MCFD Dirty Tricks Series

Introduction

This material is an introduction to the seamy underbelly of the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD ) operating procedure. This is the "Dirty Tricks" section that isn't in the policy manual, but ought to be, on how to take and keep children. All MCFD agents know them, use them, and pass them on as oral tradition. Their goal: Take as many children as possible. Their method: Dirty tricks.

Forget the law and regulations. They do! They use illegal police state tactics, and have all the power. They fear the law no more than Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great "robber baron" financier and railroad builder of the last century did. MCFD has everyone, even judges and lawyers, scared of that power.

MCFD doesn't seem to know the difference between actual abuse and minor harm, and takes thousands of children every year from families who have not abused them. Spanking, arguing, accidents, even praying, are now considered to be abuse or neglect. If you have intentionally abused your children, that is a different story, and you should get a lawyer to help you.

Most people simply do not believe that a government agency charged with helping families would use these police-state tactics. Believe it. Sometimes it takes months of being on the business end of their dirty tricks before a person finally realizes that the MCFD agent is NOT their friend. This information will help you shorten that process of disbelief, and allow you to start protecting yourself before more damage is done to your family.

This material is not a substitute for good legal help. You need a good, dedicated lawyer in order to win. To have a chance against them, you and your lawyer must fight like your children's future depends on it. It does.

THIS MATERIAL IS NOT SPECIFIC LEGAL ADVICE FOR YOUR CASE. THEY ARE GENERAL PRINCIPLES, WHICH MAY NOT APPLY IN EVERY CASE. REVIEW IT WITH YOUR LAWYER BEFORE DECIDING HOW TO DEAL WITH THE MCFD. I WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR PROBLEMS YOU CAUSE BY NOT GETTING LEGAL ADVICE. YOU WOULD NOT FLY AN AIRPLANE WITH NO TRAINING. DON'T PRACTICE LAW, EITHER, WITHOUT TRAINING.

The first MCFD dirty trick is making you think they would NEVER use dirty tricks to take your children. Beneath the nice exterior of your friendly MCFD agent is a person whose job is to take children - your children. MCFD takes children from about 25% of the families for which they provide services, and that percentage is on the increase.

MCFD is there to help you, right? Wrong. Former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, a Texan, was a master at "helping" his opponents. He would say, when he was trying to twist the arms of his colleagues, "Ah only want to Hep yew." When he was "heppin' yew", that's when you had to be the most careful. It is the same with the MCFD.

Some MCFD agents want to help families, and some don't. However, the system itself rarely does. Most MCFD agents don't know or respect the restrictions in the law against taking children, and no one holds them accountable. Even judges cannot reign them in. So they do as they please, not what the law allows or requires. They have managed to form their own secret police, just like in Communist countries.

Many people ask the MCFD for "voluntary services", only to find out too late that asking for help brings the whole MCFD down on them. That is literally asking to have your children taken.

The law says that MCFD must try to unite families, not destroy them. Specifically, Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 119, Section 1 says: "It is hereby declared to be the policy of this Commonwealth to direct its efforts, first, to the strengthening and encouragement of family life for the protection and care of children . . ." They talk about help, and stabilizing intact families, and therapy, but it's all a cruel lie. They really want to take your kids.

So, their first dirty trick is to say they want to help you. Don't fall for it. They will offer "services", and home visits, and nice chats about your life and the bad things your spouse did. Don't do it. Shut up. They do not want to help you. Be pleasant, but firm. As explained in the next section, if you talk, or accept their ‘services', you may never see your children again.

If you foolishly think that MCFD will play by the rules, then they will exploit your weakness, and take your children. If you play by the rules, they will exploit that, and take your children. But if you know how the game is played, you may have a chance to keep your children, or get them back after they are taken. The secret police can be outsmarted.

You will likely ask yourself, "How can this be happening in America?" It is happening, and it is because politicians have been willing to compromise liberty and family rights for support from radical Marxists and feminists who demanded these laws. While no one was watching, these people stole our American System of law and due process, and family rights, and liberty, and quietly substituted this new nightmare of a secret police system that you are now dealing with.

