The CYFS Succubus – And How to Fight It

S14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (BORA) gives the fundamental right of freedom of expression. The Supreme Court has been careful to protect this right, going so far as to allow a protest outside a police officer’s house. Freedom of expression is all the more important in this instance because this site is itself a protest against the worst kind of oppression imaginable.

It is the common calling card of all evil and oppressive systems and regimes to destroy any source of information capable of challenging their oppression. This site being one of the few mediums to expose the monster that is CYFS is therefore one of the greatest threats to its monopoly.

Those of us who dedicate our lives or at least part of them to the pursuit of truth and wisdom sometimes call ourselves philosophers or lovers of wisdom. It is a dangerous pursuit, and the path is often called “the razors edge”. Buddha, Christ, Moses, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Hubbard and many others treaded that path and many were destroyed by the very darkness that they sought to dispel.

I do not even dare to say that I am worthy of speaking the names of these masters; but the fight for justice must be taken up even by the smallest of us whilst we have the breath to fight. Injustice begins with the bully in the playground who is not stopped, with the rudeness of an official that goes unchecked, with a child wrongly removed that is not challenged and ends in despotism, and the destruction of human liberty- a shadowy world of darkness.

All those who have had their children removed face the greatest of all deprivations of human rights, one of the greatest injustices short of imprisonment or death, the deprivation of one’s flesh and blood. The crime against you is magnified by the fact that your voice is not heard, forbidden, choked and no one listens. They have sought to censor the only forum where you can speak. Why? Why ban your cry for justice, your tears and your anguish- have you asked yourself that question? The answer -or at least one of them- is far darker than many of us would care to know, and like all evil most of us are afraid to face it.

The weapons of philosophy are only language and truth – I would like to begin with definitions so that we can agree on the terminology. It is only after this that any meaningful discussion can be had.

Succubus:

A succubus is a ghost that drains the energy out of the living. By its nature it is dead and hates life, it is vampiric and needs the lifeblood of its victims to survive. Legend has it that the succubus cannot enter until it is invited, if invited it will stay until its victim is drained of its energy and also becomes a succubus. The victims of succubi often become mad. Of the numerous legends and myths on succubi spanning all cultures one recurring theme is evident: succubi love to attack the weakest and most defenseless, especially women and children. The removal of a child by a succubus and the ensuing grief of the parents is the succubus’s greatest pleasure where it reaches the height of its power.

Nazi:
Nazi stands for National Socialism. It is a particular brand of government and political philosophy that puts the values of society above the rights of the individual. It assumes that society knows best. Nazism is not as many assume simply limited to Hitler’s Germany. It takes its roots in fact from the Spartan philosophy that everyone’s life and liberty is subservient to the greater good of the community. the Nazi philosophy is that if a parent is not “fit” to mould a child into a good citizen (whether the parent is someone who others consider inappropriate -e.g. too ill, too intelligent, too politically incorrect, too non-conformist, etc then the state should and can remove that child. Nazism has complete contempt for human rights.

Crime:
A crime is something that is against law and the rule of law, something against the international laws of humanity and human rights. The fact that a crime is committed using the help of the law by a decree does not make it less of an offence. For example if a child is removed in breach of international human rights conventions where the party removing the child knows full well that it is breaching these conventions, then that person is a criminal in the wider sense of the word.

There are a lot of people, many of them highly educated, in social work and psychology and medicine and law who have realized that the current practices of CYFS in a number of cases are abhorrent and criminal.
I will not go into statistics or detailed facts as this is not the place but it is fairly correct to state the following observations:

• New Zealand CYFS workers are poorly trained, incompetent and underpaid. The internal culture of the organisation has traces of Nazism. This has been the subject of a great deal of press which has come to a head with the case of the British social workers who have left. These workers told the press that they were forced to remove children sometimes with police and dogs present. In cases when this was not needed and the children should never have been removed. These social workers who had consciences were made to sign documents prohibiting them from revealing certain matters to the public as part of their initial work contract. This shows that CYFS has something to hide. One asks why a governmental organsiation would force its workers to sign such agreements. Some of these social workers became extremely depressed and left their jobs. From this the following logical conclusion would follow: In addition it is not uncommon for CYFS to remove children from a birth mother at birth thus causing irreparable psychological trauma to the mother. This is justified on “possible” harm grounds and raises questions about whether human rights have any value in the removal process.

i. It is the opinion of many that CYFS workers who remain a long time in the in the system remain because they are either succubi and enjoy the power or are so incompetent that they cannot get a job anywhere else. Those who still have a conscience leave.

ii. It would follow that Such people see nothing wrong with breaking the spirit and the letter of the law, misleading the courts and lying to obtain their desired result. The removal of the child becomes a power game.

