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QUICKLINKS (subsections of the long introduction):THIS IS THE SITUATION THE GOLDEN RULES USEFUL INFORMATION CASHING IN
HELLO!!! LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF
Telephone me in France: 0033626875684 for free legal advice! Or contact me by email ian@monaco.mc If you give me a contact phone number from any country you like no matter where you live. (MOBILES ARE OK !) and times available to receive a call I can phone you back at my expense.I do not accept attachments as they are time consuming and may contain viruses;please use regular email or fax documents to 0033493220967.For my replies, I type emails with one finger so in complicated cases I prefer where possible to telephone you as it takes a lot less time to advise you this way ! ABOLISH FORCED ADOPTION!! My name is IAN JOSEPHS.UK Social services have never hurt me, my family, or my friends, but their wicked abuse of power has simply shocked me into action!"Forced adoption" too often legally deprives healthy,happy,children from all contact with loving parents,brothers,sisters,,grandparents,and other relatives for the rest of their lives! Many will say that I overstate and exaggerate my case thereby undermining it. I promise you that on the contrary I am understating it as things are now far worse than the public could possibly imagine or accept as credible if I revealed all!Please feel free to use or quote anything you like from my site that you may find useful. Am I just some lunatic eccentric ?Well if I am, so are the editors and columnists who write for the Times and the Telegraph who evidently share my views as you will see if you read on ! A WORD OF WARNING from Lord Denning, rated (by some) as the finest judge of the 20th century. In his book ‘WHAT NEXT IN THE LAW’ he wrote about ‘Abuse of Power’. “ Whoever may be guilty of abuse of power, be it Government, State, Employer, Trade Union or whoever, the law must provide a speedy remedy. Otherwise the victims will find their own remedy. There will be anarchy.”
After all can anyone answer this question? HOW CAN SOCIAL SERVICES JUSTIFY THE REMOVAL OF BABIES AT BIRTH FOR "RISK OF EMOTIONAL ABUSE" AND THEIR SUBSEQUENT FORCED ADOPTION BY STRANGERS?
You don't believe this happens? Just read this SUNDAY TELEGRAPH LEADING ARTICLE!!
The unnatural justice of secret family courts
The local authority, however, is convinced that there is a possibility that she might harm the child. To most people, it will seem grotesquely unjust that any child could be removed on such a basis. Northumberland County Council is, however, far from unusual in acting in this way.The courts have endorsed the removal of hundreds of children from their natural parents on the basis that there is a possibility that they might "abuse their child emotionally". Some of those forcible adoptions are appalling acts of injustice. How can such things happen in Britain? The answer is simple: the courts that enforce the taking away of children from parents on local authority say-so operate in secret. It is illegal to reveal their proceedings, or even their judgments.
--------------------------------------------------- It is true that accredited journalists can now be admitted at the discretion of the judges ,who however ban them from any cases likely to be controversial. Even when they are admitted they cannot print names of witnesses or word for word details of proceedings.
Yes,they gag parents to "protect their privacy" but allow local authorities to advertise their precious children for adoption in the Daily Mirror,and other periodicals, with first names ,colour photographs,birth dates and ethnic origins rather like pedigree dogs ,who of course do not need privacy ! You can access the actual texts of the new rules as passed by parliament as follows;- Statutory Instruments
Despite the new rules the judges simply exclude the media from controversial cases as the very typical example below shows !
COURT 7
At half past 10
At 11 o'clock
At 12 o'clock
At 2 o'clock
At 3 o'clock
In these courts happy loving families are ruthlessly split up to feed the adoption "juggernaut" .An adult teenager was recently told by a judge in the family court ,"Your baby sister is no longer your sister because she has been adopted so you will never see her again !" Forced adoption is doubly wicked because it is a "life sentence" where the adopted children are permanently deprived of contact not only with their parents but also with their adult siblings, grandparents,aunts, and uncles . Worse still blameless brothers and sisters are more often than not adopted separately and are forced to lose all contact with each other as well as with the rest of their families at least until they are 18 and usually for the rest of their lives.The damage done to these children by heartless judges is simply horrendous...... Adoption system is UK's shameful secretBritain is the only country in Europe where children are routinely removed from their parents without consent, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
This week I return to one of the most disturbing stories this column has ever reported. It began on a morning in April 2007 when the home of a respectable middle-class family in Sussex was overrun by 18 policemen and two RSPCA officials, supposedly looking for guns. When the father, a professional dog breeder, volubly protested, he and his pregnant wife were arrested and handcuffed, to the horror of their watching five-year old daughter (whom I call, for legal reasons, "Jenny"). East Sussex social workers were then called to remove the little girl. Her mother had a miscarriage while in custody and returned to an empty home, left in chaos. Jenny has remained in foster care ever since, and despite her parents pleading for her return through 74 legal hearings, the ruling by a family court judge last March that she be put out for adoption was upheld in July by the Appeal Court. Having now seen further documents relating to this saga, I can understand why the family's GP wrote that in 33 years as a doctor he had never come across "such an appalling case of injustice". The first document was her parents' careful chronology of every step in the story, including transcriptions of many of their telephone conversations and meetings with Jenny, invariably under strict surveillance by social workers or the foster carer. The dominant impression from these recordings is of Jenny's desperation to be reunited with her parents, and of an increasingly distraught child who cannot understand what has been done to her. The parents claim that pressure was put on her constantly to say that she didn't want to see them again. Why did the family court judge not allow this evidence to be heard in court, although she did admit accounts of these "contacts" by the social workers? A second document is the judgment by Mr Justice Bodey in the Appeal Court confirming that Jenny must be put out for adoption. No evidence had been produced that her parents ever caused Jenny physical or mental harm. His ruling centred on two points. One was evidence that her home was a mess on the day of the raid, although those who knew the house well testify that it was normally clean and tidy. The other was that, when the family's home was invaded by 18 policemen (a figure confirmed by one policeman in evidence), the father verbally abused them in colourful fashion (but didn't attack them physically). Are these really adequate grounds for tearing a child and her parents permanently apart? A third document is the book Forced Adoption by Ian Josephs, a businessman who has taken an active interest in the removal of children from their parents by social workers ever since he was a Tory county councillor in the 1960s. He acted in part of the Jenny case as a "Mackenzie friend", that is, an informal assistant and adviser. Mr Josephs shows that Britain is almost the only country in Europe which routinely allows children to be separated from parents without their consent. Indeed, he reproduces a press release put out in 2003 by Hammersmith & Fulham Council boasting how, under a Local Public Service Agreement, it had received a reward of £500,000 from central government for hitting its target of 101 adoptions in the year. This particular, highly controversial scheme of cash bonuses has, thankfully, since been abandoned. The impression given by these documents supports the GP's view that this is an "appalling case of injustice". Social workers, lawyers and judges seem enmeshed in a system heavily skewed towards putting children out for adoption – by a process so shrouded in secrecy that it seems designed more to protect the system itself than the interests of the child. Most alarming of all is that there seems no one with the authority to intervene in cases such as Jenny's, where that system appears to have left both a loving family and justice horribly betrayed. And if two articles from the Sunday Telegraph are not enough read two from the Times !
Family Courts are the B-side of the Law
What a strange, fumbling kind of justice system it is that condemns a woman as an unfit mother for the heinous crime of trusting her husband. Yet this is what seems to have happened in a recent case that I feel compelled to write about, even though legal restrictions force me to leave out much of the detail. The nub of the case is this. A woman, let us call her Janie, gave birth to her first and only child a year ago. That baby was taken away from her and subsequently put up for adoption. Not because of her own failure to care for the baby — her own love and care never seem to have been in question. No. She has lost her baby because of a suspicion that her husband John may have injured another child in his previous marriage almost ten years ago. The suspicion was no more than that. John was never charged with anything, let alone convicted. Social workers were never sufficiently worried to take that first child into care. Since his divorce John has shared custody of that child perfectly amicably with his ex-wife. Yet the same local authority which left the first child with him has forbidden him to see this new baby. And his new wife, despite having nothing to do with the first case, may never see her baby again. Unless this case is overruled in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, where it is now heading, it will set a peculiar precedent. For it implies that any British mother could be penalised for choosing a partner to whom the State has taken a dislike: penalised with the loss of the thing that is most precious to her in the world. It cannot be this simple, you are thinking. Well, not quite. The child of the first marriage is disabled, and did seem to have suffered an injury — I am not permitted to say more. But no one knows how. Both John and his first wife have always protested their innocence. They had a second child who came to no harm. No court will ever truly know whether John was innocent. But the fact is that he was never found guilty. For the local authority to leave him alone with a child that it thought he had harmed, and to take away another that had not been harmed, is utterly hypocritical. No court should be able to punish you for a crime you may commit, when there is no evidence. It should, surely, be a crime to remove a newborn baby from a mother who has never harmed it.
For that in itself is a form of abuse. Yet the secret State often chooses to abuse the children itself, rather than let them run the risk of staying put. They are at least alive, it calculates, even if it is a diminished kind of alive, deprived of the mother bond. And too often, it strikes the wrong balance. In 2002, the ECHR ruled against the British Government for removing a new baby from its mother in hospital and refusing even to let her cuddle it under supervision, when there was no evidence that the baby faced a serious risk at that time. The judgment came too late, though. The baby had already been adopted. This is what Janie fears. The ECHR has agreed to hear her appeal and to consider whether the English court ruling breached Janie and John’s right to family life, to freedom of opinion and to freedom of expression. That is quite a ticket. But even if the ECHR finds in Janie’s favour, it may be too late. The local authority is already seeking families to adopt her baby. Her only hope is that prospective adopters will be put off by knowing of her appeal. Any lawyer will tell you that family courts are the B-side of the legal system. The majority of judgments will never be read outside the courtroom. Perhaps judges fear the consequences if they do not support social services and social services are later proved right. They seem to start from the assumption that children are de facto wards of court who need protection from their parents. Even then, Janie’s case seems extraordinary. Certainly the parents are not the brightest people in the world. They are not perfect. But the more I learn about it, the more I believe that Janie and John’s biggest mistakes were emotional. Janie seems to have been very co-operative. However, John has been irritable, even aggressive, which would support the view that he has a violent nature. But can you really convict on that basis? Which of us could control our temper if faced with losing a child to a bunch of hypocrites? In a Hollywood movie, anger is a natural reaction to injustice. In an English suburb, defiance makes you guilty. The legal system wants “remorse”. But how can you show remorse for something you haven’t done? Until this case I had tended to be sceptical about the claims that the Government’s targets for adoption were leading to miscarriages of justice. I still feel that ministers were right to want to speed up adoption and to release more children more quickly from the hell of care. But I have now started to take more seriously the argument that these targets have created a perverse incentive for local authorities to take more babies into care. Babies are, after all, more attractive to prospective adopters than older children and therefore an easy way to reach those targets. In Janie and John’s case, you do have to wonder why the authorities have rushed to take away a healthy baby, when they did not take away a disabled one. Janie’s case seems to me to make a strong argument for introducing juries. Why is a burglar facing six months in jail allowed to ask for a jury trial, but a mother facing the irretrievable loss of her only child is not? Mistakes will always be made when the ordinary, imperfect citizen is judged by the imperfect and powerful. Personally, I would rather face 12 men good and true. The parents asked judge Munby to stop any adoption of their daughter until the European court at Strasbourg until a verdict had been given by the European Court in Strasbourg.Exceptionally Judge Munby published his refusal for all to see ! http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/library.asp?i=2946 Camilla Cavendish, of the Times replied !
May 24, 2007
The Rank Hypocrisy of Family Court Judges
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The daughter of teachers and with a glittering academic future, Fran was delighted when she became pregnant. But social services discovered the illness she thought she'd put behind her - and will confiscate her daughter when she is born...
It's not because Fran doesn't want the child. She does. Desperately. And not because she is frightened of the pain of labour. She is prepared for that. It is what happens afterwards that fuels Fran's anxiety. And there can be no preparation for that pain. For within 30 minutes of birth, barring any medical complications, Molly will be handed by doctors to social workers. They have instructions to take away Fran's newborn baby and place her in foster care. The 22-year-old will then be transferred from the maternity wing to a gynaecological ward, because Northumberland Council has decided that Fran - who has never harmed anyone in her life - is potentially a risk to other mothers and their babies. Fran has no idea if she will be able to touch her baby, even for a minute, before leaving hospital alone, or if she will ever get her daughter back. Her biggest fear is that she won't, and that Molly will be put up for adoption.
'They have taken away what should be the most precious time in my life - and I will never get that back. I'm already in love with my baby. I can feel her moving, I talk to her. I've bought her baby books and clothes. You just can't undo that attachment.' Fran is an intelligent and articulate woman. She has nine A- starred GCSEs, five grade A A-levels and is in the third year of a neuroscience degree at Edinburgh University - which she is completing at home in Hexham, Northumberland. |
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However, what concerns Hexham Children's Services, which is part of Northumberland Council, is Fran's medical history.
Having had a difficult relationship with her parents, who are teachers in good state schools, from the age of 15, she started selfharming. Fran spent three years - on and off - in psychiatric hospitals.
Her problems appear to have begun when she was raped by an acquaintance at the age of 14. Diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, she was discharged from a therapeutic facility in 2002, where she had spent 13 months, and spent nine months as an outpatient.
Today, she needs no medication and, according to her former psychiatrist, Dr Stella Newrith, 'has made a significant recovery to the point where her difficulties are indistinguishable from those of much of the general population'.
In a letter to Northumberland Council, Dr Newrith, who treated Fran for a year when she was 16 and has known her for many years, stated: 'There has never been any clinical evidence to suggest that Fran would put herself or others at risk, and there is certainly no evidence to suggest she would put a child at risk of emotional, physical or sexual harm.'
Furthermore, she said: 'I would view the removal of Fran's baby as an extraordinarily heavy-handed gesture. It is also my professional opinion that doing so would be an infringement of Fran's human rights, as it would be much the same as removing a child from someone from the general population.'
Yet on August 16, a child protection case conference recommended that Fran's baby should be taken away at birth - a decision based in part on the contents of a letter from consultant paediatrician Dr Martin Ward Platt, who has never met Fran and could not be present at the meeting.
In his letter, Dr Ward Platt states that 'even in the absence of psychological assessment, if the professionals were concerned on the evidence available that [this woman] probably does fabricate or induce illness, there would be no option but to put the baby into foster care at birth pending a post-natal forensic psychological assessment'.
However, he warned that it was necessary first to establish as far as possible whether or not Fran does suffer from this illness - something Fran claims they have failed to do.
Fran has never been diagnosed with this condition, yet she has nevertheless been deemed by Northumberland Council as someone likely to suffer from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a controversial and unproven condition in which a parent - usually the mother - makes up or induces an illness in her child to draw attention to herself.
And so, unless a judicial review next week rules in Fran's favour, her baby Molly will almost certainly be taken away at birth.
'I can understand why they might have concerns about my past, but the speed with which they have come to this conclusion, despite the evidence of my own psychiatrist, is terrifying,' she says.
'I was at the case conference and it lasted just ten minutes.
'This letter from Dr Ward Platt was given to me just five minutes before the meeting started, and when it was produced, the chairman said there was no point - in the light of what this letter stated - even considering the other evidence which I wanted to present, which was letters of support from psychiatrists.
'I think they simply panicked, and when people panic they make, in my opinion, bad judgments. I left that meeting numb with shock. I'd had absolutely no time to digest the letter or argue my case, and I was so horrified at what they'd said that I just couldn't even begin to respond to it.
'I have never harmed anyone in my life. I have no criminal convictions. I believe I can be a good mother to Molly - but they are not even prepared to give me a chance to prove that.
'I have offered to stay in a mother and baby unit after Molly's birth for as long as they want, and to be monitored. I would be prepared to stay there for 18 years if it meant I could be with my baby. But that, it seems, is not even an option.'
Fran's case is far from unusual. Two thousands babies under one year old were taken from their parents last year by social services - three times the number ten years ago. Critics believe councils are doing this to help meet government adoption 'targets'.
Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, chairman of the Justice for Families campaign group, certainly thinks so.
'How can it be in the child's best interests to take a baby away from its mother at birth? The reason why they do it is because it's much harder to take away a baby the longer it spends with its mother, and a healthy newborn baby is so much easier to find adoptive parents for.
'It is estimated that 97 per cent of babies taken away from their mothers at birth, on the basis that the mothers are "capable of emotional abuse", are never returned to them - and that is simply scandalous.
'Of course, there are cases where it is right to do so, but the whole public family law system is corrupt because of the secrecy which surrounds it. Decisions are based on opinion and conjecture, rather than fact and evidence.
'What does Fran's case tell us? That no woman who has been raped or had mental health problems can be allowed to have a baby, even years later?
'What could be more traumatic than for a mother to have her baby taken away at birth? It's monstrous. That, in itself, can cause mental health problems, which is then used by social services against the mother as a reason not to return the baby. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
'There has been a massive increase in younger babies being taken into care, before there is even any evidence of harm - and you have to ask why that is.'
Despite her own troubled past, Fran Lyon is convinced she can be a good parent, and is desperate to prove that. From the start, she has been open and honest with social workers about her medical history, but she feels this has been used against her.
Although she describes her childhood as 'difficult', she refuses to elaborate, other than to say that she is close to her mother and younger brother, but has no contact with her father.
The catalyst for her severe mental health problems was, she says, the rape she suffered when she was 14.
She told police that she was attacked while working as a Saturday volunteer in a charity shop in Northampton, when the shop's founder - a middle-aged man - drove her to an empty warehouse supposedly to pick up supplies for the shop.
When Fran reported the rape, he was interviewed by police. Three more women claiming they, too, had been attacked came forward and agreed to testify against him. However, in 2001 the man killed himself before the Crown Prosecution Service could decide whether to proceed.
'After the rape, I became clinically depressed,' says Fran. 'I lost a huge amount of weight and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after trying to kill myself with an overdose of tablets. It wasn't a cry for help; I wanted to die because of what he had done to me.'
She spent the next three years, on and off, in residential psychiatric hospitals in Oxford, Nottingham and London after being diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, in her case characterised by self-harming, instability and suicidal tendencies.
For the final 13 months, Fran went to a therapeutic residential clinic, where she attended individual psychotherapy sessions and group analysis before being discharged as an outpatient.
By the time she was 18, she appeared to have put her problems behind her.
