Parental Criminalization - A Firsthand Account

 

A Tale of Two Standards

“In a nation where a crime is officially sanctioned, there can be no regret and no justice.” – Simon Wiesenthal

Like aboriginal and poor people, a targeted individual is expendable and can be legally destroyed with impunity and immunity. The same double standard that applies to any group slated for extermination is also at work when it comes to enemies of the State: namely, there is one criteria of justice and law for people approved by the system and another for those who are not.

This bipolar arrangement is especially malevolent because it is unofficial yet normative; institutionalized yet invisible to most people. I have learned this from my own hard experience of having my life “legally” torn apart by Canadian society.

In the same way that child poverty is a consequence of parental poverty, the separation of children from one parent occurs because that person has first been deliberately estranged and ostracized from his previous life.

My descent into the nightmare of Parental Criminalization began several years before the divorce that was initiated by my former wife Anne McNamee at the behest of the United Church of Canada. The shattering of my marriage and theft of my children was in fact just one aspect of a wider assault and criminal conspiracy that began soon after I launched a ministry among west coast indigenous people in the fall of 1992.

Barely six months after I commenced that work in Port Alberni, B.C., my wife Anne was contacted by a senior United Church official named Art Anderson. The latter had been notified of Anne’s anxiety about my work with indigenous people.

In his first phone call to her, Anderson told Anne that I was doing “great damage” to the church by allowing native survivors of the church’s Alberni Indian residential school to speak from my pulpit. He said that my job as a minister was in jeopardy if I kept allowing the survivors such a forum. (1)

Anderson’s threat sent Anne into an immediate panic, according to her counsellor Jack Thornburgh, a United Church member who had unethically leaked Anne’s confidential concerns about my work to Anderson. She implored him not to jeopardize the wellbeing of her and her daughters. She claimed that our marriage was on “rocky ground” and that she had been considering divorcing me. She also dissociated herself from my ministry and my work with natives.

Anderson assured Anne that I would not lose my job if I was “reined in” and stopped associating with natives. But he added that if I was fired, it would not affect her, since the church would pay her to relocate and to divorce me if she cooperated. He “guaranteed” Anne a favorable judgment in Family Court and assured her that she would obtain legal custody of both our daughters Clare and Elinor. 

In return for his sinister offer, Anderson told Anne to monitor my actions and keep him informed about my plans with native people. Anne agreed to this arrangement, without my knowledge.

Thus, the stage was set for my firing without cause and permanent “defrocking” and blacklisting two years later, which followed the game plan worked out by Anne, Art Anderson, and their co-conspirator, church lawyer Jon Jessiman. Anderson claimed to Anne to be acting on behalf of the United Church General Council, its highest body. (2)

This backroom coup was accompanied by more conspicuous attacks: late night death threats over the phone, threats of resignations from church members if I kept allowing Indians into church, and visits from burly parishioner-loggers armed with dire warnings. One of them, George Geddes, told me, 

“You have a young family to support, Kevin, and we can’t have anything happen to you if somebody gets pissed off at your work.”  

In hindsight, these shots were designed to wear me down psychologically prior to my firing. It is a common method used against criminalized parents: a shroud of vilification is hung around the target to make him doubt himself and encourage others to fear and shun him, making it easier to destroy him quickly and quietly, and then erase him.

My eventual firing, defrocking, and blacklisting by the United Church happened with remarkable speed between 1995 and 1997, as did the parallel legal assault that stripped me of my children during the same period. Their similarity was not coincidental, but rather constituted the opening salvo of a coordinated, years-long attack by Church and State. 

By the spring of 1997, I was penniless, unemployable, and stripped of any daily contact or normal relationship with my five and eight-year-old daughters. That is when my Parental Criminalization took hold with a vengeance, like a monster growing from what it fed on. I quickly became an effectively second-class, stateless person operating under an assumption of guilt, without recourse to the law. The rights I once thought I had suddenly vanished.

I have mentioned one blatant example of this: the illegal garnishing of most of my income by the same B.C. Attorney-General whose office robbed me of my children. That discrimination against me became so common it is difficult to recount all its instances. It was nothing less than an unending, daily barrage of inequity and cruelty inflicted on me and my children from every direction.