Further, CYFS uses psychologists to justify removal. These psychologists, without any scientific basis for their opinions, form vague and deliberately obscure assessments on the best interests of the child. These psychologists know that their opinion will be accepted by the judge without question. However, they forget to tell the judge that their opinions are about as valuable as those of a priest (probably less so) as psychology is not a science. Their assessments are often wrong and incompetent but difficult to rebut because only their friends and colleagues are permitted to provide such opinions in court because only those listed as “court experts” are in practice permitted to give evidence.

Many counsels for the child and CYFS workers actually advise the court that someone is writing on this web site as if it were a crime. This appears to be intended to influence the court’s opinion of that person and is a further vehicle of oppression.

I have personally witnessed the following cases:

1. A mother who had her child snatched at birth without any valid legal reason being provided.

2. A mother who had her child removed shortly after birth due to a deliberate misdiagnosis with a psychiatric illness which did not in fact exist.

3. A mother who had her child removed and given to an insane pedophile when the agency knew the man was a pedophile.

4. A mother who had her child removed and given to a violent and abusive father despite of a protection order in favour of her and the child.

I have been told of dozens of cases where CYFS have placed children of fairly normal parents with caregivers who abused them repeatedly sexually, physically and psychologically, and CYFS did nothing about it even after they have found out about the abuse. I have been told of one case where a child was put in a home where the caregiver was an alcoholic and her son was a marijuana user who made the child smoke, dance and perform monkey tricks under the threat of torture and even when the child escaped CYFS did not change that child’s caregiver status.

From this and many other cases I have witnessed and had reported I have formed the distinct opinion that CYFS care nothing about children. I have openly written of this in an article in the Investigate Magazine.

CYFS replied in the later edition that I was incorrect but pertinently they never told me why. This shows they really have no arguments in response because the above matters are true.

There are hundreds if not thousands of such cases where children are wrongly removed, given to abusive caregivers, and sometimes they suffer irreparable damage and are scarred for life. In fact a large number of those now in the criminal and psychiatric system are ex-CYFS children.

It follows that these cases are examples of breaches of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCROC) and the BORA, not to mention a number of other conventions ratified by New Zealand.

The removal of children in such circumstances is nothing less than a crime. All those who participate in this process are nothing less than criminals and hopefully the day will come when they are exposed and held accountable. In the meantime, unfortunately and for a number of reasons I would rather not say in print, the system is such that this web site is the only avenue for someone to expose the truth.

One must not forget that all movements for human liberty were conceived in such small and seemingly insignificant beginnings. The civil rights movement in America exposed the racist laws and attitudes of governmental departments through information, civil protest and the few civil liberties lawyers who had the gall to take on the system. It was the light of information and court action which eventually changed the system from within. Succubi hate the light and so do the institutions who serve them. I want to raise at this point a small irony. Not so long ago, many New Zealanders who considered themselves human rights activists protested apartheid with such vehemence yet today there are no protests in the streets about wrongful removal of children- why?

In this article I have of course made a number of generalisations. There are of course a lot of people who beat, molest or hurt their children in a number of foul and unforgivable ways. These people undoubtedly deserve to have their children removed, but ironically such people rarely fall under the radar of CYFS and are unlikely to be reading this web site. Indeed a number of such people are CYFS approved caregivers and there is a body of information to support this statement. Indeed ask yourself what kind of person would volunteer to look after someone else’s children full time for a small amount of money?

The other generalisation is that CYFS workers are succubi. Not all CYFS workers are succubi but the ones that are not are encouraged to either leave as soon as practicable. It is difficult to work in a Nazi organisation without becoming part of the culture. You cannot, for example, be a member of the Ku Klux Klan without sharing their values to some degree.

