Real Stories of CPS: Account#2

My coworkers [at a group home] were all women, many single moms, mostly women of
color. On my first shift, I was reprimanded by my coworkers for holding a
crying baby–because they couldn’t give all the babies physical
comfort–they didn’t want them to expect it.

I made a dollar over minimum wage, had no experience caring for abused
children, and worked long hours. We were not made aware of the
circumstances that led the children to be in CPS custody or of any special
needs they had. All we knew of the children, we learned from their
stories, rumors, or sneaking peaks at the forbidden files.

Two children who were healthy, happy and well cared for, were in the group
home for a month–children can’t be placed back home or otherwise without
a judges order–they were removed because both parents where intoxicated
when the cops arrived. The police were called by a neighbor–apparently
the parents were outside arguing.

Children with behavior challenges were often mistreated as a result of
overworked, unsupported staff; who are unequipped to deal with extreme
behavior–being in challenging situations with out any tools to deal. I
think, for the children, this further enforces harmful ideas of being
damaged, broken and unlovable.

The food was unhealthy, and no attention was paid to food allergies unless
they where too severe to ignore. There was no awareness of cultural beliefs
practices and customs and no special care for sick children. Kids who had
never been in an abusive situation were often abused by children who had
suffered from physical, psychological and sexual trauma.

-Anonymous

Real Stories of CPS: Account#1

My mom was very neglectful and physically and emotionally abusive throughout my childhood, I can see that now.  Her m.o. was that we would move every time people started questioning what was happening in our family, so my sisters and I never really developed strong friendships or relationships with other family members.  We were always isolated, so when we’d end up in the school office or in family counseling after our teachers would report our situation, we would refuse to talk or deny the allegations against my mother.  Why did we lie to CPS?  We were afraid of being separated, we had learned that we would just move again and we’d be punished more harshly by our mother.  Sometimes I think we should have spoken up, but when the truth finally got out, all our worst nightmares were realized.  The situation had gotten so bad that one of my sisters tried to commit suicide after being punished by my mother.  A huge custody battled ensued and my sisters and I ended up in foster care til the end of the case, which coincided with my high school graduation.  It was terribly traumatizing to testify against your own mother as a graduation gift.  I was court ordered to go straight to the state college I had been admitted to and attend summer session, but was not emancipated, so as a result I was under my mother’s power when it came to loans.  She refused to fill out documents and I had to work full time to go to school.  My sister who had attempted suicide entered my father’s custody, and ended up in months of rehab and eventually was kicked out as a minor by my stepmother.  She came to live with me, but slipped into heavy drug use and worked in the sex industry for years to support her habit.  My second sister remained in my mother’s custody, but then she was isolated with my mom’s violence.  She literally spent years in psych wards and rehab before the state took her from my mother and she entered a group home.  She dropped out of high school and ended up joining the navy because she thought she had no way out.  Now I am a public school teacher and I see the bias in CPS protection, I see how weak it is, and I know that my case is hardly unique.  CPS and the state failed my family, CPS continues to fail the families I serve.  We could do so much better by children.

-Anyonymous

OCCUPY CPS new flyers and posters

Posters and flyers — each have a version with profanity (‘fuck’) and without.

CPSposterwhut

CPSposterfuck

CPSflyerwhut

CPSflyerfuck

Occupy Child Protective Services on MAY 1st GENERAL STRIKE

Join OOP and OCCUPY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES during the MAY 1st GENERAL STRIKE!

Come out on May Day to SHUT DOWN this horribly oppressive  institution that doesn’t give a fuck about  children or parents!

We cannot only block capital in spaces of waged labor, but also in the capitalist, racist, patriarchal reproduction of social life! STRIKE EVERYWHERE!

When: May 1st 8:30 AM
Where: CPS 401 Broadway — near Jack London Square.

See you there.

.. why occupy CPS?

