Hello Steemians.
Today I would like to write my first post for @familyprotection. As some of you may remember from my very first post here on steemit.com, I have a long history with child protective services, actually called "the ministry for children and family development" here in British Columbia, or "MCFD". My interactions with MCFD began when I was a child, but this post is about an experience I had while living in Victoria, BC just before Christmas of 2012.
I had recently spent a lot of time in court working to get my two daughters back out of foster care. I had been involved in several ministry imposed parenting program as well as attending counseling at the Men's Trauma Center while taking antidepressants.
The children were returned to me around mid December, 2011. On December 20th a friend and his girlfriend came over for a few drinks after the girls had gone to bed. My girlfriend (at the time) and my friends girlfriend were "non-alcoholic" and didn't drink at all while my friend and I split 12 beer. We hadn't seen each other since we were teenagers so we were remembering old times and talking about old friends, arm wrestling, being a little loud I guess. The downstairs neighbors already didn't like use because of noisy kids (in a family complex) so they decided to call in a noise complaint to the police.
The police came, saw that nothing was going on and all the kids were still sleeping soundly and left, they barely asked any questions.
The next morning my social worker showed up at the door as we were on our way out. She said the police called her and said I was drinking and being noisy so she wanted to come check on us. Next she told me that she had arranged for some respite care for the girls so I could get a break once in a while and that it started then, on that day. She said the girls will be gone for three days and that I would have them back by Christmas. I didn't trust the situation at all and I but my social worker made it very clear to me that there was nothing I could do about it so instead of causing a scene and having the cops called in front of my toddlers, I chose to tell them that everything was OK, and that I would see them in three days. I hugged and kissed them and smiled as I told them that I will see them soon.
That was the last time I spoke to them for a month. No phone calls, no visits, i didn't even know where they were. I called and called my social worker, her boss, I contacted lawyers and politicians, newspapers and media outlets, all to no avail. All I could do was wait for court dates that were months away.
Finally I became furious and decided to expose this homewrecker for who and what she was. I built a website, on that website I wrote a story, non-fiction. I started from the beginning, before the incident at Christmas, when this social worker started to pick apart my family. I wrote in great detail about everything that had happened and what I had tried to do about it. I used real names. I posted it on Facebook and Craigslist, I paid money for advertisements on google to spread my website as far as i could. I sent it to the parliament buildings, the news station, to everywhere I could think of. Someone at the news station referred me to a lawyer who was a friend of his. This person became a lawyer because of having to fight MCFD for custody of her own kids many years ago! She was amazing and was with me every step of the way after that.
All the publicity from my website finally got the attention of my social worker, her boss, and their lawyers.
They sat me down and threatened to sue me. They said it was slander. I told them it's only slander if its not true. They said that I have to take the website down or they will "file an injunction".
I looked across the table and said "you have already taken everything from me, I have nothing left. What do you think you're going to get from suing me? Its not going to stop me from setting up websites and writing on them".
For the first time throughout all of this I finally saw fear in the eyes of the ministry workers. I told them I would take the website down only if they got me a different social worker who was going to do the job properly and stop messing around with my family.
They did. They sent me "the specialist" as I call him. Clearly he is the "PR social worker" sent to clean up the mess. He and I went over my file, arranged to have my children returned to me and my file closed. Since then I have not had any social worker show any interest in me at all and now my file is marked as restricted so not even social workers can read all of it.
This was one of many destructive experiences with MCFD, I hope that sharing it with you helps someone, somewhere.
Thank you for reading!
