Dear Aislinn,
Regarding Kathy Hollimans article Man branded as abuser fights DHS to see kids: Dad says state gets mileage from unfounded claims (March 15-16, p.1) and Commissioner Concannons editorial response (March 22-23, p.A13), the original article is among the best reporting I have read about a tragic abuse of our child protection system and family court law -- false accusations of child abuse in cases of disputed custody or visitation. Commissioner Concannons response pleads particular exceptions and bureaucratic assurances about proper review procedures, while ignoring the underlying issues of bias against fathers, and the political agenda of some, not all, social workers, child therapists, and family counselors. 
The deeper issues include the suggestibility of children (of everyone, in fact), especially at times of crisis, the tendency for child abuse teams to close ranks in denying malpractice or irrational determinations, and the inability of the court system to distinguish between fabrication and flawed Freudian theory that was effectively debunked sixty years ago. Once the DHS accuses a father of child abuse, he is guilty until proven innocent, and there are no acceptable avenues to prove innocence. The falsely accused and his child(ren) are treated in inhumane and demeaning ways, in situations inhospitable to nurturing family ties, by people actively attacking the parent-child bond.
Divorces are unpleasant at best and often traumatic. When there are children involved, one is tinkering with the DNA of human relationships, not only man-woman, but father-son, mother-daughter, brother-sister, eventually, perhaps, a step-parent or two, and the host of his family and her family and their friends and relations. This is the tap root of our society upon which divorce has become a blight and needlessly traumatic for the children involved. "This is what we normally do in these situations," says the judge. "I had to recommend visitation the court would accept," says the family evaluator, and one is left seeing ones kids alternating weekends and Wednesday afternoons. "Kids need fathers, not visitors" should be a bumper-sticker available at every family counseling clinic, every family courtroom, every DHS office, every women's shelter, every lawyer, every social worker. Instead you get, Mother gives good touch, let's talk about daddy.
Now as a professional, the "child therapist" is obliged to report the suggested "disclosure" to the DHS child protection team, which in turn must make a "determination" whether to "substantiate" the suggested "disclosure." The DHS determination is often the first the falsely accused parent ever knows that his world has been blown apart. In some states a report of disclosure from a professional child therapist is ample cause to "substantiate" the report in and of itself, but in any case the official "disclosure" is the operative icon, transforming the child into a "victim" and the father into a "perpetrator," prompting a report to the police representative to the "child protection team," and obtaining a "temporary" order from the court protecting the "at risk" child with the added cruelty of "supervised visitation in a neutral [i.e., hostile] environment." In practice, the "temporary" order is often the first of many that will endure for the rest of the childs youth, and all meaningful parenthood is ended for the falsely accused.
The horrors that can devolve from the malpractice of one bad social worker would fill several volumes. One social worker can carry multiple, well paid roles as the child's therapist, the enabler to the controlling, vindictive mother, the initiator of the abuse, the principal, often the only accuser or professional reporter, a leader of the local child abuse action team, the principal expert witness for the state in court, and in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. One dual role is usually considered to be unethical in truly professional circles, but reports of malpractice and unethical behavior to state professional review boards are solved by a simple, bureaucratic Catch-22:
The professional in question was trained to act this way, and she is acting according to her training, therefore this malpractice is, by definition, NOT malpractice, and anyway I have to work with these people, day in, day out.
As with the family court judge, an old prosecutor from way back, who has no idea what is going on and simply relies upon his own court appointed lawyer for the child, who in turn is a fascist weasel who wants to be a judge himself, while collecting his hourly rate paid for by the falsely accused father.
As with the dotty court appointed child's guardian ad litem with the lascivious imagination and platitudes and conspiracy theories and meddlesome ways. As with the jack-booted Gestapo case workers of the DHS, SRS, Dept. of MH, with close ties to the women's crisis center and other local covens, the very coinage of the term
feminazi. As with the last court of appeal, the creme de la disinterested professional community, the Ph.D. of family evaluators, chosen by the accusing sex abuse expert and paid for by the falsely accused father. Why not get the best? Say, for instance, Harvard Medical School and Mass General's Children and the Law program, with its snakes with credentials defending their bizarre published theses and hidden political agendas to defend the most lucrative child sex abuse industry, and the children be damned.
Substantiated cases of child sexual abuse seem to be running at about 2.1 per thousand children nationally and slightly lower, 1.2 per thousand in New England. Maine is well in line with these rates, having an overall substantiation rate of 15.5/1000 children (4,767 cases in 1994) and a child sexual abuse rate of 1.8/1000 (559 cases in 1994). It is impossible to know from the figures how many of these substantiated cases involve children who are the subject of custody or visitation disputes. The states do not report such fine distinctions, despite years of clearly indicated abuse of the child protection system in these cases.
Let us modestly assume that only half those substantiated cases are false positives. That certainly may pump $32 million a year into the Vermont child sex abuse industry - right out of the pockets of the falsely accused father. In Maine, "David" spent $100,000 and seems to be making progress, with your help. In Vermont, I spent $100,000 -- my daughter's college fund -- and can no longer even write her a letter. In fact, very few fathers have such financial resources, so it may certainly be just $10 million a year diverted into the local Vermont child sex abuse industry. "For every one of me," you write, "there are 250 fathers who had to give up." There are more than that. Justice has two roads in these cases -- (1) give up or (2) run out of money. In either case, upon false accusation the father is assumed to be guilty until he reaches one of those conclusions, and the baby, already twisted out of shape by the usual suspects, is condemned to a childhood without a father by the perpetrators themselves.