FREDERICTON - Shaun Nixon said he'd be out on the street with his four-month-old son Tobias if it hadn't been for the eleventh-hour generosity of a Fredericton firefighter.
Enlarge Photo Stephen MacGillivray PhotoStephen MacGillivray/canadaeast news serviceShaun Nixon holds his son Tobias with Shawnee Main and her son Graeson. haun Nixon said he'd be out on the street with his four-month-old son Tobias if it hadn't been for the eleventh-hour generosity of a Fredericton firefighter.
Nixon and Tobias had been living in the Comfort Inn on Prospect Street since his girlfriend abandoned them about a month ago.
But recently, he ran out of money to pay for his hotel stay and, with no family or friends nearby, he faced a daunting future.
Nixon couldn't turn to the Fredericton Men's Shelter because of Tobias and the Transition House doesn't allow men.
The government-subsidized apartment he'd secured isn't available until Aug. 1.
Nixon and Tobias had nowhere to go.
That's until Shawnee Main, a firefighter and single mom, heard about Nixon's struggles on the evening newscast.
She felt she had to do something, so she paid him a visit with words of encouragement, a pile of baby supplies and a promise to pay his hotel bill until his apartment is ready.
"It really hit me. I am a single mom with a big support system, but I couldn't imagine not knowing where my kid is going to sleep at night," she said. "(Nixon) has no family here in Fredericton that I know of.
"He must've felt pretty overwhelmed," she said. "He's a new parent and he's doing it on his own and that alone is tough. I felt for him."
"(What she did) meant everything to me," Nixon said. "I didn't have any time at all and she really saved my rear.
"Knowing that a total stranger would step up like this and help me out just means the world."
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
DFCS says it "missed the signs" that led to boy's death
DFCS says it "missed the signs" that led to boy's death
By MEGAN MATTEUCCI and CRAIG SCHNEIDER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The state child welfare director on Monday said his agency “missed the signs” while investigating child abuse against a 6-year-old boy, a special needs student who police say was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend.
Enlarge photo FORSYTH COUNTY Eder Acosta, 20, is charged in the death of his girlfriend's 6 year-old son.
Mark Washington, director of the state Division of Family and Children Services, said the agency responded to four prior complaints regarding trouble in Bryan Guzman-Moreno’s Forsyth County home.
“I can see we missed asking the right questions, bringing in the right specialists and making the right decisions at the right time,” Washington said. “I have very strong concerns and questions about what I see.”
Police say the mother’s boyfriend, 20-year-old Eder Acosta of Cumming, beat Bryan to death Thursday.
Acosta, who is not the boy’s natural father, was arrested Saturday for Bryan’s death, Forsyth County Sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Frank Huggins said. He allegedly attacked Bryan early Thursday after taking the boy’s mother, Laura Moreno, to work at 6 a.m. He returned to the mobile home the couple shared and began beating Bryan, Huggins said.
“By 6:30 a.m., the boy was at the hospital in full cardiac arrest,” Huggins said Monday.
State Child Advocate Tom Rawlings said he is also looking into the case. He said Acosta had been accused in January of hitting the boy.
Rawlings said the January accusation was among three complaints to DFCS of child abuse against Bryan. He said there was another complaint involving a fight between two uncles in the home.
Rawlings said that in January, another child of the boy’s mother had said he did not want to be in that house because his mother and her boyfriend fight a lot.
The sibling also said that Acosta had on one occasion hit Bryan hard on the leg with his fist because the boy would not go to the bathroom, Rawlings said.
Rawlings said DFCS worked with the family for some months after that, but it remains unclear whether the agency had an open case on the boy at the time of his death.
The state child advocate is a post appointed by the governor to watch over state child welfare services.
In September 2008, DFCS looked into a complaint regarding a bruise on Bryan’s thigh, and in November of last year, DFCS looked into a report of scratches on the boy’s face, he said.
The agency did not substantiate either of those instances as child abuse, he said.
