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community, I want to hear your best solution to this problem. How do we build a network of people who are willing, ready, and equipped with the knowledge and power to peacefully fend off any attack or knock at the door from the dreaded CPS!https://steemit.com/familyprotection/@markwhittam/fight-fire-with-fire-then-we-all-get-burnt-again
This is a tough challenge, Mark. My suggestion is just one of many you will receive but it could be combined with others:
Thinking outside the box, Maggie Tuttle came to mind. Maggie Tuttle is an inspirational UK children's rights activist. She runs the charity and website childrenscreamingtobeheard.
Maggie insists that it's rarely in a child's best interest to be removed from a family when that child has good grandparents who are more than happy to take their grandchild in.
The pain, anger and frustration grandparents feel on losing a child to the Social Services/CPS is all too easily forgotten. In a way, grandparents experience double the pain, having to witness two generations of their own torn apart - the SS/CPS affect whole families.
"Even if a child can't go and live with mum and dad, let them go and live with extended family", pleads Maggie.
Listening to Maggie gave me the idea of forming a “Matrix of Matriarchs” - an international network of volunteer grandmothers who had seen a grandchild/grandchildren removed and wished to help others avoid that, offering support and advice to parents when the worst happens and pooling knowledge and resources.
The only qualification for joining this network would be that Granny had seen a child being removed from her family and wished to help stop it happening to others.
Example scenario:
Granny 1 is contacted by a local couple who need a crowd to show up in peaceful support of them keeping their children e.g. outside court. Granny 1 contacts nearby Grannies 2 and 3. Using their own social networks, including their own families they are soon able to muster a peaceful crowd.
Why grandmothers and not grandfathers? For simplicity's sake. Today's families are fragmented and complex - let's start with the grandmothers.
By building such a network we would be reconstructing in some way the strong inter-generational bonds that are being systematically wiped out.
Grannies make excellent activists. The new movie, Granny Power, which is about to be screened in Toronto, covers the activists network The Raging Grannies:
"The film spans the present and the past of the Raging Grannies movement: from its beginnings 25 years ago in Victoria, B.C., to its present as an international movement. The film is also a window on important issues that concern us all: our role as citizens as we grow older, the challenges of aging, the inevitability of death. Remaining active and finding a voice as elderly women, these grannies are deflating clichés about aging and proving that life can be lived to its fullest, in every way, to the end."
Photojournalist Paola Gianturco might agree: in 2012 she published an award-winning book celebrating grandmother power in many countries:
It started when she was in Kenya, talking with a group of older women about their families.
“As they went around the circle, I realized what they were telling me is they were raising their grandchildren because their children had died of AIDS,” she said.
Gianturco realised that entire communities were depending on grandmothers for their very survival and that grandmothers worldwide are working to improve their grandchildren’s futures. Her book, published in 2012, includes stories of grandmothers in Canada, Swaziland, and South Africa who collaborate to care for AIDS orphans, grandmothers in India who are becoming solar engineers, and grandmothers in Thailand fighting against environmental degradation.
We must not be naive: mothers and grandmothers can be incompetent; abusers at worst - of course there are women in pedophile and other criminal networks. And in some cases, a child really has been removed from a family with intergenerational issues in his or her best interest. So it is not impossible that this network could be infiltrated by evil or disruptive grannies. But I believe the number of good grannies well outweighs the bad: a group of them regularly chatting or otherwise communicating on the networks would soon root out any bad apples.
And the fact that the network was about helping parents and children and grandchildren from other families would reduce the potential for jealousy and other conflicts. To get round confidentiality issues and gagging orders, parents consulting grannies could choose aliases for themselves and their children.
Just a few reasons to choose grannies (there are many more):
- Some grandparents are already custodial - so they will be familiar with all the legal ins and outs of cases and how to jump through the legal hoops set by the State:
Many grannies are more awake politically than their sons and daughters.
The granny generation talks to each other - most don't spend all day glued to their phones (yet).
Grannies have more life experience. They may have worked all their lives in a relevant occupation e.g. in teaching - or even for the CPS (insider information)!
Grannies who have supported a son and daughter having their children stolen have specialist legal knowledge and experience.
Most have more time than their busy sons and daughters.
Most have a few more resources, whether these are money or wisdom, hundreds of friends and acquaintances or just dogged determination and a healthy suspicion of police and social services.
So that's my suggestion:
