Question from my Ask Me Anything thread:

What is your actual job? I know you talk about it a lot, and I know it has something to do with CPS, and you seem to be training for some other aspect of your job, but I'm not sure what it is that you actually do at work on a day to day basis.The trouble with answering this is that what I actually do varies ( Read more... )

Help the Hamiltons!

Their youngest child has a level of need that Bridges to Health and similar programs were created to help. Unfortunately, since they're not in my state, I can't point them there ( Read more... )

1. A 19-year-old who is flirting with/dating/consensually sleeping with a 16-year-old is neither a pedophile nor a sexual predator ( Read more... )

...is going through the newsclips and finding stories like this.

[WARNING: very very VERY disturbing.]

I really try to believe that youth can be rehabilitated, that they don't always understand the seriousness of even terrible acts, but this? I have to wonder how someone whose mind is broken enough to do something like this can ever recover to ( Read more... )

I had a kind-of-OK idea for a final project for Human Behavior.

Then, I got a really nifty idea as a spinoff of the kind-of-OK idea.

THEN, I went back and read the syllabus. Really Nifty Idea is not quite within the constraints of the assignment, though I liked it a lot better. Back to kind-of-OK idea.

( a little more about what I'm doing )

Yes, obviously it's bad for someone hired as a babysitter to be making kiddie porn with the kids in his "care".However, the correct response to that is NOT to blame the fact that the babysitter was a 20something male, or that he was found via a Craigslist ad. (I do think that references should be checked for a sitter, regardless of age or gender ( Read more... )

WARNING: very disturbing child abuse report.

( and the things that particularly disturb me )

This is in response to both merina888 and silyara, in particular.

( Cut for length, for possible slight TMI, and because not everybody cares )

Today, an official "LGBTQ Youth" policy was posted that includes the right of transgender youth in OCFS (juvenile justice) facilities to be placed as their identified gender, including provisions for request of a placement change for a youth who comes out as transgender while in custody ( Read more... )

So, I've been doing some reading about at-risk LGBTQ youth (not the most cheerful subject in and of itself, I know), and in one very detailed report on "conversion therapy" and such I found out that not only are ex-gay ministries targeting youth, in some cases they are targeting "prehomosexual" five-year-old children! (And in typical blame-the- ( Read more... )