She started to flourish, taking five A-levels at Orpington College in Kent and applying to study neuroscience at Edinburgh University.
At the same time, she worked for two mental health charities, Borderline and Personality Plus. It was through that job, two years ago, that she met the man who is the father of Molly.
'Of course, I was worried when I fell pregnant. I wondered how we would cope as a couple, because we weren't living together,' says Fran.
'But once that wore off, I was excited. I would go shopping with my mum to baby departments, buying books and looking at prams.'
But a few weeks ago, all normality ended. Social services suddenly became involved when Fran phoned the police after what she describes as a 'disturbing incident' with her partner. Fran's relationship with him ended immediately.
'The case was referred to social services and I was interviewed by two social workers, who said from the beginning that they would have to look at the whole family, not just one person in isolation,' says Fran.
'At that first meeting, they asked about my concerns regarding the baby's father, but then it became clear through their questions that their investigation was centred on me. I have never made a secret of my mental health problems. I felt I had nothing to hide.'
Fran was co- operative, she says, because she naively thought children's services would offer her help and support. She was stunned when she received a letter informing her that a child protection case conference would be held on August 16.
'That's when I became frightened and thought for the first time: "Are they going to take my baby away from me?"
'I couldn't believe how everything had happened so quickly. When you are up against a big system such as social services, it is very easy to feel overrun and overwhelmed.'
Realising the seriousness of the situation, Fran instructed a solicitor and contacted her former psychiatrist, Dr Stella Newrith, who offered her full support.
A second psychiatrist, who Fran knew through her charity work, offered a character reference stating: 'I have no doubt that her diligence and capacity, particularly in dealing with complex emotional situations, will stand her in good stead for the rigours of parenthood.'
Yet these testimonials, Fran says, were never even read out at the conference after Dr Ward Platt's letter was produced.
Northumberland Council insists that two highly experienced doctors - another consultant paediatrician and a medical consultant - attended the case conference.
Neither they, nor anyone else present - including Fran solicitor - made any objection. Feeling stunned and intimidated by what she had heard, she felt unable to speak out.
Everything she wanted to say will now be heard - with the help of a new solicitor who specialises in such cases - at appeal.
According to MP John Hemming, Fran should win her case; but there is no guarantee that she will. Both he and Fran are particularly concerned that last week social workers contacted the psychiatrist who provided a character reference for Fran. They believe this was done with the intention of 'pressurising' the witness into withdrawing his support, and undermining Fran's appeal.
It was seemingly suggested by a social worker to the doctor in question that Fran had given incorrect details about her health to hospital staff: in short, doubt was cast on the reality of an ectopic pregnancy Fran suffered on Christmas Eve two years ago.
'Is it ethical for social workers to go behind my back and speak to my witnesses, discussing my private confidential medical history and suggesting to them that I might have made things up?' says Fran.
'I did have an ectopic pregnancy, and I have the scars to prove that I had abdominal surgery.' Mr Hemming goes further, describing such behaviour as akin to witness nobbling. He also claims it is not uncommon for social workers to pressurise witnesses - a punishable practice in the criminal courts.
'There is a culture in which the end is seen to justify the means, and sometimes the means employed would not be tolerated in any other court of law,' he says. 'Yet if anyone tries to speak out, they are guilty of contempt of court. The whole family court system, because of the secrecy which surrounds it, is vulnerable to bad practice. Social workers are under pressure not to lose cases.' Northumberland Council, while legally prevented from speaking about individual cases, insists there is nothing sinister in their actions.
A spokeswoman said it was the court whichwould make the ultimate decision, after hearing legal representation from both sides. 'Safeguarding children is our top priority,' said a spokeswoman. 'We speak to all sides without bias or pressure. 'We would welcome a review of the family court arrangements, and support transparency, as long as this is in the best interests of the children.
'Safeguarding arrangements have been praised as good following a rigorous inspection by a number of Government departments. It was specifically noted that "good action was taken to enable parents to keep their children safe in the home and the communityî. Our duty to safeguard children is our only motivation, and we strive to keep children with their families wherever possible, or extended families if that is not possible.
'We do not have numerical targets for adoption; nor have we received any financial rewards in relation to adoption figures.'
As for Fran, the final four months of her pregnancy are filled with stress and uncertainty, and the nagging terror that her worst nightmare will become a reality and her baby daughter will be snatched away from her. 'Some days I feel positive,' she says quietly.
'But others I feel totally overwhelmed. All I am asking for is a chance to prove that I will be a good mother.'
Sadly, that wish may not be granted her.
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IMPORTANT! The miserable wretch who was chairman of the so called "Case Conference" that lasted 15 minutes should be dismissed in disgrace. His name is BOB HILL and he should never be allowed near any case conference ever again !
AND THEN? Fran flees the country, see the link below!
http://www.fassit.co.uk/inquiry_team_videos.htm
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Download Form N434, Notice of change of solicitor, Court Service Forms, Administrative Court. Just to emphasise important guiderules.....
Remember that social workers ARE NOT POLICE and cannot give you orders or forbid you to tell your children that you love them,miss them and are fighting to get them back! It is absolutely essential that you blurt out "I love you and want you back but wicked childstealers have kidnapped you and these horrible thieves are stopping you from coming home !" Say this or words to that effect before anyone can stop you as SS nearly always tell children "mummy does not love you or want you any more" and the children MUST know the truth. Only a court can legally give you orders so do not be bluffed into signing documents or obeying orders from the SS ! Social Workers have a statutory duty to try and keep families together not split them up ,so they should be asked in court just what attempts they made to keep YOUR family together before taking the baby or the children ! QUOTE THE "HUMAN RIGHTS ACT"section 8:- Article 8: Right to Respect for Private and Family Life1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Article 8 guarantees respect for four things: a person’s private life, family life, home and correspondence. This guarrantee applies also to the rights of grandparents,siblings,aunts,uncles,and cousins to remain in contact with each other contrary to the forced adoption of a child by adopters whose names and locations are kept secret!
NEVER,NEVER lose contact with your young children,just read the paragraphs below !! Send them your phone number buried in the middle of a cd rom (disc),written on a doll,written in invisible ink on a seemingly innocent postcard,or simply whispered in their ears at a suitable moment. Alternatively if your name is Jane for example,register an easy email address (eg) mumjane@aol.com Any child old enough to send an email will then be able to contact you no matter where you are or where they are! If the child has no easy access to a computer ,then a visit for "study purposes' to any public library will also allow free use of one of their computers to send emails free of charge ! If on the other hand your baby or toddler is being snatched insist on breastfeeding a baby as this gives you extra contact. http: //www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2003/850.html
Citation: BLD 160403280; [2003] EWHC 850 (Admin).
Published Date
This case establishes the right of the mother to breastfeed,and is often ignored both by SS and judges!
Fight for parents,grandparents,aunts,uncles,and cousins all to have contact under the Human Rights Act. (see section "get your children back")
Children of all ages even those as young as 6 or 7 years old for example ,can go to any public phone box and call parents reverse charges if they are quietly told how to do this,explained as follows:- Dial 100 from any private phone or public call box and you will be offered 4 options(choices) Choose option4 which asks if you want to speak to an operator.You then ask the operator for a call reversing the charges. The operator will then ask you for your name and the number you are calling.(this must be to a fixed line not a mobile)Your mother or father will then say ok they accept the call and no money is needed from you, the child who is calling! If your children are still with you or at least in contact get them to practice telephoning you reverse charge so that if the worst does happen and they are removed then contact is NEVER lost !! Remember also that if no court order forbids you expressly and specifically from contacting the children there is nothing to stop you seeing them when they come out of school (even nursery school!). Remember that all children "in care" have "personal education plans"that the SS are supposed to share with you.If you know where the school is you know where your child is !Ask the local education authorities(NOT the SS !) for a copy of these plans and ask also to be put on their mailing list so you can continue to follow your children's progress even after they have been snatched ! What are the timescales for dealing with requests? Requests for information from pupils, or parents, for information that contains, wholly or partly, an educational record must receive a response within 15 school days. Unless a parent simply asks to see the official educational record under the Regulations, schools and authorities are entitled to receive any fee first (see below). Most requests for information are likely to ask for at least some information in the educational record. However, should a subject access request be made just for personal information outside the educational record, a response must be made promptly and at most within 40 calendar days.
YOU MUST BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK IN COURT AND TO SAY ALL YOU WANT TO SAY,CALL ALL THE WITNESSES YOU WANT TO CALL,AND MAKE ALL THE POINTS AND ARGUMENTS YOU WANT TO MAKE ! Sack any solicitor or barrister that refuses you these very elementary legal rights OR worse still who advises you to surrender and go along with everything the SS demand.You do not need a lawyer to earn easy money by arranging your surrender !
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Baby P was 17 months old when he was tortured by his mother's boyfriend in spite of 60 visits by social workers and 3 visits to hospital. It all culminated with a visit from a specialist paediatrician who failed to notice that he had a broken back, 2 finger tips sliced off, several finger nails pulled out, 12 broken ribs and bruises all over his face and body concealed by chocolate. He would still be alive today if someone just once had given him a cursory physical examination but this was not done, probably because as usual Social Services etc. were intimidated by this brutal child abuser living in smelly and sordid surroundings with his sluttish partner and his Rottweiler dogs so they left the horrible family alone to look for easier prey; mostly amongst respectable and responsible households.
Most people seem more intent on wreaking vengeance on the murderers of Baby P than preventing the same situation occurring again; may I therefore make a suggestion?
Social Services plead shortage of staff and financial resources as excuses for overlooking torture of children (even after 60 visits to Baby P). In other European countries they take children from parents only if they have been severely physically or sexually abused but in Britain we waste most of out valuable resources fighting cruel cases in secret and costly courts to remove children and even new born babies at “risk of emotional harm” and for similar lesser reasons. The parents of Baby P would never have gone to court to fight for his return if he had been taken earlier as parents that violently physically abuse their children avoid courts like the plague!
Physical torture KILLS KILLS KILLS!!!
Emotional abuse does NOT
Poor school attendance does NOT
A cluttered house does NOT
Witnessing domestic violence does NOT
Hostility to the “professionals” does NOT
A parent with learning problems does NOT
Where therefore should the “SS” priorities lie?
I’m only asking!!
I would have thought myself it was MORE IMPORTANT to concentrate on preventing babies being tortured rather than the more common rush to remove babies AT BIRTH from mothers whom some highly paid psychobabble merchants have decided may at some future date emotionally harm their babies!Crystal ball gazing?
If all the resources of child protection were used to examine thoroughly (looking for visible bruises and burns) say once a month, all those children suspected of having been seriously physically or sexually abused thousands of children’s lives would be saved. At present our resources are wasted fighting in courts to remove happy healthy children from their parents for risk of emotional abuse and similar non life-endangering symptoms. Only parents that truly love their children fight through the gruelling ritual of the secret family courts and against all common sense they nearly always lose. If they dare to protest publicly more than 200 parents a year are jailed (answer to a parliamentary question) for breaking the “omertà” wall of secrecy!! If only mothers facing a life sentence by losing children to forced adoption had the right to a hearing by jury most of the present injustices would disappear. In short, what is needed is simply concentration on eradicating physical child abuse and then introducing hearings by juries who would rarely take children in other cases such as “emotional abuse”, cluttered dwellings, poor school attendance etc.
'Evil destruction' of a happy family.
A system involving social workers, police and courts took a child away from loving parents for no apparent reason, writes Christopher Booker.
Daily Telegraph, 18 Jul 2009
Two weeks ago I reported as shocking a story as this column has ever covered. It described how a loving family was torn apart when the parents were arrested by police on what turned out to be wholly spurious charges, so that their three children could be taken into care by social workers. As reported on another page, it now seems this awful episode has come to a happy ending.
However a new case has lately been surfacing, if anything even more shocking. This also involved the arrest of two parents and the abduction of their child by social workers, in a story so bizarre that, at last week's Prime Minister's Questions, Gordon Brown was asked about it by the family's MP, Charles Hendry, who has long been concerned with the case because the mother is a vice-chairman of his local Conservative Association. The family's horrified GP says that, in 43 years of medical practice, he has never "encountered a case of such appalling injustice".
I first planned to describe this case in April, but was pre-empted by the draconian reporting restrictions on family cases, which, for reasons which will become tragically clear, have now been partly lifted.
The story began in April 2007 when "Mr Smith", as I must call him, had a visit from the RSPCA over the dog-breeding business he ran from the family home. He had docked the tails of five new-born puppies – a procedure that had become illegal two days beforehand. Unaware of this, he promised in future to obey the new law.
Three days later, however, at nine o'clock in the morning, two RSPCA officials returned, accompanied in cars and riot vans by 18 policemen, who had apparently been tipped off, quite wrongly, that Mr Smith had guns in the house.
Armed with pepper spray, they ransacked the house, looking for the nonexistent guns. The dogs, released from their kennels, also rampaged through the house. When Mr Smith and his wife, who was three months pregnant, volubly protested at what was happening, they were forcibly arrested in front of their screaming five-year-old daughter "Jenny" and taken away. Two hours later, with the house in a shambles – the dogs having strewn the rabbit entrails meant for their dinner across the floor – social workers arrived to remove the crying child.
Held for hours in a police cell, Mrs Smith had a miscarriage. When she was finally set free, she returned home that evening to find her daughter gone. It was the beginning of a barely comprehensible nightmare.
Her husband was charged with various offences connected with the dogs, including the tail-docking, but was eventually given a conditional discharge by a judge who accepted that he was "an animal lover" who had not been cruel to his dogs.
Far more serious, however, was that the social workers seemed determined to hang onto the child, now in foster care, on the sole grounds that they had found the house dirty and in a mess (the "animal entrails" played a large part in their evidence). This was despite the testimony of a woman Pc (who had visited the house a month earlier on a different matter) that she found it "clean and tidy". Two hundred horrified neighbours, who knew the couple as doting parents of a happy, well-cared-for child, were about to stage a protest demonstration when they were stopped by the police, on the social workers' instructions that this might identify the child.
For more than two years the couple have been fighting through more than 100 hearings in the courts to win their daughter back. From a mass of evidence, including psychiatric reports and tape recordings made at meetings with her parents (only allowed in the presence of social workers), it is clear she has been desperate to return home. It is equally clear that considerable pressure has been brought on the child to turn her against her parents,
One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have "been forced to have oral sex with her father".
After Mrs Smith alone had been subjected to four different psychiatric investigations, which came up with mixed findings, she refused to submit to a fifth, and this apparently weighed heavily with the judge who last December ordered that "Jenny" should be put out to adoption.
In the Appeal Court 11 days ago, Mr Justice Bodey ruled that, because the mother had refused that fifth test, indicating that the parents put their own "emotional wellbeing" in front of that of their child, the adoption order must stand. When this judgment was reported, an independent social worker, who had earlier been an expert witness in the case, wrote to Mr and Mrs Smith to say he was "horrified" to learn that Jenny was "not back in their care", having assumed for over a year that "she must have been returned home".
Their equally horrified GP, saying that he had never "encountered such a case of appalling injustice", wrote "the destruction of this once happy family is in my opinion evil". So shocked was their MP, Mr Hendry ,that he last Wednesday took the highly unusual course of raising the case with the Prime Minister at question time. Numerous others who know the family well have expressed similar dismay. One neighbour, herself a former social worker, whose own daughter often played with "Jenny", said: "I worked with children in social services for 25 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is disgusting."
What is clear in this case, as in so many others, is that a system involving social workers, police and courts in what is an obviously very close alliance should yet again have left a happy, loving family destroyed for no very obvious reason, Almost equally alarming is the way that system manages to shield itself from the world, through reporting restrictions which it claims are designed to protect the children but which too often end up by protecting only the system itself.
--------CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL JUDGMENT
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Telegraph View: Child abuse won't be overcome until we define what it is Ed Balls will fail unless he gives guidance on what social workers should be doing. 10 Jan 2009
The horrific accounts of errors and incompetence by social services officials that we publish today will generate outrage and despair: outrage that officials could leave children with parents they know to be violent, criminal and addicted to drugs; and despair that despite the hundreds of inquiries, the hundreds of inspections, despite the repeated promises from the Government that things are getting better, nothing changes. The same mistakes are consistently repeated, with fatal consequences for children.
The persistent failure of social workers to protect children who are in very serious danger is made even more outrageous by the profession's propensity to remove children from parents who are manifestly no danger at all to them. Of the 35,000 children who are taken into care every year on the recommendation of social workers, a large proportion are removed on grounds of "emotional abuse" – a category so broad and ill- defined that it can include both praising your children too much and not praising them enough, or feeding them too many vegetables or too little fresh fruit. It appears that social workers, aware of their inability to intervene in cases where children really are at risk, compensate for that failure by intervening in families where they are obviously safe.
There is no doubt that those two bad practices are connected. The resources of social work departments are, as directors of those departments frequently point out, strictly limited. Time spent investigating parents who do not threaten or endanger the children in their care is time not spent investigating, visiting or intervening in the cases where there is a threat. If genuinely at- risk children are to be protected, resources have to be targeted at cases where parents pose a clear and present danger.
It is, in a literal sense, true that social workers do not know what they are doing. That is not their fault. Government "advice" on what they should do is, quite correctly, centred on ensuring that children are protected from "significant harm". But, in all the many hundreds of pages that both Labour and Conservative governments have issued on when social workers should intervene, the notion of "significant harm" has never been defined in a meaningful and precise way. The result is that it is left to officials to interpret the term as they see fit. And that means "significant harm" has as many interpretations as there are social workers: one can conclude that a child whose parents are violent drug-addicts is not at risk of "significant harm", while another can claim that a parent who "plays too often and too long" with her is so dangerous that the child should be taken into care.
The first step the Government needs to take in order to stop this malpractice is properly to define the notion of "significant harm". That will not prevent fatal misjudgments being made. But it will make those misjudgments less likely. It will save the lives of many children, and also prevent forcible removal from parents who love them and protect them, and who would provide them with a far better start in life than the dismal future that awaits those who are taken into state care. It will also make it possible for the inquiries and inspections that take place after a child dies to say something useful, instead of merely reporting (as they do at present) that "no one was to blame". So long as inspectors do not work with a clear and fixed notion of "significant harm", they are in exactly the same position as social workers: they cannot identify the kinds of practice that they ought to prevent.
Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, has insisted that he will take steps to end social services' persistent failure to protect seriously at-risk children. He will fail unless he gives clear guidance on what social workers should be doing – and he can only do that by defining the notion of "significant harm." We await his proposals.
THIS IS THE SITUATION(As at January 2009)
Year
Into care
Returned to parents
Adoption
2004
580
90
360
2005
600
100
320
2006
670
70
140
In each case fewer than 1 in 5 of newborn babies return to their mothers.
1: There really are SECRET COURTS in the UK. 215 MPs of all parties signed the "early day motion" below.
That this House urges the Government to remove the veil of secrecy from the workings of the Children Act 2004; considers that the closed door policy of the family courts breeds suspicion and a culture of secrecy which does nothing to instil confidence in those using them, which affects not just the courts but the social services departments of local authorities; and believes that it is possible to preserve the anonymity of children involved in the proceedings without the cumbersome rules which obstruct parents from receiving advice and support, which in particular works to the disadvantage of parents with special learning difficulty.
2: These courts take children from loving parents who have committed no crime. There are of course parents who brutalise and even torture or kill their children but such parents rarely go to court to recover their children; they stay as far away from courts as they possibly can! Common sense surely tells us that parents who care for their children enough to keep fighting for them in numerous very painful court actions ought to stand a good chance of winning them back. The sad fact is however that although judges often severely criticise social services in court they nearly always end up cautiously finding for the local authority and against the emotionally distraught parents. Parents are regularly condemned by "establishment judges" for neglecting their children, abusing them physically (or more often emotionally) not "beyond reasonable doubt" but "on the balance of probabilities"! Lord Denning defined this in Miller versus Ministry of Pensions as "more probable than not"Statistically,this means that the judge has at least a 51% chance of being right and probably at best 70% chance of being right so at least 30% of all forced adoptions were wrong and families split up on mere "hearsay" (statements by social workers and other persons, not in court and who could not be questioned). Wicked deeds violating parent's basic human rights!
3: These parents lose their children for ever to adoption by strangers. The children adopted are refused access to records of their birth parents or siblings at least until they are 18, and usually for the rest of their lives.
4: Parents are GAGGED and regularly sent to prison in secret proceedings if they reveal what went on in court.
Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) Hansard source
My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts.
5: Establishment judges make decisions to take thousands of babies for risk of possible future emotional abuse.
Extract from The Times, Aug 23 2007: “Emotional abuse” has no strict definition in British law. Yet it now accounts for an astounding 21 per cent of all children registered as needing protection, up from 14 per cent in 1997. Last year 6,700 children were put on the child protection register for emotional abuse, compared with only 2,600 for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse. Both of the latter two categories have been falling steadily. Meanwhile emotional abuse and “neglect” - which replaced the old notion of “grave concern” in 1989 - have been rising. Both are catch-alls. But emotional abuse is especially vague. It covers children who have not been injured, have not complained, and do not come under “emotional neglect”.
6: No jury would take babies from mothers because some expert made predictions of their future behaviour.
(Extract from The Sunday Times, Nov 18th 2007):A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones. For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work is a lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.
“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.”
7: Criminals facing 6+ months in prison can demand a jury; parents losing their children for life cannot.
8: Carefully selected pregnant mothers with vulnerable backgrounds but often with no criminal records or disabilities are told their babies will be taken at birth! Equally carefully selected are the "expert" psychiatists and psychologists who regularly "work" with the family courts and are eager to practice their latest "psychobabble theories". They are therefore only too willing to earn their generous fees and diagnose nearly every unfortunate mother presented to them by social services with a"borderline personality disorder" or to report that she "represents a risk of emotional abuse" to her children. Sometimes they will even diagnose a really hostile mother as "unfit" to instruct a solicitor! "The Official Solicitor" is then appointed for her! He will inevitably agree with everything the local authority demands and will refuse to let the aggrieved mother say a word! The result in nearly all these cases is that babies and quite often all the other children from the same families are taken into care for eventual adoption by strangers.
You still believe in "psychobabble"? Just listen to this video!
You Tube video - the Thud Experiment
9: Local authorities are rewarded by central government for reaching "adoption targets" hence adoption is prioritised.10: Fosterers get up to £400/week/ child,special schools up to £7000/week/child,adoption agencies,experts lawyers all cash in lavishly!
SO: What to do?
- Stop the secrecy and the gagging of parents forced to remain anonymous and unable to complain under their own names.
- Stop adoptions of children for emotional abuse or for "risk", and open adoption records to children already adopted.
- Stop judges deciding cases of long term fostering or adoption, and give juries the final decision. Better still abolish forced adoption altogether!
- Stop excessive rewards for those who live off the misery caused by this wicked system!
This would be a very very good start!
Christopher Booker.
Daily Telegraph 4 July 2009
One of the most disturbing features of life in modern Britain has been the extraordinary powers given to social workers to seize children from their parents, too often – when those powers are abused – supported by the police and family courts. What makes this still more alarming is the legal bar on reporting these episodes, supposedly to protect the children, which again too often works to protect the social workers themselves at the expense of the children.
Details of yet another shocking case, which comes to its climax in a county court in eastern England this week, have recently been placed in the House of Lords Library. This follows a comprehensive investigation carried out on behalf of the family by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who, as a hereditary peer, does not sit in the Lords, but has passed his dossier both to an active life peer and to this column.
Until six weeks ago, Mr and Mrs Jones, as I must call them under reporting restrictions, lived happily with their three young children, two sons and a daughter, aged under 13. Mr Jones, a business consultant, is related to various European royal families and his brother is a senior Army officer seconded to the UN. If he has one weakness, as he admits, it is to refer to these connections, as he did to the heads of the schools attended by his two older children, saying that he was particularly concerned for their security. He asked that he could be allowed to drive into the school grounds when picking up his daughter, because he did not want to leave her waiting, potentially vulnerable, in the road outside.
The headmistress agreed to this, but, concerned about other children's safety, contacted the local police, who in turn passed on their concerns to social services. The result of this was that, on May 18, when Mr and Mr Jones, accompanied by their younger son, arrived at school to pick up their daughter, they were met by a group of strangers, one as it turned out a female social worker. She asked, without explaining why or who she was, whether he was Mr Jones. When she three times refused to show him any ID, he was seized from behind by two policemen, handcuffed and put under arrest.
He was driven by a policeman to a nearby mental hospital where he was told that, because of "a number of concerns", he was being detained under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act and "sectioned" under S.2 as of "unsound mind". His wife, it turned out, had been similarly arrested, for loudly protesting at the handcuffing of her husband and the forcible seizing from her arms of her young son. The three children had been taken into care by social services.
Mrs Jones was allowed to return to an empty home that evening. Mr Jones was permitted to attend court two days later, to hear the magistrates grant an interim order for the children to remain in the care of social services. Because he was "sectioned", he was not allowed to speak. The chief magistrate, it later emerged, was chairman of the trustees of the mental hospital in which he was being detained.
On May 28, Mr Jones appeared before a mental health tribunal which, after hearing all the facts relating to his case, gave him a complete discharge. He returned home to his wife and immediately contacted his MP, a local MEP, lawyers and others he thought might be able to help, one of whom set in train the investigation by Lord Monckton that led to this story appearing here.
Despite the finding of the tribunal, the social workers have remained determined to hold on to the children, with a view to their care being determined in a county court on Wednesday. The voluminous dossier setting out this extraordinary sequence of events not only includes lengthy statements from Mr and Mrs Jones but copies of detailed statements by the social worker and policewoman most closely involved in the case (along with a good deal more circumstantial evidence).
The only reason offered in these documents for the abduction of the children is Mr Jones's "delusional belief system" that special care should be taken of his children because of their elevated family connections. The only harm done to the children is their very evident unhappiness at being separated from their parents.
It must be hoped that the court this week recognises how grotesquely this tragic case has been blown out of all proportion, and rules that a loving family should immediately be reunited.
Wronged parents need the oxygen of publicity We hear the tragic details of children left in danger. But we must not silence the families of those removed unjustly
by Camilla Cavendish.
The Times
March 6, 2009
"They're ripping lives apart and no one knows,” says one kind colleague who has rashly offered to return some of the phone calls I get from people trying to get their children back from social services, or to stop them being taken away. She is staggered by the volume of misery, powerlessness and desperation that this issue provokes almost every day. And that it is almost invisible outside.
We all see the tragedies that go the other way. Baby P is imprinted on our minds. When the Audit Commission warned yesterday that thousands of children may be at risk of neglect and abuse in parts of the country because of shambolic child protection systems, we all have vivid images of the horror that can result if social workers do not intervene.
Yet we have almost no idea of what happens when the same shambolic systems intervene in the wrong lives.
When children die, they have no “privacy” left, so the media tell their story. But if children are taken from loving families and placed with strangers, their “privacy” makes their views the property of the State, to be translated only by the State.
I know one child, now back with his mother, who was told by social workers that she didn't want him any more because she had a new baby. I have heard others say, on reaching 18, that they had assumed they were in care because they were evil. Many suffer the cruel ratchet of family contact visits being relentlessly reduced from maybe a few hours to an hour a week, to an hour a fortnight - awkward meetings in municipal rooms. This is done to wean children from their parents, for ostensibly good reasons but it also helps the State to claim that the “family bond” is weak and that the child would be happier with strangers. Of these things done in our name, we know almost nothing.
When we do find out, it is often too late. On Tuesday I went to the Court of Appeal to observe a strange case in which two teenage boys are protesting that the State is punishing them by keeping them in care.
The council apparently became concerned that the boys had refused to see their mother after she left the family home. A judge decided that their father was poisoning the boys' minds, encouraged by a psychiatrist who, it was said in court, had exceeded her remit. They were taken into care. The boys have since run away from two foster homes, repeatedly stating that they want to live with dad, not mum. The system has deprived them of both.
The mute expression of disbelief and fury on the face of the older son on Tuesday, when the judges dismissed the appeal, was eloquent. By that stage, my feelings mirrored his. But it was hard to be sure. This was the first time any of the evidence had been made public, because only now has it gone to appeal.
We need proper regulation of the care system. The Audit Commission report demonstrates that regulators are too weak to improve performance in children's services. We need a regulator who can spot problems early and make social workers accountable.
I am a social worker,
Your partner has departed
Your partner is abusive?
You have a learning problem,
Your son is hyperactive?
Your child was taken into care,
Foster parents love your kids
Children's homes are run by us,
"They" said adoptions worked the best
What happens in our special courts?
Your children may be healthy,
The judges know that we are right,
Our special courts are secret,
We'll get your kids adopted,
We have adoption targets,
by IAN JOSEPHS (a very social worker!)
_________________________
USEFUL INFORMATION
At last a BREAKTHROUGH!! Read the following article in the "LAW GAZETTE". You can now hit those "SS" people through their pockets! The more times you go to court the harder they will find it to pay for it all! Fight like a tiger and never give up and like countless other mothers (some of whom I have advised) You can WIN and get your children back!
Do not be fooled into cooperating with the "SS" when you are given their promises or those of your legal aid lawyers that if you go along with the "SS" everything will be alright! It WON'T!! All they want from assessments and psycho charlatans is more evidence to win their case so do not give it to them! The "SS" are not police who must be obeyed but they ARE your ENEMIES as long as their stated intention is to take your children into care or for adoption. When your enemy runs out of ammunition you should never send them a fresh case of bullets for them to fire at you!! Only agree to assessments and psychos if ordered to do so by a judge; otherwise refuse unless your children are returned to live with you first! Any other assessment or psychiatric examination cannot be normal or natural.
Lastly never get "conned" into putting your kids into voluntary care because more often than not despite what the law gazette says you may never see them again IF YOU ARE IN THAT SITUATION USE THE LAST PARA OF THE GAZETTE AS PROOF THAT THEY MUST BE RETURNED TO YOU WHEN YOU ASK! And the best of luck to you!
Just 1,611 applications were made by councils in England and Wales between the beginning of April and the end of July, according to figures from the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass). This compares with 2,160 in the same period last year and 2,284 between April and July 2006.
Since May, councils have been obliged to foot the bill for child care proceedings as part of a government drive to make the courts entirely self-funding through fees. The move has resulted in a 2,500% hike in costs, with child care proceedings rising from £150 to £4,825.
Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass, told the Gazette that Section 20 agreements – where children are placed with grandparents or other relatives – ‘went up by several hundred’ in the same period.
‘Care applications have dropped significantly… I am concerned about the drop because it’s too large to be complacent about,’ he said.
Douglas added that the use of Section 20 agreements – voluntary arrangements between parents and local authorities that do not come under court scrutiny and can be rescinded by the parent at any time – should be kept under review.
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As a social worker for 15 years i have seen children taken into care unnecessarily,been ordered to lie in court,had the Dept.'s solicitor reconstruct my witness statement to put parent in a bad light,made to exagerate a parents problems or blow up a minor incident.I eventually retired on ill health
ian hughes, bridgend, britain
1: It must surely be the right of parents and anyone else in a democratic country wishing to complain against injustice to go to the media with details of everything that happened to them in the family court Most judges in family courts refuse leave to appeal and solicitors always back them up so the idea of appealing when leave has been denied is nearly always a "non starter". Parents are at present denied their democratic right to (like rape victims) shed anonymity and then go to the media under their own names to get public and political support followed by possible reform! How can this be justice?
2: Harriet Harman,(minister of state, Department of constitutional affairs )said in Parliament "Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy." Surely those who still deny these facts cannot believe she was lying to Parliament! How can imprisonment with no public process be justice?
3: Extract from The Times, Aug 23 2007: “Emotional abuse” has no strict definition in British law. Yet it now accounts for an astounding 21 per cent of all children registered as needing protection, up from 14 per cent in 1997. Last year 6,700 children were put on the child protection register for emotional abuse, compared with only 2,600 for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse. How can taking newborn babies for "risk of emotional abuse" possibly be justified when the effect is to punish parents and abuse their babies not for anything they have done but for something that some hired prophet thinks they might perhaps do in the future. How can this be justice?
4: Any burglar facing a prison sentence of 6 months or more can demand a hearing before a jury so how can it be right or just that parents who risk losing their children for life to "forced adoption" are denied this option. Juries consider complicated medical evidence in cases such as murder, and compensation for injuries, also complicated tax laws in cases of fraud, and insider dealing. The simple decision whether a mother accused of risk of emotional abuse should keep her newborn baby or not would I think we must all agree be more likely to favour the mother if considered by a jury but records show that such cases nearly always favour the social services if decided by a judge. That is probably why juries are banned from the family courts but allowed to decide libel cases in other civil courts! To take a newborn baby from its mother and give it away for adoption by strangers is a far far worse punishment for her than any jail sentence as it condemns the mother to a life sentence and the baby to probable death later in life if it should require a kidney or bone marrow transplant or other medical attention in which a birth family member was needed but could not be located! How can this be justice?
Re K D [1998] 1 AC p.812 letter B Lord Templeman stated; ‘The best person to bring up a child is the natural parent. It matters not whether the parent is wise or foolish, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, provided the child’s moral and physical health are not endangered. Public authorities cannot improve on nature.'
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The mother of two children who are being adopted by gay men even though their grandparents want to care for them wept yesterday as she told of her final meeting with her son and daughter.
‘I told them, “Listen, Mummy is not going to see you for a while”,’ she said. Her son replied: ‘But Mummy, I want to come and stay with you and Granny and Grandad.’
The row over the future of the five-year -old boy and four-year-old girl intensified yesterday after the Daily Mail revealed details of the heartbreaking case. Their
But social workers said their ages – he is 59 and she is 46 – and their health – he has angina and she is diabetic – ruled them out.
The mother told the Mail that she had been ordered to say her goodbyes to the children last August during a trip to Edinburgh Zoo. ‘They told me not to cry and be strong so as not to upset the children,’ she said. ‘How can you tell a mother that when she’s never going to see her children again?’
She voiced her anger at the decision to allow her son and daughter to be fostered by a homosexual couple.
‘I did not under any circumstances want my children to be placed with gay men. I wanted them to have a mum and a dad.
‘They can’t be telling me that, within a 60-mile radius, the only people they could find to look after my children were two men.
‘I’ve got nothing against gay people. I’ ve got gay friends, but children need a mum and a dad, not a dad and another dad.
‘I’m ashamed of what I’ve done, especially what I’ve put mum and dad through because they have been brilliant every step of the way.
‘My children deserve so much love and my mum and dad were prepared to give them it, but social work snatched them away.
‘They are a mum and dad in a million and I know they would have brought my children up brilliantly.’
The mother also revealed that social workers have asked her to meet the gay couple under their supervision. But she will not see her children – or be allowed to know where they are going to be living.
The Mail revealed yesterday how the grandparents had fought a relentless battle for the right to look after the youngsters after deciding their daughter was unfit to do so.
But they were opposed every step of the way by Edinburgh’s social work department, which believed they should go to an adoptive family.
When the grandparents eventually caved in to what they describe as ‘bully tactics’ by the social workers, the department arranged for the children to be adopted by a gay couple in the Edinburgh area. They had already decided that, whatever the outcome of the battle, the children should not see their mother owing to her unstable lifestyle and history of offences.
Recalling her final, 90-minute meeting with her children, the mother said: ‘I was told that this would be the last time. They asked me to pick a place to take them and I decided on the zoo. The social worker was with me and kept saying to me I would have to tell them I was not going to see them any more and that I had to stay strong for their sakes.
‘At one point she said that my son was the spitting image of my mum and my daughter looked like her grandad. What kind of thing is that to say at a moment like that, when I’m about to tell them I won’t see them again?
‘I told them that I loved them and I would write them lots of letters and cards and that they would be going to a new house soon.
‘I got really upset and had to keep turning away so that they didn’t see me crying. The social worker said, “Just leave it there”. Ten minutes later, that was it.’
But the mother still had to help put the children in the social worker’s car. ‘My son grabbed me tightly on the leg and and would not let me go. It was just absolutely devastating.’
She said that the heartrending last meeting had happened while her parents were still fighting for full parental rights for the brother and sister, who have been staying with foster parents for the last two years pending a decision on their future.
Her parents’ last meeting with the children came two months later in October. By then, under mounting pressure from the social work department and concerned about months or years of further disruption to their lives, they had taken the agonising decision to withdraw from the legal fight.
