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Brooks Imperial, Lay-community representative, Elbert County Child Protection Team of Kiowa writes:

I don’t know the facts surrounding Niveah Gallegos’ or Chandler Grafner’s deaths. No matter, they were undoubtedly horrible. As long as you are handing out blame however, you should consider that for every Niveah or Chandler, there are dozens of children in similar jeopardy across Colorado at any given moment. Sadly, these cases are not unique.
The Colorado Department of Social Services has an impossible mission. You need to keep in mind that the call to DSS usually comes only after many other things have gone terribly wrong. When you mix young children with parents who are little more than older children themselves, drugs, alcohol, multiple sex partners, violence, lack of income, lack of employable skills, lack of education, lack of family commitment, parents themselves victims of all manner of abuse from their parents, etc., this is what you get. These are often un-fixable situations and people. They are bad outcomes that might, sometimes, be able to be mitigated into less-bad outcomes.
Those are the cards that DSS deals with every day of the week, 24/7. I’m not excusing anything DSS did or didn’t do in the above cases. What I’m saying is, you’re living in a fantasy if you think the state can fix these broken people through some procedure.
There’s only one solution to this problem. Stop the behaviors that lead to it. Recognize that the burden of self-destruction falls most heavily on those least able to handle it - the kids.

This letter has not been edited.

READER COMMENTS

“drugs, alcohol, multiple sex partners, violence, lack of income, lack of employable skills, lack of education, lack of family commitment, parents themselves victims of all manner of abuse from their parents, etc., this is what you get.” – looks like the description of most of the Democratic voters, especially in large cities with all Dem mayors and city council, just like Denver. Good job Dems.

Sure hope these druggies, multiple sex partners, no income, no employable skills, un-educated, family unfriendly, recently abused people don't become the "norm" or, are they the "norm"???
If so, stop the world me and my responsible family and friends with their responsible familys wanna get off!!!

Is it me or are there more and more heartless, cruel, maniacal men, women and even older children, slithering from under rocks and torturing anyone (especially the young and vulnerable) they can without remorse of any kind?

When parents abuse their children they have become un-caring monsters?
My heart goes out to the poor, poor, children of these monsters!!

It seems nothing much can be done to help these abused kids. They fall through the cracks(lame,stupid, excuse) and are generally ignored by the state agencys! So go ahead and kill the kid we don't care!

I bet the workers at the DSS don't ignore paydays like they do children in peril.

No,JoAnne,they're not the norm-but DHS would like them to be.The paydays their folks never miss(I used to be one of them,so I know) depend on incompetent parenthood.DHS pays people,usually very young women of color,to bear children they can't possibly care for.Said kids need a comprehensive range of every kind of professional service,necessitating a comprehensive range of professionals at DHS to provide those services.
From a DHS perspective,the murders of Niveah Gallegos and Chandler Grafner are unfortunate but irrelevant(well,the dead don't need professional services,do they?) and the current scandal is merely part of the cost of doing business.Their legal staff knows,as the public does not, that government has no obligation to protect any individual,and no criminal liability should an individual,even a child,come to harm.

Thank you to the letter writer for pointing out the realities of working for child protection. The bottom line is that there will always be families that fall through the cracks and 20/20 hindsight will expose this as negligence and failure. What is harder to track are the families where intervention has paid off and nothing bad happened to the children.

If we are serious about addressing the risk factors for these families, let's stop complaining about the cost and commit our energy, money and time into helping these children break this vicious cycle.

