.

If you look at a picture of naked kids in non-sexual situations and think you're seeing something sexual then there is something wrong with you. Full stop. Either you've been abused, you're an abuser yourself or you've been horribly brain washed. Any of these possibilities makes you more of a risk than the person who shot the photos.

Taking this a step further, people need to start filing scary "child pornography" charges at judges, lawyers and everyone else who participates in this kind of insanity. If the judge doesn't take one look at the photo, realize it's nothing and dismiss the case then he might well be a consumer of child pornography. Otherwise, why didn't he realize it was innocent? If a few people in power start getting their lives ruined by this nonsense maybe it would stop.

In my opinion, it is a fundamental right to raise your children according to your standards. Parents should be in control of the risks, ideas, and experiences their children are exposed to. Minority views on what is appropriate should be protected as rigorously as minority political or religious views.

I would like to see limits on state intervention in families. I'd like to see CPS investigations require probable cause, warrants, and time limits. I'd like to see a clear standard for circumstances under which the state can take action. Personally, I think the standard for any enforced separation should be clear and convincing evidence before a jury of gross neglect (lack of life necessities, repeated serious reckless injury, serious risk of death) or malicious, repetitive physical abuse. And even in those cases, I'd prefer the first conviction to result in parole, not immediate action.

Child abuse is serious business, but separating families is serious business too.

Legally, I'm going to be an adult within the month. I'm certainly not a parent, but I am a kid, and I haven't been so brainwashed as to lose sight of what pre-adolescence is like. I could go on and on about the funny, stupid, and downright embarrassing things I did, particularly before I turned "double-digits".

Side-point: Giving these decidedly private photos to a public agency to develop was an absolutely stupid thing to do, but by no stretch of the imagination can I blame everything on him because of it. That's a lesson learned, for sure, but the idea that anything else he did was "wrong" just blows my mind. I'd like to say to some of the salon commenters... don't impose your personal morals on everyone else, please. I know there's a fantastic one-word term for people who do that, but it escapes me.

It's a confession of failure for a society, if the determinant of acting is fear.

"He loved Big Brother."

We use "Orwellian" a little too loosely but for the victims of this, it seems almost that bad.

Really the harm seems to be in they way people are being treated not in trying to prevent child abuse etc...

Wrongfully, many modern societies (until recently) fiercely rejected homosexuality, with often tragic results.

The current methods of dealing with pedophilia - by suspecting everyone, every man in a park taking photos of his children - are a blight.

At some point, society will have to stop trying to drive pedophilia into the ocean and find a different way to deal with it. Nobody chooses to be a pedophile, they can just choose to repress their behaviour. We should find them and help them instead of victimizing the innocent.

On the one hand, nobody wants children to suffer. If at all possible, every child should be protected from abuse. I think the key, as the author elaborates on, is education. Knowing the difference between a crazy hippy family and pedophiles seems like common sense -- but if you, as an uneducated clerk at a crappy CVS in the middle of nowhere, saw something that offended your sensibilities and seemed perverse... Without education things like this will happen again and again. Once something like this gets into the bureaucratic pipeline it becomes an unfortunate problem of due diligence.

My run-in was no where near as large of scale, but aggrivating, humiliating, time wasting, and ridiculous. I'm no hippy journalist letting my kids run free, basically just your run of the mill suburbanite developer 8-to-5 schmoe and my wife is a Special Ed teacher . One day, we come home from work to find that DFS had tried to visit and that we must call back with a time we can be interviewed. At the time, we had a six year old and a less than 1 year old. Someone had reported us for child abuse. It was like a record scratch. What? I don't hit my kids. My oldest went to a private school. I spent plenty of time with them. Our #1 fear is leaving them somewhere so my wife watches them like a hawk. It made no sense.

We called back and an agent came by the next day. We tried to leave our oldest at school because at that age, he would babble about what was happening and other parents would find out and the stigma would be set. But she demanded to see him, so my wife went and got him while I got the 5th degree. We were accused of some stuff that seemed hilariously lame.

* We made our son pee in a dollhouse toilet and just left it there full. --- Uh, yeah, one day we found it in the back of his room behind the shelf. We think he did it and hid it. Kids do weird things. * We let our oldest run around screaming and being reckless and has untreated ADHD. -- Yeah, he has ADHD, he's took Ritalin since he was 5 and is now on Adderall. * Our home is unsafe with rotten food all over. -- Yes, my wife is messy, but not to the level of fire hazard or health violation. Rotten food? You mean like having cans from last night's dinner still next to the stove? * And numerous other things like this...

After being checked out, she said that it was most likely a false report and that it would most likely be dropped, but the file stays around permanently and that we can't find out who made the report.

Of course, our son blabbed about the experience, and now even 5 years later, none of his school friend's parents let their kids come over to our house because the original rumor. No one makes false claims, right?

I figured out who made the report through the neighborhood network. Some old guy across the street who was mad that I left the trashcans out on the front of my home instead of the side and one time when I had let our grass grow too long because every night that I got home from work and all weekend for 3 weeks it had rained a crap-ton. I still catch him taking pictures of our house to call the Neighborhood Preservation office with when I let the slightest thing go wrong. (ie, a storm gutter fell off over the night and I didn't notice until I got home from work that evening)

The worst part is, there is little you can do. Everything is "anonymous". You can't hire a lawyer to go and tell this guy to piss off. Retaliation would be stupid. You are just "stuck".

It seems like the best way to handle something like this is to bring public scrutiny to bear on the insanity. Make a politician answer for it and the case will probably disappear.

I read loads of really interesting and eye-opening posts about all sorts of non-tech subjects... but I don't feel they should be on Hacker News to the detriment of other tech stories that could be on the front page.

That said, they did make 2 very big mistakes, and if they hadn't done either or both of them, none of the rest would have happened. first, they took pictures of the kids naked. two, they let those pictures get into the hands of strangers, ones who can then misinterpret and/or be legally obliged to do certain actions which could start a witch hunt. These people knew they were innocent, that's fine, but the problem is that from a stranger's POV, what they see is that two adult men went into the forest with some some kids, some of the kids got naked, they took photos of it. Connect the dots. It paints a bad picture. They were incredibly naive to have not realized this ahead of time.

But yes, we have a horrible system, and we need to find some way to make it better so we can protect children while at the same time not persecuting innocent adults. I'm not quite sure how we can do that.

I know this won't be a popular sentiment here because there's so much loathing of government in general. It's hard to make a judgment about how well the situation was handled from one side of the story, but that he was investigated seems about right.

I guess it's kind of a pain to be the target of an investigation, but nobody's life was ruined.