The grandfather, a farm worker, and his wife say the social work department are effectively blackmailing them by telling them they will not see the children again unless they give the new adoptive arrangements their blessing.
Although the family desperately want to reverse the adoption procedure they do not now know how they can. Their previous solicitor has moved to a new job and would
The children have already had several meetings with the men who are soon to become their full-time fathers. They are understood to be seeing them for a few hours daily and have recently visited their home. The men are giving them a bedroom each – and the girl’s has been decked out with a ‘princess’ bedspread. The children have also been shown the wellington boots waiting for them at the back door when they want to play outside.
Under the adoption procedure, the children will see more and more of the gay couple, spending occasional nights in their home, until they move in permanently. The social work department will remain in contact with the new parents for the first year of adoption – then, providing there are no serious problems, contact will cease.
Thereafter the only official channel the children’s natural family will have for making contact with them would be through an adoption agency. The mother said: ‘The
Now they want me to meet the men. Social work phoned me to ask how I was feeling now about them being adopted by a gay couple and if I had calmed down.
‘They told me that out of the couples they had on their books they were the ones who were able to cater for their needs best. I find that very hard to believe. I’ll have to say
Councillor Marilyne MacLaren, convener for education, children and families at Edinburgh City Council, said: ‘I have been assured that the professional view is that
‘These are always very complex cases but I think it is important to say that the grandparents have been fully involved in discussions about this case over a period of
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Social services Stasi should hang their heads in shame
Should proof ever be needed of the scandalous social engineering now so casually carried out by our state, it comes in the case of the loving grandparents of two small children who desperately sought to adopt them but saw them instead placed with a gay couple.
The decision was made to refuse the grandparents the right to raise their own blood relatives and instead give them away to two gay men ‘in accordance with who can best meet their needs’, according to the social services jargon.
But how can two strangers – gay or straight – best meet the needs of two children abandoned by a drug- addict mother for whom the only constants in their short, difficult lives have been their loving grandparents?
We don’t even know what the reasoning behind this perverse decision was, because it was taken in secret, behind the closed doors of a children’s court. Those who took part will not be held accountable and we are unable even to identify their victims.
This decision is one of particular cruelty. The decision itself is bad enough, but the grandparents’ description of how they were treated give us a chilling insight into the Stasi-like approach of modern social services.
They were told that if they so much as objected to the adoption of the children by the gay couple then they would never be allowed to see the children again.
‘You can either accept it,’ the grandparents were told by social workers, ‘and there’s a chance you’ll see the children twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.’ The Stalinist secret police couldn’t have put it better.
Further, the grandparents are not allowed even to know where the children will live, what the gay couple’s circumstances are and what kind of a home they will provide for the children. Equally astonishingly, it emerges the youngsters were not given to a gay couple for want of other alternatives: indeed there were several other heterosexual couples desperate and deemed suitable to adopt the children.
But the social workers and the courts opted for the gay men.
As the grandfather in this case says: ‘The mother is the cornerstone of any family and the most important person for a young child.’ That’s hard to argue with. His little granddaughter will no doubt have lots of female role models, gay- speak for women friends, but it’s not the same.
A little girl already wary of men, no doubt because in her young life she’s witnessed her addict mother being ritually abused by them, will have to turn to one of them one day, when she gets her periods, when she needs her first bra. It’s hard enough asking your own mother such things, let alone a gay man.
The only reason given for denying the grandparents the right to adopt their own daughter’s children is worries about their age and their health. The 59-year-old grandfather is a farm worker and has angina, his wife, just 46, is being treated for diabetes.
Plenty of people lead normal lives with diabetes – and angina.
And how outrageous to say a woman of 46 is too old to be a mother – particularly when it emerges she is still bringing up children of her own. Who’d have dared to suggest that Cherie Blair was too old – or to suggest it to the countless women who have healthy children in their forties?
When did the State decide to endorse such monstrously cruel social engineering? When did it decide to fly in the face of overwhelming evidence that children’s lives are best when they are raised by a mother and father living together – preferably married?
It appears that social services, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe that all relationships are equal when it comes to raising children. Indeed, in this case they seem to have decided that a gay relationship is preferable to a couple of opposite sex.
This is simply not true. They are not equal when it comes to the things children need most – commitment and stability. Yet is is regarded as heretical even to state the facts: which are that marriages last longer than cohabiting heterosexual relationships and they both last longer than gay relationships.
Those are the cold, bare truths. It is too soon to know the statistics on same-sex marriages as there has not been enough time to assess the trends and many same sex couples enjoy enduring and truly fulfilling relationships.
But if commitment and stability matter most to children’s happiness and success, the least suitable place for them to be raised is by a gay couple. That’s not homophobia, that’s not bigotry, that’s a fact – unpalatable as it might be to the Left consensus.
When you read of such shocking decisions, you can only wonder how any sane judge could put two small children with two men. Are they trying to meet some target they have been set for placing children for adoption with gay couples? Who knows, because shamefully all of this process is conducted in secret.
It also reflects how out of touch the state and the law is now, not just with the traditional family, but with the role of grandparents. Again and again we hear stories of grandparents cut out of their grandchildren’s lives after divorce or death and having no recourse to the law.
Grandparents have been written out of the modern liberal family narrative at a time, in reality, when they have never been more needed or more central to the revival of the extended family.
They help out with child care, work around the house, ferry children to after-school classes and even assist with finances.
But against all the evidence social services choose to take two small children away from their natural family and give them up for adoption – to a gay couple.
It beggars belief and seems guaranteed to do only one thing: to give those innocent children the poorest possible start to their lives, the slimmest chance of happiness and the greatest likelihood of anger, bewilderment and failure.
Those who made this decision should hang their heads in shame.
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My comments on the recent House of Lords debate concerning identification of sperm or egg donors are as follows:
This is how they "work" it!
"UK Certificates " offers a secure online ordering service for official General Register Office issued adoption certificates for England & Wales.
An adoption certificate is a replacement birth certificate but in an adopted person's new name. It is used by an adopted person for all legal and purposes in place of their original birth certificate. The main difference between the two documents is the addition of court particulars on an adoption certificate.
We will provide an officially certified full version of an original adoption certificate for any event in England & Wales between 1927-present.
We can provide a short version if you prefer, which contains no reference to the fact of adoption.
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And now for the "experts"!
'You can't see your son - but can he have one of your organs?' How social workers left one man with a terrible moral dilemma
The letter from Hampshire Social Services was as brief as it was bewildering. ‘Please ring me on the above number,’ it said. ‘I have some information that might be of interest to you.’ This was quite an understatement, as Michael Shergold soon found.
A quietly spoken father of three, he finds that his life rarely gets more exciting than his weekly game of golf. But when he called the social workers as requested, he was confronted with a series of astonishing facts.
They said he was the father of another child - a five-year-old son from a previous, short-lived relationship. A former girlfriend, unable to cope with the demands of motherhood, had handed the boy over to foster parents.
A meeting with this new-found son was out of the question, he was told, let alone any sort of relationship. He was also informed that the boy was to be formally adopted and that the council was ringing merely to let him know.
His shock slowly turned to anger and then determination. Hurt to have been kept in the dark for so many years, Michael still believed he was responsible for the child - whom we shall call Andrew - and launched a legal fight to secure custody.
In a disturbing saga, this was perhaps the most unpleasant twist of all. It brought him to a damning conclusion - that Hampshire Social Services had made him aware of Andrew’s existence only to provide the child with a body part.
Michael tried to adopt his son but last year he lost the battle and was refused even occasional visiting rights, which were deemed too upsetting for the boy.
Like almost all cases that go through the family court system, the details were not made public.
This is not the first time that Michael, who works as a school caretaker, has suffered domestic drama. His 16-year marriage ended in 1996 when he discovered that his first wife had been unfaithful. He was given custody of the children - Peter, now 17, David, 20, and Susanna, 30 - and brought them up single-handedly.
As Alex serves home-made carrot cake and their cuckoo clock announces the time, the Shergolds seem every inch a loving family. Their attitude to their predicament is one of quiet anger and grief rather than unfettered fury.
‘We have a wonderful, close-knit family,’ says Michael. Peter and David, who still live at home, flit in and out as the couple talk. Susanna lives close by.
It is a particular irony that Michael has been employed by Hampshire County Council for the past 35 years, overseeing the repairs, cleaning and maintenance of a local primary school. As it happens, the job requires him to undergo criminal record checks every year and neither he nor Alex, who was also checked, has any convictions.
The letter that shattered Michael’s life came in January 2007, but the origins of the trauma lay five years earlier, when he had embarked on a difficult relationship with a much younger woman.
Despite their age difference, things went well at first after they were introduced through friends. ‘She was the first woman I’d dated since splitting up with my wife,’ he recalls.
‘At first I didn’t think of having a relationship with her because, at 29, she was much younger than me. But she was bubbly and got on well with the boys. It was only after a few months that I realised she was unstable and had a drink problem. She would swear in front of the boys and I ended the relationship.’
He had no inkling that she might be pregnant and that, he thought, was the end of the matter. Indeed, it was not long before he met Alex through a friendship website.
That all changed with Hampshire County Council’s bombshell. ‘It was a terrible shock,’ recalls Alex. ‘Michael was told by a social worker that his child had been put into foster care.’
At 53, Alex thought she had said goodbye to bringing up a child, but she was as determined as her husband to welcome Andrew into the family. ‘That was where he belonged,’ she says. ‘Not with strangers to whom he is not related.’
The couple, whose children had also come round to the idea of embracing a new sibling into their lives, visited Hampshire Social Services’ headquarters in Winchester, where they were shown Andrew’s picture.
With hindsight, they were naively optimistic. Immediately infatuated, they dug out Scalextric and Lego sets, embarked on plans to turn their loft into a fourth bedroom and even researched school places.
‘He looked just like his daddy,’ says Alex. ‘We were determined that although he’d had such a dreadful start in life, we’d soon make it all up to him.’
When, two weeks later, DNA tests confirmed that Michael was the father, the couple instructed a solicitor to stop the adoption order and begin their own custody proceedings. ‘I thought that once Social Services saw our happy family home and how much we wanted Andrew to be a part of it, it would only be a matter of weeks before he would come to live with us,’ says Michael.
But then came the breathtaking twist. ‘At our second meeting with Social Services a social worker told us, “Andrew needs an organ transplant and, as you know, an organ is best donated from a blood relative.” ’
The couple were left in no doubt that Michael’s co-operation was essential if his son was to stand a good chance of surviving. His mother, they learned, had initially agreed to be the donor but changed her mind on the grounds that it would hinder her chances of having another child.
Social workers told Michael that he, and his children, were the ‘next choice’. He admits: ‘I was taken aback but, of course, desperately worried and keen to help my son.’
Meanwhile, two independent social workers were assigned to assess Michael and Alex as potential parents for Andrew. It was, by all accounts, a rigorous process. ‘I was surprised to be interrogated by a total stranger,’ he says, ‘but I hid nothing.’ Yet, over a
‘The worst questions were about our sex life,’ he says. ‘They kept asking how “healthy” it was - we took it to mean how many times a week we made love - and if we indulged in 'normal' sex.’
Alex, who admits she didn’t take kindly to the intrusion, adds: ‘I felt that side of our marriage was private and we didn’t see how it could be relevant. In the end I replied, “None of your business and I am not happy to elaborate further.” Perhaps it is because I’m an American and a Christian, but I found the Social Services’ attitude difficult to understand.’
Meanwhile, the truth about Andrew’s situation gradually emerged. Finding a permanent home was not easy, however. The boy’s illness demanded a special diet and regular hospital visits.
After his rejection by one set of foster parents, his photograph had to be posted on an adoption website before finally, in 2006, the couple who were eventually to adopt him came forward. ‘I couldn’t believe this could have happened to my son,’ says Michael. ‘I found it incredible.
‘Social Services told me in our first phone conversation that Andrew's mother had named me as the father. Yet, as far as I can see, they made no effort to find me. I have lived in the same house for 11 years. I am on the electoral roll and in the phone book.’
Hampshire County Council says it did its best to locate Michael. ‘A care order would not have been made had the court not been satisfied that every effort had been made to locate Mr Shergold,’ says council leader Ken Thornber. ‘We have apologised to Mr Shergold for our failure to find him during care proceedings.
‘All circumstances leading to a child coming into care involve a degree of human tragedy and require very finely balanced judgments to be made. The needs of the child must always be the paramount concern and the judge did conclude that the local authority did its best, when it discovered the difficult situation that had arisen, to communicate with Mr Shergold and establish what contribution he could make to his son’s life.’
Michael believes he was eventually traced only because doctors said Andrew would need a transplant. Indeed, he now believes that even his attempt to adopt Andrew was something of a charade. ‘We began to feel that Social Services had let us go through the custody proceedings for nothing - that the adoption was arranged and they had no intention of placing Andrew with us,’ he says.
The Shergolds were refused custody at Portsmouth County Court last November. The judge admitted the background had been ‘difficult and somewhat unsatisfactory’ but ruled that moving Andrew in with the Shergolds would cause him unnecessary ‘difficulty and disruption’.
Just two days later - suspiciously quickly in the view of the Shergolds - he had been formally adopted, leaving the Shergolds in the cold.
Even their request that Michael should be able to see him for visits was turned down on the grounds that it would be ‘unsettling for Andrew’, who was ‘bonding’ with his new family. Yet Andrew's mother, who was judged unfit, is still allowed to visit Andrew twice a year.
Meanwhile, Hampshire Social Services are still pressing Michael to donate an organ. Even if Michael decides to do so, it will make no difference. ‘I was stunned,’ he says. ‘I asked them what would happen if I gave him a part of my body. They said that even then, I wouldn’t be allowed contact. Andrew would not even be told who donated the organ as this would be 'too unsettling'.’
The dilemma has had damaging repercussions for the Shergold family. Michael says his children are wounded and that even his marriage has suffered.
One official report on the couple expressed concern that Andrew would be brought up in a dual-ethnicity family. ‘They made out I was a foreigner who had no idea how to look after a child,’ she says. ‘I’ve raised three children. Despite the fact that they live in the States, we are incredibly close. I also think of Michael’s sons as my own.
‘I began to think that if I wasn’t around, Michael would have got custody. One night I suggested to Michael and his sons that I leave. Thankfully, they wouldn’t hear of it. But the stress has been unbearable. Undoubtedly, Michael and I would have split up if our relationship wasn’t so strong.’
And Michael adds: ‘Social Services have never given me a concrete reason why my wife and I are not suitable. That is because there is no reason.’
The couple did not qualify for legal aid and have spent £4,000 on solicitors. Now they have been told there is no further action they can take.
Overshadowing everything, however, is the decision to donate an organ. ‘If I don’t donate an organ, Andrew might not live long enough to meet me and the guilt would probably be too much to live with,’ he says. ‘If I do, it will be as if I am donating to someone who I don’t really know exists.
‘How can social workers sleep at night, knowing they have separated a boy from his real father, a good father who has already successfully raised three children? They won’t even pass on birthday cards.
‘They have stormed in and left us to pick up the pieces. I cannot believe that in this country someone can stop you seeing your own child when you have done nothing wrong.
‘Our family seems incomplete. If I see a boy in the street, I wonder if it’s him. I dream of him meeting his brothers and sister and joining us when we have big birthday celebrations. My only hope is that he can choose to trace me when he is 18.
‘But what if he doesn’t live that long or is told lies about me – that his father is dead or didn’t want him? It breaks my heart to think we may never meet.
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No complicated Bill is needed to remedy this situation. Quite simply every child should have access to their original and truthful birth certificate clearly identifying parents where known whether they be natural or donors.
Mother ‘too stupid’ to keep child
A MOTHER is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.
The woman, who for legal reasons can be identified only by her first name, Rachel, has been told by a family court that her daughter will be placed with adoptive parents within the next three months, and she will then be barred from further contact.
The adoption is going ahead despite the declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”.
Her daughter, K, was born prematurely and officials felt Rachel lacked the intelligence to cope with her complex medical needs Baby K was released from hospital into care and is currently with a foster family. Her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day medical care.
Rachel said last night: “I have been totally let down by the system. All I want is to care for my daughter but the council and the court are determined not to let me.
“The court here has now ordered that my contact with my daughter must be reduced from every fortnight until in three months’ time it will all be over and I will never see her again.”
Rachel has now lodged an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, which has the power to stop the child being given to another family. She has also applied for a judicial review of the adoption order.
Her attempts to fight Nottingham city council’s adoption of her daughter have been hampered because her case was taken over by the official solicitor,* the government-funded lawyer who acts for those unable to represent themselves. He was brought in to represent Rachel’s interests because she was judged to be intellectually incapable of instructing her own solicitor. He declined to contest the council’s adoption application, despite her wish to do so.
After the psychiatrist’s assessment of Rachel, the court has now acknowledged that she does have the mental capacity to keep up with the legal aspects of her situation. It has nevertheless refused her attempts to halt the adoption process.
John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, who is campaigning on Rachel’s behalf, said: “The way Rachel has been treated is appalling. She has been swept aside by a system that seems more interested in securing a child for adoption than preserving a natural family unit.”
*BEWARE the "Official Solicitor" ! If you get too upset or too excited the judge may decide you are not capable of instructing a solicitor or representing yourself and will appoint this parasite to represent you instead.He is by law forbidden to put on a case for you as his job is simply to agree with the "SS" ,to refuse to let you speak, and ensure that you lose your precious children without being allowed to say a word !! Even if you stay calm but still show hostility the judge may appoint a psychologist recommended by the "SS" to give you an IQ test and if through nerves etc your results are poor once again the Official Solicitor will be appointed to "represent" you.Alas,thanks to him, you will be gagged, and your children will be lost to forced adoption .588 cases like this have taken place in the family courts since Jan 2006 until now (Sunday Times June 14 2009)
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Tim Loughton:
To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years. [151067]
John Healey:
I have been asked to reply. 30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of ‘performance reward grant’ (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim
Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.
Here at last is PROOF that all concerned in "child protection" are receiving vast sums of money for work that can at best be described as "destructive" and at worst "criminal"...... There is NO conspiracy,no need for one ! Just a lot of different people all earning a lot of money in their different ways.All keen to keep on doing so and with one view in common "Don't rock the boat !"
1: Fosterers typically £400/ week per child!