And this,folks,is just what I am talking about.An intelligent,educated,conscientious individual asks with a completely straight face that clear evidence of government inattention to a dysfunction that resulted in a child's murder be excused away due to inevitable error (is that sorta like"sh*t happens"?) while lack of evidence of success should be similarly disregarded because the evidence is too difficult to obtain and should therefore be presumed to exist.
We're then asked to spend more for the same processes that have worked well only for human services professionals.
Here's a little outa-the-box thinking: If we want to reduce child abuse,let's make the root cause-single parenthood- unattractive.Let's amend the tax code so that only married-filing-jointly returns get child-related deductions and people have motivation to team up officially as parents.Let's abolish paternity laws so that potential moms have motivation to seek out a better father than Child Support Enforcement.Roe v. Wade makes paternity laws unconstitutional anyway.
And we'll make money on the deal too.Americans are lining up in wholesale lots to pay the Chinese Reds big $$ to adopt children.How about we tap into that pent-up adoption demand,and do some case management on our own oversupply.All we have to do is make single parenthood unfeasible enough that at least until those poor dumb kids get it and slow down we'll have lots of little ones that will find a much better situation,lots of capable loving parents and a government that brings in some cash for the public good brokering the whole business.Now that is a little hard on young moms,but you could consider it a sin tax.Any smoker can tell you all about THAT.
Mike-no flame intended.just telling the reader what our crew is up to that they shouldn't be.

Secure the borders. We can't even take care of our own children now, let alone Mexico's.

DHS Policy= One dead child,one less case to deal with. Carry on DHS to the next death,don't bother looking back.

Amen - I am shocked and saddened by your callousness. I would encourage you to go down to your local DSS department and talk with some of the workers. Many work in impossible conditions with the possibility of life and death hanging over every decision.

I would have guessed by your screen name that compassion and kindness might be part of your belief system. I can guarantee you that every time a child is injured or killed by their parents, the caseworkers struggle with feelings of failure, pain and grief as well.

The kind of people who have the need to condemn a whole group of people, such as the personnel at DHS, are not the kind of people from which you can expect intelligent dialog. Jimminy and Amen should go to DHS and see if they can get some counseling.

Well,we can be pretty sure Truth isn't a DHS person.That outfit outsources professional-level counselling,although there have been some workers there doing casework-related counselling whose quality is pretty close.Mike's posts put me in mind of those people.
Truth,on the other hand offers very well-written flames that are perhaps a little short on substantive ideas for improving the malfeasances to which some of the rest of us take a whole lot of well-informed exception. Was Ward Churchill Truth's faculty advisor? Is he still?

Michael R. , Before you condemn me for what I see the failure of a society to protect our children,consider this.

When a child is abused 3 agencies are involved. One the Medical, two the DSS,and three the police.That is if the child is somewhat lucky and the cororner doesn't come first.

According to The Rocky Mountain News,DSS was called by a DR. at an area hospital ,because a 2 year old was bleeding from her vagina.Not a normal occurance,would you agree?

That 2 year old was Neveah.After further investigation by the DHS it was found that the mother's boyfriend was a sex offender ever since he was in his teens.

After further investigation the mother refused to cooperate with DSS.She rather have the boyfriend than care that her daughter was penetrated and bleeding at the age of 2. Common sense along with a sense of decency would have told me ,a mother that there is no way this child is going home with this mother.

Why wasn't Neveah protected then?Do you know something the readers of the RMN don't know?

According to the RMN,DSS let the girl go home with the mother who was not outraged by the fact that her boyfriend had raped her 2 year old daughter!

The terms of her getting her daughter released to her custody was ,not to see the boyfriend and both get parenting classes!

We as a society are supposed to be okay with that! Is this what we have come to ? Holding our children out as sacrificial lambs to be raped and killed so the mother can have a boyfriend?

They had clear evidence of a rape of a 2 year old and let the perpertrators walk away without a charge,protecting the child or a care in the world.

Do you have children? Do you have grandchildren?

Imagine for one horrible minute one of your loved ones being raped at the age of 2 by a known sex offender and letting the perps walk out with that child.

I am not callous, I have more compassion for children than you will ever know.

Tell me if you can guarantee that the case worker who handled the original rape of this child struggled with pain,grief and failure.

My guess is no. It was pure stupidity.

