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On August 20 2019 00:15 Jockmcplop wrote: Everyone always ignores the social cleansing aspects of these discussions.
Ask yourselves which people are most likely to have their children taken away from them. What is their quality of life? How many of their problems are due to extreme poverty, or previous abuse? How many of them could feasibly be helped to care for their child instead of separation, but don't get the chance?
Also, I read a report recently that said something along the lines of "The lifelong trauma of separation and the child's well being in terms of the fundamental relationship between mother and child is not even a factor in court decisions about separation." That's terrifying to me, that a system that is able to remove a child from its parents is also blind to the fact that there is a basic need for a parent child relationship.
*I'm not a parent This is a huge concern especially in my neck of the world. We had "residential schools" which were created under the guise of helping kids who were not being raised correctly but it was 100% aboriginal children and ended up not being meant to help them but rather abuse them as the people running the schools were awful awful people. It has become a national shame and ended up creating FAR FAR more social problems then it solved. There has been huge financial payouts but that does not help all the people that have been screwed up and all those people that were screwed up have now been having their own children and don't have the skills to parent them and no trust (for obvious reasons) in the government to help them. And as you point out even if done for the right reasons there is damage in the separation of mother and child.
So well done correctly their is huge societal benefits, like you point out there is also huge societal risks and the oversight of these agencies and workers needs to be massive!
I
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On August 20 2019 00:23 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 00:15 Jockmcplop wrote: Everyone always ignores the social cleansing aspects of these discussions.
Ask yourselves which people are most likely to have their children taken away from them. What is their quality of life? How many of their problems are due to extreme poverty, or previous abuse? How many of them could feasibly be helped to care for their child instead of separation, but don't get the chance?
Also, I read a report recently that said something along the lines of "The lifelong trauma of separation and the child's well being in terms of the fundamental relationship between mother and child is not even a factor in court decisions about separation." That's terrifying to me, that a system that is able to remove a child from its parents is also blind to the fact that there is a basic need for a parent child relationship.
*I'm not a parent In the UK the system will do all it can and go to any lengths to place the child with family and keep parental relationships going with the long term plan of returning the child. Source: I have six foster siblings, I’ve seen how hard they’ve tried to find anyone to pass the kids to because the system is overwhelmed. How many times they’ve tried to give kids to family members who can’t take care of them to get them off their books. The idea that they want to have kids in care is completely at odds with my experience.
Fair enough. I have zero personal experience with any of this.
I suppose when you read articles about this stuff they always focus on the cases where it goes wrong and the secrecy around the system in the UK makes it pretty difficult to get any decent information outside of that.
This article is interesting
It is about how since Blair's government the policy of increasing adoptions has ended up coinciding with a massive increase in separations instead of fewer kids in care.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/18/children-parents-foster-social-care-families-adoption
The push to increase adoption in England is punishing low-income women, who are increasingly losing their children due to poverty, according to research by Legal Action for Women.
A report to be presented at the House of Commons on Wednesday contains new research from the legal service and campaign group, which suggests the policy of increasing adoption has not reduced the number of children in care – as it was intended to – but has increased the number of those separated from their parents.
Dr Andy Bilson, emeritus professor of social work at the University of Lancashire, has been analysing the data gathered between 31 March 2001 and 2016. He found the number of children from care living with adopted parents or special guardians, has increased from 87,090 to 143,440 – a rise of 65%.
His research found adoptions have risen by 40% over the past five years, compared with the five previous years, but over the same period the number of children in care rose by 7.5% to 70,440.
All of this sounds kinda like I'm arguing against separations as a whole, I'm not, but I do think due to the potential for separation alone to have severe lifelong consequences for the kid there needs to be massive oversight of the system and some way of having a certain amount of data publicly available (specifically about how changes in policy affect numbers of separations).