People assume that they will get justice in our courts. No longer. It's gone. The old America that respected family privacy is gone. A new Soviet-style system has taken its place. The sooner you acknowledge that horrible reality, the sooner you stop believing that the old system just HAS to give you justice, the sooner you can start fighting back in an effective manner.

The two most important words to know in dealing with MCFD agents are "SHUT UP". You have the right to remain silent, but they will try to get you to talk. Without your words, they have only what they can coerce out of your children.

The MCFD agent will try to convince you to talk, because she only wants to "help" you, and they will make trouble for you if you don't. Don't believe them. Without your "disclosures", they can't destroy you. Put another way, with your disclosures, they CAN destroy you. Many people panic, feeling that they nothing to hide, so they talk. However, if you do, you may never see your children again. Why? Because these are trained interrogators, and you are no match for them.

What do they want to talk about? Anything, because you will eventually give them a tidbit about abuse here, a "disclosure" there, and then, out of your own mouth, they have their case against you. For example, if you admit to having trouble with your spouse, the MCFD agent will force you to get a restraining order, and throw the "abuser" out. You will have to write out a statement under oath about the "abuse". Then, they have their case against your family, using your own words to prove there is "domestic violence".

If you talk, you will destroy your family by your own words. You may have merely complained about some minor thing, but you just made their case for them. You may never see your children again. So, SHUT UP! I cannot say it too forcefully, or enough.

Everything you say will show up in a report, in a twisted version you will not recognize. If you say you argue with your husband, the report will say, "Husband is verbally abusive". If you say that you discipline your children by spanking them, the report will say, "Parents physically abuse children." If you tell them you are depressed, the report will say, "Parent has mental health issues." If you say your spouse drinks, he will become an "alcoholic" in the report.

Then they will send you to their approved therapist to obtain further admissions, who they can count on to report to them every word you say, in violation of the patient confidentiality law. Don't go to therapy unless you are absolutely certain that the therapist despises MCFD.

So what should you do? Act like a prisoner of war, which you are. Give them your name, rank and serial number, and nothing more.

The best thing you can do is get a lawyer, the right kind of lawyer, one who despises MCFD, and then you can blame him for not talking. Tell the MCFD agent that you are terribly sorry, that you really want to cooperate, but your lawyer has told you that all communication must go through him. Do not sign anything, particularly a "Service Plan", because it will have admissions galore in it. Just tell them that your lawyer has instructed you to not sign anything until he can review it.

You must do all this with a pleasant smile, and sound sorry that you can't "help" them. Blaming the lawyer is a wonderful thing. What can they do? Everyone knows lawyers are evil.

So, SHUT UP. If you know just those two words, you will have prevented about 90% of your potential future problems.

If you have ever had your children yanked out of your home by a MCFD agent, or have been shoved aside by one in your own home so that she could talk to your child privately, or suffered some other indignity at their hands, you must wonder - what kind of monsters are these people?

They are abusers, at least by their own definition. Genuine abuse exists, of course, and is defined in the law as doing severe physical harm. Real child abusers should be criminally prosecuted, and jailed. But more often than not, the MCFD agent's definition of abuse is some psychic perversion of her own making, rather than real abuse. It often means you have religious or family beliefs that differ from those of the MCFD agent. Recently, a petition for removal cited a mother praying with her child as harmful.

Most MCFD agents actually believe that children should belong to the state, and that parents are evil. Their motto could be:

This changes only if the woman will not become a victim for them, or if the man feminizes himself properly. If you play the victim (even a male victim), and you "need" them, they will work with you. If you keep your dignity and independence (even if you are a woman), then you must be crushed. Victims thrive in their perverse world. Independent people who do not need them have their children taken away.

Many MCFD agents do not have children of their own, and do not understand that families go through some bad patches once in a while, and just have to be given some room to work it out. The MCFD agent, upon hearing from one of their police-state snitches, will swoop in like a vulture, and steal your children. No mercy. No explanations.

