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This week, on the Truth Perspective, we discussed the recent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that have been menacing the planet over the past weeks, along with the strange portents of the births of disfigured humans and animals.

On the second part of the show, the Truth Perspective interviewed Tammi Stefano, Executive Director of The National Safe Child Coalition (NSCC). Tammi has spent over two decades on frontlines fighting for child safety and serves on numerous committees aimed at protecting children from their abusers, who are often those who should be protecting them in the first place. We discussed the darker side of child protective services, the deep problems of corruption when it comes to children at risk, and what can be done.

Running Time: 02:21:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript:

Harrison: Welcome back everyone. It is April 25th, 2015. This is The Truth Perspective. I am Harrison Koehli. My co-host today is Elan Martin.

Elan: Hey there.

Harrison: And joining us in the studio again, Shane Lachance.

Shane: Hi everybody.

Harrison: And joining us especially from the Health and Wellness Show, we've got Tiff.

Tiffany: Hi everyone.

Harrison: For the first hour today we're going to be talking about a number of things, some breaking news, some stories that have come up over the past week or so, with a focus on Child Protective Services, the abuse of children and corruption behind the scenes of the agencies involved in allegedly protecting our children. And then in the second hour we'll be joined by Tammi Stefano of the National Safe Child Coalition. She's done a lot of work advocating for children's rights and has a lot to say about Child Protective Services. So we'll be having her on in the second hour.But to start out with, we've got some earth changes news carrying over from our discussion last week. Shane why don't you give us the low-down on what's going on around the world?

Shane: Well I was mainly going to talk about some of the volcanic eruptions but before we get into that, there was quite an earthquake in Nepal this morning. Elan did you have information on that?

Elan: I did. It seems that there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal several hours ago. It was reported that there were 800 dead. I think one of the last things we heard was that about 800 people succumbed to the effects of the quake. And as usually happens with these type of events, the numbers just keep going up. It seems that there were a lot of various structures in Nepal that were destroyed as well. Apparently it's the most massive earthquake to hit central Nepal since 1934. So hot on the heels of our Mother Nature is Fuming discussion, it's interesting that we would see this event occur. We'll be posting updates as other larger volcanoes and earthquakes seem to be set off and occurring around the planet more or less simultaneously. I think you have some information about what happened this week in Chile.

Shane: Yeah, actually today we just saw the third eruption of the Calbuco volcano. That was a dormant volcano for a number of years. It was rated one of the top three most dangerous volcanoes in Chile. It's been dormant for a number of decades. It's just spewing these massive amounts of ash more than six miles into the sky. It's been said that these kinds of things make their own weather. I'm sure we're going to be seeing a lot more come out with the devastation from that earthquake. The pictures that are coming out are these amazing scenes. Some of the videos are capturing wild electrical storms going on. I don't know if you caught the video that came out of a UFO, or a possible UFO sighting.

Elan: Well, it's an unidentified flying object.

Harrison: I saw a few pictures. I think it was from this one of the huge pillar of smoke and ash and out of that pillar there was this giant humanoid form.

Shane: I didn't see that.

Harrison: And it had this one light right where a Cyclops would have its eyeball. It was pretty freaky.

Shane: This light looked like there could have been two lights, but he was filming and as he zoomed in and zoomed out it just disappeared. I saw some say "It was actually this Cessna airplane".

Elan: That remained stationary for an extended period of time.

Tiffany: They said it was an airplane hovering over a volcano?

Shane: Yeah.

Tiffany: That's safe.

Shane: Not safe or realistic. So there's that. There's also another interesting story that tied into our last week's discussion as well. There was a study that came out from Yellowstone National Park that discovered that the chamber underneath was holding three times the amount that was previously thought, which is 11 times the size of the Grand Canyon.

Elan: This would be a magma chamber?

Shane: Yeah, the magma chamber.

Elan: And magma being hot, molten lava pretty much.

Shane: It's where the lava is, from what I understand it. So that reservoir sits underneath Yellowstone and has a volume of 46,000 cubic kilometres. That's just massive to think about. So I thought that was kind of interesting to come right after we were talking about Yellowstone last week.

Elan: Let's just talk about that a second because the implications of that size of magma being released above ground anywhere in Yellowstone, not to mention the ash and whatever else gets ejected, what's the word?

Tiffany: Mind-boggling.

Elan: That's two words (laughter).

Shane: Catastrophic.

Elan: Horrific.

Shane: You see some of the images coming out from the devastation from Chile and it's like this massive snowstorm that was an ash storm, just like these feet of ash being dropped and they're digging themselves out. You just see ash everywhere. So the volcano in Chile was pretty big but when you compare that to something like the super volcano in Yellowstone, it's just inconceivable what could happen.

Elan: What were we saying last week about the sizes of super volcanoes being a thousand times more powerful than this one in Chile? Something to be concerned with if there's more activity at Yellowstone.

Shane: Well we're seeing all this activity all around the world. There was the volcano in Mexico. I think they had several eruptions starting last month and going into this month. And there was another volcano erupting on Costa Rica and spewing ash 6,500 feet in the air. They seem to be popping off all over the place.

Elan: And couple that I think with another earthquake that occurred near the Pacific Northwest, not a very powerful one for sure, but if you consider that the Calbuco volcano and this earthquake that just occurred in the area of southern Canada/Pacific Northwest of the US, or all along the ring of fire, which is a kind of interconnected tectonically-related space, that means that there are things going on that portend to larger events. I guess we'll see where that goes.

Shane: Yeah, Mother Nature does not seem too happy with the state of the planet and what we're doing to it.

Harrison: I found that reference. It was the Calbuco volcano eruption with the giant figure in it. If you go to this site. If you Google "human figure of god Calbuco" the headline is "Mysterious human figure of god forms in clouds following Calbuco's volcanic eruption. It's this massive Godzilla-sized smoke figure. It's pretty freaky.

Elan: No, it's Jesus! (laughter)

Shane: Or is it Putin?

Tiffany: Why do they call it god? Why don't they call it Satan? Sounds pretty scary to me.

Elan: Do we have any other major earth-change type events that have occurred recently that you wanted to mention?

Shane: Those are the main ones that I had. In looking back at these past couple of weeks it was interesting to see another topic of conversation that we were talking about last week, the animal portents. There's been quite a number of these strange births and goats looking like humans and being disfigured in one way or the other. Either the face is disfigured or they have multiple limbs. A baby was born in India and they think that it may have been a conjoined twin that wasn't fully developed because it had two sets of arms and two sets of legs. And we're seeing a lot of things like that. Is it a sign from the universe that our planet's just so toxic that these things are happening to both people and animals? Could it be related to something along the lines of electromagnetic activity that's increasing? These are questions. We don't have the answers, though.

Elan: There have been a lot of photos that have come out over the past years about the babies born in Fallujah and other parts of Iraq. Under the Clinton administration they dumped so much depleted uranium over that country that you have horrific pictures; children that don't look like human beings; malformed heads and bodies; missing organs; elongated body parts. As far as radiation goes, I think that at least is one of the main causes and probably what we're seeing in other places as well if you include the fact that the planet is just toxified between what's happened in Fukushima, it's effects on babies in Pennsylvania in the US. Goodness knows what else and where else.

Shane: With what happened in Iraq it just reminded me, when you were talking about the children there, the way our so-called leaders address these things. I remember Madeline Albright's comment when the reporter asked her "Well what about the deaths of these millions of children?" "We think it's worth it."

Elan: Her words? And the thing about someone like a Madeline Albright - not to digress too much - if you see her in other interviews, charming, intelligent woman, and then she says something psychopathically driven like "We think it's worth it", you just cringe with terror at what this person really is. She's a grandmother. I'm sure she's involved in philanthropic organizations as well, but she's a wholesale murderer effectively.

Shane: You would think there might be some maternal instinct that would kick in, but you can't define everybody like that. Not everybody has that human instinct inside that would seek to protect the most vulnerable people.

Elan: And that sort of brings us to our next topic and probably the theme of the show, and that's the most vulnerable children, of people's children. We've been hearing a lot of stories in the news lately about laws that have been coming on the books in various places. There's a new law in Illinois which basically is so vague in some ways as to leave itself open to interpretation by the authorities, so-called. The gist of it is that the law basically threatens parents who leave their children home alone if they're 13 years of age or younger. The idea is, and I quote "Any minor under the age of 14 years whose parent or other person responsible for the minor's welfare leaves the minor without supervision for an unreasonable period of time without regard for the mental or physical health, safety or welfare of that minor is now considered neglected."