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United States40786 Posts
In the UK the funding is local so you get regional variations too. Some areas have no foster carers available and no funding so the response is to put them with anyone they can, ideally another parent, failing that any relative. Some have more flexibility to consider whether that is in the interests of the child. This creates additional problems like short term emergency placements becoming the norm with kids getting shuffled to a new carer each week because they can get budget for tonight but not for a year.
The reason I ended up with so many foster siblings is because my mother refuses to participate in short term shuffling of kids when there aren’t long term placements available because it’s fucking awful for them. So she kept them on the emergency placement until they found a long term solution and the long term solutions didn’t tend to materialize. All of them have been encouraged to keep the maximum possible family contact, sleepovers, vacations in the summers with cousins, phone calls etc. and one actually went back to live with his mother (imo not a great situation for him because she’s long term unemployed and on benefits and having him there will increase their benefits and probably lead to him dropping out of college) last Sunday as he’s 18 now and finished school.
The people involved are all trying to do the best for the kids, most of the failures come down to money.
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On August 20 2019 00:29 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 00:27 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:25 xM(Z wrote: there are even studies that show how infants can recognize/identify their mothers' face and scent and how they prefer it to other faces then i read how Barnevernet is taking infants from their mothers ... i don't know men, i can't do collateral damage here like L`Drone does. You’d prefer the known damage from leaving neglected kids than the risk of collateral damage? Nobody here is seeking damage to kids, the goal is to reduce the damage. Your fear of one kind is allowing another. why should there be a choice?. when abuse it's obvious, you take the kid; when it's not, you go for arbitration from the 3rd party.
Because any system has false positives and false negatives. You can improve the system to have less of both, and you can shift levers to have less of one but more of the other.
No system dealing with humans is perfect, so any system that involves the state intervening in families will necessarily produce some uneccessary interventions, and some situations where an intervention should have taken place, but didn't.
Let's say you have a situation where you are 50% certain that child abuse is taking place. Should the state intervene? What about 90%? 99%? 99.99%? No matter what percentage of certainty you choose, you will have some situations where the intervention was unnecessary, just because of how many families there are in a given country. And the higher you set that percentage number, the more cases where you were 80% certain, but didn't do enough because 80 < 99.99, so child abuses was allowed to continue, will occur.
Everyone would prefer the perfect system that only intervenes in cases where the child is at risk, but also intervenes in every case where the child is at risk. But that is not a real world system. In the real world, the question is statistically, how many false negatives do you accept per false positive. How many children do you keep in abusive situations compared to how many non-abusive families do mistakenly get into the system.
That is not an excuse, and does not mean that we should be lazy and not try to minimize both, but this tradeoff will always exist, and this means that there will always be stories of families having their child taken unfairly, and of families who are clearly abusive keeping their child for far too long despite government attention.
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United States40786 Posts
On August 20 2019 00:29 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 00:27 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:25 xM(Z wrote: there are even studies that show how infants can recognize/identify their mothers' face and scent and how they prefer it to other faces then i read how Barnevernet is taking infants from their mothers ... i don't know men, i can't do collateral damage here like L`Drone does. You’d prefer the known damage from leaving neglected kids than the risk of collateral damage? Nobody here is seeking damage to kids, the goal is to reduce the damage. Your fear of one kind is allowing another. why should there be a choice?. when abuse it's obvious, you take the kid; when it's not, you go for arbitration from the 3rd party. Because we live in a real world where perfect decisions aren’t always made. I, and everyone else, would obviously prefer there to be the right choice made every time. But you’re arguing against a system that produces the right choice we much as possible because it’s not as good as a perfect system that you’re imagining.
Also the arbitration from a third party is the current process. They don’t just abduct kids with no recourse. A judge hears the case from the parents and child services and authorizes the placement. “It’s not perfect” is not a reasonable criticism of a system that is as close to perfect as they can make it unless you have specific improvements to propose.
