A Family Torn Apart: Three sisters and a dark secret that threatens to separate them for ever

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A Family Torn Apart: Three sisters and a dark secret that threatens to separate them for ever

A Family Torn Apart: Three sisters and a dark secret that threatens to separate them for ever

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Since other Goodreaders have indicated that the book is not up to Glass’ usual standard I will withhold recommendations until after reading some of her earlier books. From the moment Joe and Maureen use the dinner table as "do as we say" chaos and browbeating their adopted children, a deep gratitude came over me for the caring, giving, treating me as a human being kind of mom & dad that I appreciated all the way through my life. This system breaks you apart. It is designed just like slavery to tear you apart. And instead of using the whip, they use mother time … The experience itself is just like when they used to hang people but barely hang them, and leave their feet just tiptoeing around in the mud.” These are the words of Sibil Fox Rich, compelling subject of new documentary Time. She is talking about the US prison system, of which she has some experience. In 1997 she and her husband Robert Richardson were convicted of a bank robbery in Louisiana. She got 13 years but was released after three and a half; Robert was dissuaded by his lawyer from taking a plea deal. He got 60 years.

I thought you might say that,’ Joy admitted. ‘But I wanted to ask. So can you take the younger two? Angie and Polly are six and four years old.’ Cathy tries to comfort the girls, but they are inconsolable. They just want their mummy and daddy, who they love dearly.

PDF / EPUB File Name: A_Family_Torn_Apart_-_Cathy_Glass.pdf, A_Family_Torn_Apart_-_Cathy_Glass.epub Read for book club. I would not have read it otherwise. Not good literature or story. I man just look at the cover. In addition, the children are faced with behavior that's erratic and unpredictable. They feel as if they're forced to walk on eggshells in their own home for fear of upsetting mom & day. Then with no reasonable explanation Joe & Maureen unleash their rage and abuse. Soon, Chris, Brian and Daniel feel anxiety when coming into the "home" from school because they don't know what's waiting for them.

I feel like this is such an unusual event to happen, and it was honestly difficult to read about a story where the "child" (a fourteen year old) is actually at fault as opposed to the adult. I'm so used to assuming that the authority figure is at fault (which is usually the case!!) and I found it hard to adjust my views as more information that he was innocent became clear. I suppose the only interesting part was that it occurred during 2020 COVID pandemic so the author perhaps wanted to document how strange life was then. That, and maybe the inner look at foster care during that time. Good. I’ve had a referral for a sibling group of three girls,’ Joy continued, getting to the real reason for her call. ‘We’d obviously like to keep them together if possible, and it’s preferable if they are placed in an all-female household.’ It was an emotional moment, says Bradley. Not necessarily in the context of her film (although it enabled it to become a feature), but in the trust Rich was placing in her, to safeguard her memories. In that sense, Time is more a collaboration between the two women than an orthodox documentary. That’s the way she works, says Bradley. “I don’t put work into the world that people who are in it haven’t seen before the rest of the world has seen it. I think that’s incredibly important, to get their blessing on something and it doesn’t challenge the idea of authenticity at all. To have something be genuinely collaborative doesn’t take away from it being authentic, or real, or even objective.” But where did it all start? Dr Richard Gardner, an American child psychiatrist, created the concept and produced a series of self-published books on parental alienation syndrome in the 1980s. He testified in more than 400 custody cases, discrediting allegations of domestic abuse or child sex abuse and recommending transfer of residence from one parent to another. He believed that 90% of mothers alleging child sexual abuse were liars who brainwashed their children, and that paedophilia “is a widespread and accepted practice among literally billions of people”. Gardner and the “syndrome” were discredited by the late 1990s.I don’t go out looking for stories; I meet people. I develop relationships with them, and that’s how the projects come to fruition,” says Bradley, who is currently in her native California, but has lived in Louisiana for the past 10 years. She doesn’t feel her approach is any better than the factual documentary one. The two can work in tandem to highlight the issues at hand. Besides, she adds, “don’t you think that emotions are facts? Facts don’t always become emotional, but I think in our bodies and our minds, the things that we feel become the truth.” That was Bradley’s cinematographer, Nisa East, she explains. “I was driving in my little Honda Civic right behind their car, driving and texting, and Nisa saying, ‘It’s getting really hot and heavy in here. You sure you want me to keep filming?’ And I said, ‘It’s not up to me, it’s up to Fox and Robert. Let them guide you.’ So much of being a film-maker is energy work. But what was most profound about that scene is that people have come to me and said it wasn’t till that moment that they understood how much was lost.” All foster carers in the UK have an SSW whose role it is to support and monitor the foster carer and their family in all aspects of fostering. Most referrals for children who come into care come to the foster carer through the SSW. Joy was in her early fifties, of average height and build, and had a wealth of experience. I found her caring, efficient and level-headed, although like everyone in children’s services at present she was working flat out and was slightly stressed as a result of the pandemic.

