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Where is the RAD-label taking people?
Recently, I read The Craver trial: In the participants own wordsand the picture that's being painted by the defense is not all that surprising.
Behold:
"None of us are perfect parents. And children don't come with instruction booklets." -- Michael Craver's attorney Suzanne Smith in closing arguments.
"This is good parenting." -- Smith while informing the jury of Nathaniel's medical and mental health doctor visits.
"They are not on trial for being good parents or bad parents." -- Barker in closing arguments.
"What were some of the first words out of Michael Craver's mouth? 'He self-abuses.'" -- Barker, recalling testimony of what Michael Craver said at Holy Spirit Hospital.
"It could be A, it could be B, it could be C, I don't know." -- Barker commenting on the defense's expert witnesses opinion an accidental death could not be ruled out.
"RAD. It's the home run. RAD made him do it." -- Barker discounting the Cravers' defense.
"The clips... show how sweet and innocent a child he was. Who reached out for a hug first? His 'little buddy.'" -- Barker commenting on videos shown in court.
And so the characterization of the adopted child, and the adoptive parents begins. Good Guy, Bad Guy; Saint, Sinner; who is the ultimate victim? Let the jury decide.
I have witnessed the classic parental defense many times, myself . The child abusing parent seeking peer approval will often defend his/her own actions by making strong claims about the child. Claims may include: "there was no other way to handle the situation", "the child is out of control"; "the child is not what others think he is"; It's was an accident"; "we tried everything else -- nothing works". In other words, fault and blame belongs to the child, and the parent in-question has become the ultimate victim.
And so the parent's case against the child continues to build. On and on the frustrated parent will go, knowing just how important it is to gain public support and sympathy. Without public support and sympathy, the accused knows there is a very good chance that individual will be given a punishment, as per jury and judge. Such is the consequence to severe parental wrong-doing.
I fear as more and more abused adoptee cases make headline news, we will see more and more people using RAD as the Aparent's perfect excuse and defense. In Voice For The Defense, author John Niland writes about the use of a toxic characterization label within the criminal justice system. Character assasination can do wonders for a lawyer and a case.
Prosecutors like to categorize symptoms as personality disorders because such disorders are more likely to put the client in the worst possible light and scare the jury. While some personality disorders will “age out”1 such that the disorder will become less of an influence on behavior, there is a belief that a personality disorder cannot be treated. As noted in the DSM, counsel may be able to avoid the stigma of an Axis II personality disorder if the pattern of behavior is better accounted for as a manifestation or consequence of another mental disorder or the symptoms are due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., drug abuse or medication) or a general medical condition such as head trauma.2 In other words, counsel will need to learn as much as possible about the client’s bio-psycho-social history so that the explanation for the behavior is something other than a personality disorder.
[From: Reactive Attachment Disorder , March 1, 2011 ]
Put the person with a behavior problem in the worst possible light. Make that person not-human.
Quickly and easily one can begin to see just how difficult it can be for an adult with a personality disorder to defend himself in a case where another person has been injured or killed. (When does one enter the insanity plea? ) Imagine how hard it is for a child with RAD to be given a fair chance at trial.
The Craver case of child brutality is not your average case of domestic violence. Both the accused and the victim of cruel punishment are the same individual. That individual happens to be the adopted child who has been given a label that is becoming increasingly popular within the adopted community. RAD is taking the courts by storm, and it's a scary thing to witness, as more and more new-age therapists are quick to agree (and testify on behalf of the defense) RAD - a diagnosis that is more than a little complex and misunderstood - is causing a child's poor behavior.
The parents in Craver case are defending their honor and reputation by claiming RAD caused the child's death. This reminds me of the argument that guns, not people, kill people. And so the questions have to be asked: what did the parents of this child do to prevent his death? What sort of treatment-plan did these parents seek? Was the treatment-choice wise? Did the stress and frustration that goes with a strange little boy get to the best of either one of them?
Those who follow cases that involve RAD know A) the diagnosis is questionable and complex, B) the children behave very badly and C) the parents don't know how to handel the child or the stress. For many, there is the fundamental belief that the child with RADis so damaged, there was no saving him, not even from himself.
This nightmare outcome is becoming more and more popular as more abuse cases reach the courts.
In 1987, a case of RAD-inflicted adoptee abuse made news. The outcome was surprising in the sense that the judge's BS detectors must have been on full alert.
In August 1995, after giving up on another domestic adoption because of what seemed like endless red tape, they flew to Russia and adopted a blond, blue-eyed boy they named David.
Six months later, David was dead, with deep bruises all over his body.
Mrs. Polreis was charged with child abuse resulting in the death. What set her case apart was her defense. In a legal first, her lawyers argued that David, who was 2 years and 10 months old, suffered from a rare illness called reactive attachment disorder that may have led him to inflict his own injuries, which in turn led to his death.
The prosecution branded this defense ''voodoo'' and said Mrs. Polreis, 44, was guilty of clear-cut child abuse. After a two-week trial in July, a jury here in the high plains of northeast Colorado convicted her in just two hours. She did not testify in her own defense and her husband, mother and brother were witnesses for the prosecution.
[From: Woman Sentenced to 22 Years in Death of Adopted Son , September 1997]
Most poignant was the statement made by the judge:
''You haven't accepted responsibility for this,'' he said, and he called her defense ''a classic case of blaming the victim.''
He said he believed that the boy suffered from reactive attachment disorder but that a civilized society ''cannot accept any less protection for its troubled children'' than for those who develop normally.
"A classic case of blaming the victim". This is a common occurrence in abusive adopted abuse cases -- the adoptive parents often place blame on the child, as if that's a valid excuse to lose all control and become overly harsh or even violent. The parents fail to see where and when they went wrong, and how they failed to make matters better.