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On August 20 2019 01:13 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 00:29 xM(Z wrote:On August 20 2019 00:27 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:25 xM(Z wrote: there are even studies that show how infants can recognize/identify their mothers' face and scent and how they prefer it to other faces then i read how Barnevernet is taking infants from their mothers ... i don't know men, i can't do collateral damage here like L`Drone does. You’d prefer the known damage from leaving neglected kids than the risk of collateral damage? Nobody here is seeking damage to kids, the goal is to reduce the damage. Your fear of one kind is allowing another. why should there be a choice?. when abuse it's obvious, you take the kid; when it's not, you go for arbitration from the 3rd party. Because we live in a real world where perfect decisions aren’t always made. I, and everyone else, would obviously prefer there to be the right choice made every time. But you’re arguing against a system that produces the right choice we much as possible because it’s not as good as a perfect system that you’re imagining. Also the arbitration from a third party is the current process. They don’t just abduct kids with no recourse. A judge hears the case from the parents and child services and authorizes the placement. “It’s not perfect” is not a reasonable criticism of a system that is as close to perfect as they can make it unless you have specific improvements to propose. Actually, that’s the whole problem, they kind of do.
And we have talked about what could be improved: transparency, efficient appeal comitees, public oversight, cooperation with foreign agencies when it’s from foreign nationals, every decision of removing a child should go to a judge almost immediately, and so on and so forth.
It shouldn’t be a bureaucratic, extra judicial decision with absolutely 0 oversight and a kafkaian system of appeal. Period.
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On August 20 2019 01:13 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 00:29 xM(Z wrote:On August 20 2019 00:27 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:25 xM(Z wrote: there are even studies that show how infants can recognize/identify their mothers' face and scent and how they prefer it to other faces then i read how Barnevernet is taking infants from their mothers ... i don't know men, i can't do collateral damage here like L`Drone does. You’d prefer the known damage from leaving neglected kids than the risk of collateral damage? Nobody here is seeking damage to kids, the goal is to reduce the damage. Your fear of one kind is allowing another. why should there be a choice?. when abuse it's obvious, you take the kid; when it's not, you go for arbitration from the 3rd party. Because we live in a real world where perfect decisions aren’t always made. I, and everyone else, would obviously prefer there to be the right choice made every time. But you’re arguing against a system that produces the right choice we much as possible because it’s not as good as a perfect system that you’re imagining. Also the arbitration from a third party is the current process. They don’t just abduct kids with no recourse. A judge hears the case from the parents and child services and authorizes the placement. “It’s not perfect” is not a reasonable criticism of a system that is as close to perfect as they can make it unless you have specific improvements to propose.
I guess the specific improvements I would propose would have to do with demographics, social programs and the policy side. I don't think you can second guess small numbers of cases or individual cases. You end up with conspiracy thinking because of the need to protect a certain amount of data relating to vulnerable kids.
I think many of these problems can only be addressed at these levels and the systems of removal themselves are going to be, to a certain extent, arbitrary if we don't have a handle on the root causes of the issues that lead to separation.
How does investment in social programs by the government effect the number of children in an area who need to be separated from their parents? What is the relationship between average income and chance of child separation?
The answer to these questions should guide a society to the point where separations become necessary in far fewer cases, which throws doubt on the use of the word necessary in the first place. Was it necessary to remove a child from their parents if something could have been done to prevent that but no-one cared about the social issues that lie at the root of the problems?
One example of this is the UK governments deliberate destruction of our mental health care systems in the NHS. If it was easier for a single mother to get help with their mental health 15 years ago than it is now, and there are more separations now, can we call those separations necessary?