They will, without a pang of conscience, traumatize your children by prying their little fingers off your legs, as they wail and cry, and sticking them in their car, maybe never to be seen by you again. Or rip your children, screaming and panicked, from your arms, while sneering about what an abuser you are. Paul the Apostle nailed them, when he called such people, "senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless." (Romans 1:31).

Then, after ruining your whole life by taking your kids, MCFD agents actually wonder why you don't warm up to them, and don't want to work with them. It's as though they had punched you in the nose, and then wonder why you bleed.

Most MCFD agents are either classic Fascists or Marxists, which means they believe children belong to the state. You get to spawn, feed and clothe them, but then the state must educate them, train them to be wards of the state, and take them if you mess up. They believe the state is god, and support its domination in all spheres of life. They believe that rights derive from government authority, not from God, and so they resent all authority which does not acknowledge that. If you are religious, they will likely show a terrible bias against you because of it. They hate family autonomy, parental authority, home schoolers, and church authority.

This is not an exaggeration. Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Clinton's Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, said: "If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there's no equality . . . In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them." Her federal department is in charge of the national effort to mold state MCFD departments into their image.

That is what the communists believe. The following statement issued at a congress of Russian Communist Party educators in 1918 sounds like the credo of the modern MCFD agent: "We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them." The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx, called for the "abolition of the family." The MCFD agents have read that book, and they are coming for your children.

One of the favorite MCFD dirty tricks is to get one parent to say negative things about the other. This accomplishes many wonderful things from their viewpoint.

When MCFD agents come to your door, they have one goal - to get "disclosures" from one parent about how she fears the other, or how he ‘abuses' her, or argues, or that there are some kind of family problems. Thus, the critical importance of the advice to SHUT UP, and to not say anything bad about your partner. If you do, it will be the beginning of the end, and these disclosures will form the basis for the MCFD case against you, following like day after night.

If one parent says something negative about the other one, then the MCFD agent can force the talking parent to get a restraining order against the other one. The MCFD agent will usually threaten: "If you don't get a restraining order against him, we will take (or keep) your children." Then the person is forced to choose - husband or children.

They will then drive the woman to court to get a restraining order, and even force her to commit perjury, by claiming she is suffering abuse when there is none. The court will almost always issue the order on coerced and perjured testimony. Never mind that forcing someone to testify falsely is a crime, called "suborning perjury". Courts know they do it, but no one stops them.

The results of this are many. The husband is thrown out of the house. They have added to their ‘abuse' statistics. To get the order, you have filled out a statement under oath claiming abuse, and they now have a basis for a case against your family.

With a restraining order now in hand, which "proves" abuse, and the "disclosures" the woman gives them, they now have proof that the other parent is unfit. Then, they will go to the other parent, usually the man, and work him over. They will tell him the woman said nasty things about him in an effort to get him to say of nasty things about her. Either in defense or retaliation, the man will often comply.

Now they can prove both parents unfit, and they almost own your family. Only one step remains. Get the children to make disclosures about the parents.

Whether or not they can get one parent to rat out the other, they will go to work on the children to make ‘disclosures' about the parents. This is one of their dirtiest of tricks, and one of the many reasons they are themselves are abusers. They will manipulate your frightened children into saying almost anything that they want to hear. They have several tactics, described below:

First and foremost, EVERY child they steal goes into therapy, not to help the child, but to obtain disclosures against you. Obviously, every child they take cannot be mentally ill, but that does not matter- therapy is the order of the day. They must get the admissions from the child to make the case against you and prove you are unfit.

If the "therapist" can obtain any scrap of information from the child about you that may hint of abuse, she will breathlessly run to the MCFD and excitedly tell the MCFD agent. High fives all around. They now have a case!

The "therapists" they use are often unlicensed, and work for huge bloated "therapy mills", which are little more than arms of the MCFD. For example, South Bay Mental Health Associates has eight offices, each of them in a city with a MCFD office. Four of the eight are in the same building as a MCFD office! The other four are next door or nearby. The unlicensed "therapists" make illegal medical and clinical diagnoses of your child (even if the child's own doctor has made a completely different diagnosis), to prove there has been abuse.