Once I became labeled with the odious title of a “non-custodial parent”, I suddenly became unworthy of consideration by teachers, Principals, judges, police, and social workers. And as the “custodial parent”, my ex-wife Anne enjoyed absolute authority to disregard and violate the Family Court orders and routinely harm my children.

For instance, a year after the divorce, Anne dislocated the elbow of my four-year-old daughter Elinor by angrily yanking her arm from behind. She refused to take Elinor to the hospital and ordered both daughters to say nothing to me about the incident.

When I finally learned what had happened to Elinor, I immediately reported it to the B.C. Ministry of Children and Families (MCF). But the MCF refused to investigate the incident after Anne told them it had been an “accident”. As one official said, “Custodial parents have the discretion to determine the seriousness of any matter related to their child’s health and safety”; even after physically assaulting their child, apparently.

While government coverup of child abuse and torture is hardly unusual, in the case of criminalized parents it is the norm; and those who challenge it quickly become targeted and even more criminalized by the system. After having been ignored by the MCF over Anne’s assault on Elinor, I was warned by them not to make “frivolous or vexatious complaints”. In short, don’t upset the applecart of institutionalized criminality. (3)

When wrongdoing becomes entrenched in any system, it must be sustained by escalating repression and lies. Its targets are kept in a constant state of fear, defensiveness, and demoralization and made to feel isolated and unworthy. Every criminalized parent is subjected to this psychological assault and will usually internalize its Big Lie. This partly accounts for the fact that suicide among divorced fathers who lose “custody” of their children is over fifteen times higher than among non-divorced fathers. (4)

Having endured this assault for many years, I know only too well the effect of the unwarranted “hate stare” from total strangers; of the unprovoked hostility of school officials who refuse to share with me my children’s school reports; of the refusal of police and judges to enforce Family Court orders; and of the pain and confusion in my children’s eyes when they are punished by their mother for showing me any affection.

This group behavior is declaring to the targeted parent: You are the problem. You are a criminal not worthy of consideration. Over time, even the most loving children will internalize and believe this constant lie about their proscribed parent. The criminalized parent invariably ends up feeling like a dead man walking, without a present or a future.

The psychologically crippling effect of Parental Criminalization makes it a potent weapon in the hands of the State, the Church and other corporate powers. It is routinely deployed against their adversaries and political dissidents. I experienced this while under fire from the United Church, which as a religious corporation operates outside Canadian law, including in its treatment of employees. (5) But Parental Criminalization is used especially against those who have no status or guaranteed rights under Canadian law: those indigenous people who live on the so-called “Indian reservations”.

During my close work with indigenous people over many years, I have witnessed time and again how tribal dissidents are regularly targeted for Parental Criminalization by the state-sponsored “Chief and Council”. The absolute control exerted over reserve Indians’ lives by the federal Indian Act and its puppet native politicians makes such criminalization that much easier to accomplish. 

Often, those who challenge local chiefs or whose homes and assets are sought after by them are unilaterally evicted from the reserve and have their children seized by government agents. These children are often trafficked or turned into cash cows for the private adoption and foster care industries.

I witnessed these attacks escalate during the period when Indian residential school crimes were first being made public and many native survivors began challenging their chiefs’ complicity in concealing that genocide. As Art Stogan, a coastal Salish elder on the Musqueam reservation in Vancouver, told me in 2008,

“Right after I went to your residential school protest and I started talking up your work with our people, child services grabbed all three of my grandchildren and had my daughter arrested when she tried stopping them. The kids got fostered out to God knows where. That shit happens to anybody who makes waves at Musqueam.” (6)

Whether among aboriginals or non-native Canadians, Parental Criminalization is made possible by the fact that once children are registered at birth, they are legally owned by the state. Parents manage their welfare on its behalf as the children’s “custodians”.