Shane: And the kicker there is the "unreasonable period of time" because how is that defined? It's ambiguous so it's pretty much up to the police to say what's reasonable and what's not. Do we really want to be trusting the police with the way they've been behaving, with what's reasonable? I don't think so.

Elan: Just to put this in a little more context, in three states in the US, 12 is set as the minimum age and three other states in the US set the bar at eight-years-old. But for the most part, most of the states are taking it on a case-by-case basis which seems to me to be the most healthy way of looking at it. What are the circumstances? It's not trying to find reasons to go after people, which this law effectively does. And you couple that with the fact that Illinois has a very large number of people who are the working poor, or working class. So you can't separate this new law with the idea that people who are poor and might have less time and energy and resources to have babysitters for their kids, would be the ones most vulnerable.

Shane: How many families have the luxury anymore of having one parent being able to stay at home? That's just not a part of the American dream. Everybody's out and working. A teenager, 13 years old, that's typically the age of your average babysitter when you're going out. It's pretty baffling.

Tiffany: Well how many families even have two parents, or they would have the luxury of even making that choice that one of them could stay home? When I was coming up there was the whole concept of latchkey kids where if you got home at 3:30 from school and your mom or your dad didn't get home until 5:00, you stayed at home and you watched cartoons at home. Would that be an unreasonable length of time to be at home when you're 13? Or even younger?

Harrison: Well in Kansas the minimum is six. It's just ridiculous when you look at not only the disparity between the states and just how vague it is and open to interpretation. Whenever you have a law like that, it's like the Patriot Act which basically means that they can interpret it however they want. So if whoever is taking a look at the kids, it could just be a matter of if they don't like you or not.

Shane: It doesn't really matter what the circumstances are. It's more about the nanny state and it's the state dictating terms for how people are supposed to behave and act and they are the parent supposedly. It brings up another recent case. There were Maryland parents that were recently in the news I think a month or so ago. Their kids had been dubbed the "free range kids". They had previously been charged with neglect for allowing their kids to walk to school. These kids are 10 and 7 years old. Go back 20 years or so ago and that was commonplace. You hear stories from your grandfather "I walked to school uphill both ways". That was the norm.
So this couple's kids were playing in a park by themselves and somebody called the police and the police came and picked them up, took them to CPS and now their kids are in state care. So it's another instance of just these really hysterical signs of things being nuts.

Elan: It's the idea of being kept safe at the barrel of a gun. The other part of it is the trauma. Police uniform guy or not, a child being told that he must come with them to some detention centre or police station or whatever it is, that can be a very traumatizing type of thing to happen to a child.

Shane: Is it going to be any less traumatizing if it's a cop kidnapping a child and sending him to a detention centre versus some thug who's doing it? Is there any difference? It's got to be, like you said Elan, just as traumatizing. It reminded me of the cash for kids scandal in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania a couple of years ago. There was this case that involved mainly one judge but also the principal judge. He was getting kick-backs for sending children to this privatized juvenile centre that they helped build. They got a so-called finder's fee for helping to build it and it was $2 million. Meanwhile the judge who's sending away hundreds and hundreds of kids for baffling periods of time, their whole childhood until they were 18. One kid was in there for six years. They miss that part of their development with their friends going to school. As for the reasons that they were being sent, one girl had created a mock Facebook page of her vice-principal, there wasn't even anything that awful on there, just kids being kids. They were charging her with terrorism and these wild, wild charges. When the case came up, the prosecutors leaned on the parents saying "If you cooperate everything will be fine. You don't need a lawyer." And would have them sign a consent form.

Harrison: It's the same thing with private prisons where you've got this private institution and you need to fill the cells with people, so that's just an incentive to get as many people into that prison as possible and there are plenty of judges around that are willing to take a few bucks in order to send a bunch of people that way, even if they wouldn't ordinarily have been sent to prison. In this case it's being done with children and I think in general it's a sign of how twisted American society is. These judges are not fit to be in positions of responsibility. They see other peoples' lives as just chess pieces that they can move around and assemble in different ways in order to make themselves richer. So they can ruin peoples' lives simply because they're able to do it and to make a buck. It's the definition of psychopathy to treat people like objects like that for your own self-gain, for nothing else, with no consideration of any kind of higher value or value for that person as a person. They're just pieces and objects to be moved around and thrown in prisons in order to make a buck.

Shane: And all that money is coming from the taxpayers. We're paying for that kind of stuff too.

Harrison: It's even worse than that. If you look at the scale of crime, here's some judges just putting some people away in prison. Maybe some people would say "Well that's not so bad", but that's the same mindset that the violent criminals use. There's really no difference when you get down to it. And that's when we get into something like human trafficking. "There's a market for a certain product, someone to take that product and I'm going to move it around and I'm going to make money off of it." And that product just happens to be people.

When you read about these human trafficking cases and what actually goes on it's just disgusting and to think that there are human-looking people on this planet that can do that and are able to sleep at night just fine and swimming in cash because of it, it's just sick.

Elan: And protected by their status as lawmakers or police or judges or healthcare workers. As I look at all of these stories in total, it seems like a question is being asked on the part of this body of psychopathic bureaucrats and law people. It's almost like "Well how far can we go with this?" In some cases very, very far to the point of human trafficking it seems. In other places it seems to just be very egregious and traumatizing but it doesn't quite go that far. But it's almost as if there's this push or movement towards human trafficking at the farthest end of the spectrum that exists and that is just getting worse.

Shane: When you think about things like child trafficking and child sexual abuse, knowing your initial impulse is to think "Well that probably happens to a fairly small percentage of the population. It's a bad thing but it's not the worst thing." But that's not really the case. I was just re-reading Anna Salter's book Predators and looking up some of her statistics. It's just horrifying. One of the figures that she gives is there's one child molester per square mile in the United States and each one of these individuals commits this massive number of crimes. There's a study that she brought up in her book and it was consistent with other studies where she looked at around 240 of these child molesters and the number of incidences that they attempted for molestation is around 55,000, just these 240 guys. Fifty-five thousand attempts. I think the actual figure...

Elan: Two-hundred forty into 1,000 is 4x50, so about 200 times per offender. Two hundred times!

Shane: Yeah, each of these predators has victimized between 50 and 150 children and that's not saying how many times. It's baffling, these figures. The study that you mentioned previous, it was 232 people who were questioned/interviewed. They had between them 17,000 victims. How does that happen? That's got to be the only thing that they're focused on.

Harrison: Well yeah, that's it exactly I think. When you've got a person like that, they've got this drive and they structure their lives around the drive, the impulse. So that's the only thing they want and so they organize their entire life around being able to get what they want. So they know that they want to abuse children, so they structure their life in such a way that they're around children, that they have influence, a good reputation, they manicure themselves in order to look like a trustworthy person. They groom parents and people in positions of authority over children. It's astounding when you think about it and when you read a book like Predators, to see just how focused they are.If you take a quality of a great athlete and that drive to put everything towards that goal, that's what these people do in order to rape kids. It's just freaky as hell.

Shane: They structure their lives and they get into positions of power and of authority in order to accomplish what they're doing and there are all these professions that are supposed to be helping professions. I worked in child welfare for about three years and I would see this divide. You would have some of the most amazing people working in that field. I was truly lucky working with some of those people. I learned an incredible amount, but you also see the other side of the coin and that's those people who are getting off on abusing or torturing mentally, emotionally, these vulnerable populations.

When I started out I worked at a residential centre and we'd be getting kids in that didn't really belong there. When I was bringing up the kids for cash scandal, there were similar situations in Rhode Island where a judge was sending kids for truancy, missing school, these reasons that don't hold any weight to these centres. It does devastate their lives. It was a pretty tough job. It burns you out pretty quickly.

Tiffany: Yeah. I worked for Child Protective Services for about a year and that was pretty much all I could take because it does drain you. The atmosphere is just so negative and you come to see after just a short amount of time of working there, that CPS is not the benevolent society that people make it out to be. What I learned is that they spend a lot of time just breaking up families and ruining people over minor infractions. Two things really stood out for me in the year that I was working there. The vast majority of the so-called clients of CPS were poor. Very few of them were what I would consider to be middle class and of course there were absolutely no wealthy people who had a CPS case open on them.

Shane: Yeah, it was the same with me too.