The tactics used by these fake therapists are akin to those used by interrogators in war. The strategies work with children, because they are frightened, traumatized, taken out of the security of their home, and are often being abused by their foster parents. Under these circumstances, your own children may say the most amazing and untrue things about you after a few months in captivity. In Soviet Russia, prisoners would eventually admit to most anything,

One technique they use is repeatedly suggesting to the child that mommy and daddy abused them. They implant the idea in the frightened child's head until the child "recovers memories" of the past abuse. They repeatedly ask, "Did Daddy touch you there?" If the answer is no, they ask the same question more insistently, use doll therapy, or find some other way to make the child feel "comfortable" about making admissions.

These sessions can go on weekly for months, or even a year. After that amount of coercion, it is not surprising that they get admissions.

The process only goes one way, like a ratchet. If they can get a disclosure using coercion, manipulation, fear, emotional or physical abuse, appeal to pleasing the captors, or anything else short of torture, that admission becomes the "truth". It can now never be denied, even if the child repeatedly recants it. Then they go to work to get the child to say more, which will also become more "truth" which can never be denied. They always believe a child's disclosures, but never his denials.

The best thing you can do to counter this dirty trick is to make sure, in advance, that your child knows that you only talk to mommy and daddy about things going on in the family, never outsiders. If your children have the inner strength to resist their predatory tactics, and don't make disclosures to the interrogators, you will likely get them back.

Not only will the MCFD try to divide and conquer you, your partner, and your children, but they will try to compromise your lawyer, as well. This is especially true if each partner has a court appointed lawyer, along with a different one for the kids.

A lot of the lawyers who rely on MCFD for their work are in cahoots with them, but you may not know it until it is too late. Some agree with their agenda, and others are just too timid to stand up to them.

How do you tell if you have the right lawyer? You have the wrong one if she tells you to cooperate with MCFD! You have the wrong one if you see her laughing it up with the MCFD lawyer or social workers. One lawyer is so reliable for MCFD, he has his own key to the local MCFD office!

The right lawyer will have courage, will believe in the rights of the individual against the state, will respect constitutional restraint on government, will hate the police-state tactics of the MCFD, will affirm parental and family authority against the state, will stand up to every unlawful and biased ruling of a judge without fear, and will hate the MCFD with a gut-level hatred because it respects none of these things.

Another ploy by MCFD is to have two separate lawyers for each spouse, who often work against each other. Although your partner is sometimes unfortunately your adversary, your real enemy is always MCFD. However, the lawyers often work at odds with each other, attacking the other partner, rather than working to get the kids back from MCFD together.

If MCFD takes your children, the law requires the court to schedule a hearing within 72 hours, where you can prove that they should give your children back. That 72 hours includes weekends, so if they snatch them late Friday (their favorite time, because the court isn't open), they technically must give you a hearing late Monday. They don't.

The MCFD Dirty Tricks machine usually goes into overdrive at these hearings, because if you win, they have to give your children back to you.

Their first tactic is to delay the hearing as long as possible, to get the disclosures from you and your children they need to put on their case. Courts accommodate, and often extend the hearing past the date required by law. The bright side of this illegal dirty trick is that you, too, get more time to prepare.

Many MCFD lawyers will urge you to waive the 72 hour hearing. DO NOT DO IT, unless you perpetrated serious abuse. You must go on record as opposing the MCFD taking your kids. If you do not, it can be used against you later, and you give up the only chance you will have for a full year to try to get your kids back.

The divide and conquer strategy works very well for the MCFD at these hearings. If they can get the spouses and their lawyers to go at each other at this early stage, instead of fighting the REAL enemy (MCFD), they easily win. Tell your lawyer to fight in collaboration with the other lawyers, so your kids may come home.