The proof of this subordinated status of parents is found in the language and process used in divorce and custody trials. Like the bifurcation of indigenous people in Canada into “status” and “non-status” Indians, family court settlements separate and alienate fathers and mothers into artificial designations of “custodial” and “non-custodial” parents. The former becomes a mere caretaker of their own children on behalf of the State, while the latter is reduced to the status of a stranger without any inherent right to have contact with his own children except as the court dictates.

It should be obvious to anyone how this system benefits neither parent and alienates both of them from their children. But the adversarial divorce court system deliberately inflames conflict and hatred between mothers and fathers in a classic divide and conquer scenario that fogs the permanent damage being done. In that regard, the “custodial” parent plays an essential role in this familial destruction by keeping the criminalized parent under constant fire, thereby doing the work of the State and other forces targeting that parent for destruction.

In my case, I recognized this dynamic early on. I realized that my former wife Anne was a pawn in a bigger battle being waged by Canadian Church and State against me as an inconvenient whistleblower. Knowing that didn’t do much to restrain her destructive actions; but by keeping my situation in perspective and not surrendering to despair, I was strengthened internally to ride the storm of psychological warfare. Gaining that deeper understanding and strength is essential for any criminalized individual who is struggling to endure. 

As Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl notes, 

“When a man discovers the reason and purpose behind his suffering, he is no longer a victim and can master himself and his circumstances.” (Commentary on Man’s Search for Meaning, 1958).

Over time, my growing awareness of the forces behind my criminalization helped me to understand that it operated so thoroughly and systemically because everyone around me colluded in it. Preferring to see my situation as a “marital conflict” rather than an ongoing criminal assault, both my family and friends stood back and let my life be obliterated rather than enter the “controversy”. 

Their reticence was encouraged by the huge public “fear and smear” campaign against me launched by the United Church and the Canadian government during 1998. And those few people who tried standing with me were themselves targeted for defamation and assault by Church and State. (7)

Even more tragically, my children were brutalized and programmed into fearing their limited time with me. Their mother told them they would be denied supper if I returned them more than five minutes late. My daughters began to panic and even cry as the 7:00 pm return time approached, saying, “Hurry Daddy, get us home! Mommy will get mad!” Our brief four-hour slices of time together twice every week became shrouded in stress and fear. 

According to Parental Alienation specialist Dr. Jayne Major, 

“Children want to be with their father, but they don’t dare. They fear the wrath of the mother and can’t stand the hassle and stress associated with being with Dad. The entire scenario is contrived by the mother to further alienate them from their father.” (8)

My former wife’s brutal behavior was not random or accidental, but part of a deliberate strategy to keep my life entangled in chaos and pain during the crucial period when my work was exposing Crimes against Humanity by her paymasters in the United Church.

Long after our divorce, Anne was continually advised and encouraged to disrupt my life by the same church officials who had fired and blacklisted me, including Art Anderson, Brian Thorpe, Jon Jessiman, and top officers like Moderator Marion Best. The national church office not only paid Anne’s divorce and custody bill of over $53,000 but provided legal assistance to her to block my efforts in court to gain more time with my children.

Fortunately, the blatancy of their collusion ultimately backfired on the United Church by bringing much public attention to my case and the fact of the church’s crimes against indigenous children. But that exposure would not have happened if I had not persisted for so long in the face of this criminal assault. (9)

In that sense, and recalling Victor Frankl, knowing why we are suffering and what is responsible for it allows us to endure and master our situation, no matter how heinous. Like my friend and genocide survivor Harriett Nahanee observed,

“I used to be a victim. Now I’m a threat.” 

That said, Parental Criminalization is tenaciously difficult to confront and overcome because it is rooted in the psyche and norms of western Christian culture and its central paradigm of the scapegoat who suffers vicariously for humanity. This fact was brought home to me after my firing by how suddenly expendable I became in the eyes of the church, my family, the law, and society in general. 

Something more than tag-team cruelty, coverup, and vested interest was at work: namely, a system that feeds off conflict and suffering, and that requires and enables Parental Criminalization.

In the words of my lawyer at the time, Marnie Dunnaway,

“In our profession, we don’t make our living by having the parents work out their differences. And the game requires that somebody lose and pay the price.”

