When the State takes your Child

Article in Readers Digest – http://www.rd.com/

October 2005 By Alasdair Palmer

Every year some two thousand children are forcibly adopted – and we are not allowed to know why

The last time Rachel Drew* saw her daughter was on May 19 last year. Yet Charlotte, who will celebrate her eighth birthday this autumn, is not dead.  She is alive and well.

In the summer of 2003 Rachel’s local council applied to have Charlotte adopted and the judge gave his permission.  Charlotte is now with the new parents chosen by the council.

Adoption is irrevocable once the formalities have been completed, after which the mother has no right to see her child again until he or she reaches 18.  Rachel is still contesting it in court; the chances of success are slim.

Aged 40, Rachel may not have had the chance for another child.  Her reaction to the adoption – anger and agony – is understandable.  There’s no suggestion that she’s ever harmed her daughter physically.  But she has been diagnosed with mild schizophrenia.

There are no obvious signs of mental illness when you meet her, and indeed her symptoms are now thoroughly controlled by medication.  But in 2001 the Council requested a consultant psychiatrist, whom I shall name Dr X, to examine her with her daughter.  He said that “all current observations suggest Charlotte is a bright child who is happy and exuberant.  She has a strong and affectionate relationship with her mother”.

Social services however became convinced that Charlotte was suffering “emotional harm” from her mother.  The council decided to replace Dr X with another psychiatrist, whom I shall call Dr Y. Dr Y was seriously concerned about Rachel’s capacity to care adequately for Charlotte.  On the basis of one meeting spent observing Rachel and Charlotte together at a family centre, Dr Y concluded, along with another colleague, that there were “aspects of Rachel’s functioning that would not enable her to fulfil Charlotte’s needs consistently at all times”.

Social services also asked another psychiatrist, Dr A, to examine Rachel.  She concurred that Rachel “would find it hard to remain alert to, and in tune with, Charlotte’s concerns for hours at a time.  In addition, she has definite and concrete ideas about what it is beneficial for Charlotte to, for example eat, wear and do, that she often wishes to impose”.

A lot of parents will think that the appropriate response to those “observations” is:  so what?  What parent who loves their child does not have “definite and concrete ideas” about what their child should “eat, wear and do”?

Another observation made in the reports was that Charlotte was not reliably potty-trained at three and was still having “accidents” at four.  Yet this is something Charlotte has in common with several million other children. 

The judge in this case, however, accepted the professional evidence from Dr A and Dr Y that Charlotte was at such risk of emotional harm from Rachel that she should be permanently separated from her.  He recognised that this was not what the then four-year old Charlotte wanted and that “the risk of emotional harm outweighs Charlotte’s wishes and feelings”.

How seriously should the allegations against Rachel be taken?  She can certainly be difficult.  She complained to the GMC that Dr X made offensive comments including asking her how much she charged for sex, which she now accepts was totally false.  “I wasn’t taking my medication at the time” she says, “and I was hearing things that weren’t happening.  There has been no repetition of this kind of incident.

Ben Sacks is a professor of psychiatry who has acted as an expert witness in many childcare court cases.  After reading the relevant documents from this case he said the council’s reports “simply do not present any evidence to justify the removal of the child from her mother…Dr Y, for instance, places great emphasis on a technique she calls “story stems” (in which the child is asked to continue a story the elements of which are given by the psychiatrist).  I know of no evidence to suggest this technique has any validity.  To me, the grounds put forward for taking this child away are wholly speculative”.

Yet social services and officials of the family court system seem to take the view that since “the welfare of the child is paramount”, they are entitled to remove a child from his or her parents whenever they can find an expert willing to say that the child might do better elsewhere.  That interpretation of “the welfare of the child” would license the state to take away the children of at least half the population, for it is an inescapable mathematical truth that half of us to an average or worse job as parents.

It’s hard to believe this attitude could survive scrutiny if the public knew about it.  But the courts that order adoptions operate largely in secrecy.  It is an offence not merely to report the evidence presented to them, but for anyone involved to pass on documents relating to such other cases to other members of the public or the media.  The first requirement for remedying injustice is surely to be able to identify when it happened – but this is precisely what this law prevents.

Rachel can’t think about the prospect of not seeing Charlotte until she is 18.  “I have to believe that somehow there is a way to get my baby back” she says.  There were some 3700 adoptions in the year 2003 – 2004, more than half of them contested.  Rachel’s may or may not be exceptional – the secrecy surrounding the family courts means that nobody knows.

* Names have been changed or omitted for legal reasons. Readers Digest - http://www.rd.com/