The legal standard for MCFD keeping your children is in Mass. General Laws, Chapter 119, Sections 24 and 29C. The MCFD usually fails to prove their case, but the Judge will let them keep your children anyway. To keep custody of your children, the MCFD must prove that:

1. They have made "reasonable efforts" to prevent or eliminate the need for removal of a child from the home prior to stealing the child. They rarely do. (Section 29C)

2. The child is "suffering from serious abuse or neglect or is in immediate danger of serious abuse or neglect." (Section 24) This means wounds, broken bones, burns, starvation, or the like. It does not mean spanking or psychic harm.

3. Removal continues to be "necessary to protect the child from serious abuse or neglect". (Section 24)

MCFD agents want to come in to your house many times during this ordeal, for any number of reasons. It is hard to keep them out, but try your best. They want evidence to use against you, no matter what excuse they give.

The MCFD agents will say that they just want to come in for an ‘assessment', or to get some basic information from you, or to see the condition of your home. However, what they really want is to separate your children from you and get "disclosures" of abuse, to get admissions from one parent about the other, to find defects in your housekeeping, or the like. Later visits will have the same purpose, though they will give other reasons.

Should you let them in? Can you even keep them out? The answer is: Maybe. The law as written allows them to come in without a warrant, but the Constitution, which is over the law, does not. However, the issue has not been legally tested in our state, to my knowledge. In the Western States, the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that MCFD agents must have a warrant to enter when it is not an emergency. That has not happened in our area yet.

The Massachusetts Declaration of Rights (the Massachusetts State Constitution), Part the First, Article XIV, states that:

Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures, of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation for them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure: and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities prescribed by the laws.

This Article says they cannot come in or take your children without a warrant. However, courts usually ignore the clear wording of our Constitution, and turn a blind eye to this outrageous wrong. Their excuse is that the law does not apply because the "best interest of the children" overrides the law.

My recommendation: Stand on your rights, and politely, but firmly, demand a warrant before letting them in. Talk to your lawyer before doing this, because it is risky, even though it is right. If there is a policeman with a gun, who will not back off when confronted with the Constitutional requirement to get a warrant, you better let him in, and live to fight another day.

One of the scariest MCFD dirty tricks is a vast Soviet Style snitch network which they have set up all over the state, with the force of law, to report you to the authorities. This network is made up of ALL teachers, doctors, nurses, counselors, therapists, police officers, dentists, chiropractors, day care workers, school counselors, etc. These people must report any suspected "abuse", or be prosecuted and fined. They cannot be prosecuted for making a false report, unless it is frivolous. See Mass. Gen Laws Chapter 119, Section 51A.

All these people, called "mandated reporters", have been endlessly taught the importance of reporting. All their professional seminars, their whole culture, demands that they report, just in case. When in doubt, they report. Then, if there really is abuse, they won't get in trouble. Thus, the MCFD has a seamless web of snoops and spies just about everywhere a child is likely to be.

Even worse, you are no longer safe from the MCFD police in your own home. They have also found a way to turn your own child against you. At the government (public) school, children are given the MCFD phone number, and are taught to report things they see in the home to the authorities, like corporal punishment, drug use, and even family arguments They break down children's respect for their parents, and foster a submission to the state.

What they don't tell a child is that if he reports his parents to MCFD, he may destroy his whole family forever. The child may be mad about getting disciplined, so he'll get even by siccing MCFD on them. Then, they take that child, and all the other ones, too, just in case. MCFD didn't tell the child that it would happen that way, but now it's too late, just like Judas.

When you go to a counselor to get help, when you take Johnny to the emergency room if he falls off his bike, or when you talk to his school counselor, watch out. You are now a suspect. The person to whom you turned for help is likely your enemy, and may turn you in. You may go for help, and end up losing your kids. You need to think differently about how to get help. Of course, never ask the MCFD for help. Many people do, and lose their kids.

Who can you go to? Only two types of professionals cannot be made to divulge what you tell them, clergy and lawyers. Both are a little shaky, either due to fear of MCFD, or because they agree with the doctrine of state control of families.

Clergy have a privilege not to report, or to testify about what you say to them. Lawyers have an even more ironclad privilege, called "attorney-client privilege". Many lawyers, however, wanting to curry favor with MCFD, will actually betray their client's confidences. So, find a clergyman or a lawyer who hates MCFD, and tell him your problems. That clergyman or lawyer may be able to help you find a medical professional who hates MCFD enough to not report if your child has been hurt.

