A rather common thread on this web site is a disdain for the field of social work. We have taken some heat for being so outspoken on the behavior of practitioners of social work, more precisely those who refer to themselves as "Therapists." They are anything but.

It would be impossible on any single website to document all or even any significant number of instances of the truly absurd and often horrifying things done by social workers in the name of their view of what they think is “science.” The story you will see below represents an extreme case to be sure. The extreme of the case, that cost a young child her life we would hope isn’t so overpowering in itself that it misleads the reader into the belief that all cases of abuse of power by social workers are this dramatic and attention getting. Most cases are not nearly as newsworthy.

I can cite a few examples of the very strange antics of social workers. Elsewhere on this site is contained the report of the Minnesota Attorney General on the Scott County cases set off by social workers. Another example of a social worker run amok is the McMartin Preschool case in Los Angeles where social worker “Therapist” Kee MacFarlane of Children’s Institute International interviewed hundreds of children in a manner that was determined to be extremely coercive and contaminating. Then a few years later there was a case of a social worker assigned to a children’s shelter in Arizona who devised a theory that abused children would turn into pedophiles. He then strapped young boys as young as seven years old who were at the shelter in state care into a chair after removing their clothing, and placed an appliance on the genitals of the little boys and subjected them to a wide range of sexually explicit materials in the hope of measuring a response from the children. When the little boys failed to respond he repeated the series of pornographic videos and slides until some finally did respond. When they did he had devised an macabre scheme to subject the children top his brand of “aversion therapy” by spraying the boys faces with ammonia. This dungeon of child torture remained a secret until one day he accidentally injured a child and the child was treated at a local hospital. The social worker maintained throughout the process that this was a legitimate scientific process. Almost everyone else in Arizona disagreed. The process was outlawed.

In the process below, the article attached explains the process thoroughly of how arrogant “therapists” in some strange belief that suffocation was therapy, ended the process in the child’s death. Through the trial these social workers could NOT demonstrate with any real scientific support that the process had any validity in fact at all. The conclusion of the vast majority of the scientific community was that the procedure (rebirthing) was quackery. The net result was the conviction depicted below.

Social workers have come onto the scene as paraprofessionals and have usurped duties that should be confined to those disciplines that are better educated and equipped to perform those duties. As a group, social workers have been extremely strident and arrogant that theirs is the best way, that they are the most expert with children. In this process they, as a profession, have done profound harm to individual families, and to our social structure as a nation. Social workers are performing duties which the most kind view shows they are ill equipped to perform. Shoving their way into the mental health field taking on duties of psychologists and psychiatrists with little or none of the requisite training to perform those tasks outside their own mind. Until social workers are confined to doing only social work, events like the one depicted below will reoccur.

Don’t take our word for how bizarre social worker practices are. You can get videotapes yourself of the interviews of children in the McMartin case and the video tapes of Candace dying. Look at what these people DO, and then judge for yourself if something shouldn’t be done to stop this.

Rebirthing team convicted

Two therapists face mandatory terms of 16 to 48 years in jail

Rocky Mountain News

By Peggy Lowe, News Staff Writer

April 21, 2001

GOLDEN -- Two Evergreen therapists sobbed as they were led to jail in handcuffs Friday night after a jury found them guilty in the rebirthing death of 10-year-old Candace Newmaker.

An emotional Jefferson County District Court jury took about five hours to convict Connell Watkins and Julie Ponder of child abuse resulting in death.

One juror made the sign of the cross before the verdict was read at 5:40 p.m.

"Wait!" yelled Watkins, holding off a Jefferson County Sheriff's deputy so she could hug her daughter, Teka Cooil, who screamed, "No!" as her mother was taken away. Ponder removed her necklace and her purse and hugged her boyfriend while supporters cried.

On the other side of the courtroom, Candace's grandmother, Mary Davis, wept with joy. Friday was a year and a day after Candace died following the experimental therapy.

"Justice for Candace," Davis said.

