Last week, a
delegation from the European Union visited the UK to investigate innumerable
allegations of illegal practices relating to forced adoptions, i.e. taking
children for adoption without parental consent. The barbaric practice is not
permitted in any other European country, except here. If you think it couldn’t
happen to you, read on.
Conservative MP
Lucy Allan’s nightmare began with a visit to her GP for depression, which
spiraled into a sequence of horrifying events, over which she had no control. Having
been referred to social services for “support”, she was branded an “unfit
mother” by an expert in the pay of the local authority, who she had never met.
Experts used in
family courts have been widely criticized. Professor Jane Ireland reviewed reports submitted to the family courts
by psychologists and found most
of them were written by ‘professional experts’, some not even qualified, who
make up to £4,000 per report. Those who side with the parents are rarely
invited back.
Lucy Allan’s husband
was never interviewed, yet based on a specious “expert report”, they came
within a whisker of losing their child. Despite this horrendous experience,
Lucy Allan was one of the lucky ones. She had the resources to launch a robust
legal challenge, most victims do not.
If you’ve ever
burnt toast, given your child too much freedom or not enough freedom, put your
coat on before that of your child, suffered with depression or had a panic
attack (even once), been in care, been in an abusive relationship (even though
it’s long over), be afraid. Any of the above could constitute “risk of future
emotional abuse” to your children, and is increasingly the sole basis upon
which children in the UK
are surreptitiously taken from biological parents and adopted without their
consent. 95% of whom will never see their children again.
To compound this
tragedy, many children won’t be adopted at all. 4,000 children under
irreversible adoption orders languish in care homes or foster homes. Meanwhile,
children in care are routinely ignored by social services when they report
abuse.
While children are being ripped from their birth parents on the grounds of "possible risk of future emotional harm", they are being placed in the care of proven abusers and suffer actual harm. A report in the Independent last year found that, More than 2 out of 5 foster carers in proven abuse cases had been subject to previous allegations - yet they were still caring for children.
Haringey
Council (responsible for failing to prevent the tragic death of baby P’s) and
the police were criticised last year for ‘serious failings’ in a review into the
suicide
of teenager Mary Stroman. They failed to investigate claims she had been
sexually abused for 4 years. As many as 9 police officers can be deployed to
restrain a mother while her newborn baby is ripped from her arms by social
workers, without any evidence of wrongdoing, yet children who report actual
abuse continue to be ignored by police and social services.
If someone is accused
of murder there is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. In UK family
courts, the child’s biological parents are presumed guilty and their children
can be removed, in secret family courts, without any evidence or legal
representation and without any right to appeal, never to be seen again. If parents
dare to speak out about their injustice, they face prison. Even when families can prove that they are
fit and the decision was wrong, the adoption orders are irrevocable. It’s a
life sentence for a crime that was never even committed.
Single mothers,
lower income families and foreigners are the most vulnerable. For example, a
pregnant
Italian woman came to
London
on a training course and had a panic attack. She was sectioned, sedated and
woke up to find her baby had been forcibly removed. A court order was granted
to conduct a caesarian and then to have her baby adopted without consent. At no
point was she, the baby’s father or her family consulted.
One of the worst
miscarriages of justice (that we know of) carried out in UK family
courts was that which was inflicted upon the Musa family. The couple’s 4
children were seized on trumped up allegations. When proven to be fallacious,
new ones were presented. When the couple had another baby, six police officers
and 3 social workers ripped the baby from his mother’s arms when she was
breastfeeding, just hours after giving birth. Under the Children’s Act, parents
and children are entitled to regular contact until an adoption order is
obtained. During the first visit with their older child, she said she had been
interfered with sexually at her foster home. They never saw her again and they
will never know what became of her.
This would
appear to contravene the Children’s Act but it seems the law, when it is there
for the protection of vulnerable children, is not always binding. In 2010, The
Telegraph quoted a whistleblower, At a recent case
conference, the social workers admitted that maybe they had made a mistake, and
that the mother they had falsely accused was in fact devoted and blameless. But
apparently, because of “press interest” in the case, the officials agreed that
the council could not afford the very damaging publicity which might follow if
the unhappy children were reunited with their parents. It was therefore vital that the council should continue to justify its
actions.
Last year, Justice Pauffley severely criticised family court judges, social
workers and local authorities for colluding to remove children from their
biological families without just cause. In an appeal case, she lambasted the
unnamed authority for removing a child based on ‘the result, almost certainly
of cutting and pasting” the social services report. Ms Pauffley described this
practice as having “become the norm” in local family courts, which she found
‘profoundly alarming”. She described “an established but largely clandestine
arrangement between the local authority and the court which, to my mind, has
considerable repercussions for justice”.
The concept of
the good enough parent, emanating from the work of Donald Winnicott, and
integral to any good social work teaching, was designed to defend ordinary,
imperfect parents, against what he saw as the growing threat of intrusion into
the family from professional expertise. Social workers in this country are
increasingly seen as that threat. Due to government policies that incentivize
child removal, the focus of social work had shifted from supporting families to
succeed to that of setting them up to fail.
The head of the Social
Worker’s union, Bridget Robb, has expressed concerns at the speed at which this
government, through policies and incentives, is moving social work away from
being about doing everything possible to try to keep children with their
biological families to a culture that favours forced, fast adoptions. There has
been a 96% increase in the number of court orders placing children for adoption
in the last 3 years. She believes this disturbing trend is a result of
government ideology and sits with the rhetoric of the welfare state and, “the
language about an underclass of people not deemed fit to look after their
children”.
There is no greater risk to
children than poverty and this government, through its blind pursuance of austerity,
is pushing poor families over the edge, psychologically as well as financially.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with a system that
provides State payments of £400+ per week, per child to foster carers, but only
£50+ per week, per child to biological parents.
Where there is
evidence of abuse, as was the heartbreaking case of baby P, of course swift
intervention should be made but, more children
are taken for emotional abuse than physical and sexual abuse added together.
Despite “baby P” the number of children taken for physical abuse is steadily
falling as a percentage of the total number of children removed.
When the European delegation
publish their findings we should brace ourselves to be shamed. As Nelson
Mandela said, There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.