The other thing you MUST do is get your children out of the government (public) school. It is the major pipeline from MCFD to your child. MCFD takes children right out of school when they can coerce them into making "disclosures", and they don't come home that day. Sometimes MCFD doesn't even tell the parents, and when mom comes to pick up the child at the bus stop, there is no child, and no one knows why. Needless to say, the parents are frantic, until they finally figure out what happened.

If you send your kids to a government school, you are sending them to your enemy to be educated. They will be taught to hate you and your values, and to sell you out. Get them out, before it's too late. This is the principle of "staying under the radar", which we review in detail in the "Fight Back" section.

If MCFD has stolen your children, you are probably tormented, thinking, "Why? Why?", anguishing day after sleepless night over why this has all happened. As with many things in life, when there seems to be no rational basis for what has happened - follow the money.

In this case, the MCFD can make a ton of money by ‘leasing' out your child to a foster home for a year, and then ‘selling' (adopting out) the child at the end of the ‘lease'. While the child is in their captivity, they can leverage lots of state and federal cash from numerous programs. If MCFD can get you to incriminate yourself, or manipulate your child into making false disclosures, they can get a court to terminate your parental rights, and then adopt the child out, for more big bucks.

A recent federal law actually establishes adoption quotas for each state, with bonuses for each child adopted out, and even more money for every child adopted exceeding the quota. ‘Special needs' children earn even more, both during the ‘lease' period and at the final ‘sale'. A researcher in one state found that a severely needy child can earn its masters up to $250,000 a year in government money. We are still awaiting the figures for the Commonwealth, but the state budget for the MCFD alone is over half a billion dollars, not including the money for lots of outside contractors and medical care.

Keeping the children for a year is important, because, under a new law, they must adopt them out after 15 months!. So, if MCFD can keep your children a little over a year, they can sell them for some significant cash. They will drag out the case as long as possible to manipulate this outcome. Yes, they will literally SELL your children because they themselves have kept them too long. You should see, as I have, the MCFD agents having warm fuzzies over this, while the parents bitterly weep.

If you finally manage to get your case to trial, that is the first time you or your lawyer will have to tell your story to a judge. However, the fact that MCFD has kept your children for a year can actually be used against you at the trial! The MCFD will argue that it would traumatize the children to take them from their foster home, because they have now bonded with the foster parents. In their warped view, it would traumatize them to send them back to the parents, even though it didn't bother them to rip your baby out of your arms a year before.

Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 210, Section 3, actually makes bonding with the foster parents a basis for terminating parental rights. They take the children, delay the trial, and then use that as a reason why they need to keep them.

After the MCFD takes your child, snoops around your house, and gets you to incriminate yourself, you are then ready for one of their next dirty tricks - the so-called "Service Plan".

This 7 to 10 page document is a cut-and-paste monstrosity that serves the purposes of the MCFD: That is, to get you to give evidence against yourself, and to remold you into embracing big brother through therapy and re-education. It keeps you occupied with the hope that you will get your children back, while it dampens your anger against the nice folks who kidnapped them.

Don't sign it, unless your lawyer advises you to do so. If you sign it, you are admitting to your ‘crimes' (sometimes literally), committing yourself to therapy, and possibly ensuring that you will never see your kids again. The MCFD agent will exert much pressure to have you sign this plan. Don't do it, despite their threats that not cooperating will make it worse for you, and prolong getting your kids back.

There are many other good reasons to not sign their plan. For example, many plans require attendance at a batterers program. If you go to such a program, you are given two bad options: 1) Admit you are a batterer, and then you will not get your kids back; Or 2) Deny you are a batterer, then you are a "batterer in denial", and you will not get your kids back. Either way, you lose.

Every service plan requires therapy, the sacred MCFD sacrament, and it must be from a therapist of their choice, so that MCFD can have access to all the information to help them make their case against you. Women are often sentenced to attend group victim therapy, where everyone is supposed to sit around and whine about their victim hood, and affirm everyone else's. No one is allowed to get past her victim hood, or there would be no need for them. Statements made at these victim groups are immediately reported to the secret police at MCFD.