Washington, the DFCS director, said “hot buttons” and “cues” were missed during the agency’s work on the cases involving Bryan.
Noting that the boy was uncooperative and had difficulty communicating, Washington said the DFCS workers should have brought in specialists who work with children with such conditions.
Washington said he is not sure exactly what was missed.
“It’s very important that we learn what we missed, why we missed it, and how we improve our practice.”
On Thursday, Acosta assaulted the boy and drove him to the emergency room at Northside Hospital-Forsyth, deputies said.
“He told the ER he [the boy] had a medical problem and stopped breathing,” Huggins said.
The boy was later transferred to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, where he was pronounced dead.
An autopsy showed the boy died from blunt force trauma. Coroners found extensive internal injuries to the boy’s head and body, Huggins said. The injuries were not visible when Acosta brought the boy to the emergency room.
Huggins declined to release details about the attack, including if a weapon was used.
Acosta is being held without bond in the Forsyth County jail on charges of murder, cruelty to children and aggravated battery.
The boy, who attended special needs classes, was scheduled to enter first grade next month at Sawnee Elementary School in Cumming, Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Buster Evans said.
Two other children, including a 1-year-old and an 11-year-old, were home at the time of the attack. They were not injured and have since been turned over to DFCS, Huggins said.
Deputies interviewed the boy’s mother, and she’s not expected to be charged, Huggins said. Several other relatives who live with the family were also interviewed.
Huggins declined to say if Acosta has a prior criminal record. However, he said Acosta had never been arrested by the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, and deputies had never been to the couple’s home prior to the murder.
Staff writer Katie Leslie contributed to this article.
By MEGAN MATTEUCCI and CRAIG SCHNEIDER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The state child welfare director on Monday said his agency “missed the signs” while investigating child abuse against a 6-year-old boy, a special needs student who police say was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend.
Enlarge photo FORSYTH COUNTY Eder Acosta, 20, is charged in the death of his girlfriend's 6 year-old son.
Mark Washington, director of the state Division of Family and Children Services, said the agency responded to four prior complaints regarding trouble in Bryan Guzman-Moreno’s Forsyth County home.
“I can see we missed asking the right questions, bringing in the right specialists and making the right decisions at the right time,” Washington said. “I have very strong concerns and questions about what I see.”
Police say the mother’s boyfriend, 20-year-old Eder Acosta of Cumming, beat Bryan to death Thursday.
Acosta, who is not the boy’s natural father, was arrested Saturday for Bryan’s death, Forsyth County Sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Frank Huggins said. He allegedly attacked Bryan early Thursday after taking the boy’s mother, Laura Moreno, to work at 6 a.m. He returned to the mobile home the couple shared and began beating Bryan, Huggins said.
“By 6:30 a.m., the boy was at the hospital in full cardiac arrest,” Huggins said Monday.
State Child Advocate Tom Rawlings said he is also looking into the case. He said Acosta had been accused in January of hitting the boy.
Rawlings said the January accusation was among three complaints to DFCS of child abuse against Bryan. He said there was another complaint involving a fight between two uncles in the home.
Rawlings said that in January, another child of the boy’s mother had said he did not want to be in that house because his mother and her boyfriend fight a lot.
The sibling also said that Acosta had on one occasion hit Bryan hard on the leg with his fist because the boy would not go to the bathroom, Rawlings said.
Rawlings said DFCS worked with the family for some months after that, but it remains unclear whether the agency had an open case on the boy at the time of his death.
The state child advocate is a post appointed by the governor to watch over state child welfare services.
In September 2008, DFCS looked into a complaint regarding a bruise on Bryan’s thigh, and in November of last year, DFCS looked into a report of scratches on the boy’s face, he said.
The agency did not substantiate either of those instances as child abuse, he said.
Washington, the DFCS director, said “hot buttons” and “cues” were missed during the agency’s work on the cases involving Bryan.
Noting that the boy was uncooperative and had difficulty communicating, Washington said the DFCS workers should have brought in specialists who work with children with such conditions.