Tiffany: Yeah. And the second thing was, I'd say the majority of them were black. So in this country poverty and minority status often go hand-in-hand. None of the families could afford any kind of legal representation. If there was a rare case when they were able to afford a lawyer, the case was immediately dropped. CPS would not pursue any case against a family who had a lawyer.

You have to consider I was maybe slightly older than some of the other social workers who worked there, but a lot of the social workers are fresh out of school. They have no experience in forensics or interviewing or child interviewing. They have no idea of psychopathy or anything like that. The things that I saw, most of the parents were young, they were inexperienced. They were just minor things. Schools would call or neighbours would call on each other. Parents who were divorcing might call on each other. Family members or neighbours that had a beef with you might call on you. There were very few legitimate cases of abuse and neglect, I would say. A lot of it was just the state screwing with poor people and breaking up their families.

Shane: And then you wonder too, with those cases that appear to be valid, how much is that because of the types of oppression that they're experiencing? Once kids get into the system they stay in it, and it tears them apart. If they get aggressive then it's "Oh see!" They try to use that to prove their point.

Elan: Well it sounds like so far, from the stories we're reading and the experiences that you've had Tiff and Shane, that Child Protective Services seems to be one of those organizations like Homeland Security that exists for itself, that it's another way to facilitate money going into the coffers of people who are engineering the bureaucracy. In that sense it doesn't seem to be an isolated thing. It's part of a much larger problem of introducing state-run or federal-run organizations that find a "problem" that they have created. They create the problem, effectively and the problem for people who are trying to speak out against it is that it's so entrenched, it's so institutionalized that you're basically going up against a Goliath. As a front cover they're saying "Well this is a benevolent kind of thing that we're doing", but it's not. It's the opposite.

Tiffany: And if you speak out against it you're lambasted for not wanting to protect the children, not being pro-family...think about the children.

Harrison: Here's just another ridiculous story from March 24. The headline is something like "Kansas mom charged with possession of drugs. Son removed from home after defending medical marijuana use in class." So on the 24th, Shona, the woman, her 11-year-old son and the rest of his class were visited by DARE officers for a drug education class. So the kid, knowing that his mother's life was saved by cannabis - she was using medical marijuana and cannabis oil - he decided to speak up to inform the class and the DARE officers that the information that they were giving them was incorrect. From there he was detained and questioned by Kansas state authorities. He was taken out of the town and after realizing that her son was late coming home,Shona contacted the school office and found out that her son had been taken by the police. She says "My husband and I are separated and neither parent was contacted by the authorities before our son was taken and questioned." So he was actually out of the town for three days. She doesn't know where he was and they didn't tell her about it. Because he defended medical marijuana in class.

Shane: I think with that case too, they weren't even willing to work with the father. Even though they were separated and had different homes, they were still trying to keep the child out of his family.

Harrison: Yeah, they wouldn't give him custody of the kid.

Shane: It's just incredible.

Tiffany: I think the mother actually got charged with possession in that case.

Harrison: Yeah, because they found two ounces of marijuana and some cannabis oil in her house. So if you have children, you've got to tell them that they can't talk about anything when they're in school unfortunately. It's just the way it is. We live in this Gestapo state where anything your kid says about you can be used against you, even if it's just something ridiculous and minor.

Shane: As we were saying, the system is massive and like this huge brick wall of oppression. It just seems to find its way into every nook and cranny. When we were going over these stories it kind of reminded me of the Franklin scandal. For any listeners who might not be familiar with that case, the Franklin scandal centres around the Franklin Credit Union and its managing director who was Larry King, Lawrence King. This was going on in the 80s. He was at the centre of this whole network of pedophiles that was going into the halls of power in Washington as well as all over Omaha and Nebraska.

It was just incredible to see the number of reports that were being compiled that kind of showed without any doubt that this guy Larry King had been doing these really, really horrific things to the children. He was having boys abducted from Boy's Town as well as the foster care system. They'd take them to these sex parties and sell them to their buddies. So these reports that were coming out were being blocked over and over and over again. These judges either didn't want to go there or they may have been involved in one way or another and just don't want to see it.

Even normal people don't want to see it. We don't want to admit that that kind of stuff is happening in our own back yard. But it's just so pervasive. What it came down to was the FBI just squashing these investigations. So it really brings up the question of how involved our own government is in these types of things. How widespread are these things? Are they going on in every state? It's just baffling to see.

Harrison: I've recommended before and will recommend again the book by Nick Bryant called The Franklin Scandal. It's a long book, 500 or 600 pages, but it's so detailed and so in-depth. He really did his research. He read all the court records. He got as much data as he could on the case and wrote a really great book about it. But what becomes really clear when you read it is just how well organized this was. The people doing this had first of all, a network of pimps and young kids that they groomed just to groom other children; kidnapping, human trafficking, murder. They had links with judges, police, pretty much any possible avenue to get these people and to get justice was blocked off because they had those channels under control.

So they could control court sessions and sentences and they actually went after one of the prime witnesses in the case and she went to jail as opposed to her abusers. It's just astounding really, to see what's going on. And not only that, it goes to the very top. In the Franklin Scandal, Bryant doesn't name any names but in other sources and in other interviews you can find out who these people were and who these children saw. This went to the top of the White House in the 80s. And by the top of the White House I mean directly to George H.W. Bush. He was named as one of the perps, one of the violent pedophiles that was involved in this. And not just him. There were people involved in the CIA, other people from the White House.

And I bet this stuff is going on up until today. It's still going on. These are just the types of people that you find in Washington.

Shane: Washington and the UK. There's that case with the UK politician, Lord Janner. He's been accused of 22 sexual offences against nine boys and he supposedly just very conveniently came down with a case of dementia.

Harrison: Yeah, a severe case of dementia.

Shane: Yeah. And if that's not bad enough, then what really makes it worse is that the judge excused him from prosecution because of it. She said that it would be inhumane to put a man like that on trial.

Elan: I think the other justification was that he's no longer a threat to children because of his dementia as though all of his crimes weren't somehow worthy of being addressed and standing trial. If it's true that he has dementia, it doesn't make what he did when he didn't have dementia any less of a crime.

One of the other larger points about this and in particular with The Franklin Scandal is you also have a complicit media. In The Franklin Scandal I believe there's a little bit of discussion of the fact that you have these hired gun attack dog journalists who take the side of the courts and the case and basically destroy anyone's reputation who happens to be speaking in opposition to these forces.

That's also I think, another one of these shocks that you experience when you're reading all of this stuff. How can all of this be?!?! And to such a degree?!?! And the reason is the Gary Webbs of the world have been marginalized or cut out or subverted in some way. And we really don't have a media, in large part that has any real integrity.

Shane: Look at the BBC and their own pedophile network.It was interesting to see in The Franklin Scandal, I think it was the Omaha Daily Sun or something like that was ultimately owned by Warren Buffet or one of those bigwigs. They would come out and they would prime people by writing these puff pieces on Larry King. There was a puff piece on his sister who was one of the foster parents involved in trafficking these kids. She was awarded a foster parent of the year and given the award at the White House.

So they would be priming people in favour of these predators while taking down anybody who would come out against it. Even the mayor of Omaha. He was trying to get rid of the Sheriff, who was also friends with Larry King. He eventually did get rid of him but the press tore him apart so badly that eventually he got kicked out of office and the Sheriff got reinstated. It just shows how much power they have to do these sorts of things.

Harrison: Elan, I think you had a clip.

Elan: So Nancy Schaefer was a former Georgia state senator. She's conservative, was president of the Eagle Forum of Georgia and Eagle Forums' national chairman of parents' rights and spoke out quite vociferously against the corruption of Child Protective Services. What she was trying to do was basically draw attention to widespread pedophilia and sex crimes against kids in the US. She had a bird's eye view of what was going on and was brave enough to come out and speak against it. In August of 2009 she gave a speech to the World Congress of Families in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the subject of the speech was the unlimited power of Child Protective Services.

She spoke before 4,000 folks and was stating how the Child Protective Services is itself a threat to children and families in the US but also to other types of organizations around the world that were following its model. Along with Child Protective Services the whole institutions of foster care, family court and adoption services and how they were supplied, as you were saying earlier Shane, with taxpayer money and were also given financial incentives by the given states to be run in the say that they were.

