Massachusetts News 
By Edward G. Oliver 

December 1--A solemn group of distraught parents assembled at the Village Green in Hyannis on Sunday evening, October 17th. 

The drizzly weather matched their mood as they set up for a lonely candlelight vigil. They were there to draw notice to the plight of their children scattered in foster homes and facilities, some of whom are suffering according to the parents. 

They dedicated this third annual vigil to "the seventy-one children who have died in the past 4 years while in the ‘protective care’ of DSS." Their organization is "Justice For Families," a parent’s support group comprised of people who are battling to get their children back from DSS.  

Against a wall on the sheltered stage, a row of signs voice silent screams reading, "Save the children from the child-savers, help us light their way home," "Governor Cellucci, 71 dead foster children is not a ‘few mistakes,’ how do you sleep at night?" and "Missing: DSS took Tarri." A flyer reads, "STATE LEGISLATORS need to hear our stories & make drastic changes to STOP state sanctioned child abductions." 

DSS spokesman David Van Dam denies that seventy-one have died in state custody but declined to give a number. "I don’t have that number, but it’s lower," he tells Massachusetts News. Nev Moore, founder of the group, claims Van Dam himself gave her that number in a moment of candor that surprised her. 

Founded In 1997 

Nev and Tom Moore from Barnstable founded the group in early 1997, only weeks after DSS suddenly seized their two children. DSS had taken notice of the family after a one-time domestic incident between the two outside the house thirteen months prior. Nev, who feels she’s seen enough to justify her cynicism, theorizes perhaps DSS had some slots to fill for their vendors and went looking through old case files for potential candidates. "They need twenty to twenty five children a day to place with their vendors to justify their half-billion dollar budget," says Moore, adding she was lucky to get her children back. From that eye-opening experience, she grew to be a knowledgeable and tenacious family rights advocate.  

As darkness settled, Nev Moore began to speak as an intimate friend to the row of candlelit faces while standing behind a literature table holding a microphone, "It weighs heavily on my heart to see so many of the same faces, because I know that means that we’re now going into our third year where you’ve been separated from your children and your children have been separated from you…I know you are still carrying the wounds that have been inflicted by this out-of-control bureaucracy. 

"I know whose children have been abused and harmed in foster care, and I know whose children have been raped. I know whose children have been drugged into submission, and I know whose children are covered in injuries and bruises from daily violent restraints and straitjackets, and I know whose children have died. All in the best interest of the child they say, and in the loving care of the Department of Social Services. 

"If a parent has a dirty house, it’s front page news, but seventy-one dead kids don’t warrant mention in the Globe or the Herald. It’s too embarrassing for the administration."  

Moore describes a confrontation she had with Governor Cellucci on WRKO asking him why he won’t demand an investigation into the deaths of seventy-one children. "Governor Cellucci responded by saying, ‘I’m tired of hearing about DSS’s few mistakes,’" she recounts.  

"He might have been caught off-guard, but when we tell him, he has a bound duty to listen. Are we saying our children are better off dead in state custody than having a chance at life with their less-than-perfect parents?…If we buy into that standard, then a lot of high level politicians and government officials will be losing their children; people whose dysfunctional alcoholism and social misconduct is public knowledge. But we know that nothing happens because it’s child abuse only if you can’t afford a lawyer." 

Plain Folks 

After meeting some of the parents, the magnitude of their loss is clear from their emotions. These are plain folks, obviously sincere, who readily admit their faults and imperfections but know they are good parents who love their kids. They are eager to show photographs of their cavorting children, faces beaming in the bosom of their family. The stories are all similar, an argument, a fight, a slap, absent mindedness, a misunderstanding, normal daily human interaction somehow gets reported to DSS and twisted into an intolerably risky situation that demands removal of their child.  

Maybe the state doesn’t take the child right away, but failure to follow the prescribed service plan of numerous appointments during working hours will result in the loss of the child. Parents try to jump through the hoops in hopes of getting their kids back. At first they’re afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal.  

Then DSS, they say, keeps changing the rules, moving the goal posts until eventually parents realize the kids aren’t coming back without a fight. All the while the child is traumatized by an abrupt removal to a strange succession of places far worse than any situation at home with the parents, if it was ever bad at home to begin with. 