Finally it appears that I have stated that CYFS is a completely valueless and useless institution. Statistics show that it is just that. Despite having one of the toughest and most brutal agencies in the world we have the highest rates of child abuse and sexual abuse per capita. Why? Because CYFS does not solve abuse, it is impotent in the face of abuse it does not have the skill to recognize it. Without CYFS there would be no greater abuse, indeed abuse and neglect are already crimes and can easily be handled by the criminal courts and the police.

So I have made numerous completely un-PC statements. That is because PC is the same as Nazism. Human rights and freedoms are not about political correctness, it is no longer politically correct to be fearless and forthright lest you offend anyone. For example, CYFS and family court considers that pedophiles have a right to contact with their children whereas mothers with “mental problems” can have their children permanently removed without any meaningful contact. This is PC logic. If one has even an elementary training in anthropology one would have read Foucault, the right of taking a child (usually the first born) from the parents has been used by all conquerors against conquered nations. The removal of the child is the symbol of the impotence and powerlessness of the slave, it is a testament that if we can take your child we can do anything we like. You are nothing- in fact less than nothing. This symbolic social castration is the ultimate unconscious symbolic subjugation of the modern citizen. Today it is practiced on the weak and defenseless; tomorrow it will be extended to reach all citizens. Logically, having no right to raise your children is tantamount to having no rights at all.

Let us look further at the irony of this -people would be shocked to hear of a state which forbids mentally ill people to bear children. That state would be condemned. Yet no one even points to the irony that in new Zealand your child can be removed just because a psychologist thinks you “may” be mentally ill or “improper” parent. So you can have a child if you are considered mentally ill but you are not allowed to raise them. This is one of society’s logical fallacies a skeleton kept ina dark cupboard and not spoken about. In fact the removal of children are in many cases based on value judgements that the parents are alcoholics, mentally ill, poor parents or some other undefined factor without defining accurately what these things mean. It is nothing else than a social sterilization. I am talking about cases where there is no proven physical harm to the child and no actual psychological harm but CYFS is not happy about the environment in which the child is raised. These are in fact the majority of cases.

So now I wish to provide you with at least some guidance on how to fight the succubus. I have deliberately left out legal terminology and case law due to this being a hands-on paper on the basics. However, in time I will try to reference this with links to the relevant web sites and cases:

STEP-1 THE Family Group Conference(FGC)

Apart from the emergency powers CYFS have to remove children when they are in imminent danger, most removals occur after a family group conference is held. That is because a declaration by the court authorizing removal can only be made after CYFS convenes and holds and FGC.

There is a vast amount of literature and policy statements written by CYFS as to how the FGC is such a wonderful, fair and democratic process. This is almost always window dressing and in many cases the FGC is simply an informal precursor to removing the child.

Many parents have said that If you let CYFS run the FGC in the way they want to you will find yourself misquoted, misstated and having been on the record as agreeing to the fact that your child is at risk from you. Then it becomes impossible to change the record. This FGC is the window for the succubus.

For the record you have the following rights:

• To be informed of the exact reasons for why the child is in need of care and protection.
• To have your family members attend including extended family.
• To have the child informed, the consequences explained and the child’s views heard.
• To have a support person and your lawyer present.
• To view and comment on any proposed plan that CYFS proposes for the care and protection of the child.
• To possibly ask for a second FGC
• However, the most important purpose of the FGC (on paper) is to find a way to keep the child in the family if possible. That indeed is the statutory obligation of CYFS. Unfortunately, this principle is often ignored.

You must therefore prepare carefully for the FGC, insist on every right provided by the policy and legislation and take detailed notes because if you fail to do so, you will find a completely different account at court and you would be in an unenviable position of having to prove your case. Request an audio recording and if not allowed, as for reasons. Make sure your support person takes notes of everything and signs them as witness. Finally NEVER EVER AGREE THAT THE CHILD IS IN NEED OF CARE AND PROTECTION UNLESS HE /SHE ACTUALLY IS IN NEED OF SUCH PROTECTION FROM YOU. YOUR AGREEMENT IS INDEED ONE OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE POWER TO REMOVE.

