From: shedevil@leland.Stanford.EDU (Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.2b)
Subject: A New & True DSS Horror Story (was the Spanking thread)
Organization: Fathers' Rights & Equality Exchange
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 92 06:30:07 GMT

The following was sent to me by a member of FREE.  I have cross-posted
this to soc.women, soc.men, alt.dads-right and alt.civil-liberties
because this is a story of an agency out of control...in one form or
another, this could be *any* parent.

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 >From the San Mateo Times, Tuesday, February 4, 1992.

 Headline: Nursing and a mother's worst fear By Lisa Levitt Ryckman AP
 National Writer

 Quoted and re-printed without permission

 Denise Perrigo's tale makes parental blood run cold: how she posed a simple
 question - about breast-feeding - to the wrong people, and suddenly found
 herself in jail, in court and separated from her 3-year-old daughter for a
 year.

 "I've had moms call me and start bawling, imagining it happening to their
 own child.  And then I start crying again, too," said Perrigo, 29.  "There's
 been a lot of pain reflected in their voices, imagining what we've been
 through.  A lot of anger, that this could happen.  A lot of fear."

 The Onondaga County Department of Social Services in Syracuse, N.Y., which
 declined to discuss the case, has also heard from frightened parents, said
 Diane Erne, DSS deputy commissioner.

 "There's a lot of breast-feeding women out there saying, `Heavens, could I
 lose my child?' But as a policy statement, this department has never removed
 a child because a mother was breast-feeding," Erne said.

 "It was never described as breast-feeding," countered Ralph Cognetti, an
 attorney for Perrigo who is preparing a lawsuit against DSS and others.
 "They twisted it and called it sexual abuse - `placing the mouth on the
 breast.' If it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable."

 It began January 1991, when Perrigo, who lives in Lafayette outside
 Syracuse, called a community volunteer center to find a phone contact for
 the La Leche League, a breast-feeding advocacy and support group.

 She wanted to know whether it was normal to become aroused while nursing.
 Had she reached La Leche, she would have learned that yes, many women
 experience such feelings.

 Instead, she was referred to the Rape Crisis Center, where the volunteer
 apparently equated Perrigo's question, and the fact that she was nursing a
 2-year-old, with sexual abuse.

 The center called the child abuse hot line.  Perrigo spent the night in
 jail.  Her daughter was taken by DSS workers.

 During a five-hour police interrogation, Perrigo said, "I was just focusing
 on, if I could just explain it to these folks, if they could just understand
 that it was just a mistake, that we could get this whole mess straightened
 out, and that would be the end of it."

 It wasn't.  Criminal charges were dismissed immediately, but DSS filed
 sexual abuse and neglect charges in family court and kept her daughter, whom
 she didn't see for a week.

 Perrigo's court-appointed attorney, Karin Morris, was shocked by the case,
 her first involving abuse allegations.

 "I was well-read about nursing and what's normal," said Marris, a young
 mother who breast-fed her own children.  "I was in touch with the right
 people immediately."

 Meanwhile, Perrigo's parents filed a petition for custody of their
 grandaughter.  Despite the department's policy of making every effort to
 place children with family or friends, it failed to act.

 "We were after them for months on this," Marris said.  "And finally, we
 received a one-page letter where they said essentially that Denise's parents
 were unacceptable because they did not believe that any abuse had taken
 place."

 Perrigo's parents were forced to hire their own attorney.  Eight months
 after Perrigo's daughter was put in foster care and $8,000 of their own
 money later, they were granted custody.

 In the interim, Perrigo's own visitation with her daughter became
 increasingly restricted.  For months, she saw her only two hours once every
 two weeks, in a small room at the county office building, while a social
 service worker stood by.

 "At first, she kept asking to nurse.  And I said, `You can't, honey, you
 really can't,'" Perrigo said.  "And then the older she got, and the more
 time we spent away, it would be, `Mommy, when can I come home?  Mommy, let
 me tell the judge I want to go home.'"

 In April, Family Court Judge Leonard Bresani found that no abuse or neglect
 had taken place and ordered Perrigo's daughter returned.  He cited testimony
 by La Leche League officials who had spoken about the normalcy both of
 nursing toddlers and having feelings of arousal while breast-feeding.

 The department persisted.

 "I feel the caseworker assigned to the case felt Denise was guilty from the
 very beginning," Maris said.  "It became very mean-spirited."

 Instead of returning the child, DSS filed new charges before a different
 judge the next day.  Among these were allegations that Perrigo had inserted
 foreign objects into the girl's vagina; later, it was decided that this was
 the child's description of having her temperature taken rectally.

 An imminent-danger hearing, normally a procedure completed in a matter of
 weeks at most, dragged on for five months as DSS dredged up every
 potentially damning detail from Perrigo's past.

 "She had lived for a while with her pastor and his wife, and the department
 implied that she had been involved with her pastor," Marris said, adding
 that the department made much of the fact Perrigo is a single mother.

 Cognetti said DSS also brought out that she had sought counselling because
 she believed she was too easily drawn into sexual relationships with men and
 had been abused at age 12 by an uncle a year older.

 "This is all after-the-fact stuff they dug up to make a bad situation look
 good," he said.  "They had absolutely nothing.  They were scrambling."

 In Novemeber, Judge Edward McLaughlin found that no abuse had taken place
 but that there had been neglect.

 McLaughlin cited Perrigo's failure to wean earlier, along with some other,
 puzzling reasons for finding Perrigo neglectful.  Among them: the fact that
 she sought counseling for her daughter after one of the child's friends was
 abused, and that she subjected her daughter to DSS interviews by making her
 phone call in the first place.  Marris is appealing.


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-- 
     LOOKING FOR:  Nan Booton, Lorna Taylor, Linda Dalgard, & Sumi Furiya
I am: Anne Mitchell, mom, 3rd-year law student, transplanted East-coaster, and
     	  founder of FREE, the Fathers Rights and Equality Exchange.
   The fathers' rights paper is ftpable from leland.stanford.edu;/pub/dads 

Newsgroups: misc.kids