Washington said he is not sure exactly what was missed.
“It’s very important that we learn what we missed, why we missed it, and how we improve our practice.”
On Thursday, Acosta assaulted the boy and drove him to the emergency room at Northside Hospital-Forsyth, deputies said.
“He told the ER he [the boy] had a medical problem and stopped breathing,” Huggins said.
The boy was later transferred to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, where he was pronounced dead.
An autopsy showed the boy died from blunt force trauma. Coroners found extensive internal injuries to the boy’s head and body, Huggins said. The injuries were not visible when Acosta brought the boy to the emergency room.
Huggins declined to release details about the attack, including if a weapon was used.
Acosta is being held without bond in the Forsyth County jail on charges of murder, cruelty to children and aggravated battery.
The boy, who attended special needs classes, was scheduled to enter first grade next month at Sawnee Elementary School in Cumming, Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Buster Evans said.
Two other children, including a 1-year-old and an 11-year-old, were home at the time of the attack. They were not injured and have since been turned over to DFCS, Huggins said.
Deputies interviewed the boy’s mother, and she’s not expected to be charged, Huggins said. Several other relatives who live with the family were also interviewed.
Huggins declined to say if Acosta has a prior criminal record. However, he said Acosta had never been arrested by the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, and deputies had never been to the couple’s home prior to the murder.
Staff writer Katie Leslie contributed to this article.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Reality of Equal Shared Parenting Around the World and Canada - by Edward Hoyt, Founder of " New Brunswick Childrens Equal Parenting Association"
To Start this I would like to quote British senior judge Mr. Justice Coleridge, responsible for family courts across South-West England from the Daily Mail.
"Family life is in ‘meltdown’. Family breakdown is a “cancer” behind almost every evil affecting the country. Mr Justice Coleridge blames youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction and binge-drinking on the “meltdown” of relations between parents and children. He warns that the collapse of the family unit is a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming.
The speech to family lawyers contains a fierce attack on the “neglect” of successive governments. The 58-year-old judge, who is married with three grown-up children, will say family breakdown is an epidemic affecting all levels of society from the Royal Family down. It is “on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even “a decade ago. It is a never-ending carnival of human misery. A ceaseless river of human distress. “I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family.”
The judge, who is in charge of family courts across South-West England, will say he has a duty to speak out. He will call on the Government to put the family at the top of its agenda, alongside the economy and the war on terror – and make it “rather more important than taking oaths of allegiance”. His speech will say: “Families are the cells which make up the body of society. If the cells are unhealthy and undernourished, or at worse cancerous and growing haphazard and out of control, in the end the body succumbs. “In some of the more heavily populated urban areas, family life is quite frankly in meltdown or completely unrecognisable . . . it is on an epidemic scale. In some areas of the country family life in the old sense no longer exists.”
The judge condemns families with a mother and several absentee fathers. He says: “Single parents often do a fantastic job, but a great many, perhaps through no fault of their own, do not. “A large number of families now consist of children being brought up by mothers who have children by a number of different fathers, none of whom take any part in their lives or support or upbringing. “These are not isolated, oneoff cases. They are part of the stock-in-trade of the family courts.”
Judge Coleridge has spent the past eight years presiding over cases of divorce, children in care and family break-up.”
(Coleridge, Daily Mail, 4 April 2008) "
To introduce this I will give a little background on myself. I have been a parent for nineteen years as a "Single Father" of my son as his natural mother has by her own choice never been involved in his life. I have also been a"Parentally Alienated" father of a near 15 year old daughter. I have been in the " Equal Parenting" movement in Canada for 10 years now and seen first hand the damage that our current system does to children. I beleive by people and politican's alike reading what other countries are doing may bring a little light on how far behind here in Canada we really are when it comes to parenting. I have worked with some of the orginal founding parents of the Shared Parenting movement and the new, as they have appeared over the years. I have witnessed and participated in court cases here in New Brunswick and Canada as an observer and an active participant. In the 10 years that I have been in this; I have witnessed everything from Shared Parenting by choice working to murder cases because of the adverseral systems curently in place. I do not hold a PHD from a university but do hold a degree in the school of life. The last count of peer reviewed studies, magizine articles and books on the subject of Equal Parenting that I have read is 1109.I have written in News Papers and Magizines in Canada on the topic but beleive that more knowledge nees to be out there for the public.This article shows the different legislations shown from different countries and is a framework in which Canada must start to adopt before it is too late.