Hundreds of balloons will be released from Slough town centre to mark a special event to launch Slough’s new fostering Allowance Scheme.
Saturday, July 2 will encourage more people to consider becoming foster parents to local children and see the launch of a new fostering allowance of £400 per week.
Between noon and 4pm, the Town Square will be bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling. Football fans should be sure to bring a camera as a David Beckham look-a-like will be ready to pose for photos.
Janet Tomlinson, head of education and children’s services at Slough Borough Council, will make a short speech at 1pm before the balloon release.
Team members from Slough’s Family Placement Services will be giving out fostering information including the fostering freephone number, car stickers, bookmarks, keyrings, wristbands and balloons.
Janet Tomlinson said: "Fostering offers great challenges and great rewards. Even if you’ve never thought about it before, why not come down on July 2 to find out more?"
The freephone fostering number is 0800 073 0291.
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Channel 4, Thursday 25 November, 9pm
In 2004, caring for Britain's most vulnerable children is a multi- million pound industry. Children in care cost the taxpayer over £830 million pounds a year. That's an average of £2,500 per child, per week - more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton. Yet many homes are failing to provide children with even a basic standard of care.
In this programme, Dispatches goes undercover to investigate the consequences of the increased privatisation of residential children's homes. The investigation reveals how homes are run by private businessmen charging social services departments enormous and unethical mark-ups on services - many of which aren't even provided. Fees of £7,000 a week are not unusual yet Dispatches finds private children's homes which are failing the children in many respects. Homes often use untrained, and sometimes unvetted, agency staff to look after some of the UK's most at risk youngsters - many of whom have been the victims of abuse, prostitution and drugs.
The current system is failing thousands of children a year. According to a recent report, three in five kids leave care with no qualifications at all. One in five will be homeless after two years and one in three of the current prison population has previously been in care. Tragically, some don't make it at all, with approximately 60 youngsters dying in children's homes every year.
Information, advice and support for people who are in care, or have been in the past, can be found by checking out the following organisations and websites.
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3: COUNCIL MUST PAY £500,000 FOR WRONGLY TAKING GIRL INTO CARE
(The headline for the article below was misleading. As the story made clear, the £500,000 was the total cost to public funds. The council was ordered to pay the parents £200,000 legal aid costs and will have to meet its own costs. The child would also have been represented and payment of those costs will be met from public funds).
A couple had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason and kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge said yesterday.
Mr Justice McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings" and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the emergency order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds, were £500,000, including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000, which the judge ordered the local council to pay. The judge took the unusual step of making his judgment public after a hearing behind closed doors, although the family, the local authority and the magistrates court are all unnamed.
He laid down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which are certain to lead social services departments and magistrates courts to re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely no pleasure to have to record the multiple failings of the local authority in this case".
But to do so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion on the issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be learned for the future".
He said the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".
Mother and daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for psychotherapy and the girl had been put on the local child protection register.
The notes of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues. Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental to move."
But social workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy - now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of child abuse in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes illness to get attention. At the end of a case conference on the girl in November 2004, social services received a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.
They were told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong. Within hours and without any information from the doctor, social workers were at the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection order allowing the girl to be taken from her parents immediately.
They acted without telling the parents and without seeking any medical opinion to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical treatment before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.
The council's actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous" and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction of this family's ordinary life".
Those descriptions "do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took place on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader, who had no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to the magistrates, of which every one was "misleading or incomplete or wrong".
He ruled that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".
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4: THE EXPERT AS JUDGE AND JURY
Yet another woman was sent to prison last week, following expert evidence that she had shaken to death a baby in her care. Keran Henderson, a 42-year-old childminder, was said to have killed 11- month-old Maeve Sheppard, by shaking her so violently she was left blind and brain-damaged. The infant died in hospital a few days later.
The case has grim echoes of those of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel, all of whom were accused of killing their children only to be found innocent later. Clark, a solicitor, who was released from prison after serving three years, died last March as a result of psychological trauma and alcoholism caused by her ordeal.
At the Court of Appeal, two days after the judgment on Henderson, a retrial was ordered in the case of Barry George, the loner convicted of killing the television personality Jill Dando in 1999 with a single shot to the head. Expert testimony as to the significance of a particle of gunshot matter in his pocket is being challenged.
There has also been the recent conviction of the true killer of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed, 32 years after the event – and after Stefan Kiszko had served 16 years for the sexually motivated killing, even though medical evidence could have pointed out his infertility proved his innocence. Once again the review of the evidence threw a spotlight on the role of expert witnesses, whose testimony is often crucial in criminal cases but can be unreliable.
Our blind faith in scientific opinion makes us reluctant to question pronouncements by “experts”, but while the law requires everyone from plumbers to nurses to be trained, registered and checked, there is no such requirement for witnesses who may be pronouncing on matters of life and death in court.
A study by senior barrister Penny Cooper of City University in London, has shown that the majority of lawyers and judges do not bother to check the qualifications of experts they approach to bolster an aspect of their case. She also found a substantial number of the expert witnesses had undergone no training to understand their legal duty.
The disquiet this arouses has led to a clamour for legislation to require expert witnesses to be regulated. But how to do that without calling into question thousands of court decisions will not be an easy task.
There is already acute unease over the proliferation of parents convicted of causing cot deaths, shaking babies to death, or harming them by creating symptoms of fictitious illness.
Henderson, for instance, a mother of two herself, a long-term childminder and stalwart volunteer of her local Beaver Scout group, was sentenced to three years in prison for shaking baby Maeve so violently that she was left with fatal brain damage, despite the fact there was no evidence of any “grip marks” on the child, which would normally be expected to accompany such an action.
Her husband, a former police officer, has said she will appeal and hopes to create a campaign similar to that run by Sally Clark’s family, to try to prove his wife’s innocence.
Many character witnesses spoke up for Henderson in court and the family has dozens of supporters in their home village of Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire.
Some even believe her prosecution was only pursued because of the successful appeal by Roy Meadow, the expert paediatrician whose evidence led to the conviction of Sally Clark.
Following the Clark case, in which Meadow quoted a completely erroneous statistic suggesting the chances of Clark’s babies having died naturally were one in 73m, he was struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for misconduct. The Court of Appeal agreed he had acted in good faith.
In the meantime, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted post-mortems on Clark’s two infant sons, was less lucky. His appeal against a GMC finding of serious professional misconduct was rejected. Williams was accused of tailoring his diagnoses of the nature of the babies’ deaths to fit the police case against Clark.
The GMC is currently hearing a claim of gross professional misconduct against paediatrician Dr David Southall. The council has received evidence alleging that Southall falsified his curriculum vitae.
Southall’s evidence has figured highly in at least 50 criminal cases and possibly hundreds of family court cases held in secret, which have led to children being removed from their parents.
Questions of how frequently babies really are shaken to death, and indeed if it is possible to do so, have divided medical opinion for some years. There have, however, been up to 200 convictions annually for related forms of violence against babies and young children.
After Clark, Cannings and Patel, another bizarre case was overturned. Ian and Angela Gay, who had been convicted of poisoning their three-year-old adopted son with salt, were cleared when it was revealed the boy was suffering from a rare, and fatal, congenital abnormality.
Recently, the attorney-general ordered a review of almost 300 criminal convictions and 30,000 family court proceedings where children were taken into care. Only four were referred to the Court of Appeal. This, according to critics, was a function of the way the review was done, with authorities being asked to review their own decisions.
Social workers say the crusade to root out dangerous adults is to some extent a reaction to a previous era of regular criticism of their profession when children were left to die at the hands of their parents. Although some acknowledge the pendulum may now have swung too far, others are furious: “Do people think we spend all our time trying to break up families for no good reason?” said John Coughlan, a joint-president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. “In comparison with the volume of cases, the number of errors is tiny. We never rely on expert witnesses alone.”
Others argue that the opinion of expert witnesses is often the decisive factor. And as we have seen most recently with Barry George, it is not just child murder cases that have turned on such evidence.
Last year the Home Office took the unprecedented step of holding a disciplinary tribunal against Michael Heath, one of its most senior forensic pathologists: 20 charges against him were upheld. One man was subsequently cleared of murder, and numerous other convictions have been called into question.
A spate of other convictions came from evidence supplied by Paula Lannas, another Home Office forensic specialist who was the subject of a long-delayed disciplinary hearing that collapsed because those investigating her said they had a conflict of interest. Not only has Lannas been deprived of an opportunity to clear her name, but dozens of prisoners who claim they were victims of her errors have been unable to get the evidence reviewed.
Police forensic scientist Peter Ablett, who is now chief executive of the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners, points out there are only three ways to prove a crime: a reliable eyewitness, a confession, or forensics. The advent of DNA technology and other advances in recent years has brought increasing reliance on forensics, yet only about 3,000 of the estimated 8,000 expert witnesses operating are members of the council and signed up to its code of practice.
He said many of those who are not are unaware that their duty is to give impartial evidence to the court, not to bolster the case of their paymaster.
City University’s Cooper, who is also a governor of the Expert Witness Institute, was concerned to discover during her research that not only have one in five experts undergone no training to understand this duty, but one in 10 was so arrogant they said they saw no need for it. “There should be a requirement for them to be trained, and there should be rules requiring judges and lawyers to consider their credentials before accepting them as expert witnesses,” she said.
Such a provision cannot come soon enough.
A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones.
For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work isa lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.
“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.”
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5: FIRMS CASH IN ON SHORTAGE OF FOSTER HOMES
LONDON: Private agencies are making millions of pounds out of a critical shortage of foster homes for children. Firms are charging councils on average £800 per child per week, an EVENING STANDARD investigation revealed.
This amounts to £41,600 a year to find suitable homes for the most vulnerable children in society.
One head of social services said: “It is cheaper to send the children to Eton.”
London councils are so desperate to hold on to their foster parents that two are offering them free loft conversions - worth up to £30,000 - so they can take in more children. Britain’s largest independent agency Foster Care Associates had a £56mn turnover in 2003, the last year for which accounts are available.
Its eight directors - seven of them social workers who set up the company 10 years ago - paid themselves total fees of more than £2.2mn as well as sharing pre-tax profits of almost £900,000.
The directors awarded themselves on average £285,000 each - about 10 times the annual salary of a social worker.
There is an estimated shortage of 10,000 foster carers across the UK. This has driven up the prices charged by the 150 or so independent agencies.
It costs councils between £300 and £400 a week to place children with their own approved foster carers but they cannot meet the demand and have to turn to outside agencies. More difficult children can cost as much as £1,500 per week to place in foster homes.
The problem is especially acute in London, where out of 11,500 fostered children up to one-third are found homes through independent agencies. Many of them are ‘dumped’ in outlying towns around the capital. A total of 60,000 children are fostered nationally.
A spokesman at the department for education said: “We know there are too many children being placed outside of authorities. We commissioned a report last year looking at how we can reduce that number.”
Out of the 11,500 fostered children in London, half of them are teenagers, about 3,000 aged eight to 12 and 2,500 aged under eight.
Children are typically being sent from London boroughs to Kent, miles from their schools and friends. Some 330 problem children from London are being fostered in the Margate area.
This has prompted the Kent child protection committee to compile a report, sent to ministers, warning the town is now at a ‘tipping point’ and branding the situation ‘explosive’.
Paul Fallon, director of social services at Barnet council and spokesman for all London’s social services directors, said: “Every penny we spend on one child is a penny we can’t spend on another child. If I place a child with Barnet it is £400. But it costs me about double that to place a child in an independent placement.
“It is a sellers’ market and that will impact on prices. We are stuck. It is cheaper to send children to Eton.”
He estimated that in Barnet about 30 to 40 children - about 10% of the number needing foster care - are unaccompanied child refugees. They have helped to swell numbers of children needing placements, putting added pressure on social services.
A spokeswoman for Richmond council, where private places at £900 cost three times as much as council places, said: “In emergencies we will negotiate with another borough for a temporary foster place, but that’s very rare.”
The crisis has prompted Barnet council and Hammersmith and Fulham to offer grants of up to £30,000 to foster parents to build loft conversions to house more children. A spokeswoman for Hammersmith and Fulham said the outlay would pay itself back within one to two years even if it creates just one extra fostering place.
Defenders of private agencies point out councils often do not factor hidden staffing costs - such as administration and on-call social workers - into their weekly fees. Private agencies also point out they are often called upon to find placements for the most difficult children. They point out they also provide round-the-clock social worker support as well as educational support and therapy. Not all agencies are profit-making with fostering services carried out by charities such as Barnardo’s and NCH.
Marcelle Ibbetson, service development manager at NCH, which also typically charges £800 a week, said: “We don’t think local authorities have properly costed the real cost of foster care. Their behind the scenes costs are hidden. What we provide is private placements at the specialist end of the market.”
None of the directors of Foster Care Associates was available for comment. But in an interview last year Sally Melbourne, FCA’s director for the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region, said: “The majority of the fee we charge local authorities goes to the carer and on the welfare of the child. We are a business but we make very little profit, last year we made 5% profit.”
A spokesman for the company added: “The company specialises in children that are difficult to place. That is not necessarily behaviourally difficult children but it could be kids with five siblings that need to be kept together or from the ethnic minorities that needs to be placed in their own community. We offer a complete support structure including therapy and education, which is why the costing may look more expensive.” – LONDON - EVENING STANDARD.
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6: Written Parliamentary answers
So many times have the "SS" denied the existence of adoption targets it is worth repeating again that they did exist and that local authorities greatly profited from them !
John Healey (Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government)
Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.
Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Government statistics show that 49 per cent of children in care go straight to prison. With 56,000 children in the British care system today, that means 28,000 are set to receive custodial sentences.
David Akinsanya believes the problem lies with the care system itself.
He says the care system is inflexible and does not offer appropriate care to young people.
Less than 1 per cent of the child population is looked after by the state, but the research found that 42 per cent of young women prostitutes interviewed had been in care at some point in their lives. "This is an extraordinary figure, which demonstrates that looked after children are very vulnerable to involvement in drug use and sexual abuse through prostitution," the report concluded.
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Children placed in care are three times more likely to die than others, a shock report has revealed.
In one year, 16 in 10,000 vulnerable youngsters died in care. The national death rate for children was five in every 10,000.
The study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that 800 youngsters have died in care over the last ten years - an average of two a week.
Malnutrition and diseases were the main causes of death.
Last year 12,000 kids in care had no immunisations, 9,600 had no health check ups and 8,400 never saw a dentist.
By law children should get checks within two weeks of going into care. In some local authority areas, less than 50 per cent do.
A Children and Young Persons Bill, which should improve matters, goes before MPs tomorrow.
Tim Loughton, Shadow Minister for Children, said: "Despite the efforts of beleaguered social workers, the system is failing."
Official figures show that only six per cent of the 60,000 children in care gain five or more A* to C GCSEs and more than a third are not entered for a single GCSE.
Conviction rates for young people in care are three times the rate for other juveniles. One in four girls leaving care is pregnant or already a mother. A recent case which caused outrage involved a 12-year-old living in a children's home in Blackburn who became pregnant while working as a prostitute.
WHY ,WHY,WHY, when social workers and worse still judges decide healthy happy children are "at risk" from their own parents do they not compare that risk with the horrific risks children run when put into the care system?
Leaving school with no qualifications,ending up in prison, or working as prostitutes (often pregnant from unknown fathers),or worse still dying violently either in care or soon after leaving it !
Even if they survive all the above horrors and settle down to form a new family with a loving and attentive partner the "SS" will rarely leave them alone !
Time and again the fact that the mother has been brought up in care is taken as proof that she is not capable of looking after her own children ! The unfortunate mother is usually put into an assessment process and more often than not ends up losing her children to adoption by strangers!In other words children are removed from parents deemed unsuitable by "experts" and then themselves deemed unsuitable to raise their own children such is the appalling standard of care inflicted on children hoping one day to be parents by an unfeeling state !
Dismal outcomes are the norm despite the £2.5 billion a year spent looking after them. It costs £100,000 a year to keep a child in a children's home, more than four times the fees at top private schools such as Eton or Winchester.
Fostering can cost up to £30,000 a year, compared with the £7,500 a year that state boarding schools charge parents for accommodation, with the £5,000 cost of education covered by the local authorities.
Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) Link to this | Hansard source My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts, and with the important intervention of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, to open them up so that they act in the public interest while maintaining personal privacy.
Only in the SECRET family courts are punishments (losing their children to long term fostercare or worse still adoption by strangers) imposed on persons (parents) who have neither committed a crime nor even been accused of committing any crime! THERE IS NO OTHER CASE IN UK LAW WHERE THIS CAN HAPPEN!
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British justice: a family ruined
Last autumn a small English congregation was rocked by the news that two of its parishioners had fled abroad. A 56-year-old man had helped his pregnant wife to flee from social workers, who had already taken her son into care and were threatening to seize their baby.
Most people had no idea why. For the process that led this couple to such a desperate act was entirely secret. The local authority had warned the mother not to talk to her friends or even her MP. The judge who heard the arguments from social services sat in secret. The open-minded social workers who had initially been assigned to sort out a custody battle between the woman and her previous husband were replaced by others who seemed determined to build a guilty case against her. That is how the secret State operates. A monumental injustice has been perpetrated in this quiet corner of England; our laws are being used to try to cover it up.
I will call this couple Hugh and Sarah. Neither they nor their families have ever been in trouble with the law, as far as I know. Sarah's only fault seems to have been to suffer through a violent and volatile first marriage, which produced a son. When the marriage ended, the boy was taken into temporary foster care for a few months - as a by-product of the marriage breakdown and against her will - while she “sorted her life out” and found them a new home. But even as she cleared every hurdle set by the court, social workers dreamt up new ones. The months dragged by. A psychologist said the boy was suffering terribly in care and was desperate to come home. Sarah's mother and sister, both respected professionals with good incomes, apparently offered to foster or adopt him. The local authority did not even deign to reply.
For a long time, Sarah and her family seem to have played along. At every new hearing they thought that common sense would prevail. But it didn't. The court appeared to blame her for not ending her marriage more quickly, which had put strain on the boy, while social workers seemed to insist that she now build a good relationship with the man she had left. Eventually, she came to believe that the local authority intended to have her son adopted. She also seems to have feared that they would take away her new baby, Hugh's baby, when it was born. One night in September they fled the country with the little boy. When Hugh returned a few days later, to keep his business going and his staff in jobs, he was arrested.