The best tactic to finesse MCFD pressure to sign their service plan, is to tell them that you must show it to your lawyer, and can't sign it without his approval. This can create substantial delay. Then, actually do as many of the activities required by the plan, as possible, without telling them you are doing so. Get your own therapist who hates MCFD, and get a psychological evaluation, and a glowing report about your therapy sessions. Go to a parenting class. Get urine screens, if that is on it. Do whatever activities on the plan that will not cause either a report to be made to MCFD, or cause a bad result later.

Then, when you go to court for a hearing, and the MCFD says you will not cooperate, you can pull out all the reports and evidence that shows that you did everything they required, and aren't they going to be embarrassed!

It is a well documented fact that MCFD plays dirty tricks with their records, in many ways. They alter and falsify them, in order to make you look worse or themselves better. They ‘lose' ones that are helpful to you. They withhold or delay giving you records when you ask for them, in order to keep important information out of your hands. They ‘redact', or black out, key parts, so you can't see their dirty tricks.

You are allowed, by law, to get records. The procedure is explained in the appropriate part of the ‘Fight Back' section. They keep many kinds of records, and they often fail to give you any that they think you don't know about. Familiarize yourself with them, so you can ask for all the different kinds.

Insist on getting every scrap of paper. Many treasures await you. For example, the little-known and super-secret 29C form, where they usually perjure themselves about why they took your children. They put the most amazing things on paper that will help you make your case, but you won't know it unless you get everything they have.

After the MCFD files a report of abuse against you under Mass. General Laws Chapter 119, Chapter 51A, and then "supports" the finding, meaning that they believe it is true, you have an opportunity to contest it at a so-called "Fair Hearing". It is "fair" in the same way a communist show trial is fair - first they try you, then they shoot you.

After you get a written decision that the MCFD supports abuse, you have thirty days to send to Boston and apply for a ‘fair hearing'. The address is on the notice they send you. Then comes the dirty trick: The hearing is conducted, not by a judge, but a MCFD lawyer! At the beginning of the hearing, the MCFD lawyer puts on the record that she is neutral, and has no interest in the outcome. Uh-huh.

Even though they almost always affirm that you are an abuser, still go through it. Only then, can you appeal to a court. Plus, it puts on record that you disagree.

The MCFD has a one-size-fits-all approach to visitation with your children: Everyone gets one or two visits a month - supervised. At these visits, the MCFD agent will be watching you like a cat watching a mouse. You won't be allowed to show too much affection to your child. The MCFD feeds your children with all kinds of negative things prior to these visits - even telling them that they will never go back home.

Do everything you can to reassure them that you love them and that you are fighting for your family. However, if you show too much affection, or encourage your children to resist their captors and hang in there, the MCFD agent may stop the visit. Go up to the edge of where they will not terminate the visit early.

Another visitation dirty trick is to file a new abuse complaint right before you go to court to get your visitation increased, so that they can say: "Horrors, no! There have been more disclosures of abuse. We can't agree to more visits. In fact, we want to terminate them." It doesn't matter that you have not been alone with your kids unsupervised for months. Under continual MCFD interrogation, the children have ‘recovered memories' of how you abused them.

If the MCFD has stolen your children, the law requires the MCFD to place them with relatives, if some are available, rather than in a foster home. One of their dirty tricks is to delay and frustrate all efforts to do that. The reason is that they lose control. Their foster parents can be counted on to report any ‘disclosures', and to help with the case for permanently removing you from the picture. Relatives, on the other hand, usually want to help reunite a family, which is what the MCFD is charged with doing.

Push for the placement with relatives, and don't let their excuses deter you. They will usually do anything they can to drag their feet. Just keep pushing.

