Building new parts into a decrepit decaying structure
The most recent government propaganda sheet titled `The Children’s Plan’
(published by the Department for Children, Schools, and Families - December
2007) would be an admirable script for a satirical comedy, were it not full of
inherent tragedies for children and their families.
The rhetoric of the document is typical of the present government and its
well-known `spin’ and is full of fine pious words, if they were not a complete
hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy begins with the statement that,
“Families are the bedrock of (our) society and the place for nurturing happy,
capable, and resilient children. Government does not bring up children – parents
do – so government needs to do more to back parents and families.”
This is from a government which for over a decade has set out to destroy
families by removing children unnecessarily and for unwarranted reasons in order
to fulfil quotas for substitute parental care in adoptive and foster care
placements with huge financial incentives to local authorities to do so. The
mantra of council workers charged with child protection work has been that they
“know better how to raise children than do parents” and it is “in the best
interests of the child” to be removed into local authority care for flimsy and
fabricated reasons. Many hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly
removed to meet the demands of the child adoption industry which has become
indelibly interlinked with the child protection services as the provider of
child victims.
But such workers have been simply following the creed of the ideologues in
government circles and their single-minded goal to engage in a crude form of
social engineering which removes children from caring and competent parents to
fulfil the needs and demands of childless and desperate couples.
The hypocrisy continues with the acknowledgement by the government that there
are many thousands of children living in poverty in Britain. i.e. an
insufficiency of income. Yet children who are alleged to be `neglected’ which is
primarily and mainly caused by poverty, are included as a form of child abuse in
order to massage statistics on the level of child abuse in the U.K. The
government have in effect been saying, “Yes our economic policies have resulted
in many thousands of children living in poverty, but we “Blame the parents for
neglecting them”. Heads the government wins, tails they don’t lose.” Except now
they have betrayed their own worst-kept secret and are even acknowledging that
for children living in such poverty and government inflicted neglect, it has
seriously and adversely affected the educational opportunities of those
children.
They indite themselves with their own confessions of incompetence and
negligence.
The government have finally acknowledged that children need decent homes to live
in and a place nearby to play. Yet it is this government that has encouraged
wholesale population increases for over a decade so Britain is now grossly
over-populated resulting in a massive under-provision of housing and other
living accommodation and has been allowing local authorities to sell off school
playing fields and parks where children play in order to build houses and
supermarkets on them for this unrestricted and unlimited explosion in the
population. Where will they now find the green areas on which to build the parks
and play areas for children in urban areas?. Old factory and mill sites?.
But the rhetoric becomes even more tragic and a bitter pill for parents of
children who are chronically sick or disabled and therefore in need of
assistance and support from health, education, and child welfare services. The
more honest workers in these services have at least frequently acknowledged to
parents, “Well we can undertake a detailed and expensive assessment of your
child’s needs, but don’t expect any services as there are no resources.” This
obsession with `Assessment’ as the gateway to services has been very rewarding
for the workers concerned and for social workers and psychologists etc who carry
out those `assessments’, but of no practical value to the families who so
desperately need help and support from public services.
But the worst case scenario for thousands of parents of sick and disabled
children has been to be accused by doctors, nurses, teachers, and social workers
of having caused their child’s illness or disability, often in the face of
detailed assessments and diagnoses by other professionals that the child is
indeed suffering from a serious ill-health problem or a severely disabling
condition. This has been done with this government’s active encouragement in
such documents of `Guidance’ as Fabricated and Induced Illness in Children which
uses as its base a fraudulent theory created and promoted by two prominent
paediatricians who have been completely discredited and are now in professional
and public disgrace. But the `Guidance’ remains and will no doubt lead to many
thousands of other sick and disabled children being needlessly removed from
their parents and families.
If the parents of sick and disabled children have managed to fight off this
attack on them and their children, they are still left with the irremovable
stain of child abuse and are stigmatised throughout their communities and
neighbourhoods. Even their churches turn their backs on them.
