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In Bakersfield, California, family members allege that the dead 3-year-old girl Serenity Julia Gandara and her still-alive 4-year-old brother Isaiah were suspected child abuse victims prior to Serenity’s death.

Their 1-year-old sister Juliana wasn’t in the home as she has been staying with other relatives. But CPS showed up to take her away from her aunt and uncle for several hours before they returned her. CPS would not reveal why they took the child. The maternal grandmother, Maria Garcia, suggested that the CPS taking of the 1-year-old baby was in retaliation for her reporting to the media that she had previously complained about child abuse regarding Serenity and Isaiah yet CPS did nothing to protect the children.

Grandmother of murdered foster child said CPS wrongly took sibling

Meantime, there are serious accusations against Child Protective Services. Serenity’s maternal grandmother, Maria Garcia, said CPS retaliated against her after she criticized a social worker for allegedly ignoring reports that Serenity and her brother, 4-year-old Isaiah, were being abused at their foster home.

“You needed to take care of thing when I told you what happened with my kids the other kids. You never listen to me,” Maria Garcia said she told the social worker.

The paternal grandmother, Renee Maese, said that other family members wanted to adopt the two kids, but CPS sided with foster parents Albert and Carla Garcia who are now wanted for murder and felony child abandonment and are believed to be in hiding in Mexico.
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Tonya Craft

False sexual abuse allegations are an appalling mainstay in child custody cases today. They cause immense damage to the falsely accused parent and to the children. The false accuser usually doesn’t care who they hurt so long as they get the kids as a result. The courts and government are quick to side with the false accuser, demanding that a careful investigation be done and in the meantime the children will live with the parent making the accusations.

These “investigations” are often nothing but a witch-hunt that takes multiple years to fizzle out. By that time, the children involved are often suffering badly from the lack of a parent who loves them. The falsely accused parent has often not only lost years with his children but has lost his job, career, home, savings, reputation, and quite possibly a new marriage, too. Usually none of this is remedied. The falsely accused parent doesn’t even receive an apology from anyone. Some “mother’s rights” groups don’t care about any of this and view false sexual abuse allegations as a sure-win strategy of choice because they are willing to do anything to get children away from their fathers, even when it results in psychological damage to the children. But the recent case of Tonya Craft may give reason for them to change their positions. That’s because it is a case in which the mother was falsely accused of sexual abuse by her ex-husband, a malicious parental alienator of the most vile sort named Joal Henke.
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Some emotional abusers are particularly adept at using a technique called “gaslighting” (from a movie starring Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer) to drive their victims to question their own grip on reality and even to make them feel like they are going insane. The essence of gaslighting is to make somebody believe a falsehood and to wonder why they didn’t remember or recall it previously. It is a mind game often used to distract from their own problematic behaviors and to create self-doubt in their target of abuse. Many Borderlines and some with related personality disorders from the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B group (including Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Histrionic) personality disorders are particularly skilled and prone to using gaslighting on their partners and people close to them.

In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Dr. Robin Stern sums up the behavior like this:

Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldn’t and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has.

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Foster children are often at higher risk for child abuse than kids who live with their biological parents. Today, there is yet another dead foster child with the foster parents on the run from police.

On July 18, 2010, a 3-year-old girl named Serenity Julia Gandara was found dead with signs of trauma to her head and torso in the home of her foster parents in Bakersfield, California. Her 4-year-old brother Isaiah was still in the home.

The foster parents, Carla Torres Garcia and Alberto Garcia, fled with three other children reportedly born to Carla. Their names and ages are Carlos Joe Solvalvarro, 10, Crystal Garcia, 4, and Alberto Garcia Jr., 4.

The children left behind, Alberto’s dead niece and still-living nephew, had been removed by the courts from their mother’s home reportedly due to drug use.