If all your pushing gets you nowhere, you could be the victim of one of their particularly dirty tricks: They may have secretly promised, or at least encouraged, the foster parents that they could adopt your children after a year. You may find this out from the MCFD records you obtain. This may explain why the MCFD will not place your children with relatives despite all your pushing, even when the relatives are clearly an excellent place for them to be. If they promised the foster parents the title to your children, MCFD will use every delay tactic possible to place them with your relatives and avoid obeying the law. Unfortunately, few judges stand up to this.

One of their dirtiest and most hidden tricks, if the MCFD has taken your children, is that you will not have a chance to challenge the MCFD in court until the very end of the whole process, a year or more later.

This dirty trick involves depriving you of what the law calls "due process". Due process means that you have an opportunity to have your case heard in court in a timely fashion, that you get the legal protections provided by the state and federal constitutions, that you are innocent until proven guilty, that your parental rights are protected from improper state interference, and many other rights. You may have noticed that MCFD and the court give you none of these things.

You will be at hearing after hearing, month after month, but the judge will never let you talk to her about any evidence until the trial. You can fight like crazy at all the pre-trial hearings, but it will all do no good. The MCFD wants the children for the full lease period of a year, and they can hold you off for that amount of time, because the law gives you no due process rights..

Some few children will come home during the one year period, because the alleged offense by the parents is minor. However, it appears that they have recently increased the percentage of children they keep, and they want to terminate the parental rights of as many as possible.

How can they do this? A terrible duo of cases, called Care and Protection of Isaac, and Care and Protection of Jeremy, have given the MCFD virtually unfettered power to do what they want. A judge can't even stop them from keeping your children, no matter how obvious it is that you are fit parents, and even if you bring in piles of evidence, and prove it so even the O.J. jury would believe it. You will still not get your ‘day in court' until a year or more has elapsed.

Because you do not get a chance to prove your case for a year, you must do everything possible to keep your children in your possession in the first place. Possession is nine tenths of the law when it comes to the MCFD.

When the MCFD can't accuse a person of abuse or neglect, because the accusation is against the other partner, they will still try to drag the non-offending partner into it. They do this by saying the innocent partner didn't stop the other person from committing abuse or neglect. They call this neglect by not keeping the child safe from a perpetrator.

It does not matter if you had no idea it was going on. It does not matter if you would have had to lunge ten feet across a room like Superman to stop your child from being spanked. It does not matter if it is a completely false allegation, and there was not ever any abuse or neglect to stop. You are an ‘enabler', and you must "recognize the other parent as an abusive caretaker". (Parents are never ‘parents' any more; They are ‘caretakers'.)

This is one of those dirty tricks that is very hard to oppose, because it addresses a ‘thought crime', rather than actual abuse or neglect. The MCFD solution is usually in the form of a ‘Service Plan' which requires the parent to admit committing the thought crime of knowing the other person was an abuser (whether it happened or not) and ‘owning' that new way of thinking.

If only one partner is accused of being abusive or neglectful, the MCFD will go into a frenzy over ‘safety issues' with the other parent, and end up causing far more problems than they pretend to solve. Rather than try to address the problems, and reconcile the family, they toss a grenade into the already difficult situation, and create distrust, mutual accusations, and ruin any chance of reconciliation. They actually despise forgiveness and "moving on", because then there are fewer victims for them to help. Until their ‘victims' define the whole of their remaining life in terms of their victimization, they are not thinking properly.

Rather than try to modify abusive or neglectful behavior on the part of the innocent partner, the MCFD approach addresses how they want you to think about the other person's alleged abuse or neglect. If your partner was not abusive or neglectful, or the issues were minor and long past, you still have to do this. Otherwise, you will likely not get the child back.

Be aware - thinking incorrectly is now abuse or neglect.

It may sound cynical to be so critical of the Department of Social Services. But I have wept with too many good parents who have lost their children, to not be cynical. Frankly, the system is evil and corrupt. The courts are helpless in the face of MCFD power, or they affirm it because they believe in the MCFD philosophy.

The exposure of these dirty tricks is only part of the story. You need to know how to fight back. Get a good lawyer. Read the "Fight Back" section of this web site. May God bless your efforts to stop this abuse of children, and reunite your family.