Despite the good intentions of some workers in the agency, Child Protective Services (CPS) is not what it claims. It does not do us a service, it does not protect our children, it does not create healthy environments for them. CPS is designed to enforce a so-called “normal” model of the family, actively punishing those of us who do not comply with the capitalist, patriarchal, racist, white supremacist ideal of what a family should look like. CPS is used to scare and punish people who threaten or fight the system.

CPS targets the poor, people of color, single mothers, queer, and non-gender-conforming parents and kids

• CPS is notorious for targeting poor single mothers.
• When children are removed from their homes, they are taken into group homes, where underpaid, over worked and under trained “care” providers are responsible for them; in ratios of about 10 to 1. Children who have never before experienced abuse are often abused by other children who have; or by overworked employees and have no way back to there families, or into foster care until a judge decides there fate–often months later. Those who are eventually placed into foster care are often  are often physically or sexually exploited by selfish fucks just trying to get some extra money out of the situation.
• Also, the mere fact of being a queer, trans* or gender-nonconforming parents can get child services called on a family — if, for example, a homophobic or transphobic school counselor gets wind, CPS can be called.
• Children are also more likely to be displaced if they are queer or trans*, and the truth is CPS is NOT likely to place children in foster care with queer or trans* parents! This reinforces the homophobic ciscentric idea of the family, and endangers queer and trans* youth.
• Finally, the mere fact of being black or brown, poor, and a parent, will result in heightened scrutiny and policing from CPS — CPS is a racist institution and enforces its violent rules primarily on people of color. A middle class white mother, and even a queer white middle class couple, will not be treated the same by CPS as a poor African American single parent, period, and this is how institutional racism is reproduced.

Occupy Patriarchy will fight back

Feminists, queers, and trans* people who have been organizing within the Occupy movement since the beginning started Oakland Occupy Patriarchy to support each other as we organize against racism and patriarchy and gender oppression, both within our movement and within the greater capitalist society. We recognize that capitalism, patriarchy and racism are mutually dependent and we want to end them all in favor of a better world for all of us. Our action against Child Protective Services on May Day is part of our struggle.

Many of us at Occupy Patriarchy have direct experience of CPS’ oppression. We are fed up with CPS and are determined to expose its repressive actions and to continue to build a community to fight it. On May 1st, The day of a new GENERAL STRIKE, we will occupy CPS. We will gather at the CPS office on 4th and Broadway in downtown Oakland at 8:30. We invite and call in all who share our critique, our anger, our oppressions, our experiences, and our revolutionary spirit to join us.

Please Write Letters of Support to Reunite Kerie with her Children!

Kerie needs letters of support for her court date on Monday, in order to get her children back. A letter of support is: a testimony to her character, sharing good experiences about her, especially if you’ve seen her interacting with her kids, in the loving, supportive, and brilliant way she always does!! The court is most receptive to people who have good or high-status jobs, (even though Keri wants letters from everyone and doesn’t value people based on their ‘status’ within capitalism!). IF YOU WRITE A LETTER, you MUST include the phrase: “I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.”

People must send these letters in by MONDAY, APRIL 16!
Send them here! : antirepression@gmail.com
And please donate to help this amazing mom get her kids back! :https://www.wepay.com/donations/fund-to-help-keri-get-back-her-children

♥♥ love, antirepression crew & oakland occupy patriarchy

SINGLE MOTHER FALSELY ACCUSED OF ENDANGERING HER CHILDREN AT OCCUPY OAKLAND

[This article is a much shorter version of an original piece that connected Kerie Campbell’s situation to larger systemic issues, with analysis about how patriarchy and heteronormativity get enforced in this society, through the court system and in so many other ways. However, because of Kerie’s legal situation, her lawyer warned us that this kind of publicity might anger the court system and prevent what we all want to happen more than anything: for Kerie to gain custody of her children. We will continue to make important systemic analysis in other actions and articles. In the meantime, we are finding ways to support Kerie and hope you join us to help Kerie in her struggle to get her children back.]

The authorities apparently stop at nothing to intimidate and scare people from participating in a movement that they fear. Stayaway orders, bogus arrests, heavy charges for minor offenses, sham “lynching” laws, and, most recently, deploying the Child Protective Services to attack a single mother for participating in Occupy Oakland.

