You have a loved one in your family who is missing, whether for one day, one month, one year, or for many years. You are suffering the emotional, mental and even spiritual anguish of not knowing where your loved one is. You know that the well-meaning people in your life want to help and support you but they don't have a clue as to what you are going through. You are frustrated with the professionals who are being paid to help you and how it is taking so long to get the answers needed to provide resolution for your family and you. You know you are expected to be strong but there are times that you want to scream and you sometimes wonder if you can go on, if this nightmare will ever end. Yet you are firmly resolved to keep fighting until that loved one is back home;
You are enduring, or are a survivor of, abuse, any of the many forms that abuse can take, whether physical, mental, emotional and/or financial abuse. You often wrestle with fear, anger, depression, shame, and desperately need to talk about what you are or have suffered and yet you wonder if anyone will ever understand or even believe you;
You are a victim of a crime or have a loved one who is; for you or that loved one, there may still be no answers, no arrests, no justice and no peace or resolution because your case remains unsolved, whether this crime is of a violent or "nonviolent" nature. You live with the ongoing mental, emotional and even spiritual torment of knowing that you have suffered horrifically but the person (s) responsible for the nightmare you and your family are enduring is not being held accountable for it. You, too, want to scream and sometimes wonder if you can go on but you are bound and determined to keeping fighting for your answers;
You simply want to help out of your concern and compassion for those in pain and gratitude for how you have been helped in your time of need and you want to give back with no selfish agenda;
There is an ideal place that wonderfully fulfills that needs or desires of those of the many of us who fit into one or more of these categories. You can find this resource at a social networking site called PEACE4 THE MISSING. It is easy to sign-up and become a member, even though some screening will be done to protect existing Members from anyone with a selfish or harmful agenda. Even for nonmembers, this site is easy to search and navigate and if you are a Member, it will prove an uplifting experience. If you have a missing loved one and are seeking support, a forum to raise awareness for your loved one, a place to vent and to be yourself with no fear of being judged, this is the best place that I know of for you when you want support and connections with others who are also living your nightmare. You can connect with other familes as well as with survivors and advocates who are pre-screened. This is the one place where families rule and are made the center of everything that is done online and offline by PEACE4 Members. You can be as active as you want and share as much as you want but if you are shy or are reluctant to talk because of an ongoing investigation, there is no pressure on you to participate or share.
If you yourself are a missing person because you have been abducted or trafficked earlier in life or have run away or for any other reason and you are looking for your family, this site is for you. You will find Members in your situation and be able to connect with them. There are a number of living, unidentified people who, for various reasons, live without their names and are seeking their families. Many of the Members are survivors and advocates who want to redeem their experiences by helping others and "pay it forward" by giving back, knowing how they themselves have been helped. Many are still being victimized and are seeking support as they work though their situations.
The proposed legislation called "Billy's Law," created by Janice Smolinski, whose son Billy has been missing for seven years, is the heart and soul of this site. It is related to the site called NAMUS (National Missing and Unidentified Person's System) which is a govenment-sponsored database. PEACE4 provides all the information, resources and helpful links needed for families to make the best use of these means in their searches for their missing loved ones. Many PEACE4 Members are activists seeking to make Billy's Law mandatory in all 50 states. PEACE4 educates the public thoroughly about missing people, the issues surrounding them and about the how and why of people turning up missing or unidentified. PEACE4 educates the public about NAMUS and Billy's Law and empowers the public about how to raise awareness about these resources to bring missing/unidentified people home and to solve crimes.
The Members of this site care deeply about ALL Missing persons and their families. However, because of the inadequate resources available to families with adult missing loved ones or whose loved ones are among the "cold case missing" of ANY age, many families who are Members have adult missing loved ones. PEACE4 Members will post verified AMBER ALERTS and missing children cases for Member families who have missing children. PEACE4 realizes that families of missing children have more resources than families of missing adults, including The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and therefore more public awareness. Yet ANY family with a missing loved one is warmly welcomed into this community of people who care about each other and where drama and bullying don't exist.
Thank God, I do not have a missing loved one but if this ever happened to my family and me, this would be the best place for us to be. You can check out the site, get the feel for how it works and sign up to join:
http://peace4missing.ning.com/ PEACE4 THE MISSING site
http://namus.gov/ NAMUS database website
http://helpfindthemissingact.blogspot.com/ blogspot for Billy's Law
Friday, November 4, 2011
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Keeping Safe Online
Your profile on Facebook or Twitter gets hacked.
