[alexamenos]

a view from inside the san angelo coliseum/concentration camp...

Mental health workers rip CPS over sect
Staff complains agency traumatized kids, disregarded mothers' rights

By ROGER CROTEA
San Antonio Express-news

Mental health workers sent to emergency shelters in San Angelo last month to help care for the hundreds of women and children removed from a polygamist sect's West Texas ranch have sharply criticized the Child Protective Services operation, telling their governing board it unnecessarily traumatized the kids.

The CPS investigation of suspected child abuse and its decision to seek state custody of all 464 children punished mothers who appeared to be good parents of healthy, well-behaved and emotionally normal kids, workers said in a set of short and unsigned written reports made at the request of the board after a briefing Tuesday.


Threatened arrests
All nine reports by employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state's child welfare agency for removing the children from their community, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter.

A few described ongoing tension between the two groups of social workers, including threats by CPS to have interfering MHMR workers arrested.

"I have worked in Domestic Violence/Sexual Abuse programming for over 20 years and have never seen women and children treated this poorly, not to mention their civil rights being disregarded in this manner," one wrote.

The workers spent several days in San Angelo, some shortly after the April 3 search of the Yearning for Zion Ranch prompted by a sexual abuse complaint, during the chaotic opening of a shelter in the city's coliseum, or in the days leading up to the children's dispersal to foster care facilities across the state later that month.

"The entire MH support staff was 'fired' the second week; we were sent home due to being 'too compassionate,' " one report stated....

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one of the flds moms speaks for herself....

one of the more troubling things to me has been how easily these women have been demonized in an oh-so politically correct way -- they're zombies, automatons who lack the capacity to think or act for themselves.

anyhoo....maggie jessop answers the *brainwashed zombie* charge rather forcefully --

I am an FLDS woman and I am entitled to the same rights as you
Maggie Jessop

....

So, you want to hear from the FLDS women, huh? OK, you asked for it.
However, I may not have it within my psychological or emotional capacity to communicate appropriately due to the widespread "fact" that I belong to an uneducated, underprivileged, information-deprived, brainless, spineless, poor, picked-on, dependent, misled class of women identified as "brain-washed." [nb: /sarcasm] But, I'll give it my best shot.
....
Who is brainwashed, after all, may I ask? Excuse me, please, but I feel completely indignant that authorities in the state of Texas would insult my level of intelligence, however minimal it may be, and label me a half-wit when I have witnessed hundreds of numbskulls lower themselves so pathetically, responding without conscience in blind obedience to orders from the Gestapo. And they call me brainwashed? Amazing.
I believe the truth shall be known and right will prevail. In the meantime, I continue to lug around my gargantuan briefcase as I search for my children. That briefcase really ought to be a diaper bag.
My day planner ought to be filled with ideas for a day of improvement with my children, for nothing is more joyful than witnessing the development of a child from heaven, nothing more pleasant than watching a beautiful bud of the rarest flower on earth blossom into a picture of loveliness, a precious bloom in the garden of life, nourished by that eternal element of unconditional love, a gift from our Eternal Father, which He makes available to His children through the instrumentality of unselfish motherhood.
My pillow really ought to be a sacred place where I can rest my weary head after a satisfying day of interaction with precious children, not a sponge of sorrow to mop the tears of a childless mother.