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United States40786 Posts
On August 20 2019 01:21 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 01:13 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:29 xM(Z wrote:On August 20 2019 00:27 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:25 xM(Z wrote: there are even studies that show how infants can recognize/identify their mothers' face and scent and how they prefer it to other faces then i read how Barnevernet is taking infants from their mothers ... i don't know men, i can't do collateral damage here like L`Drone does. You’d prefer the known damage from leaving neglected kids than the risk of collateral damage? Nobody here is seeking damage to kids, the goal is to reduce the damage. Your fear of one kind is allowing another. why should there be a choice?. when abuse it's obvious, you take the kid; when it's not, you go for arbitration from the 3rd party. Because we live in a real world where perfect decisions aren’t always made. I, and everyone else, would obviously prefer there to be the right choice made every time. But you’re arguing against a system that produces the right choice we much as possible because it’s not as good as a perfect system that you’re imagining. Also the arbitration from a third party is the current process. They don’t just abduct kids with no recourse. A judge hears the case from the parents and child services and authorizes the placement. “It’s not perfect” is not a reasonable criticism of a system that is as close to perfect as they can make it unless you have specific improvements to propose. I guess the specific improvements I would propose would have to do with demographics, social programs and the policy side. I don't think you can second guess small numbers of cases or individual cases. You end up with conspiracy thinking because of the need to protect a certain amount of data relating to vulnerable kids. I think many of these problems can only be addressed at these levels and the systems of removal themselves are going to be, to a certain extent, arbitrary if we don't have a handle on the root causes of the issues that lead to separation. How does investment in social programs by the government effect the number of children in an area who need to be separated from their parents? What is the relationship between average income and chance of child separation? The answer to these questions should guide a society to the point where separations become necessary in far fewer cases, which throws doubt on the use of the word necessary in the first place. Was it necessary to remove a child from their parents if something could have been done to prevent that but no-one cared about the social issues that lie at the root of the problems? One example of this is the UK governments deliberate destruction of our mental health care systems in the NHS. If it was easier for a single mother to get help with their mental health 15 years ago than it is now, and there are more separations now, can we call those separations necessary? This is a pretty key point imo. Child separation can be where a systemic failure becomes obvious, a symptom of the problem. With a more effective holistic approach to building a society that meets the needs of individuals the neglect of children should be reduced.
Some are unavoidable though. Of the six foster siblings I have, 2 were taken into care because their mother was severely mentally defective, 2 had their family breakdown due to heroin, and 2 had parents best described as trash humans who just didn’t want the responsibility.
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Norway28267 Posts
I mean I also think one of the most essential aspects of child care is giving really easy access to and removing stigmas surrounding contraceptives, sex education and abortion, so that you only get parents that actually want to be parents.
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On August 20 2019 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean I also think one of the most essential aspects of child care is giving really easy access to and removing stigmas surrounding contraceptives, sex education and abortion, so that you only get parents that actually want to be parents. This times 100, and I really wish the "pro life" community in the states would get behind this and making sure all children have safe homes and so on so that the best choice becomes having the baby.
Right now pro life is all about making abortion illegal when it should be about making illogical (outside of medical requirements)
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Pro-lifers generally have no demonstrated interest in anything aside from abortion, though there is a significant and mostly catholic minority that does indeed do pro-life consistently up and down. The fact that they ignore how much the people they stand alongside at abortion clinic protests actively undermine the safety net is still a massive mark against them.