So it's a pretty interesting talk. I don't know if we'll have time to cover both parts, but what she says is pretty compelling. She sounds like a credible witness and activist in this area. So we're going to play that clip and there are just a couple of other things regarding that, that bear mentioning.
My name is Nancy Schaefer and I am from the state of Georgia in the United States. Thank you for your gracious invitation to join you tonight. Thanks to all of you who have made this incredible World Congress of Families No. 5 in Amsterdam possible. It's a privilege for me to join you tonight and to be with you in some pro-family policy here. I will share with you the unlimited power of Child Protective Services.

I served in the Georgia State Senate and after four years of viewing the ruthless and unsparing actions of Child Protective Services, also called CPS, which I will use tonight, I wrote a scathing report entitled The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services (applause). Thank you. The report cost me my senate seat. Here's some copies of the report if you'd like to get one. However, there are causes worth losing over and this is one. I'm going to talk about some of the problems and then some realistic, maybe, solutions for families and children and maybe look to some steps that we can take.

This is not to say that there are not those children in wretched situations who need to be removed. There are and we all agree. But tonight I'm talking about those children removed from their homes intentionally for profit. Children are seized unnecessarily from their families due to the federal aid created in 1974 entitled the Adoption and Safe Families Act. It offers financial incentives to the states that increase adoption numbers. To receive the adoption incentives or bonuses, local CPS must have more children; they must have more merchandise to sell. Funding is available when a child is placed in a foster home with strangers or placed in a mental health facility and medicated, usually against the parents' wishes. Parents are victimized by the system that makes a profit for holding children longer and bonuses for not returning children to their parents. This is abuse of power. It is lack of accountability. And it is a growing criminal political phenomenon spreading around the globe.

Oftentimes, but not always, poor parents are targeted to lose their children because they do not have the wherewithal to hire an attorney or fight the system. Being poor and lacking proper housing does not mean your children should be removed. CPS has redefined poor to mean psychologically inferior therefore it is in the best interests of the child to be removed. Best interests of course has also been redefined at the child's expense. It has been reported over and over that six times as many children die in foster care than in the general public. Once a child is legally kidnapped and place in official "safety", the child is far more likely to suffer abuse including sexual molestation and/or rape.

Case workers and social workers are often guilty of fraud. They withhold and destroy evidence and they seek wrongly to terminate parental rights while being protected by state immunity. There is a huge bureaucracy made up of judges, court appointed attorneys, guard ad litems, social workers, state employees, court investigators, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, foster parents, adoptive parents and on and on, who are looking to the children in state care for their job security. Judges have control over private living arrangements and income of 48.3 million Americans.

The United States Census Bureau reported in 2002 that 40 billion in transfer payments were made between households of custody parents and other parents. That money, 40 billion, is under the direction and control of family court judges in environments covered with confidentiality laws that protect the wrong people. Fathers are victims of this unjust system. Child support payments, even without having visits with their children, are choking the very life out of fathers.

Three fathers of whom I am aware and have been in touch with, committed suicide in the last 12 months because they lost the opportunity to even visit with their children.
Elan: So obviously Nancy Schaefer, a highly articulate lady, very credible, very brave, saying just a number of things that are very compelling and would obviously present a big challenge if more people were listening to what she was saying. It's interesting that she only had this kind of voice in Amsterdam at an event there, the World Congress of Families in Amsterdam. She just mentioned it in this first part, children have six times the likelihood of dying in custody of Child Protective Services than they would at home. Putting that kind of data into the information field, into the media, would definitely present a serious issue. Something I believe she says in the second part was that she thinks ultimately the best thing would be to shut Child Protective Services and start anew, it being that corrupt.

A very sad thing about Nancy Schaefer was less than a year later she and her husband of 50 years were shot dead in their home. It was officially ruled a murder suicide.

Shane: Well it sure is suspicious. You hear these statistics and they're just so baffling and you have to wonder what percentage or how much of that is from these rings. It's not just accidental that these children are dying, that these corrupt and inhuman creatures are doing these things intentionally and if they have the kind of power like we know they do, from the examples from the Franklin scandal, it would follow that her death could very well be linked to this sort of activity. They don't want that kind of information out.

Elan: Yeah, well there were a couple of other terms she used to describe the CPS, being abusive of power and just lacking in credibility. I have heard those terms described so many times in reference to the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, NSA, all of these other agencies are the farthest thing from transparent. Unfortunately you have to have some kind of intimate experience with them or information in the way that someone like a state senator like Nancy Schaefer would have, to realize how this is true. It has to be up front and personal otherwise unless you make a point of reading something like the Franklin Scandal or reading SOTT or another alternative news source that isn't afraid to come out with this information, you just don't know how bad it is.

Shane: And you block it out too. When you come across this information you don't want to believe it. It's that shocking and it's that horrifying that you just don't want to believe it so you build narratives around these stories. "Well that happened and you just got in a bad situation" and so on and so on. And that's how these predators survive. They know that our very nature will create these narratives and they use that to continue the deception and that's how they get their victims.

Harrison: Alright. We're going to try giving Tammi a call. It looks like she's available. So just bear with us for a minute as we see if we can get our technology to work as we want it to.

Tammi: Hello.

Harrison: Hi. Tammi.

Tammi: Yes.

Harrison: Hi, welcome to the show.

Tammi: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Harrison: Let me just introduce you a bit first, for our listeners.

Tammi: Sure.

Harrison: First of all, we've got four people in the studio today. I'm Harrison. We've got Elan, Shane and Tiffany.

Tammi: Okay.

Harrison: Shane actually did a few years of work in welfare services and Tiffany had a year in Child Protective Services so we've got some perspective there for the conversation.

Tammi: Excellent. In what state?

Shane: I was in Rhode Island. I actually worked for a family agency. When I started out I was in residential and that was probably about a year there, in a boys' emergency shelter. That eventually got shut down but I stayed with the agency and the foster family support program and we did visitation stuff. Eventually I got pretty burnt out and it was a pretty rough experience. The agency I thought was made up of many good people, but working with the state, that was really one of the toughest things.

Tammi: Right. And you said that that was Rhode Island?

Shane: Yes.

Tiffany: Yeah, and I worked for the Children Services Board in Ohio.

Tammi: Okay. So I'm more or less familiar with both and I'm from Rhode Island so I'm very familiar with the system there, ironically.

Shane: Yeah, I was working there at the time when there was a judge similar to the kids-for-cash case when the judge was sending the kids to shelters.

Tammi: What was the judge's name?

Shane: I can't remember.

Tammi: Was it a male or female?

Shane: Male. He was the head of the child and family court.

Tammi: Was it Bibalaquai?

Shane: It doesn't ring a bell.

Tammi: No. Anyway, it's not important.

Harrison: Tammi, let me just introduce you there first, so everyone knows who we're talking to.

Tammi Stefano is the executive director of the National Safe Child Coalition. She has spent over two decades on the front lines fighting for child safety. She's a member of various abuse and maltreatment committees and has launched capital campaigns for law enforcement, fire organizations and public schools. Tammi is eager to launch a campaign to reform the broken system. So Tammi, to start out with, could you tell us a little bit about what National Safe Child does and how you got involved in doing what you do.

Tammi: Sure. I have a legal background and I got involved because I was brought into a couple of cases. One was the familial case and it wasn't good. I want my granddaughter who's standing near me right now and who's going to be leaving to go back with her dad. She's going to give a shout out guys and then she's gotta go. This in Angelina.

Harrison: Hi Angelina.

Tammi: Who knows a lot about what we're talking about. So we'll put the earpiece in her ear for a minute and I'm going to let her give a shout out. Go ahead.

Angelina: Okay. Hi. (giggling)

Tammi: Say your name and say how old you are.

Angelina: My name's Angelina.

Tammi: And how old are you?

Angelina: I'm 11.

Tammi: And what do you want to say?

Angelina: I guess just hi. What am I supposed to say?

Harrison: Hi.

Angelina: Alright. Well bye.

Tammi: Okay. So that's part of the reason why I do what I do actually. So we began to see a lot of systemic failures. So what I saw was so much abuse in child custody cases. I saw children who were disclosing abuse by one parent, mom or dad, primarily dad when it came to sexual abuse. The parents would take the matter before the family court and it was consistently, the parent who was actually being accused of the abuse would gain full custody while the other parent would be put on paid, supervised visitation. The cost for the parent who did nothing wrong, other than to say that they believed the child and the child disclosed that they were being abused, was horrific.

