Parents lose custody.
It happens all the time.
Sometimes the parent is the paternal father.

Sometimes the person who completely and totally loses primary custody entirely is the lady who gave birth to the child.

It may not be against the law to take advantage of someone’s unhealed wounds, but some churches, non profits, and advocacy centers tend to find broken people and broke them some more, with the promise of helping others.

Sometimes people love to grab headlines and use them for their own gain. While that’s not a crime in and of itself, what’s illegal are the crimes these type of organisations can commit.

Under no circumstances do churches, advocacy groups, and cause-based non profits ever want their underlying public trust and social currency to be questioned.

It’s like a veneer of self righteous activism. Yet one quick check under the hood and you find multiple instances of significantly questionable behaviors.

Is making a rumor about someone else for attention seeking and vindictive gains defamation? Absolutely. But instead of doing some simple checks of the person’s “victim status”, most of these smaller suburban organizations seem to have a pattern of simply ignoring all reality in an attempt to gain money and attention.

Is a law enforcement lead church safety team covering for people who make hoax threats a crime? Well, the FBI is pretty clear that making hoax threats is not a joke. There’s not a fine line, or a minor difference between ‘see something say something’ and ‘knowingly making a false threat about someone else’ for vindictive gains and attention.

In any of these situations, when you peek under the hood, sometimes people don’t like what might be seen and exposed to the public.

After all, that public trust is the only way these activist groups, churches, non profits, & cause based community outreach programs exist is by making sure that the ‘image’ stays in tact.

It’s sad to see the same pattern repeated over and over again. However,

Some of these advocacy groups, churches, community outreach programs, raise awareness campaigns, and non profits, ….they always include some type of these elements:

1. You need to come endorse us with blind trust.
2. We are ruthless in our outreach program to do anything, say anything, & use anyone’s story.
3. And like a heard of sheep, please come give us support because everyone else is doing it too.

It’s a cycle of social trust that leads you deeper and deeper and deeper into a spiral of tail chasing when there is no system in place that prevents toxic enabling of false claims.

When there’s nothing at all in place that prevents someone / ANYONE with a great “story” to come get help, get money, take resources, and persuade the organization to blindly dole out handouts, then that’s what every organization risks.

For every fraudulent case that an organization endorses, there are real legitimate victims who go without.

There are times when people are victims. But is everyone that makes a ‘claim’ actually a victim? Of course not. So, why don’t more organizations have any types of ‘checks and balances’ in place to prevent their own resources from going to fraudulent stories?

Anyone can watch the news, open Facebook, hear a story at the beauty shop, ask a friend to hear their story, make a simple spin or two on the story, and suddenly become a victim.

The problem here is that most organizations are filled and staffed with people whom ‘something’ bad HAS happened. They were victimized by date rape. They were a victim of a abuse. They were a victim of a sexual assault.

Being a victim never gives anyone the right to take out their past hurt on someone else. Yet that seems to be the norm.

• Get a story. Doesn’t matter if it’s true, real, verified, or a liar seeking attention.
• Circle the wagons. Rally on the courthouse steps. Run it through the social cycle.
• Get your pitchforks. Blame all of one gender. Light the torches.

It’s much easier to have this vigilante victim mentality than it is to say, “Ma’am, we’re going to offer you the opportunity to seek help. Here’s a list of therapists in our neighborhood and our area.”

Instead there seems to be this growing pattern of, “Oh yes. That happened to me too. Here’s our organizations resources have all you want.”

And those resources can be time, money, food, diapers, program spots, vouchers, and more. Yet there’s a complete lack of effort to even TRY to have any type of filter, screening or validation to verify that the person’s story is true.

YOUR RESOURCES ARE NOT INFINITE.
NEVER TAKE AWAY FROM LEGITIMATE VICTIMS.
LEARN TO SCREEN, LISTEN, AND VALIDATE.
EVERY TIME YOU SAY ‘YES’ TO ONE PERSON’S STORY, YOU HAVE TO SAY NO TO SOMEONE ELSE.
IF YOU CAN’T MAINTAIN A SYSTEM OF VALIDATING SOMEONE’S STORY, DO YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE?

Your Character Matters more than your reputation.

The way that you ARE is more important than the way that you are perceived.

The way that you ARE matters MORE than the way people THINK you are. It might seem backwards in today’s world with the social media. Sometimes people will get a projected image of who they think you are or who they want you to be b/c they’ve seen you on through the filter of instagram, the likes of facebook, and the hashtags of twitter.

But once someone sees who an individual is outside of the social side, outside of a social business encounters, and in a very real life situation, that’s when who-you-really-are tends to come out.

Way too many people will devote their lives to manage, manipulate, and charm other people to like them.

Ms. Conaway would get people’s attention by relating to any story that she possibly could find.

If it was from an advocacy group, in the Facebook feed. “My man was in the army for 40 years, has done 6 tours between Iraq and Afghanistan.” would yield a reply such as “Oh yeah, i can totally understand how you feel. Mine was in the Navy.”

And, local folks will look at that thinking, “Wait. Wasn’t Brad in the Navy for 4 years and wasn’t that a few decades ago?” (yes)

Or she’d get something from her past and relate it to the present situation. A door breaking or getting a hole – be it from someone running into it, or an adjacent door knob hitting it, or from one of those over-the-door shoe organizers, if there was a broken door it trigger memories from an ‘apparent’ time that her first ex had broken a door when they lived back at Pensacola Christian College.

How people act an REact on a personal level (not just socially) but on a personal level matters. Either in a small group setting, or in a personal one on one relationship, having character matters more than what anyone else thinks or perceives.

Examples: Rick doesn’t want to be seen as someone who can’t separate truth from a lie. That’s not a perception that any pastor wants.

Katie might have a desire to be liked and to never been seen as a con artist or a manipulator. The character then becomes less important than defending the credibility of the reputation.

What would happen if those incidents had proper resolution? Perhaps a public statement of correction from the church, or something similar from some of the people in the community? That would go a lot further than having their “social” factor questioned by simply sharing some truthful integrity and pulling back the curtains of the perception.

People need to have confidence in knowing that you are NOT making an attempt to CONTROL how they see you. Communities need to be able to TRUST that someone is not purposefully trying to MANIPULATE the REALity of their character by simply putting on a social facade.

{{someone remind me to add videos and open records request}} 😉