Among the group of twenty or so attending the vigil were Heidi Polanza from Mashpee, who lost two daughters to DSS, and the Petersons of Hyannis who lost all six children. Eric Bleiken of Yarmouth attended, with his son, Matt. He ran in 1998 as the Republican opponent to Congressman Delahunt, getting a third of the vote. He offered moral support to the group and advised them to work against unresponsive representatives. 

Children Are Abducted by State 

Nev goes on speaking to the group. "Tommy and I started this because we realized that thousands of children are literally abducted by government agents from loving, adequate homes and families where there has been no abuse or neglect. We discovered that there is so much more behind this. A huge, ugly picture, a picture so frightening that I don’t even want to tell people about it. I don’t want to be the messenger of their disillusionment. 

"The issue is about greed, it’s about feeding children into a gargantuan money machine. The money machine is about two-bit junk psychologists forming multi-million dollar contracts with DSS. It’s about massive Medicaid fraud and it’s about bringing federal dollars into the state." 

She then alludes to underlying causes beyond the greed, something at a higher level that is being worked out, totalitarian in nature and driven by ideologues. "Hillary Clinton stated openly in a speech in New York this summer that her goal was to have a social worker in every home, except of course her own." 

Moore then took off the gloves. "The time for being nice has now passed. We’ve tried being nice, we’ve dressed up and we’ve gone to the statehouse, we’ve made appointments and we’ve had meetings, we talked to the legislators and we talked to the media. We’ve asked them very nicely to please stop the atrocities and the brutal destruction of decent families. Being nice has not worked. The time has come to fight for our lives and our children’s lives, to fight for our Constitution and our freedom." 

Starting a Lawsuit 

Justice for Families is starting a lawsuit with attorney Greg Hession from Belchertown, who exudes confidence in his case when he says, "Believe me, they are dead." Hession says he is probably going to do it as a coalition with the Constitutional Legal Institute of New England and Family Legal Service and it will require five to ten lawyers by the time they are done. He explains DSS operates under "an enormous and almost hideous web of federal mandates" which require state compliance in order to keep getting federal money.  

He’s also working with an attorney in Utah who’s filing a similar suit. The Utah attorney informed Hession his state is getting "a minimum of twenty-five thousand dollars per kid snatched and as much as $250,000."  
 

He has dozens of families lined up with "tales that would break your heart." Instead of a class-action suit, he will probably file the cases individually. When asked, he provides an example of one of the cases involved, "A guy is accused of satanic, ritual, sexual abuse. No trial, no hearing, nothing. Just one of these 209A ex parte deals, he has no idea of what’s going on. The old lady accuses him and dad hasn’t seen his kids in four years with no evidentiary hearing." He explains further, "The typical way that DSS does this is they get involved in some way, and then they coerce the mom to get a restraining order and throw the man out or they take the kids. Another case I have is DSS told one of my clients he could spank his children if they disobey; he did so, they took the kids. This is nine months ago, hasn’t seen them since. It’s not just men, it’s men and women, for no reasonable basis they keep children and families apart." 

Hession explains that DSS wields the 51A child abuse reporting statute and the 209A abuse/restraining order statute and "bounces those two things off of each other and uses them in a sort of a symbiotic way to destroy families. I call it the ‘Unholy Triumvirate.’" 

Nev Moore continues her speech by raising the standard of law and order: "Let the police handle child abuse and neglect, because if there is no evidence of child abuse and neglect, then no one can lose their children." She makes the point that a child suffers trauma every time it is abruptly taken from the mother, but the use of trained investigative professionals like the police can prevent that from happening to innocent families. 

She calls for DSS to be dismantled saying, "We need to disassemble the multimillion dollar contracts DSS has with its service providers." She says they are a recipe for corruption. Moore then quotes statistics from Health and Human Services saying, "68% of all substantiated cases of abuse and neglect do not involve child maltreatment; well what the hell do they involve?" She then cites another statistic from HHS when she says; "At least 1.5 million parents per year are falsely accused of child maltreatment. We’re not saying there is no such thing as child abuse, but we’re here representing the 1.5 million people! And how many children do you think that represents? Two, three, five million children? Massachusetts is leading the pack in these statistics. Child protective services is a 12 billion-dollar per year industry in this country, and Massachusetts gets at least half a billion. You do the math. Who’s getting the biggest piece of that pie? Massachusetts." 
 

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