And the more cases that I started to get, the more that DCFS, CPS got involved, if they get involved and they do an interview and it's unfounded, then what happens is the parent who believes the child then gets deemed as making false allegations against the other parent to gain custody. They label it more as a malicious attempt in order to alienate - and I'm sure we've all heard that word - the other parent. Thousands and thousands of cases are so evident and obvious I can't tell you. I've had hundreds of cases where it's not possible for there to be false allegations because I have four-year-old children with STDs (sexually transmitted diseases). That's not a falsification. The child is identifying the father. Mom loses all custody.

It's so typical. The question gets raised as to why. Why is this happening? And there's a lot of different theories. I'd love for some of the folks on the line to tap in on what their opinion is about it.

Shane: Well I think there's probably several reasons. One of the topics that we cover on Sott.net a lot is the phenomenon of pathological types and specifically psychopaths and how they get into positions of power. When you have these decisions being made and handed down, you really do have to question how much empathy, how much of a conscience can these judges have to make these types of decisions? So I think that could be a significant part.

Then there's the additional issue which would seem inter-connected; are these rings that we're seeing that are tied into politicians and judges and the wealthy class in any given area, and their involvement in these things. So is it that the network is so involved in so many areas that they don't want these things to come out? Somewhat like the "too big to fail" type of thing? It's just such a massive thing to try to cover it up.

Tammi: That's right. That's absolutely right. I can tell you that there was a local community college that had a legal secretaries class and a certificate type of program. They had a presiding judge come in and give a lecture to these folks that were taking this course about a month-and-a-half before they were ready to graduate. One of the people within the class called me and said "You're never going to believe this!" And I said "What?" And she said "This judge came in and said 50% of the parents that bring into the court allegations of sexual abuse or similar types of allegations, are lying. Fifty percent!" There is no such number. There's no such research that exists. On the contrary, we're looking at about two percent and a couple of years ago Canada had a big study that showed zero percent of children will lie to the parent about abuse and the reason being that it became zero is because if they're interviewed with somebody who is trained to interview them, they would not get past that person, it would not happen.

So here we have a judge who's giving these minds who really are not schooled and they are vulnerable and as a matter of fact, most people when they look at a judge, it's an automatic 'whatever he says has to be true'. It's set in stone.

Shane: So where does this fifty...

Tammi: There is no such thing as 50. It's his own mind. It doesn't come from anywhere! There is no such study. I do extensive research on this. Any cited research wouldn't ever go near that number, even if it was not a conservative number. It would never be anywhere near 50. That was his own number and I was livid. I actually made an appointment and went in about two weeks later and I spoke with the class before they graduated and I said "I just wanted you to know; I heard about the presiding judge and I need to set the record straight" and I just gave them a bunch of literature.

I really believe, not just for the class but for all of your listeners, that we have to get to the point where we do our own research. If we have the internet - and those listeners that don't have the internet, they have the libraries that offer free internet - information is so readily available for free. And if we fail to do a little research in an area that's so very important, then shame on us for the repercussions that the government is now imposing, the Department of Children and Family Services, Child Protective Services is now imposing!

The right to parent your child, these fundamental liberties are literally being stripped from the American people. And if they do not take a stand and they do not know their rights, how could they ever exercise them? It's impossible.

Harrison: Can you tell us a bit about Child Protective Services, like what are the protocols that they take for removing children from their parents? What kind of restrictions do they have? What can they do? What can't they do? What should they do?

Tammi: Okay, sure. What shouldn't they do? Okay, let me tell you what my experience is and my experience covers many states. What they have a right to do is, if somebody makes an allegation of abuse, they would call the hot line. The hot line would then send out an emergency response worker. This emergency response worker would go out and investigate. Now depending upon the type of allegation that was made, whether it's sexual abuse, whether it's physical abuse, the kid being beaten or something of that sort, that will really be dependent upon how soon this emergency response worker is going to actually go out and investigate. And when they go out and investigate, typically in my experience, folks that you and I have worked for have been different so maybe you have a different perspective, however the thousands of workers that I have dealt with, the ER workers anyway, they go out and they spend anywhere between 10, maybe 20 minutes on a good day, with the child.

They're going to the home where these allegations allegedly are taking place, okay. They don't remove the child, say into a hallway or outside, "Let's go for a walk. Let's talk". It's typically they ask the parent to go and sit in another room, IF they do that, IF. Sometimes they go to another corner of the room. So if you can imagine that you have this child who is possibly being terribly, terribly abused and you have an ER worker come, another stranger, and a lot of times they'll send a male care worker to interview a tiny female child regarding sexual abuse. That's not going to fly very well.

This is just common sense; send a female to a female, especially given the allegations, depending upon what they are. They spend 10-15 minutes. They go back to their office. They answer multiple-choice questions that are put into an SCM system. At the end of answering these questions, whatever the system spits out, that's the determination of the probability of risk. Is this a high risk, moderate risk, low risk, no risk? A computerized system! So you've got to hope that this ER worker isn't tired, isn't bitchy and in a bad mood, didn't like the father, the mother, whatever because if they don't answer exactly right, this child could potentially just be left at risk. It's a computer system. A computer system cannot determine abuse of children. That's the bottom line. Cannot.

And then after that, if it does rise to the level of warranting further investigation, then they hand it off to a social worker and the social worker goes out and will speak to two or three collaterals, if they can find them, they'll interview the people. And they just ask very generalized questions typically. "Have you ever seen anything?" "Do you know about anything?" Well I can tell you, with sexual abuse, nobody knows about anything but the child and the abuser. And that's it. And if they're really lucky and if such a word could be used in such a criminal offence act, a sibling knows, a sibling walked in, father confides to somebody, mother confides to somebody.

Twenty percent of sexual abusers are females, not just males. I've got a couple of cases and the unfortunate thing with the females sexually abusing children, it's just implemented into a boy's personality "You don't cry. Come on, you're not a sissy. Don't cry. Be tough. Be strong." While on the other hand you have the girls saying "Oh sweetheart come here. Does it hurt?" So boys really get the short end of the stick as younger children because they both should be treated the same; something hurts, guess what? It doesn't matter what gender, it's still hurting. If somebody needs to cry it doesn't matter. If you need to cry, you need to cry, male or female. The boys are certainly at a disadvantage.

And then growing up unfortunately, when they're abused the mindset is that boys get a pat on the back. You get into high school, you get into junior high. Forgive me for being so blunt, but we'll just call a spade a spade. They're going to get a pat on the back if they got in bed with somebody. "That's awesome!"

Shane: Yeah, you see all those cases of the teacher who was abusing boys 12, 13 years old.

Tammi: Thirteen, yeah. Getting pregnant, right?

Tiffany: There's a story posted about that. If you read all the comments on the bottom, there's all these males who chime in like "Where was this teacher when I was growing up? That's a great thing that happened to this boy!"

Tammi: Imagine that, and that's exactly the mindset. That's exactly the mindset and it's such a problem because I assure you, the emotional impact that it has, although they won't share that part of it, and the trauma that it causes, is no different. They are traumatized. They are violated. Their brain map, their path, their brain development, everything has been altered as a result of it. And the problem with the boys or the young men, teenagers, is they'll never say it. They just won't say it, even if it comes up, they're going to say "Are you kidding? Ha ha. I'm blessed. I'm better than all the other guys now because I started young."

There's a lot I could share but it's not the time yet. So corruption with judges anyway; corruption in this system; they make their own decisions; they place children in jeopardy. I have a lot of whistleblowers that have reached out and part of what the whistleblowers tell me is the problem is that the government is actually pushing for this and hard as it is to believe that the government could ever be pushing for such a thing, we just need to think about it very logically. They, for some sick, demented reason that the American people couldn't begin to fathom because there's no logic in it - say we consider that the government was advocating for a break-down of a safe childhood. Say they were in some sense advocating for trauma infliction to come in and actually promoting it, allowing it. What would that do to the child? Well it would cause the child when they're abused, to become more sexualized. They become more promiscuous. They become more dependent, more open, more desperate. They're not the grounded people, obviously that we would see from somebody who was not abused.

There's a lot of military whistleblowers and they say they've been part of some testing. I can't speak a lot about it right now. My god, if it's true, it's devastating. But the bottom line is if it's true and I'm waiting to get more information, we are in such trouble. We are just screwed and it really will take "we the people" as a whole to really come together in a way that I don't know if people in this day and age have the capability to come together in such a way. Because it's quite scary.

Harrison: Tammi, it sounds like the system is completely broken because on the one hand, you started out talking about how what are possibly real allegations of abuse will basically get ignored or filtered out from the computer testing.So on the one hand we've got children who are actually being abused whose voices are not being heard and nothing will be done. On the other hand when something actually is done, the child will often end up with the abuser as opposed to the parent who should have custody.