Watkins, 54, and Ponder, 40, face a mandatory 16 to 48 years in prison when they are sentenced by Judge Jane Tidball on June 18.

The six men and six women on the jury said they were horrified at the rebirthing session caught on a videotape. On it, Candace's screams echoed through the courtroom many times during the three-week trial.

"You don't treat a child like a horse and try to break it," said Bruce Coffman, a 47-year-old juror and father of two.

Attorneys for Ponder and Watkins wouldn't comment but made plans to make bail for the clients over the weekend.

Jefferson County prosecutors and sheriff's officials were overjoyed. They said Watkins and Ponder's therapy was nothing more than torture.

"I don't think Candace Newmaker died because of their ignorance," said sheriff's investigator Diane Obbema. "I believe she was killed because of their arrogance."

In closing arguments Friday morning, defense attorneys for Watkins and Ponder characterized them as caring therapists who are willing to take on the troubled children traditional practices can't reach.

Prosecutors painted them as "monsters" who replied with callousness to the cries of a little girl who was slowly suffocating.

"This was done as therapy," said Joan Heller, Ponder's lawyer. "This was done with all the best intentions. Something went wrong, and we don't know what went wrong."

Not so, said prosecutor Laura Dunbar, pointing directly at the two women seated at the defense table.

"Candace Newmaker died a slow, agonizing and torturous death, and these two defendants caused it," Dunbar said.

The jury also had two other conviction choices: criminally negligent child abuse resulting in death, punishable by a possible four to 16 years, and child abuse resulting in bodily injury, which is a misdemeanor.

Jeane Newmaker, Candace's adoptive mother, has also been charged in her daughter's death. One year ago, she brought her daughter to Evergreen from Durham, N.C., for the controversial two-week "intensive" therapy provided by Watkins. Newmaker believed Candace suffered from attachment disorder, described as an inability to bond with a caretaker because of past abuse and trauma.

For the rebirthing, Candace was made to lie in the fetal position and was wrapped tightly in a navy blue flannel sheet. Eight large pillows were then placed around her, while Ponder, Watkins and two others pushed against her to simulate the birth process.

Jurors saw the procedure on videotape twice, watching and weeping as they heard Candace begging for air and shrieking for fear that she would die. They also saw the therapists' response, ridiculing her as a "quitter" and telling the child to "go ahead and die," and "being reborn is hard work."

There was no playing of the videotape Friday. Instead, the defense offered up the navy blue flannel sheet that Candace was wrapped in. It's possible, Heller said, to breathe through the fabric.

"Take it out of its bag and hold it up to the light," Heller said to the jury. "You will see that you can see through it just as you can breathe through it."

Go ahead, get that sheet out, Jensen said to the jurors. Lie underneath it, he said, as he grabbed a large couch pillow from a pile of evidence. Place this large heavy pillow on top of the sheet, then on top of your face and see if you can breathe through it -- "it goes from some (breathability), to virtually none."

Jensen scoffed at the therapists' "witchcraft" and the use of "psychodrama," essentially play-acting an abuser's role so the child may bring up repressed feelings.

"They tell you it's psychodrama," Jensen said, rolling his eyes. "If that is drama, it has to be a Greek tragedy."

Candace died from mechanical asphyxiation, prosecutors say, which caused her heart to stop beating and damaged her brain.

But Watkins' lawyer, Craig Truman, again laid out the medical evidence he said only clouds just how Candace died. There was no vomit found in her lungs and her airway was clear, he said. There were no abrasions or bruises found on her stomach. So how could her diaphragm be damaged enough for mechanical asphyxiation?

"What we have here is a question as to how did this child die," Truman said.

Truman, coming off as a country doctor with his folksy wit and quick use of medical terms, and Jensen, with his fire-and-brimstone preacher-prosecutor role, traded lyrics to pop songs during the closing arguments.

Jensen used a Bob Dylan lyric to describe the videotape, saying the thing speaks for itself.

"Does it take a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing?" Jensen asked. "No."