Scarcely a week
goes by without more evidence emerging to indicate that our “child protection”
system is so dysfunctional that it should be looked on as a major national
scandal. On one hand, we see the number of applications by social workers to
take children into care soaring to nearly 1,000 a month, having more than
doubled in the four years since the tragedy of Baby P. On the other, we hear of
horrific episodes, like those recently reported from Rochdale and Rotherham,
where social workers and police turned a blind eye to the systematic mass-rape
of underage girls, many themselves in state care.
For three years I
have been investigating scores of cases of children seized from their parents
for what appear to be quite absurd reasons. This outrage has not yet come to
the centre of national attention only because our child protection system hides
its workings behind a veil of secrecy. I have been amazed to discover how our
family courts routinely turn all the cherished principles of British justice
upside down. The most bizarre allegations, based on hearsay, can be levelled
against parents who are then denied the right to challenge them.
Although I have
reported on several such cases more than once, they drag on through the courts
so long that I haven’t been able to explain how they ended. I summarise three
of them here to indicate why this is the most disturbing story I have covered
in all my years as a journalist.
My first case
centres on a mother who, five months after the birth of her daughter, fell from
a first-floor window. Lying in hospital, temporarily paralysed from the neck
down, she took a call from a social worker who told her that her baby was being
taken into care. Although no one had suggested that her fall was anything other
than an accident, the social workers made out that it was a suicide bid and
that she was an alcoholic and a drug addict. A psychiatric report and clinical
tests found that none of these accusations were true.
The mother had
to make a weekly 80-mile round trip to have “supervised contact” with her
daughter. The contact supervisor wrote glowing reports on how closely they
seemed to be bonded. But when, at a case conference, a social worker was
challenged by the supervisor for having excised any references to this from her
reports, it was the supervisor the council suspended. After a succession of
hearings at which, I gather, the judge became increasingly impatient with the
social workers for their sloppy handling of paperwork and repeated requests for
adjournments, it seemed the case was going the mother’s way. Her wish for her
daughter to be returned to her was supported by the child’s “guardian” (an
official appointed by the court to represent the child’s interests).
But then, for no
clear reason, fortune swung back the other way. Two years after the case began,
the judge ruled that the child should be sent for adoption. As the mother made
a final plea to the Appeal Court, a lurid report in the local paper repeated
all the original claims of the social workers: that the mother was an
alcoholic, a drug addict and had tried to commit suicide. A family friend tells
me she witnessed the distraught mother being allowed a “goodbye session” with
her daughter, the centre of her life for three years, whom she will never be
allowed to see again.
The runaways
My second case
centres on a mother who fled to Ireland with her teenage son because social
workers had been making enquiries about them, due to the fact that the father,
who had been out of their lives for six years, was an alcoholic prone to
violence. When they had been happily settled in their new home for six months,
with the boy doing well at school, British social workers brought the father to
Ireland and persuaded an Irish judge, on evidence that mother and son were not
allowed to see, to order the boy’s deportation back to England. He was so
depressed that he attempted suicide. (I spoke to the boy in hospital shortly
afterwards).
After being
taken to England, the boy was placed in foster care, where he managed
repeatedly to convey to his mother that he was desperately unhappy. Although
bright, he was initially sent to a special needs school, where he was bullied
for being so different from the others. He was denied the right to attend court
to express his wishes, in contravention of the UN Convention on Children’s
Rights. Neither he nor the mother had anyone to speak up for them and, although
there is no evidence that she ever harmed her son, it was ruled that he must
remain in foster care until he is 18 (normally, children are released from care
when they are 16). The mother continues to work in Ireland, denied any further
contact with her son until he is old enough to return to her.
Parents who lost
their six children
My third case is
the strangest and most disturbing of any I have covered. I first came to it
shortly after the mother of a large family had given birth to her sixth child.
Her new baby had been torn from her arms in a hospital bed by six policemen and
three social workers just three hours after the birth. Three months earlier,
the social workers had removed five older children from the family home in the
belief that the mother was a “sex worker” engaged in child trafficking with her
husband, whom they claimed was not the father of any of the children. The
social workers also had a letter, allegedly written by one of the children,
claiming that her mother had beaten her.
What made all
this particularly odd was that, one by one, these claims seemed to crumble. DNA
tests showed that the children all came from the husband. The letter was in a
different hand from that of the child supposed to have written it, but no
graphological tests were allowed and it was eventually admitted that the letter
had been “destroyed”.
For a time, the
parents were allowed occasional supervised contact with their children,
although for this they had to travel for four hours. The oldest child claimed
at one meeting that she had been sexually interfered with in her foster home –
after which she was never allowed to see her parents again.
But the case
against them began to seem so flimsy that the baby was returned to them.
However, they subsequently took the baby to a hospital to ask for advice on a
puzzling complaint. A junior doctor carried out blood tests which apparently
showed nothing amiss, but when the family’s name came up on a computer, the
social workers were summoned. More tests were carried out, the parents were
accused of giving their child a dangerous drug and the baby was again taken
into care.
Events then took
a still more serious turn. The couple were arrested, accused of planning to
abduct their older children (even though they had no idea where they were) and
fly them abroad in a private plane. They were sent to prison on remand, while a
long list of further charges was compiled, ranging from physical abuse of their
children to a claim that they had sought to kill the baby.
At their trial,
44 prosecution witnesses were called. Only two were allowed for the defence.
The children spoke on video link, but their parents were not allowed to
question them. The parents were given long prison sentences and a family court
then ruled that the children must all be sent for adoption.
However odd all
this may seem, I know enough about this family, and a story I have followed
since 2010, to believe that it represents a travesty of justice which says much
about what our child protection system has become.
No comments:
Post a Comment