STEP-2

You will now have a court date whereby you have to prepare a defence to the declaration. In many cases your child will have already been removed and access denied or supervised access imposed. This will have occurred ex parte i.e. without hearing your side of the story and in many cases based on incorrect statements by CYFS staff and officers or misdiagnosis or incompetent reports by CYFS psychologists. The court will undoubtedly believe these people over you.

In order to have a chance you must do the following:

• Control what you say and do, any signs of anger and protest will be twisted to label you as aggressive or mentally unstable. Appear calm, never meet with CYFS staff or especially with your child unless you have a support person there to record everything said. The support person must be someone who is credible in court and who is prepared to take notes. The best is a social worker from an outside organisation because they have the most credibility. All contact with CYFS should be in writing wherever possible.

• Get a social worker whom you trust or can find to make an independent assessment of you and provide an affidavit to the court as to your suitability.

• Find a psychologist willing to be an expert witness engaged by you, he will be able to give evidence as to the false and misleading reports filed by CYFS and to challenge any inaccuracies in the psychiatric reports.

• Find as many people as possible to be witnesses on your behalf. The evidence of people who have known you and can attest to your being a good parent makes it much harder to find against you.

• If you have a psychological condition, make sure that your doctor, psychiatrist, or psychologist is available to explain the condition properly. It is a sad fact that a majority of people discriminate against and are prejudiced against people with perceived mental illnesses to the extent that they hold (secretly) the view that mentally ill people or depressed people should not be near children. This was view held by the Nazi psychiatrist who destroyed and sterilized Germany’s mentally ill and created an organsiation very similar in concept to CYFS designed to take children away from the unfit. This view has influenced modern New Zealand family law and psychology. Therefore someone professional and able to allay the prejudices would be a great asset. Of course such experts are hard to come by.

The following applications should be considered:

1. An application under the Official Information Act 1982 for the entire file. On many occasions despite this the entire file is not released. Third parties such as doctors’ notes etc should also be considered in a discovery application to the court. You will be surprised how much information you can get.

2. An application that the court allow your expert to access to all psych reports so he can critique them.

3. An application for access (urgent interim access).

4. If the child is of age and counsel for the child is not doing his/her job to ascertain the wishes of the child, then make an application that either your psychologist or a court appointed psychologist, or even the Judge to ascertain the child’s views. This is dangerous territory because depending on the timing of the application it could be that the child has already been brainwashed and has been told what to say.

Indeed on a similar note I have been witness to a case where a caregiver was willing to testify for my client as to the child’s wishes to be returned and CYFS threatened that if she did so she would be penalised by having her parenting “investigated”. This incident was carefully noted by the Citizens’ Commission of Human Rights.

STEP 3 -COMPLAINTS AND INFORMATION.

Document your case in detail but avoid emotional language, swear words and emotive phrases. Succinctly document the acts that have been unfair or wrong in law. At this stage you have the right to use the media and this web site but you must be careful to do so in away that does not break the law. This requires a number of detailed considerations. One possible interpretation of the family legislation is that you cannot talk about a case if it identifies the children or the parties. Nothing is stated about mentioning the CYFS workers and the facts of the case. I once had this argument with the Judge when I pointed out that the BORA permits my client to write about the case, the Judge ordered that I seek permission, I asked her for an order that my client is not permitted to publish so that I could appeal it. The order was never made because, I believe, the Judge knew that basically to forbid freedom of expression was contrary to law. You do not need a judge’s permission to express your opinion that CYFS breaches fundamental human rights and has done so in your case. However, at the same time you should follow the letter of the legislation by not mentioning the children’s or parents’ names. Try also to use formal language because the statute actually makes an exception that a case may be written about in an academic publication. This site could actually with stylistic changes become an academic publication and hence conform to the category.

Issue press releases so that the press can cover your case. If you knock hard enough, press attention can be extremely powerful, for example, David Bain’s case. In fact many of your cases are just as atrocious as Bain’s- children are imprisoned by the state against their wishes and torn from their parents.

The Commissioner of Children will usually write that they cannot get involved because there are court proceedings, making their role virtually nonexistent. While they are correct in assuming that they cannot get involved in the very issue before court the Commissioner can nonetheless get involved with CYFS’s wrongful actions which are not subject to court proceedings. So complain anyway.

Ombudsmen also have the statutory power to inquire into administrative misconduct and unfair treatment. Make a complaint to them also.