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On August 20 2019 01:07 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2019 00:29 xM(Z wrote:On August 20 2019 00:27 KwarK wrote:On August 20 2019 00:25 xM(Z wrote: there are even studies that show how infants can recognize/identify their mothers' face and scent and how they prefer it to other faces then i read how Barnevernet is taking infants from their mothers ... i don't know men, i can't do collateral damage here like L`Drone does. You’d prefer the known damage from leaving neglected kids than the risk of collateral damage? Nobody here is seeking damage to kids, the goal is to reduce the damage. Your fear of one kind is allowing another. why should there be a choice?. when abuse it's obvious, you take the kid; when it's not, you go for arbitration from the 3rd party. Because any system has false positives and false negatives. You can improve the system to have less of both, and you can shift levers to have less of one but more of the other. No system dealing with humans is perfect, so any system that involves the state intervening in families will necessarily produce some uneccessary interventions, and some situations where an intervention should have taken place, but didn't. Let's say you have a situation where you are 50% certain that child abuse is taking place. Should the state intervene? What about 90%? 99%? 99.99%? No matter what percentage of certainty you choose, you will have some situations where the intervention was unnecessary, just because of how many families there are in a given country. And the higher you set that percentage number, the more cases where you were 80% certain, but didn't do enough because 80 < 99.99, so child abuses was allowed to continue, will occur. Everyone would prefer the perfect system that only intervenes in cases where the child is at risk, but also intervenes in every case where the child is at risk. But that is not a real world system. In the real world, the question is statistically, how many false negatives do you accept per false positive. How many children do you keep in abusive situations compared to how many non-abusive families do mistakenly get into the system. That is not an excuse, and does not mean that we should be lazy and not try to minimize both, but this tradeoff will always exist, and this means that there will always be stories of families having their child taken unfairly, and of families who are clearly abusive keeping their child for far too long despite government attention. there needn't be statistics or percentages for this: 2 were taken into care because their mother was severely mentally defective, 2 had their family breakdown due to heroin, and 2 had parents best described as trash humans who just didn’t want the responsibility. that's 101%; i can't see what an 80% certainty would look like. it's either-or to me so if you could maybe give an example of what a 80% certainty would look like. psychologists and behaviorists know within the first minute of seeing a child if he's been abused or not; there's no might have been abused or 80% chance to have been abused.
a judge is not a 3rd party because:It is generally conceded that, in the area of child welfare, social service agencies have the expert knowledge and methods for making enlightened custodial dispositions. Consequently, courts rely on agency decisions and have come to utilize agencies as the intermediate placement for a child whose custody must be resolved. Child welfare agencies are given the authority to choose the custodian for a child on a temporary, permanent, or indefinite basis, and may, at times, be authorized to supervise the placement of the child. In a certain sense, the court is surrendering its jurisdiction by its reliance on the welfare agencies, and this delegation of decision-making power may have far-reaching consequences. Whether welfare agencies use their power as wisely as courts assume depends largely on what we mean by "wisely" and on what agency is involved. In general, courts unfortunately have neither the time nor the facilities to supervise agency placements, and it is only when an individual has been rejected as a qualified custodian that courts have an opportunity to review agency practices. when i talk about a 3rd party i mean an independent psychologist, behaviorist, educator, social worker, or any juridical entity comprised of all of those.
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No one knows within 1 minute with 100% certainty whether someone has been abused or not. If that were the case, this whole problem wouldn't exist. Anyone who tells you something like that has either no idea what they are talking about or is lying.
And anyone who, after talking with someone for 1 minute, claims to know anything about them with 100% certainty is also lying. That is not even enough investigation to give you a 100% on the color of someones hair.
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Norway28267 Posts
How abused must you be before it's severe enough abuse to warrant taking kids from parents? How neglected?
Can you spank your kid once per year? I think no, but I don't wanna take kids away from parents if they're otherwise caring and responsible. Once per month? Hard for me to find justification for that. Once per week? That's clearly abuse. Where does the ratio go? Is it allowed to do it once per year with flat hand, but not once per year with a belt?
What if the kid doesn't shower, comes in unwashed clothes every day, is scrawny and small because the family doesn't feed him enough? What if the kid is 12 years old and 110 kg because the family feeds him or her nothing but deep fried cheetos? There are a lot of things parents can do that make them unfit to be parents.
Claiming that there is no gray area in these cases just does not make sense. Your own line is drawn somewhere, if you think that corporal punishment once per week is abuse warranting taking kids away but once per month is not, then clearly at some point between 1 week and 1 month, you find yourself in your own personal gray area.