Tammi: Right absolutely. Well let me talk about a third scenario. The third scenario is there are some really abusive parents and these children desperately need help. They need to be removed. Those scenarios truly exist and they're horrific. But the problem is, ladies and gentlemen, when we hear about these cases, there's no time for the social workers - here in Los Angeles, it's the largest DCFS entity in the nation. There are 7,000 social workers just in Los Angeles County. That only encompasses 22 percent of the actual workers. So the other 78 percent - that number's real, 7,000. So the other 78 percent are sitting in an office pushing a pencil.There's no time. They don't have time. They're too busy taking the children away from good parents. So there's no time to actually focus on the children that truly desperately need our help. Like Gabriel Fernandez. I don't know if anybody's familiar with that case.

So Gabriel Fernandez is a case that is near and dear to my heart and will be forever. A little boy, 8 years old, made 69 calls to the department. Sixty nine! Nobody did anything. Actually we call them drive-bys because the social workers had to write down their mileage. And when they wrote down their mileage, they would in fact drive by the house and that was the extent of it. Most oftentimes they didn't stop. They stopped a couple of times and what the neighbours said is "I saw them walk in. We were so happy and less than five minutes later they walked right out. We watched them walk away." Well this little boy inevitably was murdered.

He was used as target practice. He had beebees lodged in his groin and his lungs. Lodged. He had almost every tooth in his mouth knocked out. He had burn marks from the bottom of his feet to his neck. He was sodomized. He was beaten. His skull was crushed in. Three months, three months they had a chance. Sixty-nine calls. Never did a damn thing! Those cases that are slipping through the cracks, children. I have interviews that I have not publicized yet simply because there is litigation going on against the department in this particular case and I don't want to taint it whatsoever because this little boy deserves something more than certainly he was given.

However I have firsthand interviews with the teacher. The teacher was so distraught she came to many of my events and she said "I did everything. I had the social worker's number on speed dial. What more could I do?" She went to her school principal. The principal said "I'm going to take a picture because I don't know what to do. Black eyes." You name it guys. This wasn't a secret. It wasn't hidden. It was ignored because they were too busy doing dishonest things with families that they didn't need to because there's some financial incentive. Okay. Anyway.

Tiffany: That's really the conundrum of Child Protective Services. On the one hand you have children who are taken away from parents who might benefit from some parenting classes, but they're not abusing or purposely neglecting their children.And on the other hand there's legitimate abusive cases that are ignored. Like I said before - I don't know if you heard this part before you came onto the show - but they're very young, they're inexperienced, they have no experience with forensic interviewing. They're burnt out.They drive by the house. They'll knock very quietly. If nobody answers they just leave.So the real legitimate cases are falling through the cracks and then they're going after the easier targets.

Shane: What makes this tragic too is that the people that are making these reports are overcoming a good degree of denial that most people do face in situations of abuse. To have these people make these reports and stand up, and then just to be squashed back down, it's tragic. Because then on the other hand you have these cases of abuse going on where everybody does just turn away and nobody sees it and that continues to happen. It's just an all-round awful situation.

Tammi: That's absolutely right. I don't even know if the system can be repaired. Respectfully I say this, there are some great social workers. But one of the whistle-blowers that I often communicate with - and I do want to be fair. I've met some really great social workers that really do thorough investigations, that are trained, that know what to look for. Not these young, wet-behind-the-ears workers, they have no business and they should feel a conscience to go in and try to make a discernment as to whether a child has been sexually abused. Physical abuse is a lot easier as we all know. You see a mark and it's not going along with the story that you're hearing.

I was up until 3:00 in the morning last night since this little boy. I've got a picture right now. The parents sent me a picture. He's got a black eye. This is the second black eye this week. It's really, really bad and what do we do? I interviewed the little boy over the phone because it was better to interview the little boy over the phone and at least get something and I recorded it with mom's permission, than to have absolutely nothing at all.So after that, the police came and luckily, luckily we had a really nice police officer. She was trained. Sometimes you just really, really luck out.

Elan: Can you speak a little bit to what happens in some cases where you've seen abuse happen once and a child is taken into custody by these organizations and gets kind of lost in the system of foster care.

Tammi: Ugh! It's horrific.Okay, I'll give you a case that I'm actually working on. We're going to court next week. A wealthy Jewish family. The dad is Israeli, not from this country. Mom is from this country and lots of domestic violence. Mom is reporting the domestic violence. And she has her own money from well before she was married to this man. When Child Protective Services came in, because there was domestic violence which truly is traumatizing to a child and this had been ongoing, the proper protocol in that case is to remove the child or to have one of the parents - typically it's the mother if the mother's the one being abused - to go and live at a domestic violence shelter. Most times, I'd say 80 percent conservatively, most times the father will say "No, no, no. I want my child to stay here and I'll just move out." In California the department doesn't allow that because they say they don't believe it. "We don't believe that you're going to leave so if mom does not go into a shelter then we're going to take the kid."

In this instance they did take the kid, even though mom and dad completely did separate permanently. It was actually two, a little boy and a little girl. They kept them together. They placed them in a foster home initially. And about a week-and-a-half later they separated them. All the while mom and dad being separated, are going to court, trying to fight this, trying to get attorneys, the typical alarming, emotionally-driven state that any parent is in when they realize that their child is with a stranger.

Well they ended up after a week-and-a-half separating this little boy and this little girl, for whatever reason. The little boy got put in a home with a Hispanic family that couldn't speak English very well. So there was a communication problem. Not only couldn't they speak English, but the little boy was sexually abused while he was in the home. Unbelievable is the next part of this story, which is he tells the social worker. The social worker confirms it. The department leaves him in that very same home. They leave him there for another month-and-a-half. And it's all documented. They never told either parent. So imagine that you're going to court. You're fighting for your child. You're fighting because your child is away, has been removed from the home. You never in a million years are thinking while your child was removed from this 7,000 square foot right-down-the-street-from-Kim-Kardashian's house by the way, in Calabasas, that your child's being raped by somebody who really you can't even communicate with because there's such a great language barrier.

In Los Angeles County about a year-and-a-half ago they approved 1,000 convicted sexual offenders. They approve them to be foster parents; convicted and on the sexual registry, on the CACI (Child Abuse Central Index) index. Yes! Approved! So what does that tell you?And that's real. The LA Times covered it. It was in the newspaper. They came out with it. These are real numbers. There's really no proper protocol for vetting people to be a foster parent.

Harrison: So what are the criteria that they use?

Tammi: Well, they're going to do a fingerprinting. They're going to take some background information. If you pass the fingerprinting, you're pretty much passed. They're going to go into your home. They're going to see if there's any safety risks. Listen, somebody's coming to my home, I'm an abuser, I'm going to clean up the house, I'm going to burn a candle and I'm going to make it look like it's hunky dory because I want that child. And that's the reality.

And because they're so desperate, why? Because in Los Angeles there are 32,000 children that have been removed. Just in Los Angeles.

Tiffany: And there's a financial incentive behind this too. Do you know in Los Angeles County how much are foster parents paid to take in children?

Tammi: Sure. It depends on what type of foster parents because the kinship program which is you're a foster parent but you're actually related to the family in some way, but the mom and dad can't take care of the child so you'll come in as an aunt, a cousin because if there is any family and the family steps up it falls under that kinship. They get paid less. So it's about 500 and something dollars a month. Now the foster parents get paid anywhere from $500 to $1,500, depending upon if the child has behavioural issues, if the child has to take psychotropic drugs. So last month LA Times again comes out with 50% of the children just in Los Angeles County in the system are on psychotropic drugs. Actually 51%.

So what does that mean? That means that payment goes way up. It can actually go to $1,800 per child. Now imagine a foster home having five children. You don't have to work. I have two judges here that I know are corrupt. Actually one got removed from the family law bench and now does the domestic violence restraining orders. He had two or three children from the system. Another judge - I'd love to say his name but I can't right now, but I will email it to you as soon as we're done with what we're doing - he and his wife had three children from the system. The more we started looking the more we saw that so many of these professionals are adopting these children. When you adopt a child through the system, they're paying you until that child is 18 years old. And then to add further insult, if the child doesn't stay with you anymore because you end up being deemed an abuser, like a case that I had a couple of months ago when two children got removed from an adoptive mom who was abusing them, their whole lives by the way, when they got removed and I spoke with CPS they said she'll continue to get the money, even though they don't live with her anymore. Can you imagine that taxpayer?