Parental Criminalization is so normative, politically expedient, and bolstered at every level of law and society that it can only be resisted and overcome outside the present political and judicial system.

From Defense to Offense

“Whoever determines the ground of battle will win every engagement, no matter how small their forces.” – Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

Canada is the worst place in the world to be if you’re a Criminalized Parent or targeted individual, because its so-called “crown courts” operate according to administrative edict rather than the rule of law and due process. The foreign corporate fiction called the “Crown of England” claims absolute authority and jurisdiction over every Canadian and indigenous person. And so, every judge, lawyer, cop, and politician swear an oath of personal allegiance solely to the CEO of the “crown”: Charles Mountbatten-Windsor.

This rigged game means that there is no freedom to maneuver once you are targeted and drawn into the crown courts. The judge is under no obligation to protect your rights or to follow the rule of law, only to serve the crown as its bonded agent. As in a medieval Church Inquisition or a royal Star Chamber court, you are assumed to be guilty and must either conform to the court’s verdict or be punished.

To expect or seek any kind of justice in such a feudalistic arrangement is not only hopelessly naïve but suicidal. And yet time and again, most targeted Canadians who I work with see no alternative but to try defending themselves in these pseudo-courts.

Fortunately, there is an alternative; but it means thinking and acting offensively rather than defensively. It requires challenging the entire “crown” legal system and fighting to disestablish it and raise up new courts on our own terrain of battle. 

In short, like our English ancestors in 1649, we must engage in a civil war with the monarchical status quo to establish our own sovereign authority and jurisdiction within a new Republic and its common law courts. Anything less will keep us de facto in the present slave system.

This crucial fact must be understood before any attempt is made to resist Parental Criminalization. There is no recourse under the present legal system for targeted individuals, but there is within a new sovereign jurisdiction and its courts. In the latter, we can prosecute our tormentors, summoning those crown agents who are targeting and assaulting us to stand trial. (See www.republicofkanata.org)

Turning the tables like that is not only a powerful psychological reversal and enormously empowering for people under the gun, but it places our much bigger adversary on the defensive. That gains us breathing space and the time to maneuver, as in any battle.

We have proven in practice that this independent legal approach works, even with enormous adversaries, including the Vatican. During 2012 and 2013, our International Common Law Court of Justice (ICLCJ) publicly indicted and prosecuted heads of Church and State for Crimes against Humanity, forcing the resignation of Joseph Ratzinger, aka “Pope Benedict”. 

The success of this court case led to other litigation against the Vatican Inc. for its institutionalized infanticide. But even more important, the ICLCJ verdict sparked a global, grassroots common law court movement that is empowering citizens to place the system on trial and reclaim the law and governance for themselves.

With that in mind, any targeted person, and especially a criminalized parent, has the means to go on the offensive against the repression aimed at him before it descends. But to do so effectively, our biggest obstacle, which is our own naivety and reliance on the status quo, must be contended with and overcome. But this transformation can only occur while battling our adversary. (10)

The most basic illusion that hampers targeted people and needs to be shed is the false belief that they can somehow secure justice through the system and return to their former lives and security. In fact, that old life is over now, there is nothing in the legal or political system on which to rely since that system is arrayed against us, and the only justice that’s possible is whatever we create for ourselves. 

Our own daily experience under fire teaches us this hard, new reality, but few of us are willing to accept and learn from that experience right away. And yet eventually, time lessens this denial and helps foster an attitude of total realism, which means seeing things as they are and not as we imagine them to be. Such clarity is our best weapon in our transition from a victim to a fighter, provided we persist in our battle and do not collapse or surrender.

Thus armed, parents who are criminalized by the State and who resist their targeting must also recognize the grim truth that, to quote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, 

“Whatever you love makes you vulnerable. Prepare yourself to relinquish it in order to do battle.”

For years after the surprise attack of my divorce, my Achilles’ Heel was my love for my daughters and my emotional dependence on them: something that my ex-wife and her United Church paymasters knew and exploited to the hilt. In the dialectics of conflict, our greatest virtue can, depending on the circumstances, become our biggest weakness.