You get a suspicious friend request from a perfect stranger; the next day you get a Facebook warning about your "abusive, highly offensive behavior";
You keep getting hateful, vicious comments from other users, in response to your posts or photos, maybe even threats;
You have an online conflict and notice, later, that other users connected with the user you had the conflict with, are suddenly deleting you from their pages, even blocking you;
Users of the opposite sex keep appearing on Chat, pumping you for personal information, even your home address to inquiring about your sex life;
You get messages on Chat telling you that you have been tagges in a video and, providing links, ask you to view it;
You see a notice that seems to be from Facebook asking you to verify your account for you are about to be deactivated, with a link for you to click;
You wake up one morning to learn, to your dismay, that your computer appears to be on and later, you discover that someone has accessed your bank account!
You get the picture. We use social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and others, to connect with people and to satisfy our varying agendas for using these networks. Yet we are likely to encounter hackers, scammers, spammers, bullies, and even criminals, or users who are merely unfriendly or unstable.
Let me share a few of my online experiences, which I'm sure are similar to things others experience online, unfortunately. Many months ago, I had a major conflict with an online user over a certain issue. Days later, I found that a number of other users with connections to this user, were removing me from their friends lists, even blocking me. This hurt tremendously, as it was all based on a misunderstanding and I had no way of knowing what was going on, only circumstantial evidence. And it reinforced in me a feeling of who could I trust? For months, I lived in fear of my online reputation being destroyed and became paranoid of others in my network. I did NOT see this is "just Facebook stuff"! Lesson: Do not trust anyone you don't know outside of social networks until you spend lots of time building trust and are reasonably sure of these users and their characters.
This past summer, on the eve of my birthday, June 29, I had logged into Facebook and was checking out my homepage. Suddenly, I saw a very offensive profile, bearing a pornographic profile picture; the user called himself a screenname that is not fit to put in print. Upon the urgent request of the person who shared the offending user's profile, I pulled up this user's profile, checked it out, hitting the "Report" button to submit my report to Facebook concerning this user's profile and photos. Minutes later, I received a friend request. I checked it out and took note of who sent it: the user I had just reported! I let this request sit on my profile, unanswered: I had no intention of ever accepting such a friend request.
The following morning, my birthday, I woke up and after awhile, I logged into Facebook. I posted on some group and fan pages, intending to leave my wall clear for birthday greetings. To my dismay, I visited my homepage and saw a warning sitting on top of my page. To paraphrase, I was told: "You have uploaded offensive or pornographic material that is offensive to other users or is abusive. If you do not remove this material, your account will be deactivated."
I remembered the suspicious friend request I received the night before and knew exactly who was behind this, and why! The user whose profile I had reported, no doubt to get even with me for my report, had gotten hold of my online identity and Facebook now had me down as a sex offender! I was distraught and upset and did not know how to fix this. I composed a note about my situation, which received only one comment, which had nothing to do with my actual post. What a "birthday gift"!
Eventually, the warning on my homepage concerning the false accusations against me, disappeared on its own, but I continued to feel quite disillusioned and fearful about my online reputation because of my stolen online identity. Worse, could this end up on my criminal records under my Social Security Number? Lesson: When you receive a suspicious friend request, you need to do something about it. The options for this are marking these requests as spam or even blocking the sender so he or she cannot see you to do anything to you.
In strict terms, cyberbullying is a term reserved for children and teenagers. Cyberharassment is the counterpart term used for adults. In any case, it is up to us as adults to protect our minor children online, while we must take total responsibility for our own online safety.
Numerous resources abound that show us how to keep ourselves and our families safe. Here are just a few:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/security NEW WARNING: This page appears, itself, to be a hacker site! Facebook users, including I, have been receiving scam messages via this page.
https://www.facebook.com/#!/Facecrooks
http://www.staysafeonline.org
You get a suspicious friend request from a perfect stranger; the next day you get a Facebook warning about your "abusive, highly offensive behavior";
You keep getting hateful, vicious comments from other users, in response to your posts or photos, maybe even threats;
You have an online conflict and notice, later, that other users connected with the user you had the conflict with, are suddenly deleting you from their pages, even blocking you;
Users of the opposite sex keep appearing on Chat, pumping you for personal information, even your home address to inquiring about your sex life;
You get messages on Chat telling you that you have been tagges in a video and, providing links, ask you to view it;
You see a notice that seems to be from Facebook asking you to verify your account for you are about to be deactivated, with a link for you to click;
You wake up one morning to learn, to your dismay, that your computer appears to be on and later, you discover that someone has accessed your bank account!