Shane: It's outrageous.

Tammi: Yes, outrageous. This is our money. We pay for this.

Harrison: What happens when these kids turn 18? Does it stop?

Tammi: The payments?

Harrison: Not just the money but just in general. So you've got a kid that was put in foster care so he turns 18...

Tammi: He has the right to leave or she has the right to leave. There is an extended program here in California and in several states where if they are going to college - and this part of the program is good. That's the awful part of it; some components actually are advantageous for these kids. Not all kids do have good parents. But the kids that were just lost in the system, they do have a program where they continue to get financial compensation as long as they maintain good grades and they are in college. And that goes until 21 and then 23 years old. And complete medical until they're 18 at least. So the adoptive or foster parents have no expenses with medical. They get clothing vouchers. They get monthly payments. Imagine with the economy the way it is right now, with the lack of education, the credentials that are needed to maintain a decent pay wage. Now imagine how easy it is, even if you have founding, to become a foster parent.

Imagine that you have three bedrooms in your house and you can put bunk beds. You can have six kids. And imagine if you take them to a friend who's a physician and he says "Listen, this kid's behaviour is outrageous." And the friend who's a physician says "You think he needs medication? I definitely do. It's definitely ADHD. It's definitely defiance disorder." It's whatever it is and he gets put on psychotropic drugs. If some kids that are on seven different psychotropic drugs, how many kids are even functioning? There's such high levels of drugs in their system that they're really like zombies.

Shane: It's rare to see a child in care who's on just one medication too.There's cases where they're given one and then that produces some kind of side effects so they lay on the others.

You were speaking about the programs that can help the kids once they reach 18 and they're going to college. Is there a good percentage?

Tammi: That utilize the program? That utilize that opportunity?

Shane: Yeah. Is that a generally successful program? How many make it and how many don't?

Tammi: I think that's a fabulous question and unfortunately I myself would be under the perception that those numbers are not established. However I can't verify that, but now that you have raised that question I think it's an area that I definitely need to look into. I don't have those numbers and I would be of the mindset that if the numbers were high they would certainly be advertising that because they need to advertise some success. That would be a great area.

What we do see is 60 percent - this is a very important number that I do know and this falls into the trafficking in the department, which is quite real. So the department is not obligated by law to report a child missing. I don't know if you folks know that. I don't know if it's applicable to every state but I know that here in California they are not obligated to report the child to law enforcement.

Shane: That's baffling.

Tammi: Right. Baffling. Well I had a case a couple of years ago where a mom's gorgeous young lady, 15 years old, dabbled with some drugs. She was in high school, single mom and she got real nervous because she wanted to put a quick halt to it. And we know, if anybody else is a parent, I certainly know the more you say no the more they're going to rebel against you. So there's that fine gray area where you have to kind of tiptoe to get what you want and to get what's best for them.

So this mom called a friend who said "Call the police. See what the police can do." She called the police, the police thing you know. "I called DCFS and I had her put in one of these homes for a week or two and let her get a real taste of what life could be like if she continues."The mom ultimately put her daughter in this group home. She thought everything was planned. She was onboard with it. She wanted to scare her. Well it was a really slick situation because this mother for the next year-and-a-half searched for her daughter. She had her daughter in this home. She goes at Thanksgiving, she had not been in very long at all, to talk to her daughter to say "Now baby, here's what it could be like, okay? Come home. Stay away from the bad people, the people who are not doing the right thing and get back to focus."

She goes, the gate is open around this group home. She asks for her daughter. They start looking. Her daughter's not there. She says "Where's my daughter?" They say "We don't know." Well lo and behold, not only her daughter but three other very good looking young ladies were vanished from the house. Not one staff member saw her. As a matter of fact, the gate that had to stay closed and could only be buzzed, suspiciously, and nobody knows, it was just open. They think perhaps because it was Thanksgiving.

Well her daughter was trafficked. She's home now. It took a community, it took the FBI, and it took this mother every day, she never stopped; every single day, to find her daughter. She was sold so many times. They let her go. It was not 'she escaped'. They let her go. So then the numbers are, 60 percent of the children that are in the system, within 48 hours are trafficked. Sixty. Within 48 hours. Not coincidental.

Elan: Is that specifically California?

Tammi: No, it's national. That's national. These are the national numbers now, yeah. These are national numbers. It is impossible for traffickers to know where children are placed without having somebody to give them addresses, to give them dates and times and ages and when they're leaving. Sixty percent!

Shane: That's a phenomenally high number.

Tammi: Yes it is, it is. It's an unbelievable number.

Shane: With the girl in that case that you just mentioned, was she able to provide any information as to what happened?

Tammi: She is still healing. She hasn't been home very long. She's been home about six months. The trauma.

Shane: It's unimaginable.

Tammi: Yeah, it's unimaginable. I had a young lady come on my show and she had overcome some of it. The PTSD, the tenseness, the trauma. It just changes them. They're not kids anymore. They're not teenagers anymore who should be dabbling in silliness and giggling and having a crush on a boy or a girl. It's not limited. Boys are trafficked and girls are trafficked. It's both genders.

Snuff movies are very, very popular right now. I have intelligence agents who give me information and snuff movies are very popular. This is where they do horrendous things to children and by the end of the movie they murder them on film. There's a tremendous audience that buys these films.

Shane: Before you came on we were talking about The Franklin Scandal.

Tammi: Oh heck yes.

Shane: And there is a part in that book where the author's talking about coming into contact with one of Larry King's photographers and he was trying to get him to produce those types of films. So that was one of the things that came out.

Harrison: Pretty much every big pedophile ring scandal, and there have been several of them, there was the Franklin one; there was the Dutroux scandal in France and Netherlands and Belgium; and of course we've got the recent scandal going on in the UK with all these MPs involved. When you read the cases and the testimony and the investigative journalism on them, they all include snuff films. I'm really thinking that what this looks like is that these things go on, like you said, to the very top and it's not just in the United States.

Tammi: It's worldwide.

Harrison: Every major western country. Yeah, worldwide. So it looks like Child Protective Services and probably other organizations are just part of this sick system that's going on underneath the surface. So all we see is the surface. We see Child Protective Services and of course the image is of this noble, good cause that's doing good things, but even on the surface we see that it's ridiculous because we see just the trivial, ridiculous things that they take children away from their parents for and then under the surface you've got just this hell on earth that's going on.

Tammi: Exactly.

Harrison: The adjectives we've been using just don't really do it justice. It's baffling. It's horrifying. It's unbelievable what's actually going on.

Shane: People really need to read these cases. Going through The Franklin Scandal and reading Predators by Anna Salter, once you get into some of those cases, the words don't do it justice. These are some of the toughest books that I've read and people need to have that knowledge and awareness to know what's going on.

Tammi: You're absolutely right.

Elan: One of the things that we were discussing earlier is that given how pervasive and monstrous the situation is, it's incredible that there isn't more awareness around it and it's suggestive of just how much it's suppressed by the media.

Tammi: Right. Well they are directed not to cover this. These are direct orders, actually. Given the numbers that I've given, and that's just a small portion of the large picture, in an hour's time we could never cover the capacity of what's actually happening. However, then we look at the media. They can pull a story and it seems like these specific stories are almost anomalies. "This is some freak thing that happened and by gosh this is a break in the system. This poor child", being singular.

I've spoken with people that know me. They know me. I'm a logical person. I'm not emotionally charged at all and I'm grounded. And when I tell them some of these numbers they say "Tammi, I think that you're jaded. I think that you're emotionally involved because Child Protective Services is there to help." And I could give them fact upon fact and case upon case and they just think that these are just instances that slipped through the cracks and they don't think that this really is representative of the larger picture. They can't fathom it. Perhaps it's because to actually consider this to be a reality would be so devastating to the general public, to know that this is not third world mentality. This is US mentality, that the US is trafficking more children than third world countries. More! This would be horrific.

There's been a journalist, Martin Burns, who I was dating. He was an independent journalist. He gave a lot of stories to Fox News. He covered a wonderful segment I highly suggest everybody watch. It's called Children Lost in the System. He covered exactly what I'm discussing right now. In August a year-and-a-half ago, he went for a hike and fell off of the cliff to his death. Here's a gentleman who has been to Russia, up against the Russian mob, who has covered stories that you could not imagine and yet when it came to Child Protective Services, just like Nancy Schaefer, the senator, just like Bill Bowen, just like so many that have stepped up to discuss this, like we're doing today.