For instance, my emotional need to have as much contact with my children as possible compelled me to go along with the absurdly restricted “access” arrangement imposed by Family Court and dutifully restrict my time with Clare and Elinor to eight hours every week. By cooperating with this discrimination, I was reinforcing my status and image as a second-class parent in the eyes of my children and helping estrange them from me.

At the time, I didn’t dare challenge the situation out of fear of losing what little time I had with my children, and because of the violence they faced at the hands of their mother, whose assaults on them were ignored and encouraged by the Family Court. And thereby, my love for my children helped to enable a criminal arrangement.

To resist the assaults of a destructive system we must learn to be led by our reason and will rather than our heart, and to place our love and feelings beyond the reach of our enemy. We can then turn the methods of our institutional adversaries against them and attack what they love and cannot relinquish: their money, material security, and public image. 

Such a turning of the tables garners better results than dead-end appeals for justice or humanity from a State and corporate system incapable of both. These lessons in realpolitik are especially indispensable to criminalized parents, who face a ruthless machine trying to crush them down to stateless persons without rights.

How do you fight back effectively when you become targeted and your children are taken from you? The truth is that you can’t, at first. All the power seems to lie with your adversary, the State, after it grabs your children and makes demands on you. But this assault awakens you to the fact that you are suddenly at war with a merciless enemy and the apparent rules of peacetime don’t apply anymore. If you don’t quickly become aware of this brutal fact, you will continue to suffer and lose.

In short, use the first stage of the assault against you and you children to abandon your illusions and arm yourself for battle. To do that, you need to remember and practice these first “Three D’s” of your struggle: Discard, Document, and Demonstrate.

Discard: The way you’ve been raised to think and live is your worst enemy, for it makes you permanently subject to the decisions of other people and impersonal authorities. You need to discard a lot of your assumptions and reflexes when going up against your new enemy. The State does NOT have in mind the best interest of you and your children, for its aim is to profit off your suffering. It cannot be trusted or relied on for justice.

Getting rid of your lifelong automatic deference to so-called authority won’t happen overnight, but it can be started by critically questioning everything said and done to you and thinking in terms of what YOU want rather than what you’re being told to do. During every encounter with them, demand this of social workers, cops, or judges: By what right and authority are you separating me from my natural relationship with my children without my consent? For in truth, they have no such right or authority.

Document: It is essential for you to have your own accurate, up to date record of everything that happens to you and your children. This is important for future legal actions and for your own understanding of what is unfolding. Film or record every conversation you have and keep duplicate copies of all correspondence along with all your evidence. NEVER appear alone before an official or adversary; always have an eyewitness accompany you. And NEVER rely on “official” transcripts or your opponents’ version of events, which will be skewed in their interest.

Demonstrate! That is, make a stink: Experience shows that your best defense is to quickly make everything that is happening to you and your children as public as possible. Doing so rallies support for you and puts your enemy on the defensive, making them more cautious because they know they’re being watched. That’s essential for you to gain time to build support. So, the moment your children are taken from you or you are hit with a court summons, protest. Hold a picket line and press conference outside the courthouse or family services office. The bigger the stink you make, the less severe will be the attack on you, because no bureaucracy likes bad press or exposure of their often-illegal activity. Conversely, if you play along with your enemy and follow their orders, you’re showing them that you’re a pushover and they will steamroller right over you.

Your best guide in dealing with this first phase of the attack, and indeed with every phase, is The Art of War by General Sun Tzu. This three-thousand-year-old work is tailor-made for anyone who is fighting much bigger adversaries, embodying the eternal principles, strategies, and tactics of guerilla warfare. Its foremost doctrines include:

1. Establish the conditions of battle before it begins to determine its outcome;

2. Never be led by any enemy but rather lead it;

3. Never do what your enemy expects or wants; always act unpredictably and outside the experience of that enemy;

4. Conceal your intentions and movements and then strike unexpectedly where the enemy is weak and vulnerable;

5. Never reinforce error or defeat; use every experience to prepare for the next battle;

6. Respond to aggression by a bigger enemy by creating space to dissipate its power, gain time, and redirect the battle on your terms;

7. Use hopeless situations to discover a deeper resolve and courage;

8. Attack whatever your enemy loves and it must respond on your terms;

9. Turn the greater weight of your enemy against itself by using your speed and unpredictability to outmaneuver it;

10. Never defend and always attack, thereby forcing the enemy to follow your lead. *

(* Taken from my book “Truth Tellers’ Shield: A Manual for Whistleblowers and Hellraisers” (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1537363948), pages 122-129.)