Add the fact that Joe & Maureen are so preoccupied with a double-standard lifestyle of presenting themselves as vanguard parents of decency causing their own problems of duplicity and pain that they're unable to give their "adopted" children what they need and crave - consistency, safety, unconditional love. As a result, the children feel highly stressed, anxious, and unlovable. I read a lot of memoirs/biographies and this is one of the blandest. Way too much detail and the whole time you’re wanting to get to the end to find out the truth but mainly just to get it over with. And it was all for not. All because a teenage lied and made terrible unfounded allegations. Gives a very intimate look into foster care in the UK. When domestic abuse has been proved, there are entirely justifiable reasons for a victim to have negative views of their abuser, and the term “parental alienation” should never form any part of subsequent proceedings. But for men who are abusers there is another reason to use it too: one woman going through proceedings said, “Women are often legally advised that if they mention abuse then they’ll lose custody of their children to their abuser.” I have seen this happen. There are grounds for hope, she believes. One is the fact that racial injustice and America’s prison-industrial complex are now mainstream topics. “They’re being talked about in the media in the same way that Batman is being talked about, right?” Attitudes are changing: John Bel Edwards, Louisiana’s governor since 2016, campaigned on prison reform and has granted 116 of the 164 clemency appeals made to him; his predecessor, Bobby Jindal, pardoned just 83 out of 738 during the previous eight years.In hindsight I wonder if the truth would ever have come out if Angie and Polly hadn’t lived with me. I’m not saying I’m a better foster carer than others, but splitting up the girls from their older sister allowed them to disclose what was really going on. However, I’m jumping ahead of myself. It was Tuesday afternoon when Joy Philips, my supervising social worker (SSW), telephoned and their story began. Cathy Glass’s A Family Torn Apart remains in the top ten for a seventh week – this time at number 10. Angie, 6 and her sister Polly, 4, are utterly distraught when they arrive to stay with foster carer Cathy Glass. Their older half sister Ashleigh has accused their father of something horrible and the two young sisters have been removed from home to keep them safe. Excellent. And you are all well?’ Joy asked. It wasn’t simply a polite question but had gained real significance since the start of the pandemic. The 2 stars are not the only interesting thing about this movie as the murder is based on a true story.

But her main hope for viewers, said Tabak, is to “allow themselves to feel that sense of outrage that our government has done this to families and continues to treat these individuals without respect for their basic humanity”.

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She has also worked in commercial film-making. She met Ava DuVernay on the set of her Louisiana-set series Queen Sugar, and later worked as assistant director on DuVernay’s Central Park Five series When They See Us. “Like Fox, and like all great leaders, she has a way of leading while also being generous and opening doors for people.” She has a solo exhibition at New York’s MoMA opening in November, and has been working for the past year on a documentary about tennis star Naomi Osaka. The future’s looking bright. Sooon they're feeling unimportant and unworthy. Quite simply, dysfunctional Joe and Maureen didn't know how to deal with feelings in healthy ways. Since they'e dealing with their own problems as if enabling an addiction with each other, not having the time, energy, or emotional intelligence to pay attention to, value, and support their children's feelings. The result is neglect. Their children experience this as "my feelings don't matter, so I don't matter." This, of course, stamped out their self-esteem and caused them to feel unimportant and unworthy of love and attention. At the start of August I had just said goodbye to Jamey, whom I’d fostered since before Christmas. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was asked to take another child or children and I steeled myself, wondering what their sorrowful story would be. In over 25 years of fostering, I’d looked after many children who had suffered abuse and neglect, but no two children’s stories are ever the same, and that was certainly true of the girls who arrived next. Throughout the film, Vilma and María rely on lawyers, advocates and witnesses to navigate a system confusing and protracted by design. Their cases, said Tabak and Kent, point to the crucial role of supporting state-level legal and social service agencies to advocate for immigrants. But the challenge of reunification was “only the beginning of the next chapter, the next hurdle, the next set of fears”, she said. “Will I get asylum? How can I prove my case? Will my child and I be separated ever again?” As a film-maker, “you just felt that [fear] every minute”.



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