To begin the different countries I will start with Germany as they were the first to come forward with true changes towards "Shared Parenting".
Germany - 1998
Germany has a post-divorce presumption of joint legal custody was already in effect in family law since 1998, when several years ago the family court judge Jurgen Rudolph a German Regional Family Court justice in the city and district of Cochem.
The German "Federal Ministry of Justice" in Berlin states they still will introduce more postive changes even with the Cochem model "Cochemer Modell" and Cochem Court Practises,"Cochemer Praxis" to create an even more child centric model. This in Germany has recieved country-wide acknolegment as being the best practice for child centered approach to child custody arrangements.
In his courtroom was continuously confronted with more than capable parents fighting each other with the assitance of their lawyers over post-seperation arrangements concerning the residence, care and access over their children and was demanded to decide in favour of one parent. Parents and lawyers from both sides seemed to be only involved in painting their adversarial ‘opponents’ as black and incapable as possible during the divorce proceedings in the family court.
The position he took in this was that he considered post-divorce physical custody arrangements between principally fit and capable parents. This was at that time not to be a standard-decision for the family court and himself as the family judge to make and decide on by default that one parent would have custody the other become non-custodial or as we refer to as a vistor. That lawfully existing care-obligation in Germany for both parents to care for their children the making of physical custody arrangements over their children had by default to be considered primarily as a matter of responsibility for both the divorcing parents themselves to decide on in the first place.
Proceeding this and him witnessing in-fights between parents and their lawyers taking place in adversarial divorce proceedings, the regional family court of Cochem then experimented by changing its family court practises. The new revolutionary family court practice divorcing parents were strongly encouraged by the court to first come up themselves with a mutually and consensually agreed “Parenting Plan” for the residency, care and access to and over their children, as a mandatory precondition before being able to enter and finalise their divorce settlements in the Cochem family court.
As the parents now needed to come up with a mutually agreed parenting plan or parenting arrangement proposal, this mandatory demand of the court both not only resulted in a reinstatement of the equal level playing field and cooperation between the parents looking for divorce (instead of the previous court practises magnifying the differences and conflicts between the parents). But equally important, it also lead to a complete practise overhaul within the professions involved in the divorce proceedings in the family court.
Rather than adding fuel to the fire in an already adverserial situtation, the parents in their conflict, Lawyers, Social Workers, Youth Welfare Workers, began cooperating with each other in order to offer mediation and other support services and help to the divorcing parents who were in need of support in making the parenting plan needed in order to finalise their divorce proceedings. It did take time but the cooperation between professionals evolved from cooperation on the individual case levels created a more structured network cooperation of the involved professions around the "Cochem Family Court."
Spain - 2005
They introduced a new shared parenting law which is regarded as wholly inadequate by Spanish family rights lobbyists. Government officials and professionals on their own initiative are attempting to introduce policies reintegrating alienated children with their alienated parents and there is a vigorous movement for change.
Belgium - September 2006
The Socialist Party implemented presumptive 50/50 joint physical custody legislation reffered to as effective bi-location of the child,after parental separation by the Belgian Federal Government on September 4th,2006. This was approved by the Belgium "House of Commons" and "Senate" and brought into legislation. It introduced an immediate unilateral court-access for either of the divorced or separated parents in requesting for additional reinforcement orders if needed. It also introduced a presumption of dual location or shared residency which by law should be taken into serious consideration and thorough investigation with priority in each individual case by the Belgian family courts and judges on the request of either one of the divorcing parents separately.