Many people would think this man a hero. Instead, he received a far longer sentence - 16 months for abduction - than many muggers. This kind of sentence might be justified, perhaps, to set an example to others. But the irony of this exemplary sentence is that no one was ever supposed to know the details. (I am treading a legal tightrope writing about it at all.) How could a secret sentence for a secret crime deter anyone?
Sarah's baby has now been born, in hiding. I am told that the language from social services has become hysterical. But if the State was genuinely concerned for these two children, it would have put “wanted” pictures up in every newspaper in Europe.
It won't do that, of course, because to name the woman and her children would be to tear a hole in the fabric of the secret State, a hole we could all see through. I would be able to tell you her side of the story, the child's side of the story. I would be able to tell you every vindictive twist of this saga. And the local authority knows perfectly well how it would look. So silence is maintained.
And very effective it is too. The impotence is the worst thing. The way that perfectly decent individuals are gagged and unable to defend themselves undermines a fundamental principle of British law. I have a court order on my desk that threatens all the main actors in this case with dire consequences if they talk about it to anyone.
Can that really be the way we run justice in a country that was the fount of the rule of law? At the heart of this story is a little boy who was wrenched from the mother he loves, bundled around in foster care and never told why, when she appears to have been perfectly capable of looking after him. When she had relatives who were perfectly capable of doing so. In the meantime, he was becoming more and more troubled and unhappy. To find safety and love, that little boy has had to leave England.
What does that say about our country? The public funds the judges, the courts, the social workers. It deserves to know what they do. That does not mean vilifying all social workers, or defending every parent. But it does mean ending the presumption of guilt that infects so many family court hearings. It does mean asking why certain local authorities seem unable to let go of children whose parents have resolved their difficulties. It does mean knowing how social workers could have got away with failing to return this particular boy, after his mother had met all the criteria set by a judge at the beginning. It is simply unacceptable that social services have put themselves above the law.
We need these people to be named, and to hear in their words what happened. We need to open up the family courts. We need to tear down the wall of secrecy that has forced a decent woman to live as a fugitive, to save her little boy from a life with strangers, used like a pawn in a game of vengeance. Even if the local authority were to drop its case, it is hard to see how Sarah could ever trust them enough to return. At home, for their God- fearing congregation, the question is simple: what justice can ever be done behind closed doors? And in whose name?
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Jailed: The man who helped his wife flee abroad as social workers threatened to take their baby
The businessman's wife was heavily pregnant with their first child - and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers - when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris.
She had a second reason for fleeing - she believed her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage was to be adopted against her wishes.
Her 56-year-old husband was arrested on his return to Britain, and later jailed for 16 months for abducting the eight- year-old, known as Child S.
The boy's mother, who is a professional woman in her 40s but cannot be identified for legal reasons, has since given birth prematurely to a girl and is struggling to cope far from friends and family.
Her plight raises further disturbing questions about the secret family courts which only last week were in the spotlight when social workers illegally snatched a newborn baby from its mother.
Such cases are shrouded in the heaviest secrecy - with families threatened with jail if they discuss their fears that their children are being removed unjustly.
But the story of the father and his family in hiding can be revealed for the first time because he appealed in a criminal case - which can be reported - begging for his 16-month jail sentence to be reduced.
His plea to the High Court was dismissed and the father, who has never seen his baby daughter, was led away in tears.
A teacher friend of the father was also in tears.
The friend said: "This isn't justice. They are a law- abiding family with respect for the police, but putting him in prison for protecting his family makes the law an ass. What good does it serve?"
The three appeal judges were told yesterday how Child S's parents had separated in 2004 after a volatile and violent marriage.
The mother claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she "sorted her life out".
But when she asked for his return, social services refused.
After months of legal battles, a family court judge sided with the council's plan to put the boy up for enforced adoption. By this time, the mother was pregnant.
A friend said: "She was led to believe by social services she would have no chance of keeping the child she was carrying, which is outrageous. She was in despair."
According to papers before the appeal court, she then made contact with her son at school last September and whispered instructions to him through the playground fence.
In the early hours, Child S "crept out" of his foster home to meet his mother and stepfather and the escape plan was under way.
The mother left a note which claimed: "We had to go." The court was told that detectives believed the mother and children were in Spain or France.
Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the "powerful emotions" involved, but said: "Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents.
"Those who act must expect a prison sentence because a real punishment is called for and to deter others who might be subject to the same pressures."
The judge expressed his disbelief that the father did not know the whereabouts of his wife.
The father - who has adult children from a previous marriage - is being destroyed by prison, a friend said outside court.
She added: "He is absolutely shell-shocked by the actions of the courts. Basically, they have said you are not allowed to be human in your responses.
"What parent wouldn't act to stop their child being taken from them? He has aged ten years and gone grey with the worry of it all."
Free the 'Grandfather One'
Two MPs have put down an early day motion in the House of Commons to bring attention to what they believe is a miscarriage of justice. It notes that a man named Charles Roy Taylor has been sent to prison for 20 months for being in contact with his stepgrandson. It “wonders if this is a good use of scarce prison resources; and calls for the Secretary of State for Justice to consider whether he should be released for Christmas”. Jack Straw no doubt has bigger things on his mind. And no story like this is ever as simple as it looks. But it deserves attention.
Charles Roy Taylor is a 71-year-old with a heart condition. He knew that a jail sentence was the penalty he might pay if he did not take steps to avoid his stepgrandson. But this seems desperately unfair. The teenager, whom we shall call John, has been in care since his mother died of an overdose. He has been phoning his grandparents and running away to see them for some time. In the end, social services became concerned that the grandparents were “undermining the care plan” by continuing to see John. It does not appear to be clear to the grandparents what the care plan is. But it does not seem to include them, even though they could presumably be John's first port of call when he leaves the care system at 18.
It is not the local authority's fault that this child had a difficult childhood. In taking responsibility for him, social workers were doing their best. Neither he nor his grandparents sound like the easiest people to deal with. But as in so many cases of this kind, bitterness between the family and the authorities appears to have escalated into a ludicrous situation, which simply cannot be in the best interests of the child.
After a great deal of argy-bargy that I cannot go into for legal reasons, Mr Taylor last year gave an undertaking not to communicate with John until he was 18. But asking a man not to pick up the phone to a child, not to take him in when he turns up at the front door, is a harsh demand. It is tantamount to asking him to deny that the child exists, when what that child may need most is attention.
In stalking cases, when Person A is ordered to avoid Person B, it is usually at the explicit request of Person B, who fears assault. In this case, Person B was apparently desperate to see his grandparents. He seems to see them as his best hope. So in whose interests was such an order? If he has broken his undertaking, Mr Taylor has surely been responding as humanely as most of us would. A jail sentence seems wholly disproportionate.
When I first learnt of this case I felt that there must be more to it. That perhaps the grandparents were suspected of abuse. I can find no evidence of any such allegation. Indeed, the authorities initially seemed happy to leave them in contact with John. What appears to have happened is that the exchanges between the family and social workers became increasingly bitter, all of whom no doubt believed themselves to be in the right.
The council cannot comment on individual cases. It will say only that “Mr Taylor was sentenced by the High Court after he breached a court order”. It cannot comment on John's treatment in care. John seems unhappy. He has apparently asked to be discharged. But his voice can only be heard within the system, a system he seems determined to rebel against.
There is a growing campaign on the internet to release Mr Taylor. This has two parts. The first is that a 20-month jail sentence is preposterous when the prisons are so overcrowded that dangerous criminals are being released early. The second is that Mr Taylor was allegedly committed to jail in a “secret court”. This seems unlikely. But it is an allegation that is made frequently. Legally, you cannot send someone to jail in a secret court. In practice, it is questionable whether a judge sitting in a family court from which press and public are excluded, who declares the court open for a few minutes to pronounce sentence, is really “open”.
This matters, because the view of the legal profession increasingly seems to be that the less we know the better. The justification for keeping family courts closed, despite the recommendations of the Commons Constitutional Affairs Select Committee, is to protect children's privacy. Yet this argument is no longer confined to the family courts. It is increasingly being trotted out in criminal cases too.
In the past month, one court has ruled that the defendants in a witchcraft trial, who were alleged to have done unspeakable things to children, could not be named in case this led to the identification of their victims. Another court banned publication of anything about a mother accused of poisoning her child with salt, in case the information affected her surviving child. The Times has recently succeeded in overturning yet another ruling, that a man who pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children could not be named in case his relatives might suffer. The Court of Appeal found that the man should be named, and that the attempts to restrict the proceedings were invalid.
The law must not become a secret process. Some lawyers seem convinced that the media want to identify vulnerable children, but it is always possible to write these stories without doing so. Seeing that justice is done is a fundamental part of law.
What is sad is that our elaborate system of child protection, which is designed to put children first, has sometimes become a way of avoiding accountability. The two MPs are right to ask whose interests Mr Taylor's jailing serves. Presumably, the last thing John wants is for his grandfather to be in jail. They are both victims of a system that asks us to take on trust that it knows best. But prison is surely the wrong place for Charles Roy Taylor.
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How social workers took away our children for 11 months without a shred of evidence
Enjoying the sunshine at a park near their home, the Aston family cling closely to each other as if to make sure they will never be prised apart again. Jodie, a bubbly ten-year-old, entwines her arms around her brother, Luke, who was 12 last Thursday, while both children smile fondly at their parents, Craig and Donna.
For an interminable 11 months, Jodie and Luke were removed from their home because their parents faced accusations from doctors of the most hideous crime imaginable: sexually molesting their own daughter.
They were permitted to visit their children only under strict supervision, for just three hours a week. All letters which they sent to Jodie and Luke were vetted by social workers - making them feel like criminals.
What's more, they were cruelly ordered not to say "I love you" to either boy or girl. Throughout this ordeal, the couple always protested their innocence and were relieved beyond belief. When Mr Justice Holman cleared them of any wrongdoing. He ordered the children's return, insisting that his ruling be made public so lessons are learned by doctors, social workers and lawyers working in the child protection service.
In a landmark judgment, he warned that even two decades after the infamous Cleveland child abuse scandal, parents are still being wrongly accused of molesting their sons and daughters.
The Cleveland controversy was Britain's biggest and first mass child abuse scare.
In 1987, 121 children were taken into state care in North-East England over five months after abuse was diagnosed on the basis of physical examinations carried out by a controversial paediatrician called Marietta Higgs.
The parents were often wrongly condemned - just like the Astons today - without their children being listened to or their family background being taken into account.
The doctors in the Eighties had relied on the discredited sign called Reflex Anal Dilatation (RAD), said to indicate sexual abuse.
Last year, the controversial sign was condemned as unreliable by the Government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, who admitted that its use had led to mistakes in Cleveland.
Everyone hoped the lessons had been learnt from Cleveland. But now the shocking extent of young Jodie Aston's ordeal is becoming clear, it seems that is tragically not the case.
Mr Justice Holman said it was inevitable that Jodie was now "emotionally damaged" by her experiences.
After the private hearing at Leeds High Court, he said: "Unless there is clear diagnostic evidence of abuse (for example, the presence of semen or a foreign body internally), purely medical assessments and opinions should not be allowed to predominate. Even 20 years after Cleveland, I wonder if the lessons have fully been learned." The importance of this judgment cannot be overstated. Jodie's father, a 33-year-old railway signals' engineer, courageously agreed to talk for the first time about the case.
He said: "I hope the judge's words will rein in doctors, and help other parents accused of sexually abusing their children without any real proof." What happened to the Aston family seems incredible in 21st-century England. They are now seeking legal advice in the hope that the General Medical Council, the doctors' disciplinary body, will investigate their case.
Yesterday, Leeds' Safeguarding Children's Board launched a review into Jodie's case, saying "all relevant, accurate facts" must be taken into account in future child abuse inquiries.
Officials said it was too early to reveal how many other children have been taken into care or even adopted, as a result of suspected sexual abuse over recent years.
However, the Mail is aware of two other families in the city who have had their children removed, largely on the basis of the RAD testing technique, yet who insist they are entirely innocent.
The Astons' nightmare began when they took Jodie, then aged eight, to Leeds General Infirmary's casualty department on a Monday evening in August 2005. She had scraped her groin on a small wall while playing with friends.
She was examined by doctors in Leeds at least eight times. Photographs and videos - later shown in court - were taken of her naked body again and again.
The girl was referred to the community paediatrics department at the city's St James's University Hospital on the following Thursday. Nothing was found to be amiss after an intimate examination. But two months later, Jodie was changing into her pyjamas after school when her mother saw a spot of blood on her pants.
Jodie, who was prone to eczema and had visible raw splits in the skin of her hands and arms, was again taken to casualty before being referred for a second time to the paediatrics unit at St James's.
The hospital has a busy child protection team, overseen by the respected paediatric consultant Dr Christopher Hobbs.
Significantly, he is an original pioneer of the RAD technique in this country. In June 1986, just a year before the Cleveland controversy broke, Dr Hobbs and his colleague Jane Wynne introduced young Marietta Higgs to this new way of diagnosing child molestation during a Leeds' medical conference.
By looking at and probing a child's bottom, the paediatricians claimed they could see if there was reflex anal dilatation and - therefore - abuse.
Dr Higgs enthusiastically embraced the technique, provoking the Cleveland crisis.
However, 80 per cent of the "victims" were later returned to their parents because they had not been hurt at all.
Since then, the nagging doubts about the technique have grown. Today, it is well-known that RAD can appear normally and spontaneously in any child.
According to some paediatricians - notably an expert named Professor Astrid Hegar from America, where RAD has been abandoned in some states - half of all children who have not been sexually abused show the same "tell-tale" sign when their bottoms are examined.
That means, of course, that almost any family taking their child to hospital or the doctor's surgery can be accused of child abuse.
Yet in Britain, many child doctors - including Dr Hobbs - rely on the technique as an important piece of many pieces in the jigsaw of diagnosing child abuse.
Even before 1987 - at the height of the Cleveland crisis - both Hobbs and Wynne were discovering high numbers of child sex abuse cases in Leeds by using RAD.
According to the doctors' research, published in the medical journal The Lancet, 94 boys and 243 girls were diagnosed as sexual abuse victims in a previous two-year period. The paper - still quoted in medical literature - says that eight in ten of the boys, and a quarter of the girls, had "anal signs".
Astonishingly, in half of all cases, the abusers were deemed to be the children's natural father and - even more bizarrely - five per cent were women. A quarter of the Leeds adults involved were convicted by the courts. The two doctors wrote at the time: "Sexual abuse is emerging as a major child and mental health problem." So it was against this background - in a city whose medical establishments were at the centre of the RAD debate - that Jodie Aston was taken by her mother to hospital. It was the first of many visits and, during one, on November 24, 2005, she met Dr Hobbs.
Although he did not physically examine Jodie, at the end of the appointment he and a fellow paediatrician said that they suspected child abuse. It was a terrible moment for Jodie's mother, Donna.
She says today: "I couldn't believe it. I began to cry. I walked out of there not knowing what to think. Jodie saw that I was quiet, and thought she had done something wrong. I waited in the car park for Craig to come and pick us up.
"I asked Jodie if her Daddy had done anything to her. She said "no" and I believed her. But when I got in the car, Craig saw that I had been crying. He asked me what was wrong and I just mumbled something about child abuse because I didn't want to upset Jodie." At home, after the children had gone to bed, Donna had to ask her husband a question that no wife should have to. Craig said he had not touched his daughter.
"I was being accused of something worse than murder," Craig said this week.
"From that point, we began to watch the children like hawks.
"We did not allow them even to go to the shops nearby. Luke said we were treating them like babies," added Donna, 34. However, the family remained under suspicion. Donna was told by the authorities that she was also considered the potential abuser of her daughter.
The following March, Jodie faced another assessment with Dr Hobbs. Just a few weeks earlier, she had again come home with a small blood spot on her pants.
This time, the paediatrician conducted a physical examination, which included RAD. He wrote in his report afterwards: "I feel that the time has come for me to involve social services, because I am concerned about the possibility that she may have been sexually abused."
The family were trapped. The doctors ignored Donna's suggestion that eczema might be the cause of the blood spots. Meanwhile, social workers began visiting the family regularly.
Overwhelmed with worry, Craig and Donna were advised to get an independent second medical opinion on Jodie's condition. Therefore, their GP arranged for a doctor called Ruth Skelton to examine their daughter. This proved to be a disastrous move.
Dr Skelton had been trained by Dr Hobbs. As Mr Justice Holman commented in his judgment: "In my view, the selection of her was deeply regrettable. Dr Skelton lacked the complete independence that is required for a second opinion in these sorts of circumstances.
"She was being asked to review the previous opinion of someone who was a more senior colleague, then working daily at the same hospital, and who had been her own teacher."
It emerged that Dr Skelton had discussed Jodie's case with Dr Hobbs before the so-called independent examination took place in March last year.
Dr Skelton concluded that she could spot RAD. According to her report, she said that Jodie had "been sexually abused chronically, over a long period, both anally and probably vaginally . . . I feel that this child is not protected at all at present." Both Jodie and her elder brother, Luke, were taken away from the parents the same day. It was arranged that they would live with their maternal grandparents, aged 77 and 78, three miles away from their home in Armley, a suburb of Leeds. Donna still finds it hard to relate the story as she sits with the children and Craig in the family's neat sitting room.
She says: "The social workers came at 9.30am to tell us they wanted to remove Jodie and Luke. It was a Thursday. Jodie and Luke were at school. They never came home for almost a year.
"I packed a few things for the first night: toothbrushes, pyjamas, a big bear toy that was Jodie's favourite. Then I had to come home alone.
"Craig was in a worse state than me. I thought he was going to harm himself. We woke up in night crying. We hugged each other because it was as if the children were dead."
This week, she said: "There were more tears, but we had to cope for the sake of the children. On Christmas Day last year, we were only allowed to see them for one hour." Yet the family's fortunes were changing.
Craig's lawyers had instructed the American paediatrician, Professor Hegar, to give her views. She has examined 40,000 children for suspected abuse during a 28-year career. She believes that a family's history - and a host of other factors - are vital when deciding if a child has been molested.
Professor Hegar studied the medical reports and photographs of Jodie. She said: "I believe that the medical examiners in this case have relied heavily on Reflex Anal Dilatation as diagnostic of sexual abuse.