You get the picture. We use social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and others, to connect with people and to satisfy our varying agendas for using these networks. Yet we are likely to encounter hackers, scammers, spammers, bullies, and even criminals, or users who are merely unfriendly or unstable.
Let me share a few of my online experiences, which I'm sure are similar to things others experience online, unfortunately. Many months ago, I had a major conflict with an online user over a certain issue. Days later, I found that a number of other users with connections to this user, were removing me from their friends lists, even blocking me. This hurt tremendously, as it was all based on a misunderstanding and I had no way of knowing what was going on, only circumstantial evidence. And it reinforced in me a feeling of who could I trust? For months, I lived in fear of my online reputation being destroyed and became paranoid of others in my network. I did NOT see this is "just Facebook stuff"! Lesson: Do not trust anyone you don't know outside of social networks until you spend lots of time building trust and are reasonably sure of these users and their characters.
This past summer, on the eve of my birthday, June 29, I had logged into Facebook and was checking out my homepage. Suddenly, I saw a very offensive profile, bearing a pornographic profile picture; the user called himself a screenname that is not fit to put in print. Upon the urgent request of the person who shared the offending user's profile, I pulled up this user's profile, checked it out, hitting the "Report" button to submit my report to Facebook concerning this user's profile and photos. Minutes later, I received a friend request. I checked it out and took note of who sent it: the user I had just reported! I let this request sit on my profile, unanswered: I had no intention of ever accepting such a friend request.
The following morning, my birthday, I woke up and after awhile, I logged into Facebook. I posted on some group and fan pages, intending to leave my wall clear for birthday greetings. To my dismay, I visited my homepage and saw a warning sitting on top of my page. To paraphrase, I was told: "You have uploaded offensive or pornographic material that is offensive to other users or is abusive. If you do not remove this material, your account will be deactivated."
I remembered the suspicious friend request I received the night before and knew exactly who was behind this, and why! The user whose profile I had reported, no doubt to get even with me for my report, had gotten hold of my online identity and Facebook now had me down as a sex offender! I was distraught and upset and did not know how to fix this. I composed a note about my situation, which received only one comment, which had nothing to do with my actual post. What a "birthday gift"!
Eventually, the warning on my homepage concerning the false accusations against me, disappeared on its own, but I continued to feel quite disillusioned and fearful about my online reputation because of my stolen online identity. Worse, could this end up on my criminal records under my Social Security Number? Lesson: When you receive a suspicious friend request, you need to do something about it. The options for this are marking these requests as spam or even blocking the sender so he or she cannot see you to do anything to you.
In strict terms, cyberbullying is a term reserved for children and teenagers. Cyberharassment is the counterpart term used for adults. In any case, it is up to us as adults to protect our minor children online, while we must take total responsibility for our own online safety.
Numerous resources abound that show us how to keep ourselves and our families safe. Here are just a few:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/security NEW WARNING: This page appears, itself, to be a hacker site! Facebook users, including I, have been receiving scam messages via this page.
https://www.facebook.com/#!/Facecrooks
http://www.staysafeonline.org
Sunday, October 30, 2011
What Is Autism?
You may have heard about (or even know) of people such as these:
The stereotyped person who cannot talk, but maybe can communicate through sign laguage or something known as facilitated communication and possesses savant skills with numbers;
A child who learns to speak normally at the typical age but who, for reasons unknown, loses most or all speech;
An analytical person, gifted in math and decoding words, who can't make sense of metaphors or higher-order concepts;
A person who is unable to tolerate loud sounds, bright, flashing or flickering lights, light touch, but who is brilliant at reading and is fascinated with horses and is eager to share that knowledge;
A child who teaches himself to read at age three and yet, as he grows, remains unable to "get" people and is totally lost in social situations;
A person who insists on daily adhering to the same routine and eating the same foods, who withdraws from people because of the inability to "get" them and yet who is at home with ideas and concepts;
These people and many more, are illustrations of autism. And every person's autism is unique; no autistic person resembles another. Autism is, put simply, the inability of the brain to make correct connections because of faulty wiring. This results in impaired social understanding and communication and often, challanges with language and daily functioning, sensory processing issuesand how one makes sense of the world. And autism occurs along a spectrum, from the brilliant person with Asperger's Syndrome without social skills, all the way to a profoundly affected person who is unable to communicate in any meaningful way or care for self or achieve any independence. On this blog, I will be using the term "autistic" rather than person with autism," because this condition is profoundly woven into one's identity; there is no way you can separate an autistic person from his autism the way you can separate cancer from a person who lives with it.
