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Stolen Children

Sunday Mail - July 15

They're in my life. I love and miss them so much.

also 'Lost in the System'

by John Hemming Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley

Review - Sunday Mail

They're in my life. I love and miss them so much.

A year ago, weeping and unable to sleep at 2.30 in the morning, a 35-year-old mother sat down at her computer and set up a website in a desperate attempt to communicate with her four young children, taken into care by Local Authority social workers.

Posting messages on the web was, she says, the only way she could think of to reach them, to let them know she was fighting for them and that she loved them.

‘I’m sitting here thinking of you and me and life, and you are my life’, she wrote. ‘I love you and miss you so much, each and every one of you.

I sit and wonder how you all are, and what will become of our paths in life.’ Many more yearning website messages followed – birthday and Christmas greetings, accounts of happy family outings before the children were removed, poems and postings of sweet baby and family photographs. ‘I know the children won’t see the messages now because they are too little, but I wanted to create a record so that if they ever do search online later in their lives, they will know their father and I never stopped thinking about them, and that we never gave up’, she says.

But two weeks ago, the woman received a letter from the council’s Social Services department, demanding she close down the site immediately. If not, the letter threatened, committal proceedings would immediately be launched against her, and she would be sent to jail for contempt of court.

Heartbroken, she has complied.

Despite ongoing threats of legal action if she dares to speak out, however, this latest action by the council has pushed her into adding her voice to the gathering campaign to open up family court proceedings and the actions of child protection staff to greater public scrutiny.

Because of the strict rules of secrecy governing all family court proceedings in England and Wales, the children cannot be identified in any way, so the Mail on Sunday cannot disclose the woman’s name, nor where she lives. Nor can the council responsible for taking her children into care be identified, lest the mother’s decision to reveal her harrowing story be used against her in future proceedings, as she fights on to get her children back.

So we will call her Pauline, and not reveal the names of her five children now in care - three boys and two girls aged between nine years and just six months.

The local council cannot be asked for its side of this story, as Social Services departments always point-blank refuse to discuss the details of any individual case.

So this is, of necessity, only Pauline’s side of the story. Maybe social workers were justified in forcibly taking her children from her, and the physical and emotional abuse she insists the children have since suffered at the hands of foster carers has not happened, and the children are better off living away from home.

On the other hand, though, Pauline and her partner could well be in the same boat as many hundreds of other English parents who insist they have been grievously wronged by over-zealous child protection staff who ‘abduct’ their children on entirely spurious grounds.

Pauline says her family’s nightmare began one summer evening four years ago – ‘on June 18, 2003’, she says immediately when asked the date – when local youths on the drug-ridden, run-down council estate where they then lived began throwing rocks at their windows and screaming abuse.

When the police arrived in response to her call, she says they told her it was not safe for her young children to stay in the house, and suggested they be sent to relatives until the trouble died down. Pauline followed this advice quite happily, but a week later, she was shocked to receive a letter from the council informing her that child protection staff had launched legal proceedings to take the children into care.

‘I was taken into care myself when I was around six years old, and I have horrific memories of being moved from one foster home to another and of being punched and kicked by abusive carers and the council care staff doing absolutely nothing to protect and help me’, she says. ‘I ran away frequently, desperate to get back home to my mother, and when I was 13 years old, I was locked in an adults’ prison for a short while. Then, when I had children of my own, there always seemed to be social workers hanging around, watching me, I now believe, for any signs of being an inadequate parent.

‘It now seems clear that they were just waiting for an excuse to take my children away from me, and as soon as an opportunity arose, they grabbed it.

‘The only reason I was given for care proceedings being launched was my and my then partner’s ‘personal problems’. We were separated at that stage, and he was living apart from me and the children, but there was nothing to suggest that the children were being maltreated in any way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘In fact, we’d been a very happy family, and the children were well looked-after and healthy, as all the photos I took of them as babies and toddlers show. We used to go camping in the woods and by the seaside and the older children rode their bikes and climbed trees and went fishing – all the happy memories that I now try so hard to cling on to, and which I described in detail on my website in the hope my children will one day be comforted by as well.’

At the time the first proceedings were launched, Pauline had a teenage daughter whom the authorities did not try to remove and who is still living with her. But a boy then aged four, a girl of three, another boy of two and a baby girl were all removed by order of the court and placed in different foster homes.