But that is not the worst that happens.
They are then denied every form of help from education, health, and social
welfare services or are severely stigmatised in doing so. The government have
closed almost all of the special schools for disabled children as part of their
ideological dogma that all children must be integrated into mainstream schools,
no matter how difficult it might be for that disabled child to cope and
integrate with their peers in their everyday activities in schools or to
maintain their educational development in an intensely competitive environment.
This rigid policy has enabled Education Authorities to make massive financial
savings in not sending children to schools with special provisions to meet their
needs or in providing such schools, but this finance has not found its way back
to helping these sick and disabled children and their parents in any significant
way in their own homes or in securing the services which they so desperately
need.
The children and families who probably suffer most are those where the child’s
disability is not immediately apparent to the casual observer – children who are
autistic, with Asperger’s Syndrome, or ME/CFS, or other neurological disorders,
or with Cystic Fibrosis or Borreliosis/ Lyme Disease.
The statement in the Plan which will cause many parents intense amusement is the
declaration that, “Partnership with parents is a unifying theme of the
Children’s Plan”. This was an underlying theme of the Children Act 1989 but it
would be extremely difficult to find a parent in the U.K. who feels that they
have been engaged in partnership (on an equal and genuine basis – CA 1989.) with
a local authority when their children have required services from a local
authority as a child in need or disabled or if they have been subject to a child
protection investigation or their child has been placed in care.
Most often they have been dictated to and told they must accept what the local
authority determine what they need (or will receive within the limitations on
resources).
The Children’s Plan places great emphasis on the need for health, education,
welfare, and voluntary services for children to work together. A fine ambition
but as has been shown in the history of such services for the last 60 years,
they are completely incapable of working together. It has been the oft-repeated
findings and recommendations of the Inquiries into the deaths of Children whilst
under the care or supervision of child protection workers in that period, that
one of the major faults which led to the child’s death was the inability of such
services to work together. Even to save the lives of children and ensure their
safety and protection. Most recently in the case of Victoria Climbie’ and going
back to Dennis Allen and Maria Colwell. This is despite constant urgings and
structural changes and massive inputs of resources by the government to enable
them to do so.
Especially when the Children’s Plan makes no mention whatsoever of the child
protection services in Britain and the need for a fundamental and far-reaching
reform of those services in view of the constant errors and dysfunctional
operation of those services which have been so frequently shown in the media.
The government has obviously swallowed the excuse of those services that its all
a media plot to discredit them or the workings and activities of a small
campaigning group of activist child-abusing parents.
If this government, or any future government, wishes to reform the services in
Britain for children and their families then they must begin with an unequivocal
and unambiguous statement that Family Preservation is of paramount importance
and that a child’s genetic, ethnic, and cultural inheritance is far more
important than meeting adoption targets or allowing unproven and fraudulent
theories of child abuse to prevail in order to needlessly remove children from
their parents and to thereby destroy families and the lives of those involved.
Thereafter and based on this principle, the first area for drastic and radical
reform must then be the child protection services and the way they interact and
inter-relate to other services and the legal system.
ByCharles
Pragnell
(UK/Australasia)
December 10, 2007
Diploma in Social Work and Letter of Recognition in Child Care
Expert Witness – Child Protection
and Social Care Consultant
and Child/Family Advocate. (U.K./Australasia).
Please read...
Family Law and the Dire consequences for Children
Petition answered with Spin and Sophism
The Silence of the Media Lambs!
Doctors in a Dilemma
Are you an `Appropriate’ person?
Childrens Plan
State Terrorism
The Seriously Unhealthy State of Paediatrics
RAD – the Return of a Nightmare
Persecution of Children and Families
Why I am Petitioning the Prime Minister
Vaccines and Child Abuse Accusations
Why did Sally Clark Suffer and Die?
Perverse Reversal of Child Custody
Child Protection in Kangaroo Courts
Fabricated and induced illness in Children
A History of Man’s Inhumanity
A System out of Control
Forced Adoption