Why is this subject so important to me? I speak from personal experience, for I believe that I grew up with undiagnosed autism. Many years ago (need I say how long?), I was conceived and my mother, then, was 16 years old. When my her boyfriend, my dad, learned about her pregnancy with me, he was livid. Thinking he was going to "eliminate" this "problem," he kicked mom, hard, in the stomach. As a possible result of this and her traumatic labor and delivery nine months later, I was born with an assotment of problems that set me apart from the beginning but that the "experts" could not make any sense of, because the autism spectrum diagnosis was did not exist back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing up. I was diagnosed as obssessive-compulsive, emotionally disturbed, socially and emotionally immature, withdrawn, behaviorally-disordered, mild cerebral palsy, epileptic, schizoid personality, learning-diabled, and more.
As a child, I would be told, "You are just plain spoiled; you just don't want to try or do the work," "You will not amount to anything," "We don't know what to do with you," and more. I remember constantly receiving scoldings and spankings from the adults in my life. My peers often bullied me; they took note of how differently I walked, behaved, and though and they reacted to this by calling me names like retard, cripple, four-eyes, stupid, ugly, and things not fit to be put in print. And yes, the bullying did get physical, especially during my middle-school years. I don't recall that my bullies were ever were disciplined or suspended from school. The following year, I ended up in special classes; I felt that the school was trying to "get rid" of me. The fact is that they had no way of knowing how to help students with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorders, as the only time autism was diagnosed was when it occured in its severe, classic form.
As it was, educators and my family did not know what to do with me. So I spent much of my childhood and youth in and out of special classes for my peers who behaved and learned differently, and a few times, I spent time in residential placement. Always, I remember what one of my teachers of one special class said. She said one day, "I taught a class of boys and each one of them ended up in jail. I felt like a failure." To this day, I wonder how many people in jail, in prison, and on the streets, have undiagnosed autism and who never received the proper interventions that could have empowered them to learn, conform to society, become independent and achieve productive lives full of friendship, purpose, and personal fulfillment.
As an adult, I lived with pervasive feelings of worthlessness, frustration, confusion, anxiety, a shame-based identity, and I did my utmost to "pass as normal" and stay "in the closet," concealing my past and my challenges. I know I was not entirely successful, judging from feedback I would get and questioning glances and remarks that got back to me, where people would wonder "What is up with her?" Then, after years, I gave birth to my beautiful, precious daughter, who exhibited the same delayed speech and distance in human relationships that I showed at her age. One day, before she reached age three, she was oficially diagnosed with Pervasive Development Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified,"(PDD--NOS), a form of high-functioning autism (HFA). The doctor told us "This ia a variant of autism, which we now know occurs on a spectrum."
Wow. Now we knew what was up with our daughter and knew how we could help her. Soon I hear that relatives were suggesting (but not to me) that I may have been autistic all along. Could this provide answers to my lifetime of challenges that had the "experts stumped about me?
To this day, I have not found anyone in my area who evaluates adults over 25 for autism. I know I may never be able to get that formal diagnosis that could provide the closure I crave for my life. But I am forever thankful that my daughter and a whole generation, and future generations, can be spared much of the pain and hardship and anguish so many of us had had to suffer because no one knew any better. And maybe, this can help alleviate other social ills surrounding undiagnosed conditions.
By no means do my daughter nor I represent all autistic people and this one blog can't possibly do justice to this most complext topic. So I will provide a few links to sources where you can educate yourself about autism.