Six months ago, Pauline had another baby – a son. She says that before giving birth to him, she asked Social Services if they intended to remove him, and says she was assured in writing they did not. Four days after he was born though, and while Pauline was still in hospital, she says social workers arrived, with three police officers, and informed her that this child was also to be taken into care, on the grounds that there was ‘a risk of future emotional harm.’

One week later, he was taken from her and driven away in a police car, despite the fact he was being breast-fed.

After taking the council to court to gain access rights, she and the boy’s father are currently permitted to see him for five hours every day at a neutral contact centre. But Pauline says his foster carers refused to give him the breast milk she expressed each day and instead put the baby on an infant formula to which he had a severe allergic reaction, covering his body in a nasty rash which she secretly photographed on a mobile phone camera.

Pauline says tearfully that she has ‘no idea’ where the two youngest children removed four years ago are now living, and says council staff have repeatedly refused to give her any information, even as to whether they have by now been legally adopted. The older girl now aged seven, is living with her grandmother, and Pauline is allowed to have occasional contact with her and speak to her by phone.

It is the oldest boy, however, now aged eight, whom Pauline is most desperately concerned about and talking about him, she constantly breaks down, tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘Tom [not his real name] has been moved over and over again to different children’s homes and foster carers, and is now on his 14th move’, she says bleakly.

‘Two years after he was taken away, I discovered from reading council papers our lawyers had obtained that he was so disturbed, he’d been put on Prozac – at the age of just seven!

‘One day, when I was allowed to see him at a contact meeting, he took off his shirt and showed me bruises and injuries on his arms and chest and told me he’d been thrown down a flight of stairs. At that time, both he and his younger brother were placed with a foster couple who had six children in their home, five under the age of five.

‘One day when I spoke to him on the phone, he said to me: “Mummy, I’m so hungry”. Apparently, one of his punishments for misbehaving was being given no dinner.
‘I am so desperately worried about what sort of emotional and psychological damage all this might be doing to him. Already, I know he has been excluded from school because his behaviour is so disturbed.

‘I have begged the social workers over and over and over again, sometimes literally on my hands and knees, to listen to me and investigate what is happening to my son, but nobody appears to care.
‘Instead, all our contact visits with him were stopped last year, on the grounds that I was “scrutinising” my children for supposedly imaginary injuries. The very last time we were allowed to see him and his younger brother, both the boys seemed so scared and vacant and withdrawn.

‘The younger one must have been so accustomed to seeing the older boy being beaten that he pleaded with me at one point when Tom got a bit boisterous: “Please don’t hurt him”.

It completely breaks your heart. I barely sleep, barely eat. I spend all my time thinking about them.’ The one thing that kept me going was creating my website for them and the hope that one day they might find it.

‘Now even that has been taken away from me.’

 

Stolen Children 'Lost in the System'

 

by John Hemming Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley

Sunday Mail - July 15

 

 

Whenever local authorities are challenged over a decision to take a baby or young child away from their family the response is always the same: ‘It is in the best interests of the child.’

 

And that’s it – no further discussion is permitted.

 

Yes, they have to give their reasons to a judge sitting in the Family Court, but these hearings are held in secret, so journalists are never allowed to attend. The judgements of the courts are never published.

 

Outside the family court system, local authorities in England and Wales do not have to justify themselves to anyone. Officials, along with the Family Court’s judges and lawyers, are essentially accountable to no one.

 

Over the past year, during which I have been studying the workings of the system in England and Wales, I have spoke to many hundreds of parents in my constituency and elsewhere who have been ‘service users’ as the jargon used by social services staff goes.

 

And in many cases I have discovered, to my horror, the removal of young children and babies is not only unnecessary, but actually unjust and harmful to the children involved.

 

The story of ‘Pauline’ described overleaf, is a case in point. Having studied 300 pages of documents relating to her case, I am entirely satisfied that her children where removed from her without any justifiable cause.

 

I then agreed to chair a campaign called Justice for Families, which alongside many other groups is working to expose injustices in the Family Courts and to end the secrecy which allows wrongdoing to go undetected and unpunished. Justice for Families has a small number of volunteers to talk to people who claim to have had their children wrongly removed. So far, we have had details of over a hundred cases where miscarriages of justice do most certainly seem to have occurred.

