The Unseen Advocate
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For families who are accosted, rent asunder, and obliterated by our child "protective" service agencies and the courts that heartlessly enforce the devastation - there is the Internet.  Families and family advocates are meeting on the Internet.

Many families new to the Internet barely know how to acquire or use a computer, how to secure a service provider or an email ID, and may even suffer from verbal communication and writing deficits.  They are unable to make sense of what has happened to their families, their panic compounded by the sleepless nights, shapeless days.  They are gripped by fear and tension associated with the loss of their children, overwhelmed and overcome by the unreconciled grief their own children are suffering over the loss of their parents. 

Their children may have been kidnapped screaming from their beds in the night, or silently from their classrooms during the day - not by a hooded underground, but by civil servants with government-issued IDs, white collar bounty hunters hired by the state to funnel in federal dollars in exchange for falsified child "protection."

These families are finding the Internet.  They are talking to other families, who are then also migrating to the Internet, hoping against hope to see their children again, too.  Oftentimes it is very late in the process of family dissolution, with a month away to Termination of Parental Rights, or years and years after the fact.

For families who find the Internet, there they find other families just like them, they find communion and succor where before they experienced only isolation and rejection, from family, friends, neighbors and the professional community.  For families who find the Internet soon enough, there is HOPE. 

Many families who have been besieged have evolved into advocates, offering understanding and solace to the Internet newcomers.  When attorneys at law routinely turn away or sell out these unwanted families, family advocates will offer experience, knowledge, technical resources, Internet links and facilities, tactics, advice for handling private and court-appointed attorneys, and the conviction for upholding constitutional and civil rights, in addition to researching agency, local and federal law.  Advocates organize the details of a family's case, make order out of the tangle, give a defense shape and tangibility.  Advocates extend friendship and praise and encouragement.

Family advocates are almost always unseen.  Advocates almost never meet the families they are assisting.  There is no obvious incentive to being an advocate.  Often they are not appreciated, sometimes even criticized for their efforts.  But every time a child is able to see a parent again, or is permitted unsupervised visits with a parent, or comes home forever...this is a reward unlike any other for an advocate.

For anyone who reads this, please reach out to another family, any way you know how.  Offer support.  Offer your understanding.  Encourage a family to go to a library, and instruct the family how to obtain an email ID, how to find and communicate with like families nationwide.  Anyone can be an advocate.  Anyone can do a little something to keep a family together, or to help a family reunite.

Sometimes we never see those whom we help, or those who help us.  But we will never forget them.