These methods allow a small force to triumph over a larger one, both in warfare and whenever a criminalized person goes up against the State or other corporate power. But that person must first recognize that he is engaged in a battle with no guaranteed outcome and must remain determined to endure and to fight to the end. To do so, one must abandon the lazy routine of peacetime and learn to think and act like a warrior: simply, directly, and with ruthless realism.

There are no quick fixes in such battles, whose outcome is often decided according to the determination of the combatants. In Sun Tzu’s words, 

“The clarity and will of the commander is the decisive element in any engagement.”

Many people, even when facing assault, are not able to abandon the fear-based, dependent thinking of a lifetime. But only those who do stand a chance of surviving and overcoming the destruction of their lives and loss of their children. Such brave souls do not stand alone but are part of a growing army of resistance fighting to reclaim our lives, our children, and our world from a rapacious corporate oligarchy.

“If there is to be trouble let it be in our time, so that our children will know peace.” – Thomas Paine, 1776

 

Footnotes

99% of Kevin’s pay is illegally garnished, leaving only $1.43 from a pay of $124.80: The University of British Columbia, September 15, 1997.

99% of Kevin’s pay is illegally garnished again two weeks later, leaving only 95 cents from an income of $83.20: 

The University of British Columbia, September 30, 1997. 

Statement of B.C. Attorney-General Ujjal Dosanjh, in which he declines to review Kevin’s fraudulent “delisting” by

 declaring that the United Church of Canada operates outside the jurisdiction of the laws of Canada; February 13, 1998

 

The United Church of Canada co-conspires with Kevin’s wife Anne McNamee to plan her divorce action again him: Eyewitness statement of United Church minister Bruce Gunn, June 3, 1996

Statement of eyewitness Jack McDonald regarding United Church conspiracy to destroy Kevin’s work and marriage in Port Alberni, B.C. 

See: About Kevin Annett – Republic of Kanata

(www.republicofkanata.org)

1. Kevin Annett on Genocide in Canada and its coverup and his personal history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk4g5l7FcFc&list=PLYEnChrKOgm7aRDzbo6yfswzCEdMl2P8e&index=1

2. Unrepentant: Kevin’s award-winning documentary (2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyxPFPQjNfg

3. “Who is Kevin Annett?” (2013) – an insightful personal interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY4h3hDjOYM

4. “Erasing the Erasure: On the Trail of Canada’s Biggest Cover Up” – An overview article on Kevin Annett by Sarah J. Webster  http://www.salem-news.com/articles/march262019/canada-biggest-cover-up-sw.php

 5. Crimes against Humanity in Canada: A Dossier of Evidence – The Case of 60,000 murdered children and the man who surfaced their fate (Amazon.com, 2023)

 “Kevin Annett is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past. What has been done to him is outrageous.” – Dr. Noam Chomsky, August 2002

“Kevin’s actions spoke louder than any words. He put everything in his life on the line for our people but that made him a lot of powerful enemies. Kevin’s the only white man I’ve ever come to trust.” – Ahousaht traditional elder George Hamilton, Port Alberni, 2005

“Kevin Annett made us all sit up and take notice.” – Member of Parliament Gary Merasty, March 2008

“If there’s one man who forced genocide onto Canada’s agenda and brought justice to thousands of people, it’s Kevin Annett. But he’s paid a huge personal price for it. He’s what my people call a righteous soul.” – Civil Rights veteran Colia Clark, New York, 2014

www.murderbydecree.com , www.republicofkanata.org  

angelfire101@protonmail.com