I have written hundreds of letters to our legislature and Governor trying to get Jessica's law passed in this state.

Colorado is still one of a handfull of states who will not pass it.

All it states is that if a child of 12 years or younger is sexually molested the person convicted gets 25 years to life.If we had this law maybe we can save more children.

Instead of passing a law to protect children ,Colorado has opened it's doors with open arms to sex offender's because they know where to live and get the least resistance and the least amout of time for their crimes.

Michael R.,Do you realize that as I am typeing,there are a minimum of 9,000 registered sex offenders in Colorado? Just the one's registered,not the ones who have not registered( like Neveah's mother's boyfriend) or the one's who have not been caught?

I guess I'm callous and have no compassion because I speakout against a broken Social Services system that is supposed to protect our children. I speakout against a justice system that let child predators live here and use our revolving door system to prey on our children.I speakout against our children being raped,abused,starved,and killed everyday somewhere and it always seems that Social services everywhere have had a chance to step in before our children are sacrificed.

Colorado has their priorities screwed up.

The children come first,ALWAYS!

C.I.G.A.A.-You can get a multitude of "AMENs" from me, although I would make a suggestion or two about Child Protective Services:
First,they're not cops.They don't have arrest powers,and they're unarmed.They most particularly don't have the look-at-me-funny-and-I'll-kill-you mentality considered necessary to efficient law enforcement. Their mentality is more kindly and accepting,almost theraputic.
Secondly,as a bureaucracy,their intake process is one of screening out rather than screening in,and their ongoing-case process is one of dropping a case at the first sign of perceived improvement .This present scandal is only the latest in a series of similar incidents going back decades, and is also partly the result of an innocent-unless-proven-guilty mindset line workers adopt for self-protection from much of the case overload that would otherwise be imposed upon them by political cosiderations not quite germane to this thread.
Thirdly,most child abuse cases are dealt with as civil actions,not criminal prosecutions,and therefore nobody gets very zealous about the whole thing.
For those persons concerned that a child is being harmed,probably the most effective way to secure protection for that child is to present the situation to law enforcement as a criminal act.Persistence counts there too,so be prepared.

[quote]and it always seems that Social services everywhere have had a chance to step in before our children are sacrificed[/quote] this is so true and so sad.

How can we fix the system ? I agree that until we make it unattractive to have children that we cant support or care for and, make the penalties for child abuse so severe, this will continue.

I understand there are issues of noninterference from the government and it can be a slippery slope but, something has to be done.

Okay, without painting a broad brush of Social Services ineffectiveness to protect all children,let's focus on just Neveah for a moment.

A medical Dr. called DSS after a 2 year old was brought in bleeding from her vagina.The mother's boyfriend is a sex offender.
You can't tell me anyone who came in contact with this little girl's hands were tied by what ever excuse you want to come up with to make just this one incident,OKAY!

It was obvious there was a crime committed against this little girl!
The DHS could have and should have took this child away from this mother immediately!

This is the problem. They failed her the first time and now pull out the DHS book of excuses,because they could have prevented her death!

The Dr. that examined her could have stepped up. The DHS should have stepped up. The police should have stepped up.

Instead of anyone stepping up to protect this child they let the mother step up and hand her child back to her sex offender boyfriend on a silver platter!

How many more children are we going to offer up to these child sex predators? How many more children need to be raped and abused before someone in authority does the right thing?

Dogs in this state have more rights than children raped ,starved and abused.

This child was raped at the age of 2 years old.This is a no-brainer.

YOU DON"T GIVE A CHILD THAT HAS BEEN RAPED AT THE AGE OF 2 BACK TO THEIR RAPIST!!!!!!!!!

Everyone who came in contact with Neveah that one night has blood on their hands and I hope the DHS person or persons who handed Neveah back to her rapists is fired and suffers the rest of their lives because of their stupidity.

It's about time to start holding people responsible for the raping and killing of our children.

You can't tell me anyone's hands were tied that night.

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