Kerie Campbell is an all-star activist at Occupy Oakland. There from the very 1st planning meeting in Mosswood Park, there the night the camp struck back in October, Kerie is also an admin on the OO (Occupy Oakland) website and co founder of the Occupy Oakland Children’s Village.  The Children’s Village is an area for kids and parents/legal guardians to hangout and feels safe, and is designed to create a space for children to have their voices respected and heard in ways not common for them.  It allows people come to OO events knowing they will have a safe, friendly place to spend time with their kids. Most recently, at the OO Barbecue/Speakout series, kids in the Children’s Village made puppets, got their faces painted, and otherwise hung out together with their parents or guardians.  Considering that Kerie is also a single mother with two young children, the fact that she is so heavily involved is impressive.

Around Occupy Oakland Kerie and her children are welcome, familiar faces that everyone loves. Like many other children who spend time around OO, Kerie’s kids became part of the larger OO family.  But recently something tragic happened in her life that is angering her and the larger community of OO. This activist who has such a standing in the welfare of children had her own children forcefully taken away from her by an Ex-Husband under ridiculous charges that are clearly politically motivated.

Throughout Kerie’s marriage to Anthony Sprenger and during the 6-year custody battle of their 2 children, Kerie and her ex-Husband had a tumultuous relationship to say in the least. However their legal situation was finally worked out and she had two years of relative calm, which made this most recent attempt to bar Kerie from seeing her children come seemingly from out of the blue.

On Friday afternoon Kerie arrived at her children’s school like any other Friday, the day she her Ex-Husband normally switched custody. The Friday custody switch-up, until this point, went “like clock work.”  Thursday night Kerie’s daughter called her, crying about a classroom conflict. “I told her that I would see her the next day.” Kerie recounts with tears in her eyes.  But when she got to school, her children were nowhere to be found. She panicked, until a friend told her that her ex husband had come to pick the kids up before she got there. Frantically, Kerie went to different school administration officials to find out how exactly her Ex Husband had done this without any warning to Kerie. The search for more information from the administration, with which she had a good relationship up until this point, was to no avail. “They had their heads and eyes down and said that they couldn’t do or say anything.”  Finally, she was forced to call the police (which she did not want to do) who eventually, after a lot of back and forth, produced the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) her ex used to take the children. The Restraining Order was supposed to be served her before taking her children. It had no supplementary declaration or evidentiary documents.

The TRO stated that Kerie’s children were at risk because she had taken them to the Mosswood Encampment, which was an Occupy Oakland re-occupation that occurred on March 22nd, thus endangering them. That day the encampment was granted permission to be at Mosswood by OPD once the occupiers had taken their tents down. The “recklessly endangering” activities that Kerie and her children were taking partin? They ate pizza, wrote letters to imprisoned comrades, played Frisbee and tag,and read books in an environment largely resembling a park picnic. Clearly, this event was not dangerous. The TRO mentioned quite a few other charges that cite Kerie as an unfit mother because of her involvement in OO, which is absurd given her activities in Occupy Oakland.

This attack has disturbing implications for how repression could affect single parents involved in OO and is something the larger OO community must be on the watch for.  Kerie believes this was a targeted attack against her involvement in Occupy Oakland.  “[My ex-husband] had gone after everything else before, this was all he had left to go after.”

As occupiers and feminists, we must support Kerie against this attack, and we must continue to provide spaces like Children’s Village that support people with children   who want to participate in this movement.

