From WTHR.
Not sure if you've been following the whole Nebraska "safe haven" law debacle. "Safe havens" are places that kids can go to turn to for help from abuse, or more recently where adults can turn in their kids if they can no longer care for them (or no longer want to care for them). Apparently, back in July, Nebraska expanded their law to include anyone from birth to 19 years of age, and parents have been putting it to use by dumping off their problem children.
And sometimes, they do it to help their children because they don't know what else to do for them.
A northern Indiana woman who left her 8-year-old son at a Nebraska hospital under that state's safe haven law did so because she doesn't trust Indiana's child welfare system, a friend of the woman said.
Stephanie Mote, 30, feels Indiana's system failed her when she was abused as a child, friend Rhonda Shea told The Indianapolis Star for a story published Friday.
"She didn't abandon him. She just wanted to get him help. She didn't feel he'd get the help he needed in the state of Indiana," said Shea, who shares a Wabash County home with Mote and was acting as her spokeswoman.
Mote drove to Omaha on Nov. 6 and left the youngster at a hospital there because she didn't think Indiana could provide proper help for her son's severe behavioral problems, Shea said. A Nebraska law lets parents leave a child at a hospital without fear of prosecution for abandonment.
The father of Mote's son had custody of the boy after the couple separated more than two years ago, but the child moved in with Mote in April after Miami County authorities arrested the father for failing to register as a sex offender. The father had been convicted of child molesting in 1988. Mote divorced the father in September.
Shea said the boy's behavior overwhelmed his mother. Although he's 8, he's not fully toilet-trained, and can be destructive, such as clawing paint off the walls and intentionally clogging the toilet.
Mote was adamant that the boy not become a ward of the state of Indiana, which she thought had failed her because when she was placed in foster care after being sexually abused and then was abused further.
"She thought the only option she had was to take him to Nebraska," Shea said.
...
Mote's son, who was returned to Indiana by court order Nov. 7, is in DCS custody.
Tielking told the Star the boy likely has been placed in a temporary foster home. A hearing on his case was scheduled for Friday, and Shea said Mote planned to attend. The Associated Press left a message Friday seeking comment from Tielking.
Shea said Mote fears her son now will be placed in relatives' custody.
As strange as it sounds, I can certainly understand Mote's reasoning. CPS in Indiana is a joke. Unruly kids can use it to their advantage to get their parents in trouble when their parents won't do what they [the kids] want, adults use it against other adults as revenge tactics even if the information provided is falsified (this has happened to me), and the children who are actually suffering abuse never get the help they need because no one ever finds out.
Throughout my school-age years, I knew classmates who were in abusive situations, but no one took action because "personal matters were no one's business". CPS never was involved, even though they should have been.
Yet my own father got hounded by CPS in the years after his divorce to my mother because he was a single father with a little girl in Indiana. Obviously, child molestor material.
I've had to suffer the stupidity of CPS throughout my years as a mother. I'm sure there's my files as a child from which they can draw, because as you might have heard, "the cycle of abuse is hard to break blah blah blah". Now, they use our mentally retarded son against us. I guess that since they never got their claws on me so they could screw me up, they decided to come after my kids.
One of our sons suffers from 18p Deletion Syndrome with Mosaicism. What he has is rare. In fact, I think the geneticists said that he's the only one of his kind that's known of in the world (the "with Mosaicism" part). In any case, not much is known about his condition, except that a lot of kids don't live long lives, and if they do, they aren't very healthy. "Failure to thrive" is something with which they are often diagnosed. Our son had this problem. Earlier in life, before we knew what was wrong with him, he'd be entered into the hospital with FTT, and after one too many times, someone at the doctor's office (not our pediatrician) decided that we were just neglecting him and called CPS. It didn't matter that we had been trying to get his pediatrician to test him (everyone initially thought he had a severe food allergy) or that our oldest was obviously healthy...no, because he was hospitalized so much, we had to be doing something to him.
Eventually, we were vindicated when the genetic testing came back, but CPS never officially dropped the case, and we were never offered an apology from anyone on either side. We moved on, but apparently, CPS never moved on from us. We still suffer under their wrath when we live in Indiana.
So I can understand why Mote did what she did if it's the truth. If I needed to do so, I'd much rather hand my kids off to some questionable family members than to let them become CPS victims.
My favorite paragraph from the story:
Susan Tielking, a spokeswoman for Indiana's Department of Child Services, said it's unfair for Mote to use her own experience to characterize Indiana's child welfare system.
"Our agency is a new agency, and with that comes a huge transformation of the child welfare system in Indiana," Tielking said. "Before DCS was created, the system was broken."
Wow. The system is broken now; I'd really hate to see what it was like back then! Just because a few offices were moved around and a name change was made, doesn't necessarily mean that everything is perfectly fine now.
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