Systematic
Quasi-Judicial Child Abuse
It is accepted that there is a need for a system to protect children from harm caused by their carers’ action or inaction. This is true whether or not the carers are their birth parents.
However, when this involves taking children from their parents and placing them into the care of state employees it means removing them from people who care for them because of an emotional commitment and handing people who care for them because they are paid to do so.
The damage that is caused by being “in care” is well known and evidenced in the proportion of such children who go on to a career in crime. Indeed there is now a tendency in social care to remove children from those mothers that have been themselves in care.
Massively important
to families
When a public family law dispute about children arises it can be massively important to the nuclear and extended family. There has been a tendency to wish to keep this involvement secret as there was a community tendency to prejudge parents as guilty if Social Services were involved. However, these attitudes are shifting. This is resulting in greater willingness of families to work together to fight the authorities and a growing level of community anger.
The Threshold Test
The key question is whether or not children need to be taken into care to protect them from “significant harm”. The essence of the argument of this document is that children are taken into care wrongly and that damage is as a consequence done to the children (and their parents).
A number of cases will be cited at a later stage. The question has to be asked as to why the system has developed to such a stage as it has. The real problem is a tendency to over intervene.
Insufficient
Criticism of Intervention
Enquiries such as the Victoria Climbie Inquiry went through in minute detail the reasons why no action was taken to protect this child. Interestingly it pointed out itself that the social worker was busy hunting up information about Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy – which is now accepted not to be a syndrome. Such inquiries make it clear that individuals can be pilloried for failing to intervene. This causes people to play safe and decide that intervention is necessary when it is damaging.
Failure to recognise
that intervention is damaging
There is a general belief that the actions of Child Protection Workers are in the best interests of the child. Intervention is damaging (as will be shown later) and should only occur when it is clearly necessary.
A financial interest
in intervention
Substantial sums of money are made by the various participants in the child protection industry. They would not make those sums of money if they generally concluded that intervention was not necessary.
Child Trafficking
If one makes the assumption that children are only taken into care when it is necessary then this would be reasonable. However, the reality is that this operates as a system of feedback that encourages the taking into care of “adoptible commodities” (a phrase used by social workers to identify a child which will be easily adopted). This is clearly in part driving the doubling of numbers of children aged under 1 taken into care over the last 10 years. Again the test here is to look at individual cases. It is also interesting that the contested cases tend to involve white children which are more easily adoptible.
Forcing children into
research
Child protection procedures have been used by Doctors in the
The Participants
It is important to note that the participants in the child protection industry vary. Some are hard working people who do the best they can for people in difficult situations. Others are more driven by their own financial interests and can behave most unethically.
Child Protection
Workers
Recent reorganisations in Social Care in the
There is an inherent problem in dealing with Child Protection that the key training should relate to the collection of evidence and avoiding pre-judging the situation. There is a tendency, however, within Social Workers for some individuals to imagine the worst circumstances that fit a particular set of “evidence” and then challenge people to disprove this. Proving a negative is inherently difficult.
There is evidence that social workers destroy evidence, rely upon rumour and tittle tattle rather than true evidence and I have evidence of an erstwhile Director of Social Services manufacturing and changing evidence when the evidence that existed did not suit the outcome that he wished.
A big problem here is the absence of scrutiny which has allowed people to get away with bad practise for years. Gradually instances are being dealt with. However, if you have a situation whereby complaints are dealt with by the same organisation (as is the case) then there is an unacceptable conflict of interest. Furthermore there are a number of reports of people being threatened with the removal of their children if they maintain their complaints.
Paediatricians and
other Experts
It is clear that reports written about child protection issues by the medical profession are generally written by a small proportion of the profession. Paediatricans can be paid sums like GBP £27,000 for a long report (800 pages in the instance referred to). Paediatricians tend not to have private practise unlike Hospital Consultants who deal with adults. Therefore the additional money that arises from such expert reports is material to their quality of life.
The Judiciary
The judiciary are infected with the same pro-intervention tendency feeling that they have to rely on the reports from Social Workers. Although there are some really good Family Court judges, many of them simply rubberstamp the proposals from Social Services. Experienced solicitors often know the likely outcome of a case from the identity of the judge.
The judiciary tend to be influenced by fads in terms of theories of child abuse. In the 1990s the key fad was that of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. This resulted in a substantial number of children being taken into care when secret medical files were kept from the courts preventing parents from proving their innocence.
It is, however, difficult for the judiciary in that almost all of the professionals involved will be arguing an interventionist case.
Cafcass – Children
and Family Court Advisory and Support Service
A guardian is appointed in theory to represent the interests of a child in a public family law case. Generally these come from Cafcass. However, Cafcass have a lot of similarities with any other social services department. The chief executive is an ex-director of Social Services. In essence Cafcass frequently end up as an echo of the view point of Social Services.
Legal Aid
Many of the families that end up as defendants in the world of public family law rely on legal aid. It is quite difficult to obtain legal aid to actually fight cases through to appeal and many solicitors merely try to negotiate the best deal they can get for their clients assuming that Social Services will win any contest.
Defence Solicitors
Apart from the constraints from legal aid there can also be a conflict of interest with defence solicitors also obtaining revenue from local authorities and cafcass. If, therefore, they cause difficulties they can find this revenue drying up. This can also act to minimise the demand for challenge.
Stacked against
Families
The judicial process is, therefore, heavily stacked against families. At times a mother who has just given birth is required to go to court to argue to keep her baby.