The closer you get, there is a definite suppression. So do journalists become fearful? I'm sure that they do. And those that don't become fearful either get terminated, which I know of a couple that have been terminated because they were adamant about going forth with stories which they had tremendous facts to back up.

I can tell you that Martin in one particular case, was working on a family law case involving allegations of sexual abuse that were substantiated. We're talking forensic examination substantiated. The Orange County courthouse subpoenaed him and they wanted his sources. "Who is giving you these cases? How are you getting this?" And what Martin disclosed to me, and this is the first time I'm ever going to say this publicly actually, is that Fox News spent $20,000 on outside attorneys because they couldn't use their own to protect him. And he was really shocked that they had his back in such a way because they were going to really suppress him.

So that's real. An avid hiker doesn't suddenly fall. They said it was a heart attack. I don't want to pursue it because it can't bring him back and there's family here that don't want to think about that happening. It's much easier to accept, with all due respect, that it was a heart attack. Perhaps it was. But there's always that doubt, given what he was covering, that it wasn't. And we certainly have history from other people who have been down that road.

Nick Bryant also covered the Franklin. Is anybody familiar with Nick Bryant?

Harrison: Yeah. I've read his book.

Tammi: Yes. So, his life has been threatened on numerous occasions. We interviewed Nick. Numerous occasions! He just likes the small group of us who are not willing to walk away from this conversation because it is destroying the very fabric of morals in which this country was established. It is destroying the country. These children are the generations that will be running the country. Imagine having traumatized, broken, sexualized, violent, pissed off kids who are now adults and they've got their finger on the red button. Boy oh boy, we're in trouble. And it's not their fault. Imagine that! Look at the numbers, the percentages of children that end up in prison. We're building more prisons instead of addressing the core of the problem.

Imagine if we took a portion of the money that is spent allowing the problem to continue, and just - forgive me for having a terrible memory with names, but the young lady earlier said if we had parenting programs, not all of these cases really warrant a removal. But they do need some help. I'm in full agreement with that. Listen, we all could use some help. Whoever, couldn't use a good suggestion? I could use one every day. And we should be open to that. I think it's great.

In other countries, the military is mandatory. You go to Korea. I've done a lot of traveling in the years. You go to Korea it's mandatory when they graduate high school that they do two years in military. Now I'm not suggesting military, but I'm suggesting if you have a child, if you're a first-time mom, maybe we do a mandatory, very fun, very loving and nurturing course, mandatory. Get a feel. And don't make these services cost. Give them free. Daniel Saunders out of the University of Michigan did a study. It's actually on the Department of Justice website. He did a study in which he cited that it's costing anywhere between $500 and $750 billion, no million folks, billion dollars a year due to the trauma that these now-adults experienced when they were children; healthcare costs, they go to the doctors four times more often; they have disease-cancer, heart attacks, drug abuse, STDs. The numbers are so off the charts in comparison to somebody that just wasn't abused and grew up in whatever is considered the norm. We all have a different norm, but anyway, without abuse.

Shane: There are these solutions out there. There are creative people who have looked at different types of parenting and different types of therapies. These things do exist.But not in the child welfare system at the state level. It's just more of a criminal perspective; these kids are a threat and are treated like criminals and victimized further.

Harrison: Tammi, we're coming up on the end of the show, so maybe we just have time for a couple more questions. I was wondering first of all if you could let our listeners know how to find you, what they might be able to do to give your organization some support.

Tammi: That would be awesome. I have a show every Friday night on UBNradio.com. And it's at 7:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time so it'd be 10:00 p.m. on the east coast. I do open the phone lines. I have amazing guests come on, primarily experts. I have parents come on who have this experience. My website is being worked on right now, but it is nationalsafechild.org or .com, either one. Support, contact me. We need volunteers. I have interns that are volunteering. We have parents that are volunteering. We have some professionals onboard. We are extremely limited with funds and for the past three years really have not collected any donations, actually no donations. We could certainly use the help. If you don't have the funds, but you have a talent and you have a little bit of time, these children are in such dire need. There are great solutions out there.

We need to revamp the system. Child Protective Services needs to be done away with and we need several organizations because when you give the power to one organization you are creating a recipe for power, ego, money. Give it to several organizations and let the organizations watch each other. We will then create a system where nobody is going to want to do the wrong thing because there's another organization than can pick up the pieces and will be happy to do that. We will force people to do the right thing by not giving all the power to any one particular person or entity or organization. That's really what we need to do.

Harrison: Some of the chatters in the chatroom right now are suggesting that you open up or set up your website for donations, and maybe start a kickstarter campaign to get some funds. Have you thought about that?

Tammi: You know what, I haven't. I'm just going into that area. I work seven days a week. I get very little sleep. Last night I was up until 3:00 in the morning, like I said, the little boy with the black eye. It's non-stop. I will definitely do that. I have two wonderful people actually that are working on the website. If they give us about one week it will be up and running. If you would allow me, when it is up and running, Harrison if I could give you the website and the information which will be what I've already told you but just give you a heads up that we are up and running, that would just be fabulous. We so need the help.

We're going to start posting success stories so that people can see what work we do and what the end result is because that speaks volumes.

Harrison: Great. We'll spread the word when the website gets up.

Tammi: Excellent.

Harrison: Any other last questions? No. I just had one more comment Tammi, because you mention Nick Bryant and Senator Schaefer and just reading all these stories and the related topics, I know the kind of level of attack that can be brought on a person that looks into these kinds of things. Some of our chatroom chatters are saying to stay safe and I can only reiterate that it takes a lot of courage to go up against these people that are just ruthless in order to keep doing what they're doing.

Tammi: That's right.

Harrison: So I hope you do stay safe.

Tammi: Thank you.

Harrison: Have you had a lot of personal attacks like that yourself?

Tammi: I don't want to go there.

Harrison: Sure, yeah.

Tammi: And one day I'll explain why, but at this particular juncture I'd rather not. I will say that I cannot encourage people enough to just take on a portion, a voice. Just be a voice. You don't have to be ultra proactive. You certainly don't have to put yourself in any jeopardy. But if you see something, say it and just remember we the people, we are really the majority. And if we just take the power back a little bit, and not in a revolution type of manner, in a very peaceful manner, but as the majority. Because in fact we are and these are elected officials. We need to look at who we are electing and we need to get out there and vote.

As corrupt as it all is, if enough of us get out there and vote, we can be the decision-makers more so. And you know what? We can put our own people in those seats; people who are honest, who care. There are enough good people. You don't have to have a whole bunch of experience. Trust me. Most of these people, don't be fooled, they don't. Good people, you put your name out there. You get in touch with organizations like mine, like yours. Just start getting in and we will have people advocate for you. We can get good people in. We the people. That's how I'd like to leave this.

And I just want to thank you. Thank you for caring about this topic. I'm really moved by everybody who becomes proactive and gets involved in this conversation because we know that it's the least exciting and certainly the least favourable conversation to have, but it's essential.

Shane: It is a hard topic to broach, but like you're saying, the more people that speak out about these issues, it also provides some sort of protection for those who are on the front lines, who are investigating this and also those who are going through it and experiencing it directly. So I notice that this month is national child abuse awareness month.So hopefully all our listeners will spread the word on these issues.

Tammi: Well I'll let you guys know, something very big is happening next week and as soon as it does, I'll actually email you guys and you guys might want to let your listeners know through one of your other shows, to give them an update because it's going to be an amazingly big story.

Harrison: Alright. We'll look forward to it. Okay, well thank you.

Tammi: Thank you all.

Harrison: Thanks again Tammi.

Tammi: Take care.

Shane: Thanks Tammi.

Elan: Thank you for coming today.

Tammi: Nice meeting all of you and thank you so much. Thanks for being a part of this team. I'm honoured to be a part of this team as well. Okay, take care.

Harrison: Great. Take care Tammi. That was Tammi Stefano, National Safe Child. We went a little bit over today but we just had to because it was such a good topic. Hopefully we can have Tammi on again some time because it sounds like she's got a lot to say, a lot of interesting information on this subject. It's one we've talked about before but there's just so much to it and it's so important that I'm sure we'll return to it. So with that said, that'll be it for today. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We've got Behind the Headlines tomorrow and the Health and Wellness Show on Monday. And than we will see you again next week. So everyone take care.

Shane: Thanks for listening everybody.

Tiffany: Bye everybody.

Elan: Have a good one. Be safe.