Let me throw this out there. IF I had a serious legal/moral/ethical situation that could possibly get me in trouble/cause problems in REAL life I could easily see myself doing what the OP has done. Keep the facts to a minimum and play it cool posting and detailed information wise. Detailed facts can get you in trouble and emotions just get in the way of appropriate actions.
Just sayin.
You’d go to a message board of strangers for advice when you supposedly have a wife who is an expert in the subject matter?
My feeling is that the wife didn’t want to get involved from the start, so **Incubus ** posted the thread trying to get a feel for whether what he was feeling about it- which I do believe was the urge to report it- was right or whether his wife was right.
Even “experts” can be idjiots from time to time. Never heard of that “second” opinion thing? Not to mention that whole “telling the spouse they are wrong” thingy without some backup. Plus apparently she is an uncaring Mexican and he is a white uncaring man and there ya go.
Maybe…but personally, if I have a serious legal/moral/ethical situation that could possibly get me in trouble/cause problems in REAL life the absolute last thing I’d do is post any of it to teeming millions on the internet.
If for no other reason that I would realise that giving only part of the story or playing coy with details, on a message board guaranteed to garner lots of responses by generally intelligent people, is not likely to go down well. Since the OP has been here for ten years he really should have realised that, no?
Since his wife is or was a mandated reporter and the OP relates to a possible crime in progress, it’s entirely possible that Incubus realised only too late that it wasn’t perhaps a wise move to put any of the facts out here. So clamming up is understandable, but I only hope that if there is in fact a child in ongoing danger, something is being done about it.
This is the impression I’m getting as well.
I forgot that she is an uncaring Mexican…
Thats true. But lets say I have situation A, with conditions X,Y and Z. I don’t reveal whether its X, Y or Z. Posters will give opinions on ALL of those (and variations of them). As the poster, I can reject the opinions that don’t matter and take under consideration those that do. I still get the info I need and the exact details of my situation are still vague enough that Jerry Springer’s staff can’t track me down.
BTW, I know somebody in the “child protective services” bizz (or whatever your area calls it). And they have told me horror stories from BOTH ends of the spectrum (ie he was “caught” raping the kid and there was nothing they could do…to…the poor mother accidentally sun burned the kid once and they took the child away).
Christ almighty. What is wrong with you people? Are you even reading the OP’s posts? He stated that his wife had called up and was told it was hearsay, but that she was also trying to get more information (things like names and addresses do help). Why do you think he’s ignoring it?
I know I’m in a different country, but the UK seems to be similar to the US when it comes to reporting child abuse, and I’ve seen both over- and under-reactions from reports made.
One time I knew for certain that my daughter’s friend’s Mum was being really heavily physically abused by her partner; I haven’t seen a smashed-up face like that since I was a child myself; the child had to stay at my house for a whole week of school because the mother was too badly beaten to go out in public. There were lots of other bad things going on in that home, but when a parent is being physically abused to that extent then that warrants a call in itself. The way they were living, the mother was trapped, or at least thought she was, and social services could have really helped her.
When I called to report it they refused to take my report unless I allowed them to pass my name on to the family I was reporting.
The step-Dad in question had burgled my house a few months’ previously and was friends with the people who were running the illegal club opposite my house - the club where the police were afraid to go for noise disturbances because they’d been shot when responding before. So I had to make the horrible decision of prioritising mine and my daughter’s safety over her friend’s and her friend’s mother’s. I even went to the school and reported my concerns and they said they couldn’t do anything based on my say-so.
A couple of weeks later, the family moved; they moved at least once a year and were never on the electoral roll due to somewhat unusual living circumstances.
Given my experiences on the other side of the line, I would never have believed this could happen, but it did.
The OP or his wife should make the call, and they did. Even if it does turn out to all be completely innocent, there’s enough oddness that it’s definitely worth reporting, and they did do that, so why the ire at the OP? What am I missing?
Nothing wrong with us, we’re not the ones having a hard time with reading comprehension.
Go back and re-read the thread and you’ll note that the gathering of names/addresses was mentioned earlier in the thread when he was “getting the ball rolling.” After that, he reported that his wife called it in (presumably with the gathered info on hand) and was given the hearsay brush-off.
Posters, for the most part, and including me, believe the OP should do more at this point and not just settle with the brush-off. For the record, the OP doesn’t indicate that anything more is going to be done now that the wife has hit a wall with her first attempt.
OP asked all his questions, THEN stated that wife (who inexplicably didn’t already have this information despite being an experienced CPS worker) was trying to get names and addresses in order to “get the ball rolling”, THEN said that a single call was made with an impausible-sounding brush off, and THEN oh well, nothing more we can do, so sad too bad.
And hasn’t been back since. Perhaps all sorts of things have been happening behind the scenes and Incubus just hasn’t had time to update…one would hope but given the tone of this thread it doesn’t actually look hopeful.
Did you actually read the whole thread, as in all of the responses, SciFiSam?
Still wondering what’s going on with Incubus, and his wife, and that little girl. Brrrr.
Not to be an Incubus apologist, but I’ve noticed that he doesn’t always come back to his threads and respond a lot. I hope he does come back and tell us that his wife has pushed for CPS to do some investigating here, though.
I was thinking about this little girl just tonight. I hope that she having a peaceful night, and that no one is hurting her right now. I wish that Incubus, and/or his wife, were more interested in helping her, but honestly, “There’s nothing I can do” seems to be the default for people. What they actually mean is “It’s hard/inconvenient for me to do something”, of course.
I think about her every day.
I’m hoping that he is planning to update us after they’ve had a chance to gather more info and talk with grandma. Hopefully he’s not just going to disappear.
But what more do you believe he should do? I might be misreading it after all, because I thought they didn’t have the gathered info (address, etc) on hand when most people were being annoyed at them.
Yes, I did read the whole thread. He asked the questions first - and it’s a lot easier to say ‘call call call!’ when you’re not the one making the call - and then said that his wife had called.
How would his wife having formerly worked for CPS make a difference to whether she had the names and addresses of this man and his daughter? Or what other information do you mean?
And people do have lives other than posting on this board. I mean, pretty much everyone does, don’t they? Sometimes you start a thread when you have the time to start one, then you don’t have time afterwards. In an ideal world we’d all wait till we had enough time to contribute properly, but then, in an ideal world this thread would never have been necessary.
Let me tell you a story. My son was in Germany, and was chatting online with both me and a friend in Canada. Said friend was talking about killing himself. There was no way a kid was going to commit suicide if I could stop it. So, first I called regular 911. Yeah, they said, we can’t do anything about anything in Canada. Okay. I googled, and found, a number for the police in his province (Prince Edward Island). But it was a Sunday, and I got an answering machine. So, I think, someone somewhere on that island has a phone, and will answer it. I found the number of an emergency room on Prince Edward Island. I called them, and explained the situation. They gave me the local number for the RCMP there, and I called them and I explained the situation. I had no address, only a name. I told them that this kid was talking about suicide. I have only second-hand reports, and a name, no more. The RCMP found him, and took him to get help.
What’s the point of all that, besides patting myself on the back? To make the point that, when a kid is in danger, and you can do something about it? You do something about it. If the first thing you do doesn’t work, then you do something else. And if that doesn’t work, you do something else. Until whatever you’ve done does work. Because you, and they, are fucking human beings.
Just think: If that girl were someone you loved, wouldn’t you be bulldozing the place down right about now?
Of course.
What I meant was that the wife would a: surely know whether or not to report this and b: would know the proper channels to go through in order to get someone’s attention.