"This is a common finding in up to 49 per cent of children who have not been abused. There is no research ... that supports the use of RAD as a sensitive or specific finding for sexual abuse."
Professor Hegar also suggested that dermatologists should examine Jodie to find another cause of her bleeding. One skin expert diagnosed that a small split in her skin, caused by eczema, may have produced the suspect spots of blood on Jodie's underwear.
Her crucial views were also heard by video link during the hearing into Jodie's case. Afterwards, Mr Justice Holman said Donna and Craig Aston are intelligent, responsible parents.
During the hearing, he met both their "bright and well-mannered" children, giving them chocolate biscuits and talking to them for nearly an hour.
Jodie told him that no one had touched her at home, or at primary school. Her brother Luke declared, quite spontaneously, that it was "all a big mistake".
He added: "We have got the best mum and dad. Why would they abuse my little sister?"
Both of the Aston children said they loved their parents dearly and only wanted to go home. Now, at last, thanks to an enlightened judge, they have finally got their wish.
But how many other families who suffered similarly disgraceful misdiagnoses, more than 20 years after it had been presumed the lessons of Cleveland had been learnt, are still fighting to clear their names?
-------------------------
My baby had cancer but social workers falsely accused me of child abuse and took all three of my children
One November afternoon at just after two o'clock, Louise Mason stood in a hospital ward and kissed her 11-week- old baby goodbye.
She had dressed the little girl with care, packing a suitcase of tiny clothes and soft toys. Inside, she had placed a handwritten letter to the foster parents who would look after her in the future.
On that day five years ago, Louise felt as though her heart would burst.
"I wrote down everything about my daughter," she told me this week.
"I said she had colicky attacks at six in the evening, and should be rocked until she slept. I said she needed to be coaxed to take her milk."
After writing that sad note, the young mother from Northampton was forced to hand over the baby girl to social workers, who carried her off to her new home.
Louise, 32, then returned to her house, with its empty cot, in the seaside city of Derry, Northern Ireland. It must have been one of the loneliest journeys of her life.
The baby girl - now aged five - has never been returned to this wholly innocent mother who, because she was wrongly accused of harming her baby, also subsequently had two other children taken away from her.
This week, though, a High Court revealed there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice, and ordered that Louise must be reunited with all her children.
Furthermore, the judge, Mr Justice Gillon - in an age where children are removed from their parents by family courts sitting in secret - took the extremely unusual step of allowing Louise to be named, and for the tragic details of her case to become public.
In a statement he said: "The workings of the family justice system in this case are matters of public interest, and do merit public discussion. Public confidence in the process is necessary, and the emergence of the changing circumstances of this case merits an open discussion."
He went on to list the extraordinary catalogue of events which began when, worried out of her mind, Louise took her sickly month- old baby daughter to her GP, begging for help.
These shocking details shed light on a family justice system normally hidden from view.
Of course, there are parents who harm their children and deserve the full punishment of the law.
But in the family courts, thousands of children are removed from their parents to adoption or foster care in deeply dubious hearings which never become public.
If anyone speaks about the details - to a neighbour, to a friend, to a relative - they are in contempt of court.
Crucially, the courts' culture of secrecy means that if a social worker lies, or fabricates notes, or a doctor makes a mistake, then no one finds out, and there is no retribution.
It is only because Louise was charged with a criminal offence in an open and public court - like other innocent mothers wrongly accused of infanticide, such as Angela Cannings and the late Sally Clark - that her harrowing story can be heard.
Louise was born in Northampton, the youngest of three. Her father had a plastering business, and her mother raised a close, caring family.
By the time she was in her 20s, Louise was running a successful restaurant. A few years later, she met her boyfriend, who came from Derry, and the couple had a baby. They moved to Northern Ireland to set up home.
Louise says now: "I came here in 2001, thinking Derry was the perfect place for children to grow up."
The couple had a second baby - another girl, born a healthy 7lb. But then she and her partner split up, leaving Louise a single mother.
"I was quite able to cope with the toddler and the baby, who was very placid," explains Louise. "I was a full-time mother and proud of it."
Then came the bombshell. One Saturday, when the baby was just four weeks old, Louise noticed that she was looking very ill, as though she was about to collapse.
In fact, it is now known that without medical care she would have died within an hour.
"I rushed my daughter around to our local doctor, who immediately rang the Derry hospital. I hurried there with this little bundle in my arms.
"The baby was taken off me in the children's ward. I next saw her five hours later, at 7pm.
"One of the doctors then sat me down and said: 'It is touch and go'" The team mentioned right away that it might be cancer. I remember that as though it were yesterday," says Louise, crying this week at the memory.
"The next morning, they again said cancer was suspected."
A day later, on the Sunday, the baby was taken by ambulance to the Royal Belfast hospital 60 miles away. She had a blood transfusion and tests. By the Tuesday, three days after the emergency admission, Louise was hoping that she would get a proper diagnosis.
But further investigation had showed that the left kidney and the area around it was swollen, and among medical staff there was a wide variety of opinion about the cause. Before long, doctors became highly suspicious that this was, in fact, caused by an injury.
Louise was called into a room and confronted by a doctor.
"He asked me if I had done anything to hurt my baby. He said he had called the social services and the police. I promised him I had done nothing to my child."
Her words fell on deaf ears. Back home, her elder daughter, who was being cared for by a neighbour, was collected by social workers and taken into foster care.
Yet still the trusting Louise thought it would all be sorted out in a few days. How wrong she was.
Seven weeks later, on November 15, 2002, the police contacted her.
"They asked me to attend the police station for an interview under caution. They said I was suspected of grievous bodily harm with intent."
The interview dragged on. At lunchtime, Louise was put in a cell. She was distraught.
"I was frozen with fright," she recalls.
"I kept telling them that there was no bruising or redness found on the baby, so how could I have hurt her?"
Four days later, worse news followed: her baby daughter was to be taken into foster care, too.
At the hospital, she was told by social workers to get the 11-week- old baby she was accused of harming ready. Her fingers trembling, Louise dressed her baby and kissed her goodbye.
From then on, she was allowed to see her children at a special supervised centre for only four-and-a-half hours a week.
They were delivered to the centre from their foster homes by social workers, and then taken away again.
"The eldest one could remember me," says Louise, "but I had hardly had a chance to bond with the new baby before she was taken from me."
All the time, Louise faced a barrage of accusations. The authorities claimed that she was a potential killer.
A leading member of the social work team told her: "I do not think you are safe to be left in a room alone with any boy or girl."
In January 2004 - a little over year later - a formal application to take the children into care was made in the family division of the Northern Ireland High Court in Belfast.
The medical evidence given by five doctors from the hospitals was damning. They said Louise had deliberately hurt the baby girl with great force.
"It was then that they began to make noises about adoption,' says Louise. 'My legal team were fighting hard, but it was a battle we could not win because we did not have the medical evidence." The children remained with their foster parents.
That autumn, Louise was brought before a criminal court in Derry facing two charges of causing grievous bodily harm to the baby girl.
It was only then that anyone listened to her.
In an emotional outburst, she blurted out to the jury that she wanted to take a lie detector test to prove that she had done nothing wrong. It was the turning point. The jury believed her, and in November 2004 she was acquitted of the charges. However, her children remained in care.
Meanwhile, the story of the mother begging for a lie detector test was reported in the local Press. By chance, the consultant radiologist who had treated Louise's baby girl at the local hospital on the very first day she was brought in, read the article and was appalled.
He remembered the case and the wide divergence of medical opinion, yet had never known that Louise was under suspicion or that she was to have been prosecuted. He was convinced then that the child was suffering from a rare form of cancer of the left kidney, called neuroblastoma, which could have caused the bleeding.
Dr D - as he was called in Mr Justice Gillon's judgment this week - contacted Louise's solicitor and offered to help clear her name.
"It was a miracle," Louise told me.
"That doctor was my guardian angel. The last years have been very hard for me. I was pilloried. It felt like torture having my children taken from me."
Even though she had been acquitted, the social workers appeared to ignore the verdict.
But Dr D told Louise's solicitor that he was struck by the "power" of her request to the jury to have a lie detector test.
He offered to help, suggesting that a team of independent paediatricians, including experts on kidneys, cancer and non- accidental injury, should be asked to give their own opinions on the findings of the five hospital doctors.
Significantly, the independent experts thought that the baby's internal bleeding had occurred naturally. And when their testimony was produced by Louise's lawyers at a Court of Appeal hearing, the judges quashed the family court rulings.
As a result, in June last year the Foyle Health and Social Services Trust, which covers Derry, said it no longer intended to pursue their action to keep Louise's children in care or have them adopted. It was an almighty climbdown.
By then, however, another tragedy had happened on the say-so of the social workers.
In 2005, a year after she had been acquitted, Louise had became pregnant for a third time.
She is reluctant to talk about the father, or name him, although they are no longer together - but at Christmas time, when she was heavily pregnant, the social workers called and told her they planned to take the latest addition away from her at birth.
"I couldn't believe my ears," says Louise.
"I had been declared not guilty in a criminal court - yet they still had both my children and were wanting my new baby. It was torture."
The baby was born early in 2006. True to their word, Louise had just given birth and was trying to breastfeed when the social workers arrived at Altnagelvin Hospital, Derry.
The nurses, on the instructions of the social workers, took the newborn baby away to safety in another ward while Louise's solicitor remonstrated with them that it was cruel to do such a thing.
It was five hours before the baby was returned to Louise in the maternity unit.
Ten days later, when she was about to leave hospital, the social workers returned and seized the child, placing the baby with foster parents.
Only recently - following the collapse of the Social Services Trust case - has Louise been given back the baby, and her eldest child, too.
She has missed a whole chunk of their early years.
But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that the little girl who was so sick as a baby may never return home again. She has known no mother or father apart from her foster parents, and has bonded with them very closely.
Although she has now recovered - significantly, it was a form of cancer that can go into remission of its own accord, without the need for surgery or chemotherapy - her left kidney does not function normally.
But she is happy with the couple whom she calls her Mummy and Daddy.
Recently, as part of a phased plan to reunite her permanently with her natural family, she came back to stay with Louise for a night.
"She cried terribly for her foster parents all the evening - it made us all unhappy," says Louise, sadly.
"She knows me, but will only call me Mummy Louise. It breaks me into pieces.
"She may never come home and live with me again because she wants to be with the only people she has ever recognised as her parents. It may be cruel to take her back now."
It is, by any standards, a tragic indictment of the child protection system.
-------------------------
Prime Minister Responds on Adoption
This does go to the nub of the issue. What is so different between parents in England and parents in Scotland that means that it is "essential" for under 5s to get adopted in England, but they can go home to their parents in Scotland?
EDMs are motions in parliament. Normally they don't get debated. However, they are a sort of petition signed only by Members of Parliament. You can ask your MP to sign an EDM. You need to say which number EDM it is. MPs who are members of the government cannot sign EDMs, but you can ask them to write a letter to the minister in support of the EDM.
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMByMember.aspx? MID=4735&SESSION=891
EDM 124
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34214&SESSION=891
That this House notes that local authorities and their staff are incentivised to ensure that children are adopted; is concerned about increasing numbers of babies being taken into care, not for the safety of the infant, but because they are easy to get adopted; and calls urgently for effective scrutiny of care proceedings to stop this from happening.
EDM125
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34215&SESSION=891
That this House believes that mothers should be encouraged to breastfeed as this is in the interests of the long-term health of babies; recognises that for newborn babies this means breastfeeding on demand; further believes that newborn babies in care should also be breastfed on demand where this does not result in any risk to the baby; and calls for the Government to introduce guidelines to ensure that facilities are provided to ensure that newborn babies can be breastfed on demand.
EDM 126
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34216&SESSION=891
That this House notes the comments of a senior social worker that meetings have been held during which solicitors acting for parents have discussed how to undermine the cases of their clients; further notes that there are many odd cases in which solicitors fail to oppose care proceedings or accept that the section 31 threshold has been met notwithstanding the opposition of their clients; recognises that reporting and obtaining the investigation of such behaviour outwith parliamentary proceedings remains a contempt of court for hon. Members; and asks the Solicitors Regulatory Authority to review the implementation of the new solicitors' code of conduct and how this relates to conflicts of interest in the Family Court.
EDM127
Download Form N434, Notice of change of solicitor, Court Service Forms, Administrative Court.
Local solicitors and barristers often already enjoy a close and friendly "working relationship" with the local authority.These legal aid lawyers are widely known in the trade as "PROFESSIONAL LOSERS !" and justifiably so as they make a point of losing every single case they undertake when opposing social services! You cannot win if you have "enemies in your own camp" so if your lawyers start conceding every point to the opposition and stop you from saying anything in your own defence ,then be brave! Get rid of them !
In many courts if you represent yourself you can get technical help with documents etc from the PSU (PERSONAL SUPPORT UNIT).In London they are to be found in room M104,Royal Courts of Justice,the Strand tel 02079477701/7703 or 4th floor Room 408,first avenue house,high holburn, Principal Registry of the Family Division Tel 02079477737.
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34217&SESSION=891
That this House regrets the Government's proposals to retain secrecy within the family courts; believes that this secrecy permeates bad practice throughout the whole system of children services; feels that it is possible to protect the identity of the child while allowing parents to talk and seek advice publicly about their treatment in the family courts, and that professional witnesses should be uniquely identified to monitor consistency; further believes that every case should have an anonymised judgement handed to the parents that they can discuss publicly; and calls on the Government to recognise that there are very serious problems in the system that have been postponed rather than resolved by the limited proposals contained within the consultation document.
EDM128
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34218&SESSION=891
That this House notes that in an email dated 24th October 2000, John Radford, Doncaster's then Director of Public Health, described the issue of research on babies by Dr David Southall at Doncaster Hospital in the late 1980s as `potentially a hot potato as to my recall the intervention resulted in increased deaths and didn't have proper consent'; expresses concern that the details of this research and its outcomes have been covered up by the health authorities; expresses particular concern that the research protocol specifically required that no action be taken to prevent cot death in the children selected until sufficient data had been collected; notes that the inquiry into CNEP ignored CNEP in Doncaster; and calls for a public inquiry into this and other research managed by Dr Southall to identify why the checks and balances in the system failed.
EDM129
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34219&SESSION=891
That this House notes that it is common practice for a firm of solicitors to perform outsourced work for a local authority and also to represent parents when parties in cases against the same local authority; notes and is surprised that this conflict of interest is acceptable under the professional conduct rules; understands that some parents would be surprised to find that this is the case; and calls for the Law Society to require that parents be asked to confirm in writing that they recognise that the firm they are instructing is conflicted in this way as part of the client engagement process.
EDM130
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx? EDMID=34220&SESSION=891
That this House notes that from time to time the advice given by an expert appointed by one party to a court case is used to permit the exclusion of capacity of a further party to that case and then the Official Solicitor is brought in to act on behalf of the latter party; believes that it is an unacceptable conflict of interest; and calls, notwithstanding the duty of experts to the court, for the Government to introduce legislation to prevent this from occurring.
.
I try to help parents who are desperately trying to recover or at least make contact either with their children or worse still with "newborn babies" snatched by social services from mothers that have never caused them harm.Those social workers who snatch, and those lawyers, "experts" and especially the "ESTABLISHMENT JUDGES" who combine to help them should all be sent to prison for "CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY" for a very long time! I will explain and justify this later on. They can be beaten, but only if you fight from start to finish as the following shows!
Damages win for Tim and Gina Williams - falsely suspected of abusing their children
A couple whose three children spent two years in care because social workers wrongly believed that they were at risk of abuse have been awarded a “six-figure” sum in compensation.
Tim and Gina Williams’s son and two daughters were taken from them and placed with separate foster families. The couple, from Newport, South Wales, received an undisclosed sum yesterday in an agreed settlement at the High Court in Cardiff and were given a full written apology from Newport City Council.
The court was told that there had never been any evidence that the children, now aged 14, 11 and 9, had been abused. As a result of the social workers’ actions, the Williams missed their children’s birthdays, Christmases and their first days in new schools.
A judge completely exonerated them at the High Court in October 2006 and the children were returned to them.
The couple, who waived their right to anonymity, began a compensation claim against Newport City Council and Royal Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust soon after. Robin Tolson, QC, for the couple, said: “This settlement brings closure, at least of a kind, for Tim and Gina Williams and their children. The effect of what happened will continue to be felt for a long time but at least this now marks the end of four years spent fighting for their children and their rights before the court.”
Mr Williams, 39, and two of his children sat at the back of the court during the brief hearing.
In August 2004 Mr Williams called the police after finding his youngest daughter naked from the waist down with an 11-year-old friend. The girl was taken to hospital for a precautionary check-up and the doctor who carried out the examination claimed to have found evidence of longstanding abuse but by an adult, not an 11-year-old.
Mr Williams and his wife were told that they were under suspicion and the children were taken into care. A second doctor confirmed the evidence of abuse and the couple were restricted to supervised weekly visits to their children.
There were exonerated after a US expert in child abuse examined the evidence and disputed the claims by the British doctors, who subsequently accepted that they had been mistaken. The council conceded that the children should never have been taken from their parents on the basis of the evidence.
Giving his judgment, Judge Crispin Masterman said that the children’s names were never put on the child protection register and it was simply decided to remove them from the family home. He said that the criticisms were coupled with an acknowledgment that all professionals involved were acting for the good of the children.
“It is undoubtedly true that social services departments have in recent years operated with inadequate resources and under immense stress and run the risk of attracting equal criticism whether they remove a child or whether they do not.”
A Newport council representative said: “A settlement has now been reached which will support the children’s future. The wellbeing of the children has remained paramount throughout this case. While the local authority has offered sincere apologies to the family, our priority was always the safety of the children. The court concluded that the council acted in good faith given the strength of the medical evidence presented.
“The council, together with other members of Newport safeguarding children board, has embraced the recommendations of the multi-agency review.”
Under the terms of the settlement, the family are banned from talking about it.
Sue & Tess
From Catherine Sara
Dear Ian,
We salute you.
All it takes for evil to succeed is that good people do nothing.
________________________________________
Hi Ian
A teenage mother has been reunited with her baby after the child was taken by social services without a court order.
The boy was taken two hours after he was born to the 18-year-old, who had just left the care of Nottingham social services.