In the situation where both separating parents consensually forward shared residency, care and access proposals between the two of them in the divorce and separation proceedings, the law puts the Belgian family courts and judges under the obligation to accept those mutually consented proposals as leading in the court-orders to be subsequently imposed in the divorce and separation proceedings.
In effect with regard to the post-divorce residency, care and access arrangements of either parents involved were then again acknowledged and reinstated at the core of Belgian family law and family court proceedings regarding physical custody, residency and care. By law Belgian family court judges were obligated to explicitly specify in their court-orders, their decisions and provisions with regard to the imposed post-divorce residence and care arrangements in writing if they were to deviate from the presumptive and preferred bi-location or shared parenting arrangement in their court-orders and reasoning behind the altering. These new Belgian laws have put "Shared Parenting" at the forefront of the family courts decision-making regarding the care, access and residency of the children. The legislation while the need and obligation imposed by law on the Belgian Family Courts and judges to extensively specify in writing in their imposed court-orders as to why a shared parenting or bi-location order was not imposed, opens the possibility for appeal of the courts decisions and motivations.
The underestimated new portion of the "Belgian Family Law" reform is the introduction of immediate or priority access to the courts and judges on the request of either one of the parties in conjuction or individually. This can be activated unilaterally and individually as they can proceed without the need of legal represention by a lawyer at the court-session requested, for an additional reinforcement orders of the court."When court-ordered parenting arrangements were not sufficiently complied with by the other parent and when there were complaints about the other parent with regard to abiding by the specific parenting arrangements laid down by the judge in the original case residency, care and access orders."
This laws framework has been around for 3 years and is in its infancy stages to evaluate its effects but first impressions that it will contribute to "The Best Interest of the Children" involved and now will adjust under the care of the non-confrontational but separated parents.
Italy - March 2006
The use of "Joint Legal Custody" and portions of "Joint Physical Custody" are now introduced. .On March 16,2006 this change became effective.
Australia - 2006
The introduction of " Shared Parenting Legislation" and Family Dispute Resolution to help people affected by separation and divorce sort out their dispute as an alternative to going to court. A family dispute resolution practitioner is an independent person who can help people discuss issues, look at options and work out how best to reach agreement in disputes about children and parenting arrangements after family breakdown. There still today through seeing social media's,Facebook,Twitters etc. that there are still along way to go even in Austrilia.
USA and Canada - 2009
In the United States there have been a few states there have been "Shared Parenting" bills but the norm in the USA is still archaic custody arrangements pitting parent against parent and children being the losers.
Introduced this year in Canada; Bill C-422 by Maurice Valacott; MP, a "Shared Parenting Bill", after many pressure groups approached this Member of Parliment. This was to start the process to move towards a more functionable and 21st Century approach to parenting. In Saint John, New Brunswick on July 31,2009 a meeting will be held by " The New Brunswick Children's Equal Parenting Association" in conjuction with " The Canadian Equal Parenting Coalition" to introduce this bill to people and why it is the nessesary move for well adjusted children and Families in Canadian Society. The "Social Movement" towards equal parenting being spearheaded by these groups and others such as " FACT - Fathers are Capable Too" from the 1990's and newcommers such " Not All Dad's are Dead Beats" are challenging the social fabric of Canada. The basis of many studies done from the orginal founders of the "Equal Parenting "movement to today's leaders all see the same outcome "Equal Shared Legal Custody".
All of the studies done from writers such as " Warren Farrell" and professor of social work and family studies at the University of British Columbia " Edward Kruk" state the evolution of two natural born parents create a more adjusted and functionable society. In the meantime here in Canada we are still in the "Infancy Stages" but progressing rapidly into an more forward thinking and having notice taken by the political forefront of Canada. I believe that it is more a common sense principal to be adopted into our Judicary and Legislations. In the long term of these changes will create a stable growth in Population and more of a well adjusted society.
Edward Hoyt
Founder
New Brunswick Children's Equal Parenting Association
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