Gender Politics Do NoT Help Children

Another glaring example of DSHS’s horribly misguided approach to protecting children has woken me from my summer slumber. The Seattle Times describes how CPS repeatedly returned a young boy to the home of his step-grandmother and grandfather. He was relegated to living in a trailer behind the house. And CPS signed off on it. Twice!

Worse, the boy was continually and severally beaten, choked, and burned by his step-grandmother.

Detectives now believe the suspected abuse — mostly by Loni Venegas — included beatings with a bamboo stick, choking and scalding.

Pierce county deputies had already removed the boy from his “home” in June suspecting that his step-grandmother was abusing him. CPS promptly returned him to his “home.” The Pierce County sheriff’s department finally took action again, removed the boy from his torture chamber, and indicted this horrible woman on seven counts of assault. The Pierce County Sheriff must have finally decided that with CPS around the only way to protect the child was to make sure Loni Venegas is in jail. Evident from the quotes in the article, the Pierce County sheriff’s department is extremely frustrated with CPS. All of us should be.

The Times barely mentions the fact that the boy's “grandparents” won custody in a bitter custody dispute after his mother was tragically killed in car accident in 2001. But there is no mention of just who was on the other side of the custody dispute. Was it his father? Or perhaps the parents of his father? Wouldn’t a balanced article have sought comment from them? How, in fact, did this boy end up in the hands of his violent step-grandmother instead of in the home of his father? Since fathers are considered unimportant or even innately dangerous, the Times reporter did not investigate the larger picture.

The Secretary of DSHS, Robin Arnold-Williams, has taken a stand. She has proclaimed that everyone is going to work together to fix this problem. Yeah, right. The problem IS Arnold-Williams and her bureaucracy of gender feminist ideologues that run DSHS. They are blind to the reality that women commit the vast majority of child abuse. In the mind of gender feminists like Arnold-Williams, when women are violent, it is the fault of another, usually a man. And of course due to the "patriarchal control and oppression" that supposedly characterizes our society. Just like family courts in the State of Washington, CPS is obsessive about putting children into the “care” of a woman, regardless of the actual circumstances.

This is just the latest in a string of CPS failures involving violent, alcoholic, or drug addicted women abusing children. This problem cannot be fixed until people like Robin Arnold-Williams, who have a gender political axe to grind, are removed from DSHS. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, DSHS needs to be refocused from a revenue generating machine for the state (through federal matching of child support collections) to an apolitical organization with the sole purpose and objective of helping people, families, and children.