Georgia women arrested on suspicion of caging special-needs children

[Little Tich]

Source: Yahoo! News / Reuters

(Reuters) - A mother was charged with child cruelty and false imprisonment after authorities said her special needs children, an 11-year-old boy and 8-year-old girl, had been kept in homemade cages, investigators said on Friday.

The boy was found on Thursday in one of two cages inside a house in Chatsworth, Georgia, 90 miles north of Atlanta, said Greg Ramey, special agent in charge of the regional field office for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The girl was not restrained when authorities searched the house in response to two emergency calls. But she also had been in a cage "from time to time," Ramey said.

Their mother, Stephanie Stone, 34, was arrested and charged with cruelty to children, false imprisonment and drug possession, he said. Another woman in the house, Wanda Redfern, 49, was charged with child cruelty and false imprisonment.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/georgia-women-arrested-suspicion-caging-special-needs-children-203418413.html

[jwirr]

1. The best thing that can happen in this case is that these children be removed from the home and

placed in a facility for special needs children supervised by the state. And I make this statement as first a mother of a special needs child and as a MSW who has worked with families in this situation. The children and their needs comes first.

[Demeter]

2. I think this speaks VOLUMES about the lack of useful support this mother endured for years

As a nation, we must decide whether to insist that people pull themselves and their problems up by their bootstraps while everyone turns their backs and carefully doesn't notice, OR

the State provides sufficient basic needs: food, shelter, clothing, medical care PLUS the special needs of families with especially needy children.

Just taking the kids and throwing them into neo-Dickensian institutions is NOT a good solution. It didn't work for the Victorians, and it won't work for us. It isn't designed to work for the kids, their families, or society...except to "make the problem go away", at least, until the funding dries up.

And I speak as the mother of a severely disabled 32 year-old child who has been doing it on my own with meager help from the State, and a great deal of support from family outside of her father, the shit. My daughter and I were lucky to have that family in our favor. Not everyone is.

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. sad