Employees went home for the day after the Santa Clara County Government Center building at 70 West Hedding Street closed due to power failure Thursday, Jan. 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. (Jim Gensheimer/Bay Area News Group)
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Changes at child
services must be made
Re: “Abuse policy draws outrage” (Page A1, March 3).
There are some serious concerns about the possibly illegal practices of the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office and at the Department of Child and Family Services, which have not allowed children to have private interviews as part of the investigation of maltreatment.
Why would you have an allegedly abusive parent present during an interview with an abused child? It’s comparable to having a rapist present during the victim interview.
Having worked as a child abuse investigator and expert witness, the practices described in your article should prompt an immediate investigation of the personnel involved and changes to policy and practice, as well as discipline and retraining. Let’s save our children from any further trauma by those who are paid to protect and serve.
Edna Pampy
Santa Clara
Social media can aid
students’ mental health
It’s easy to think that the students of Santa Clara County would be the happiest in the world; after all, they live in one of the richest counties in the United States. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
High school students’ mental health, already on the decline from the growth of social media and the web, has been made much worse by the pandemic.
Although there are local efforts underway to alleviate their burden (which are very helpful), much more can be done.
Why not use the internet to help them? Informing them about, and destigmatizing, mental health problems would help alleviate stress and give students strategies to deal with their problems. It only makes sense to reach out on the platforms where they spend most of their time.
Social media has been seen as detrimental to mental health; let’s reverse that and help people with it.
Anthony Kieu
San Jose
Nations must act
to ensure Gaza aid
How many children must starve to death in Gaza before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assures that supply trucks are allowed to enter the strip and that they can be safely offloaded?
Rioting for food by starving people is not surprising to anyone who has seen such in the history of our world.
Leaders of all nations must plan food distribution to ensure that people, and especially children, are not trampled as the food and other desperately needed supplies finally arrive.
But it is a dereliction of duty that we have such conditions in our time and in our world.
Gil Villagran
San Jose
People of faith should
call for a cease-fire
Both Muslim and Jewish traditions teach, “to destroy one life is to destroy the whole world, and to save one life is to save the whole world.”
As people of faith contemplating the horrendous violence in the Middle East, we are guided by this fundamental teaching. The massive destruction of lives in Israel and Gaza is unconscionable.
As war continues, each death destroys the world anew. Let us choose life instead.
Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice‘s steering committee urges a cease-fire on both sides, safe release of all hostages and political prisoners, necessities of food, medicine, shelter for all, a negotiated peace with a path for justice, security and democracy for all.
Supporting these aims requires open hearts and minds to engage, lobby, serve and stand with both sides and all who suffer in between. We pray you will join us to work toward peace and reclaiming our humanity.
Pastor Burke Owens and Rabbi Amy Eilberg
Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice
Palo Alto
Trump ruling restores
sanity over elections
Re: “Trump prevails in constitutional challenge to his ballot eligibility” (Page A1, March 5).
Every American citizen should breathe an enormous sigh of relief in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 9-0 rebuke of Colorado’s court decision to keep Donald Trump off its state’s primary ballot (and by inference, applicable to Maine and Illinois, as well).
Had those three states’ politically motivated and completely misguided attempts succeeded, it would have spelled the beginning of the end of our democracy as we know it. Thankfully, both sanity and the rule of law prevailed.
Nick Cochran
San Jose
Dysfunctional court
must be reformed
Re: “Trump prevails in constitutional challenge to his ballot eligibility” (Page A1, March 5).
The Supreme Court is highly dysfunctional and needs to be reorganized. Here are three recommendations.
First, justices need to have a code of conduct and should be removed for violating it.
Second, term limits should be set for justices. Lifetime appointments lead to a sense of entitlement.
Third, given this court’s propensity to prefer partisanship over precedent and law, the number of justices should be expanded. According to the Constitution, Congress can determine the number of justices, which historically has ranged from five to 10.
Samuel Knapp
Sunnyvale