http://autism.about.com/
http://www.autismandempathy.com/ a blog
http://grasp.org/Asperger's/Autism organization
The stereotyped person who cannot talk, but maybe can communicate through sign laguage or something known as facilitated communication and possesses savant skills with numbers;
A child who learns to speak normally at the typical age but who, for reasons unknown, loses most or all speech;
An analytical person, gifted in math and decoding words, who can't make sense of metaphors or higher-order concepts;
A person who is unable to tolerate loud sounds, bright, flashing or flickering lights, light touch, but who is brilliant at reading and is fascinated with horses and is eager to share that knowledge;
A child who teaches himself to read at age three and yet, as he grows, remains unable to "get" people and is totally lost in social situations;
A person who insists on daily adhering to the same routine and eating the same foods, who withdraws from people because of the inability to "get" them and yet who is at home with ideas and concepts;
These people and many more, are illustrations of autism. And every person's autism is unique; no autistic person resembles another. Autism is, put simply, the inability of the brain to make correct connections because of faulty wiring. This results in impaired social understanding and communication and often, challanges with language and daily functioning, sensory processing issuesand how one makes sense of the world. And autism occurs along a spectrum, from the brilliant person with Asperger's Syndrome without social skills, all the way to a profoundly affected person who is unable to communicate in any meaningful way or care for self or achieve any independence. On this blog, I will be using the term "autistic" rather than person with autism," because this condition is profoundly woven into one's identity; there is no way you can separate an autistic person from his autism the way you can separate cancer from a person who lives with it.
Why is this subject so important to me? I speak from personal experience, for I believe that I grew up with undiagnosed autism. Many years ago (need I say how long?), I was conceived and my mother, then, was 16 years old. When my her boyfriend, my dad, learned about her pregnancy with me, he was livid. Thinking he was going to "eliminate" this "problem," he kicked mom, hard, in the stomach. As a possible result of this and her traumatic labor and delivery nine months later, I was born with an assotment of problems that set me apart from the beginning but that the "experts" could not make any sense of, because the autism spectrum diagnosis was did not exist back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing up. I was diagnosed as obssessive-compulsive, emotionally disturbed, socially and emotionally immature, withdrawn, behaviorally-disordered, mild cerebral palsy, epileptic, schizoid personality, learning-diabled, and more.
As a child, I would be told, "You are just plain spoiled; you just don't want to try or do the work," "You will not amount to anything," "We don't know what to do with you," and more. I remember constantly receiving scoldings and spankings from the adults in my life. My peers often bullied me; they took note of how differently I walked, behaved, and though and they reacted to this by calling me names like retard, cripple, four-eyes, stupid, ugly, and things not fit to be put in print. And yes, the bullying did get physical, especially during my middle-school years. I don't recall that my bullies were ever were disciplined or suspended from school. The following year, I ended up in special classes; I felt that the school was trying to "get rid" of me. The fact is that they had no way of knowing how to help students with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorders, as the only time autism was diagnosed was when it occured in its severe, classic form.
As it was, educators and my family did not know what to do with me. So I spent much of my childhood and youth in and out of special classes for my peers who behaved and learned differently, and a few times, I spent time in residential placement. Always, I remember what one of my teachers of one special class said. She said one day, "I taught a class of boys and each one of them ended up in jail. I felt like a failure." To this day, I wonder how many people in jail, in prison, and on the streets, have undiagnosed autism and who never received the proper interventions that could have empowered them to learn, conform to society, become independent and achieve productive lives full of friendship, purpose, and personal fulfillment.
As an adult, I lived with pervasive feelings of worthlessness, frustration, confusion, anxiety, a shame-based identity, and I did my utmost to "pass as normal" and stay "in the closet," concealing my past and my challenges. I know I was not entirely successful, judging from feedback I would get and questioning glances and remarks that got back to me, where people would wonder "What is up with her?" Then, after years, I gave birth to my beautiful, precious daughter, who exhibited the same delayed speech and distance in human relationships that I showed at her age. One day, before she reached age three, she was oficially diagnosed with Pervasive Development Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified,"(PDD--NOS), a form of high-functioning autism (HFA). The doctor told us "This ia a variant of autism, which we now know occurs on a spectrum."
Wow. Now we knew what was up with our daughter and knew how we could help her. Soon I hear that relatives were suggesting (but not to me) that I may have been autistic all along. Could this provide answers to my lifetime of challenges that had the "experts stumped about me?
To this day, I have not found anyone in my area who evaluates adults over 25 for autism. I know I may never be able to get that formal diagnosis that could provide the closure I crave for my life. But I am forever thankful that my daughter and a whole generation, and future generations, can be spared much of the pain and hardship and anguish so many of us had had to suffer because no one knew any better. And maybe, this can help alleviate other social ills surrounding undiagnosed conditions.
By no means do my daughter nor I represent all autistic people and this one blog can't possibly do justice to this most complext topic. So I will provide a few links to sources where you can educate yourself about autism.
http://autism.about.com/
http://www.autismandempathy.com/ a blog
http://grasp.org/Asperger's/Autism organization
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