Amnesty international is an organization dealing with human rights and breaches. The same complaint should be made to them if there is evidence of rights being breached.

Human Rights Tribunal/Commission. A written complaint ghoul be made to them too.

The Citizens’ Commission of Human Rights is a body that will impartially and fairly investigate your complaint and give you access to some resources and provide assistance.

There is a principle that CYFS uses effectively- if you sling enough mud some will stick. This is used to devastating effect to paint a picture against defenseless parents who are often weak, traumatized and financially deprived. Expose this practice by joining together, sharing stories and getting statements of other parents who have been through the same ordeal. After a while these documented testimonials can be used as background support for your complaints to various bodies and courts.

Finally and not least in importance is civil protest. Form a group and protest your rights to get media attention and public acknowledgement. It is a sad truth that the majority of the New Zealand public still believes that we have one of the best fairest and most child centered systems in the world. Nothing really has changed since Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, at least in New Zealand.

Step-4

If by this time you have come to realise that you cannot get any fair treatment from the system, and the family court has not properly considered your rights or is simply not properly dealing with your matters then you should consider one of the greatest weapons available but hardly used in family law in New Zealand -judicial review. Strangely judicial review is common place in England against CYFS with powerful results. Here, it is virtually unheard of in the CYF arena but it is really only the High Court that will properly consider whether the family court has properly considered international conventions such as the UNCROC and the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights.

Thus the above conventions and rights are relevant considerations that must be taken into account. Some family court judges consider openly that they are irrelevant. Indeed I have been told by a family court Judge that UNCROC-the right of a parent and child to be together is not relevant in care and protection proceedings where the test is the best interest of the child. Clearly the Judge cannot be right because the best interests test must be read in light of and pursuant to UNCROC but this mistake is actually the reason why so many kids get removed. Judges apply the best interests test without really understanding what that means and that usually means what CYFS and the psychiatrists say it means.

Judicial review is actually far simpler than many make it out to be and relatively fast. Unfortunately legal aid is rarely available. Judicial review also has another advantage -you have an automatic right of appeal to the Court of Appeal, whereas in family appeals you must seek leave after the High Court has decided. This belies both the statutory rule that leave must be sought in family matters because most think that they are “unimportant”..

One must always remember that the case law and the statute state explicitly that a child can only be removed if there is evidence of serious risk to the child. This is conveniently ignored in many cases. I have seen some people who replace this with a vague opinion by psychiatrists that the parent has poor parenting skills I am not entirely sure of what this means because there is no definition of good parenting skills and indeed no possible scientific evaluation of parenting skills.

Why, you may ask, would a governmental agency wish to remove children from perfectly fit parents? Well you should know that for every permanently placed child agencies like Barnardos and CYFS get approximately $100,000 of government funding. The more children removed the more funding the more powerful the agency becomes. It is good for everyone, at least except for parents and children -but they do not really factor in the equation.

Step 5

It is of course understood by all that the higher one climbs the better the justice, but also the colder the air and the harder the path. The Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court are the final New Zealand avenues. You have an appeal as of right if you file judicial review and it is rejected. The Court of Appeal actually works on principles and is more open to human rights arguments. It is getting to the Court of Appeal that is difficult.

There is a final avenue and indeed your whole case should be geared to this avenue, It is outside New Zealand, it is the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. New Zealanders have recourse to this commission if they have been rejected elsewhere, but you must exhaust all remedies available locally i.e. you must go to the High Court, Court of Appeal and if leave is granted, the Supreme Court.

The UN Commission has recently made a declaration that New Zealand has breached the UN Convention on Civil and Political rights in a case far less serious than many CYFS cases related to not giving access in a timely manner. The reason why more people do not bring cases to the UN Commission is that it takes so long and most people get destroyed by the process and give up somewhere along the way.

Do not give up. That is what the succubi want you to do and your child is the most precious gift you have. The UN Commission is free, it does not take much effort to draft a claim but you must exhaust all remedies.

Conclusion:

Although garlic holy water and certain sharp stakes can in popular legend destroy the succubus, the true destruction of the succubus can only be brought by someone with heart full of love, faith and strength in the endurance to complete the task. Love is the beginning, the middle and the end, without its power the journey of struggle should not be commenced at all.