Hours later, Mr Justice Munby at the High Court said no baby could be removed "as the result of a decision taken by officials in some room".
The woman's solicitor Stuart Luke said she would lodge a claim for damages.
'Birth plan'
He said she faced the prospect of "an application by the local authority social services for an interim care order, which will be vigorously contested".
Mr Justice Munby said that without the appropriate order and given that the mother was still in hospital, mother and child should be reunited.
Describing the situation as "most unfortunate", he said officials involved in the case "should have known better".
The boy was born healthy and taken from his mother about two hours after his birth without an order having been made.
Mr Luke, from the firm Bhatia Best, said: "Mother and child were reunited 46 minutes after Mr Justice Munby's order at 1209 (GMT)."
Hospital staff were apparently shown a "birth plan" prepared by local authority social services.
'Unfortunate removal'
The plan said the mother, who had a troubled childhood and suffered from mental health problems, was to be separated from the child, and no contact allowed without supervision by social workers.
The judge said the removal of a child could only be lawful if a police constable was taking action to protect a child, or there was a court order in place.
Mr Luke said the mother would be making a claim for damages against social services officials "arising out of the unfortunate removal of her child without lawful authority shortly after his birth".
The judge ordered the council to prepare a comprehensive plan setting out their proposals to assist the mother as she had recently left local authority care, by no later than 8 February.
--------------
Baby 'snatched' from mother minutes after birth is ordered BACK into foster care
A mother who had her baby son taken illegally by social workers wept yesterday as a court ordered he should be put in care after all.
The 18-year-old, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, broke down in tears and had to be supported by two relatives as she received the devastating news.
It has been a three-day rollercoaster for the young mother. Her son, known as Baby G for legal reasons,was snatched from her in hospital by social services two hours after birth.
Family courts decide on children's lives behind closed doors
Then the infant was returned to her later that day after a High Court judge ruled the officials had acted illegally because they did not have a court order.
Yesterday, after a further hearing before the Family Proceedings Court over two days, district judge Richard Inglis upheld an application by Nottingham council for an interim care order.
The mother attended the behindcloseddoors hearing yesterday but did not give evidence.
"It has been a thoroughly traumatic few days for her and she is devastated and drained," a friend said afterwards.
The case highlights the lack of transparency in the family courts, with the reasons behind the decision will not be revealed to the public.
Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who campaigns for greater openness in the system, said: "If they are going to take such draconian action as to separate a newborn baby from its mother, they should be willing to justify it in the open.
"What worries me most about these types of cases is they do not explain what they are doing or why.
"There are other options, like a mother and child foster placement or an assessment centre so that they do not have to be separated.
"But they almost seem to revel in separating newborn children from their mothers in this country."
Baby G was born in hospital in Nottingham at 2am on Wednesday and social services took him around 4am. His mother, who has mental health problems, has just left local authority care.
The baby was taken after staff at the hospital were shown a "birth plan" that was prepared by social workers.
The plan said the mother, who had a troubled childhood, was to be separated from the child, and no contact would be allowed without supervision by social workers.
Mr Justice Munby made an order in the High Court in London that the baby should be returned to his mother, which he duly was.
In his ruling, he said that "on the face of it" social services officials had acted unlawfully because they had not obtained a court order.
Giving his decision at the Family Proceedings Court in Nottingham yesterday, Judge Inglis said: "The court has decided that the welfare of G requires that he lives in local authority foster care on an interim basis.
"His mother will have frequent periods of contact with him.
"When further inquiries have been made the court expects to be in a better position later this year to make a decision about who should care for G."
Afterwards, Nottingham council said that the interim care order "enables the council to provide appropriate protection for the baby, whilst continuing to support the mother, who is also our concern".
It added: "The council and a range of other partner agencies had enough concern for the baby's welfare during the pregnancy to believe that action would be needed to protect the baby when it was born."
The decision was made at a case conference in December 2007 at which the mother and her legal representative were present, the council said.
"The law does not allow application for a court order before birth. The protection plan made in advance included the intention to apply for a care order immediately following the birth of this baby."
Margaret McGlade, chairman of Nottingham's safeguarding children board, said there will be a review of "the communications between all parties, particularly following the baby's birth to see if there are any lessons to be learned".
Last night the mother's solicitors, Bhatia Best, said they are considering a renewed application to the High Court under the European Convention on Human Rights.
A SOCIAL WORKER'S POEM
I'm really very nice.
I help you loving mothers,
And give you good advice!
Your income is too low.
I'm really very sorry,
All your kids will have to go!
He beats you black and blue?
We'll soon be there to help you,
And take your children too!
You're really not too clever
We'll get your kids adopted
When can you see them?? NEVER!!
You need a brief respite;
We'll soon take ALL your children
Give up the hopeless fight!
So many years ago
If now you have a baby
That too will have to go!
To get some more they seek,
For each one brings a tidy sum
£400 per week!!
Where paedophiles abound
Each time we cover up abuse
"The gutter press" come round
We soon proved that they would
Fathers shout and mothers cry
Their kids are gone for good!
Our experts they will say
"You're a danger to your children,
So we'll take them all away!"
Happy and well fed
But one day you might hurt them
That's what our experts said
With us they will agree
They dare not risk another course
You have no chance you see!
So don't you breathe a word
Of what goes on inside those walls
No matter how absurd!
And don't you dare complain!
Or you'll end up in prison
And I won't say that again!
They must be met you see,
Failure means a reprimand,
So spare a thought for me!!!
Care applications fall sparks safety fears
Law Society Gazette, 21 August 2008
1: Remove the gag and forced anonymity from parents involved in family court proceedings.
2: Forbid judges in the family courts to imprison any parent without a public hearing.
3: Abolish "risk" as a reason to remove children from a sane parent unless in addition to risk it can be clearly shown and proved that such children have already suffered significant physical harm.
4: Any parents facing the possibility that their children could be removed for long term fostering or adoption without parental consent should have the right to demand that the final decision be made by a jury not a judge.Better still abolish forced adoption altogether!
Boy, 5, forced into adoption with gay couple pleads: 'We want to stay with our gran and grandad'
by Jonathan Brocklebank and Michael Seamark
Daily Mail, 29th Jan 2009
grandparents spent two years fighting for the right to care for the children, whose 26-year-old mother is a recovering heroin addict. She desperately wanted her parents to look after them.
graphic
be unable to represent them in her current role. They would also need to reapply for legal aid before taking any action – and time is running out.
social worker told me the kids are getting on really well with them. My daughter had apparently said to the social worker, “Come up and see my princess bed”. I just feel totally devastated.
that to them when I meet them because it’s how I feel, but I don’t want the whole thing to become an argument. I will have lots of questions to ask them.’
the adoptive couple will provide a safe, secure and loving environment for these children.
time.’
by Amanda Platell
Daily Mail 29th Jan 2009
All the noble Lords and Ladies seem preoccupied with children conceived by sperm donors or egg donors and the rare possibility of siblings adopted by different families meeting by chance at a later date and marrying!
They completely ignore the most flagrant injustices of all ,those thousands of babies and young children forcibly adopted against the will of parents who love them and want to keep them.These babies and young children are then issued with new fake birth certificates by a conniving and deceitful State!
What Information will I receive?
A parliamentary question revealed that more than 200 parents a year are secretly jailed for daring to reveal details of those who accused them in court or for contacting their own offspring contrary to a court order. Parents are often forbidden from knowing whether their offspring are alive or dead, and if the latter they usually find out a very long time after the deaths occured.
Children are all too often split up and adopted by different families. This must be contrary to their human rights as all too often they are forbidden to contact their siblings and may not even know of their existence. If many years later a child needs a replacement kidney or bone marrow transplant the birth family records are rarely revealed and very often declared "lost". So the unfortunate child whose needs are supposed to be "paramount" is in fact callously left to die for want of a family donor!
By Alison Smith Squire
Daily Mail, 3rd November 2008
Bewildered: Michael and Alex Shergold with his sons Peter and David last week. 'Our family seems incomplete', says Michael
But there were extraordinary surprises in store for Michael and his wife, Alex. Hampshire Social Services wanted more than just his acquiescence.
Andrew, it emerged, had been diagnosed with a severe problem in one of his organs. For legal reasons, it is not possible to be more specific.
But the boy stands little chance of living beyond his teenage years without a transplant - from a blood relative if at all possible. The most suitable blood relative, it was explained by social workers, was Michael himself.
Michael now has to decide whether to risk his own life with a dangerous operation for a son who, as things stand, he will never see.
‘Words cannot express the anger and bewilderment I feel,’ says Michael. ‘I simply cannot believe how Social Services can be so cruel.
To track me down, tell me I have a son I knew nothing about, throw my life into chaos and then tell me I will never be able to see him is nothing short of disgraceful.’
The Mail on Sunday asked Hampshire County Council two months ago about its handling of the case.
It responded by obtaining a legal injunction to prevent us printing Michael’s story, claiming that to do so might damage his son’s chances of settling down.
Determined that Michael should get the chance to speak, The Mail on Sunday has pursued a lengthy legal fight to lift the injunction, and last week we succeeded. Today, in this exclusive interview, Michael is able to talk about his ordeal for the first time.
‘To know my son has been adopted against my consent by strangers rather than his blood family, where he would have had a loving home, has been bad enough,’ he says.
‘But to know that, if I don’t donate an organ, my son might not live long enough to know me has put me in the worst situation of all. I’m in a dilemma about what to do. I feel I am being asked to make a decision in a vacuum. If I could just see my son and maintain some sort of contact, I would have absolutely no hesitation about doing it.’
Michael, 55, was speaking at his spacious three-bedroom house in Southampton, the city where he was born and where he has spent his whole life. Sitting by his side is Alex. Originally from Los Angeles, she moved to Britain in 2002, the same year the couple married, and she became a pastor with a Pentecostal church in Portsmouth.
Like Michael, she has three grown-up children and, again like Michael, she had spent years bringing them up single-handedly. She worked for US military intelligence, where she studied for degrees in psychology and theology.
Michael and Alex married a few months after meeting and settled down to a domestic routine, enjoying rounds of golf, games of bowls, trips to the cinema and regular visits to church.
dozen visits, the questions became increasingly invasive.
The criticism they endured during the adoption process hardly helped. ‘Social Services accused me of being unco-operative,’ explains Alex. ‘They made it plain they didn’t like me. It seems being American was a problem and so too, I think, was the colour of my skin.’ Alex is mixed-race.
The State should outlaw the production of deliberately fake birth certificates and should tell all children the truth about their parentage when asked. Forced and closed adoptions are both recent and equally undesirable innovations.They serve to demonstrate once again that parents should never be deprived of knowing where their children are, or worse still be jailed for trying to find out!
The Sunday Times May 31, 2009
Daniel Foggo
Adoption: Standards
Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Local authority
Amount of ‘reward grant’ paid (£)
Adoption target met
by
101 children adopted in the last three years
2: Special children's homes typically £7,000/ week per child!
3: Lawyers and court costs typically £500,000 per case!
4: Experts typically £28,000 for a simple report!
5: Adoption agencies make £millions (£18,000/placement)
6: Local authorities get £millions hitting adoption targets!
1: BALLOONS AND FAMILY FUN TO PROMOTE FOSTERING
2. DISPATCHES: PROFITING FROM KIDS IN CARE
Clare Dyer, legal editor
The Guardian, Friday March 17 2006
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 23 2006
After a host of miscarriages of justice based on discredited expert witnesses, calls are growing for radical reform of their use in court, writes Lois Rogers
The Sunday Times, Nov 18 2007
Published: Sunday, 2 October, 2005, Evening Standard.
Monday, 3 September 2007
Children, Schools and Families
Adoption: StandardsAll Written Answers on 3 Sep 2007
Tim Loughton MP (East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years.
I have been asked to reply.
30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of 'performance reward grant' (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim
Local authority Amount of 'reward grant' paid (£)
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council 210,173.00
Blackburn with Darwen 307,367.00
Bristol City Council 307,512.00
Buckinghamshire County Council 526,958.00
Bromley (LB) 499,440.00
Camden (LB) 318,916.50
Cheshire County Council 685,134.00
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council 578,333.00
Durham County Council 502,675.00
Enfield (LB) 244,963.00
Essex County Council 2,469,200.00
Gloucestershire County Council 612,209.00
Greenwich (LB) 580,996.00
Halton Borough Council 153,938.00
Hampshire 1,675,619.00
Hounslow (LB) 165,019.00
Kensington and Chelsea (LB) 339,117.00
Kent County Council 2,156,583.00
Lewisham (LB) 602,854.00
Liverpool City Council 347,404.00
Luton Borough Council 400,027.00
Manchester City Council 984,877.00
Merton Borough Council 358,708.00
Northamptonshire County Council 1,119,115.00
Sheffield City Council 1,025,000.00
Southwark (LB) 435,242.00
St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council 83,845.00
Wandsworth (LB) 387,627.00
Warwickshire County Council 231,061.00
York City Council 203,620.00
Back to Barristers 'exploiting misery' as fees in family law cases rise 25% in 5 years
Daily Mail Online
June 19th 2008
Fees paid out of taxpayer-funded legal aid to barristers in family court cases have gone up by almost a third in five years and have now reached nearly £100million a year, they showed.
And there have been big increases in claims by barristers for obscure special payments that provide 'uplift' and 'bolt-ons' to their basic charges.
Jack Straw's Ministry of Justice lifted a corner of the blanket of official secrecy that surrounds the family courts to disclose that barristers who appear in them can claim bonuses including bizarre 'court bundle payments'.
These give barristers extra money if there are more than 176 pages to their court papers and extra still if there are over 350 pages. Yet another court bundle payment is paid if a barrister carries over 700 pages of papers.
Court bundle payments alone meant taxpayers were charged an extra £8.6million by barristers last year.
-------------------------------
June 19th 2008
Crispin Passmore, the commission’s policy director for civil legal aid, said that the sum spent on barristers’ fees since 2003-04 had risen from £71 million to nearly £100 million.
“The average annual earnings from family legal aid work is £140,000 – and that doesn’t include any privately paid work they might do. So we are not talking about the minimum wage.”
Wednesday 15th MAY 2002
Research found that 42 per cent of young prostitutes had been in care at some point
The "INDEPENDENT" 14 December 2006
The Government's own research highlights how the care system is not simply a negligent parent but at times probably more dangerous than the family from which some children have been taken. A study commissioned by the Home Office has looked at the link between hard drug use, sex work and various vulnerability factors. The results are astonishing, if not heartbreaking.
2 children in care die of neglect each week
The People, 22 June 2008
By David Collins
---------------------
A chilling example of our secret State where a mother and child are forced into hiding
by Camilla Cavendish,The Times, February 21, 2008
By FIONA BARTON, Daily Mail 7th Feb 2008
A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday.
Is it really in the public interest that a grandparent is jailed for not avoiding his grandson?
Camilla Cavendish, The Times, December 13, 2007
By SUE REID, Daily Mail
9 May 2008
Yet the happy scene is full of poignancy. Until very recently, this Yorkshire couple were trapped in what a High Court judge described this week as "every parent's nightmare".
By SUE REID
Daily Mail, 22 February 2008
What do our MPs who represent us in parliament think about all this?
Q6. [163661] John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD): In England in 2006, 4,160 children under five were taken into care and more than 60 per cent. of them—2,490—were adopted. However, in Scotland 574 left care and 373, roughly 64 per cent., went home to their parents. Can the Prime Minister explain why in England children under five who leave care get adopted, while in Scotland they go home to their parents?
The Prime Minister: Social work legislation in the two countries is, of course, different. I shall look at the figures that the hon. Gentleman has put before me. But as is known, we have made strenuous efforts to try to ensure that children in difficulty are given the proper upbringing, whether that is by returning to their parents or, where it is essential, by being fostered or adopted. I will continue to look at the matter, but the hon. Gentleman has to understand that social work practice in the two countries is different.
Early Day Motions
The Times, Dec 23, 2008
by Simon de Bruxelles
_____
Dear Ian, we hope you are well,we took your advice an left for Eire ,an have a beautiful baby son named shay ,who is now 2 months old, he has come to no harm whatsoever and is highly unlikely to suffer any emotional abuse as ss stated,as we are both intelligent caring loving well balanced individuals, it appeared that Bury ss were allowing us to keep our son, however this all changed once i made contact with my local mp,the amusing thing is we didnt actually get to eire untill Shay was 1 week old,we lied through our back teeth to get him out of the uk hospital ,and it worked a treat,its amazing how the nhs panic when threatened with a lawsuit by two new age travellers,the bad news is they now appear to be going after my kids from a previous relationship but they havent a leg to stand on,in any case they would be moved to ireland at the first sign of any court action.We fully intend to make public our situation once things have cooled a little,removing kids for a likelihood of emotional abuse should be a criminal offence could you imagine the consequences if the criminal courts locked people up for a likelihood they may commit crime,the government would be bankrupt with compensation claims.babys removed from parents for eighteen years of there lives,murderers only serve half of a 30 year sentence any way take care and thanks for your advice regards Mr A Galligan Miss Tracey Mcgee
I am posting this as asked by members whom you have worked day and night to help in every way possible.
I know you are very modest and expect nothing in return for all your help.
Day and night you answer the call.
If only all Social Workers, Lawyers, Judges, etc were as dedicated to the higher good as you are,
Then oh what a world we would have of happiness and joy and light for ALL OF US.
May your light shine ever brighter and may all our lights shine like beacons until all our lights touch and spread to cover
OUR MOTHER ....EARTH.
THE ONE MOTHER WE ALL SHARE.
Thank you Ian.
Dave and myself would like you to know all the mothers and people we have spoken too. All agree that you are one of the few genuien persons we all know. I dont think you quite realise the hope and the determination that you give to us when we feel like giving up you have a certain power that gives us all insperation to keep fighting you are very special to us all, and we won,t forget you I will still be contacting you when this is all over with. I will even bring Connor to see you and tell him of all your support and insperation that you gave to us I will tell him you are the main man the one we first found when you was snatched from our arms.
Know this Ian because it is the truth when I say to you that you live up to more than our exspectations your an angle a bright light in a very dark wicked world showing everyone the truth about the ss,lawyers, and the evil judges we were all lost until you showed us the way to fight.
Sharon xx
By DAVID WILKES
Daily Mail, 2nd February 2008