This is where attachment therapists and RAD "specialists" come onto the scene.
After reading many many abuse cases, I can see how blamig the parent for wrong-doing is not so simple or clean-cut. Many parents with children with behavior problems DO seek guidance from their adoption agency, only to find no services exist for the parent and child overwhelmed by trauma. These parents are forced to seek outside help.
Help seems to come in the form of a sector As it seems to stand now, RAD is becoming the favorite disorder to have, making it an easy target for lay-people to promote untested, unregulated, non-evidence based attachment therapies to very desperate parents. Indeed, imagine how many lucky APs in Adoptionland have been drawn to quack therapists who thrive on the RAD label and have no problem using experimental (not evidence based) theory and practice on a child. A warning label should come with RAD, but it will not be coming from the parent instructors who prey upon the most desperate, unprepared and poorly educated/trained adoptive parents, desperate for a sense of normalcy.
Nowadays adoptive parents are being duped by their "love cures all" adoption agencies; they are not only not receiving the education they need to properly parent a child who has been grossly traumatized, they are not given reliable trustworthy specialists to help care for the adopted child. To make matters worse, those within certain parenting circles are promoting self-made adoption "specialists" who will quickly make distracting scare statements and associations just to "prove" how demonic and out of control former orphans from institutions can be. Few are taking the time to look at the ways in which RAD-like behaviors can be prevented, or mistaken as something else, and few are asking how the behaviors of both mom and dad are affecting the traumatized child who came without an owner's manual. Worse yet, few are looking at the motives or the educational background of those who are selling themselves as adoptive parenting specialists. It's with blind faith and hope adoptive parents are following parenting advice, and in many cases, the suggestions made to help are making life for the traumatized adoptee much more stress-filled.
While much sympathy can be given to parents forced to deal with a very troubled (trouble-making) child, I think more people need to ask how stress will affect not only both parents, but the child-victim, as well. After all, do AP's forget the child in their care is a victim of profound trauma? Do they honestly think bad memories and bad feelings suddenly go away? No one knows for sure what a child in-care has been put through, but one can easily guess the life-experience has been far less than ideal. The role of the responsible parent is really key in terms of healing the wounded child. Depending upon the route the parents choose, therapy (and a given therapist) can either help turn the traumatized child around, or make matters much much worse. Many of our abuse cases feature just how fatal poor parenting decisions can be.
I for one do not expect APs to be superhuman saints. They are, after all, simple human beings, capable of taking only so much strife and upset. However, at the end of the day, losing control and placing blame on the child is not the way to go. In fact, this blame-game is a dangerous pattern played by many an adoptive parent who complains about their child given the RAD label. This pattern of blame needs to end. Blaming, then branding, the child is not serving an adoptable child's best interest, especially when RAD itself cannot be clearly defined as one diagnosis, as it is really a simplified version of many complex diagnoses combined in such a way, it's the only way to easily describe a child's presented symptoms and behaviors.
From what I continue to read, it seems as if the defense team in the Craver case wants the public to believe if not for the adopted child's severe self-inflicted injuries, the little boy would be alive today, living a loved and happy life with his adoptive family. How can that be, if RAD made this child so bloody awful and untrainable?
And so comes the twist that comes with the bad and dangerous RAD label.... if these victims are so defective and so defiant, how can anyone expect to care for such a cold hearted beast? Is the answer: treat the child like an animal, as some therapies seem to favor? And more plaguing is the question, what is being done to prevent RAD from becoming the label that gets passed-on to all adoptees?
As it seems to stand now, RAD is becoming the favorite disorder to have, making it an easy target for lay-people to promote untested, unregulated, non-evidence based attachment therapies to very desperate parents. Indeed, imagine how many lucky APs in Adoptionland have been drawn to quack therapists who thrive on the RAD label and have no problem using experimental (not evidence based) theory and practice on a child. A warning label should come with RAD, but it will not be coming from the parent instructors who prey upon the most desperate, unprepared and poorly educated/trained adoptive parents, desperate for a sense of normalcy.
And so the modern-day foreign born adoptee faces a whole new reality. Should the really lucky living former-orphan survive the first year of adopted bliss, there may be trouble ahead if the chosen doctor/ therapist is prepared to give the adopted child a current fashionable label. Should the child not learn how to get over his trauma and not demonstrate more normal "good" behavior, that child will prove just how damaged he really is. Such a child cannot be handled by your average unprepared poorly educated parent with X amount of "normal" kids. Where shall the very troubled traumatized adopted child go? To the upgraded institution? In a cage, kept under the stairs, or in the basement? Or is it better he return to the earth, as if his life didn't even begin?
How very sad it is for the adoptee given not only the RAD label, but parents who are not educated enough to provide proper care for them. I fear it will be many years before children put in grossly negligent institutions and foster/adoptive homes will receive a fair chance and justice. Meanwhile, AP's might want to ask themselves and their adoption agencies, "What would I do... what would I require... if I were given such a troubled child?"
whether the craver parents acted out on frustration, or stood helplessly, that has to be determined. However, their case highlights the importantance of AP preparation and the respnsibility they have to their adopted child and to themselves. The traumatized child does not get better in a day or a week, or even a year. In some cases, there will always be triggers that offset "normal behavior", and Aparents need to educate themselves about the effects stress has on the traumatized child. The responsible parent does the research himself, and asks many questions, and with common sense and patience, creates a plan of care that ensure child safety and dignity at all times. not take socan Gone are the days where As convincing as some doctors/therpaists may seem, it behooves a parents to seek a second opinion when an adopted child is given the RAD label. Given all the information that's out about the harms of certain types of therapies, today's AP has no excuse to say they didn't know what else to do.