Police are looking to find the Garcias who are reported to have fled the home in a white SUV with the following description:
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In 2008, a 14-year-old boy was flying by himself on a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Orlando. The boy and his family claim that Southwest Airlines refused to change his seat even though he was being sexually harassed and offered illegal drugs by an intoxicated woman sitting next to him. They have filed a $50,000 lawsuit against the airline in Cook County Circuit Court, alleging the airline is negligent because the woman was obviously harassing the boy and was drunk or on drugs yet the airline refused to protect the child despite repeated requests for help.
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Some of the most emotionally abusive relationships and traumatic divorces involve the mentally ill. One of the most difficult of these mental illnesses is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) because it is not easily diagnosed. Behaviors can range from extreme violence to subtle patterns of emotional blackmail and projection. On top of that, many Borderlines tend to live in denial, constantly avoiding their own feelings of emptiness, insecurity, anger, disappointment and fear that more often than not stems from an abusive childhood. It is hard to treat and help someone if they don’t want to face their own abuse — abuse that they themselves suffered or the abuse that they themselves do.
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Separation anxiety is a behavior normally found in infants and small children when a loved one is moving out of contact with them. They become worried and uncomfortable, anticipating the absence of the loved one. Often this loved one is a parent, other times it is a relative or a familiar care provider. This is a normal part of the development of children and tends to go away by the time they are around three or four years old. But not all behaviors that appear to be separation anxiety are in fact so. Alarmingly, sometimes such behaviors are the result of premeditated child abuse by the parent handing over a child to another person, particularly to the child’s other parent.

Personality Disordered Abusers Hurts Kids To Hurt Ex and Win Custody

When you’re a divorcing or divorced parent of a child you had a with a sociopath, psychopath, or other personality disordered abuser (PDA), there’s a chance you will come face-to-face with the reality that your ex is willing to abuse your child to make it look like he or she doesn’t like being returned to you. The ex wants to worsen the separation anxiety, or at least the apparent “symptoms” of it, often in front of witnesses whom will be asked to write declarations or testify in court or to talk with psychological evaluators, therapists, CPS, and court-appointed mediators. The PDA expects these reports that the child doesn’t like to be returned to you will help ensure your custody is reduced and the PDA’s custody is increased.
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We’ve all heard horror stories about parents who are falsely accused of crimes by a vicious ex who is bent on banning the children from seeing them. False domestic violence and false sexual abuse allegations are a sure-fire way to manipulate family law judges to participate in parental alienation child abuse. But they are not the only way malicious parents interfere with the contact between kids and the unfortunate parent who is targeted for malicious mischief.

In this article, I’ll outline a few of the less obvious but still damaging ways that malicious parents, particularly those engaging in parental alienation, use to cause trouble for the other parent. All of these tactics are simple, easily spun by a masterful manipulator to look like they are somebody else’s fault, and yet wrongly interfere with contact between kids and their other parent. They generally rely upon wasting the parent’s limited time with the kids and creating aggravation to upset both the parent and kids. They are more commonly used by “custodial” parents to abuse “noncustodial” parents, but in theory the small percentage of noncustodial parents engaging in parental alienation could use similar tactics.
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There are probably thousands or more mother’s rights groups around the world. The web is replete with their sites such as Justice4Mothers and Rights for Mothers. Generally they are irate about being deprived of contact with their kids and being financially and emotionally destroyed by family law courts. I certainly understand that as it has happened to me, too, as it has to many other parents. Unfortunately, some of these moms have gone off the deep end into sexism and gender warfare that is both counterproductive to their cause and to the interests of their children. A very obvious sign of this is the many mother’s rights web sites that issue blanket denials of the existence of parental alienation, a form of emotional child abuse that is common in divorces and troubled families.

Kids Need Both Parents

Mothers deserve to spend time with their kids, just like fathers do. In almost every case, aside from extreme abuse and neglect, kids benefit from significant time with both of their parents and their parents’ extended families. That judges in family courts across the United States and in many other nations use child custody as a means to encourage conflict and thereby increase workload, revenues, and relish in their own power as family dictators is a disgusting display of tyrannical behavior that must be stopped.

If the family law courts of which I am aware are even remotely similar to those in other parts of the United States, the many abusive family law judges in this country are a far worse threat to the safety and security of the typical American child than Al Qaeda 9/11 terror attacks and BP oil spills combined. In opposing the tyranny of the family law courts, I support these mother’s rights groups in regards to their intent to stop the abuses of the government and its war on families. I have similar opinions of the father’s rights groups in this regard.
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For anyone who hasn’t read Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family, I just finished it and highly recommend it. Many are familiar with Professor Stephen Baskerville’s basic theories and some have read excerpts from the book. Published in 2007, this book is a comprehensive and up-to-date description of the enormity of the problems endemic to the current tyrannical status of the judicial system as a whole, not merely family court. It is an extraordinary work.

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