Like, there's a case from 4 years ago in Norway where a 13 year old girl died of starvation. (She was 21 kg at the point of death) The mother had some mental illness-ish condition, but she got charged with criminal neglect anyway. There had been several instances of messages of concern being sent, and in this case, barnevernet broke the law through not doing more thorough investigations (which would have led to her being taken away from her mom). Asking for a different system for appeals is fine, but a less intrusive barnevern would lead to more cases like this happening. The entire crux of this argument is whether parental rights or children's rights should weight heavier - my own personal opinion is that parental rights pale in comparison to parental obligations and that for children, it's the other way around.
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i think the word abuse is used in here in a to all-encompassing manner. there is physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and neglect of a child. a specialist can't identify the type of abuse(within the minute) but can tell when something is off(one can tell whether a child is just shy or withdrawn(from <causes>)). some people talk with neglect in mind while others respond with physical/sexual abuse in mind and the argument gets unnecessarily heated. there will be more agreement than not in here if that distinction in definition/wording and ones meaning was used in the starting talking point.
L`Drone is using the ambiguity(mixed opinions/statements, law variance across continents etc) of the definition to argue uncertainty but that's not the point. if by law, spanking is illegal then that's abuse: quantifiable, identifiable(by professionals) abuse.
as to your example with spanking: even when illegal, i would need to know the context of the spanking(it'll give you an idea of whether or not it's something that'll repeat in time), whether or not the parent was educated enough to know that is not permitted/is illegal, basically i'd look into all the extenuating circumstances that led to the act. when the spanking was the exception, i would not take away the child but first provide help: home care for the child, education for the parent while trying to remove some of the burden/pressure of making ends meet the parent might have.
in the 13yr old case, i'd feed the child; first taken to a doctor to check her health, then feed it 2 meals a day or something. i would not consider feeding the child to be a parental rights violation.
mainly, one can do a lot in between to ensure that the child at least would not get worse during the procedures.
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On August 20 2019 01:42 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean I also think one of the most essential aspects of child care is giving really easy access to and removing stigmas surrounding contraceptives, sex education and abortion, so that you only get parents that actually want to be parents. In my observation most parents want to be parents because of biological "need" because of the social status having children gives them. They want to be a parent physically; they just don't want the effort of raising a child with love.
On August 20 2019 06:39 xM(Z wrote: in the 13yr old case, i'd feed the child; first taken to a doctor to check her health, then feed it 2 meals a day or something. i would not consider feeding the child to be a parental rights violation.
Most people would consider not feeding a child till it dies to be a very obvious case of child abuse. But not you apparently. Fuck the parental "rights". If you can't feed your child in Norway, for the child's own benefit, the child needs to be taken under the care of an entity that can do something as basic as feeding it.
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I must be reading this wrong. You do not think not feeding your child until it dies should trigger removal? They are litterally not meeting the childs basic survival needs. You would take away a pet for this.
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I think he means someone feeding the child would not infringe upon the parents rights.
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On August 20 2019 07:07 schaf wrote: I think he means someone feeding the child would not infringe upon the parents rights. So he thinks the parent should not lose the right to have the child by not feeding it but that the state should just ffed the child as to not impact the parent?
I guess there is a little bit of logic there, except I can't imagine a situation where a parent does not feed a child and is not also emotional abusing them and so on.
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On August 20 2019 04:11 Simberto wrote: No one knows within 1 minute with 100% certainty whether someone has been abused or not. If that were the case, this whole problem wouldn't exist. Anyone who tells you something like that has either no idea what they are talking about or is lying.
And anyone who, after talking with someone for 1 minute, claims to know anything about them with 100% certainty is also lying. That is not even enough investigation to give you a 100% on the color of someones hair.
My brother's a seasoned care worker - been in the industry for 13 years now - at various levels.
He met my ex girlfriend once and asked me privately if she'd been abused by a parent, and told me she had when I initially laughed it off. She had, in fact, and I just didn't feel comfortable admitting it. So either my brother's psychic or he knows his business.
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