To donate to Kerie’s legal fund send checks to her friend Don Macleay:
“KC”. C/O Don Macleay, P.O. Box 20299, Oakland CA, 94620

Expanding themes of the Occupy Oakland Community BBQ this Saturday: Justice for the victims of racist violence and the police state

Occupy Oakland’s fourth Community BBQ & Speak-Out event will take place this Saturday, April 7^th at Defemery Park in West Oakland, commemorating Fallen Comrades on Lil’ Bobby Hutton Day and calling for justice for all of the countless racist murders that are directly caused by, or systematically ignored by, the racist “criminal justice” system. This call includes justice for Oscar Grant, who was murdered by BART police based on racially motivated suspicion; as well as justice for Trayvon Martin, who was murdered by a neighborhood watch volunteer also based on racist suspicion, and whose racist attacker the Florida police refused to arrest despite the man’s clear guilt. The connections are obvious—in its hypocrisy, the racist police state and its citizen proxies will conflate criminality with colour and use this as a basis for murder, even while protecting and defending perpetrators of murder crimes, as long as these crimes uphold the racist dimensions of power and repression. To expand these connections and our conversation around endemic, epidemic forms of racist violence in our society— to demand justice for Trayvon Martin, and also for the countless others who suffer this violence daily—we add the call for justice for Shaima Alawadi. Following the BBQ, there will be a “Hoodies and Hijab” march from the park to Oscar Grant Plaza.

Shaima Alawadi was an immigrant from Iraq, a resident of US for almost 20 years, a mother of five children, a devout Muslim, a woman who wore hijab, and a person like any other. She was brutally beaten and bludgeoned by an unknown attacker inside her own home, left for dead, bloody and unconscious on her living room floor. She was found by her daughter, with a note on her body that read “go back to your country, you terrorist.” According to a recent Huffington Post article, “Investigators said they believe the assault is an isolated incident… ‘A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that,’ Lt. Mark Coit said. ‘We don’t want to focus on only one issue and miss something else.’”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/24/shaima-alawadi-dead_n_1377724.html

In furthering the connection and our commentary on the hypocrisy of the racist police state, its perpetration of racist violence, and its perpetuation of systemic violence in society, it is particularly relevant to reflect on this reluctance of police to declare the case a hate crime. Considering that police don’t hesitate to use the hate crime classification arbitrarily in order to criminalize and repress political dissent, as in the case of the Ice Cream 3 of Occupy Oakland, it becomes obvious that the state’s infrastructures for “safety” and “justice” are only utilized in order to stabilize the racist, sexist capitalist order. They don’t give a fuck about women, people of color, immigrants, fags, dykes, queers or trans people UNLESS one of these people happens to be rich or powerful, or useful in the preservation of the status quo of rich and powerful.

The police commonly report hate crimes and racist violence as “isolated events” in order to make it harder for people to identify this violence as a structural issue within our society, rather than a few racist individuals. When, for instance, cops kill black people in Oakland, it is not because there are a few bad cops in the system; it is because cops and the system itself are the protectors of white supremacy. Shaima’s case is also particularly relevant considering that the national discourse on terrorism, alongside that on immigration, has been an overwhelming source of the resurgence of racist ideology in the U.S. over the past decade.

Shaima’s murder should make us reflect on how the imperialist U.S. government only cares to address gendered violence when it can be racialized in service of white supremacy and used to justify the state’s acts of invasion and colonization. When the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, one of its central justifications was the patronizing, racist claim of “protecting Muslim women,” meanwhile at home the domestic dissemination of an anti-terrorist rhetoric fostered racist anti-Muslim sentiments that violated and harmed women and Muslims all over the country. In other words, the government only ever addresses gendered violence when it can use it as a means of demonizing men of color at home and abroad, and thus to use this as an argument for repression, invasion, and imperialism.

In extending these calls for justice to include a Muslim immigrant woman whose violent murder was explicitly racialized by her attacker, we develop our understanding and rejection of the racist police state, even as we remember its victims, drawing connections across race/ethnicity, nationality, religion, and gender. We acknowledge that the violence of the system runs broad and deep; that it is structural, fundamental. Fuck the system. All power to the people. Justice for Trayvon Martin & Shaima Alawadi! Justice for Oscar Grant. Justice for Anna Brown… Justice for Rekia Boyd… Justice for JaParker Jones… Justice for Raheim Brown… Justice for Kenneth Harding… Justice for Aiyana Jones…