 

Two weeks ago, I lodged papers with the High Court asking for permission to inform professional bodies such as the Bar Council and the General Medical Council about alleged wrongdoings by professionals who make a living from allegations of child abuse. I need permission because as the law stands, I could be sent to jail for lodging any complaint relating to actions in the Family Court.

 

In May, I also reported England and Wales to the United Nations for contravening its Charter on Human Rights and have requested a UN investigation, similar to the one in Australia into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families and their placement with white families – an international scandal which came to be known as ‘The Stolen Generation’.

 

In my view and that of many other campaigners, ‘stealing’ describes actually what local authorities are doing to children in England and Wales today.

 

Of course, no body objects in any way to social workers and other council officials removing children and placing them in care where there is any suggestion of abuse or maltreatment.

 

Indeed, whenever cases of horrific long term abuse of children come to light – such as the case of Victoria Climbie, the eight-year-old girl beaten, starved and tortured to death by her aunt in North London – many of us wonder why Social Services staff did not intervene more energetically and competently.

 

What is utterly unacceptable to campaigners though, along with an increasing number of concerned judges, lawyers and MP’s, is the clear evidence that social workers are literally snatching newborn babies and children from good, stable, loving homes, such as the one highlighted on these pages.

 

The fact that these children are then placed in care homes and with foster parents, where, abuse does sometimes occur, further adds to the sense of outrage at what is happening in England and Wales today.

 

I realise that many people’s first reaction is to say: ‘Surely this sort of thing could not be happening in any modern society, particularly one as sophisticated and enlightened as ours.’

 

But unfortunately, due to a toxic combination of money, incompetence and secrecy, this is exactly what is happening here, over and over again.

 

Many millions of pounds in grants are available to local councils if they hit badly thought-out Government ‘targets’. These grants are meant to act as an incentive to councils to find adoptive parents for older children left languishing for years in care homes.

 

The brutal truth, however, is that healthy white babies and children under the age of five are far easier to place for adoption than older children, particularly older children who are actually physically, emotionally or psychologically damaged  by parental maltreatment.

 

Last year, the number of children under five taken into care and swiftly adopted was more than double the number in 1995 – which strongly suggests to me that babies and young children are being deliberately taken into care in order for councils to hit adoption targets and get their extra money.

 

This may seem an outrageous allegation. Yet how else to explain newborn babies literally being torn from their mother’ arms on no other grounds than that the mother ‘might’ get post-natal depression, or that the child is at ‘risk of emotional abuse in the future’?

 

Financial considerations also taint the work that lawyers do on behalf of those families whose children have been snatched. What families often don’t know until it’s to late is that these same solicitors sometimes get a lot of money from the council for other work. If this Solicitor upsets the council, the work may well stop.

 

So when the case goes to court, the solicitor says the family do not oppose an application for a baby to be placed in care and fast-tracked for adoption – even though they do.

 

I recently asked the Law Society if this behaviour was acceptable and it my surprise it said it was. I currently have three firms of solicitors I wish to report to the regulatory authorities for behaviour out of this sort, but I am forbidden to do so by the secrecy laws.

 

There are excellent social workers, lawyers, doctors and judges working in the Family Courts, but there are also some very bad ones. Yet action is rarely taken against conduct that is incompetent, misguided or even – to use a very strong word which I nonetheless believe is warranted – corrupt.

 

Another problem is that the system is biased almost entirely upon opinion. In judging future risk of possible harm to a child, the court hears from social workers and their paid experts.

He who pays the piper normally calls the tune. So parents end up battling against a battalion of people paid to say how bad they are as parents.

 

The scandalous case of Mark and Nicky Webster, from Norfolk, who lost three children after being accused of child abuse on medical evidence that was later proved to be wrong (a case brought to public attention by the Mail on Sunday ), shows how things can get skewed up by ‘expert’ opinion.

 

But the most damning issue to emerge from a recent court battle over Norfolk County Council’s attempt to take the Websters’ fourth child was the pressure placed on a care worker to change a positive view about the Websters.

 

Injustices of this sort are going on all over the country and it will take a lot of effort to get things right. But that just strengthens the resolve of campaigners to keep fighting.

 

Sunday Mail Review

By John Hemming MP