Not long ago we wrote a grumpy page about the RSPCA and its expansion into a new industry – child kidnap and forced adoption (oops, sorry, my bad, that should have read “child protection”) on the grounds that anyone the RSPCA thinks might have been cruel to an animal must automatically be a systematic child abuser as well.
It's always nice to find that one's not alone in one's indignation at some of the abuses perpetrated by those in authority. This is what Christopher Booker wrote today (21st November 2010) in the Telegraph ...
Forced adoption: another win for the child snatchers
In 43 years of medical practice, said the family’s GP, he had “never encountered a case of such appalling injustice”. To their neighbours, it was so shocking that up to 100 of them were ready to stage a public protest, until being banned from doing so by social workers and the police.
This was the case of Tony and Debbie Sims, which I first reported in July 2009 under the headline “Evil destruction of a happy family”, and whom I can now name because their daughter, torn from them for no good reason, has finally, after three years of misery in foster care and 74 court hearings, been adopted.
The story of Mr and Mrs Sims was my first introduction to that Kafka-esque world of state child-snatching which I have so often reported on since. It illustrates so many of the reasons why, hidden behind its self-protective wall of secrecy, this ruthless and corrupt system has become a major national scandal.
Until April 2007, Mr Sims, a professional dog breeder, and his wife, then a branch vice-chairman of the local Conservative Party, were a respectable middle-class couple living happily with their five-year-old daughter, who was the apple of their eye. Shortly after Mr Sims was interviewed by the RSPCA over his unwitting infringement of a new law banning the tail-docking of puppies, their home was invaded by two RSPCA officials and 18 policemen, who had been given a wholly erroneous tip-off that there were guns on the premises.
When the dogs were released from their kennels and rampaged through the house, ripping apart his daughter’s pet boxer, Mr Sims strongly protested – verbally but not physically. He and his wife were arrested and taken away, leaving their little girl, aged five, screaming amid the chaos. Social workers were called and the child was removed into foster care. While Mrs Sims was being held for several hours in a police cell, she had a miscarriage. She returned home that night to find her daughter gone.
When the couple next saw their child – months later, at a “contact” – she said she had been told they were dead and had gone to heaven. For three years they tried to get her back through those 74 court hearings. The social workers claimed the child had been maltreated, because her home was an unholy mess. But this was only because of the police raid and the dogs – a WPC who had visited the house a month earlier on other business reported that it had been “neat and tidy”.
The child could not understand why she was not allowed to go back home with her parents. The courts were unable to consider a report by an experienced independent social worker which the couple were told described them as responsible and loving parents. The only evidence the court heard was that from the social workers and their own “experts”.
When the couple were eventually told that their child would be adopted, they appealed. In a judgment last year, which the media were permitted to report, Mr Justice Boden ruled that because the parents had not shown sufficient co-operation with the authorities (after four psychiatric assessments of the couple, the father refused to submit to a fifth), the adoption had to go ahead.
One of the first people to contact the parents when this was made public was that independent social worker, who expressed astonishment, saying he had assumed that, because the social workers’ case seemed so flimsy, the family would have long since been reunited. Last week, however, Mr and Mrs Sims had a two-sentence note to say their daughter has now been adopted.
Since I first wrote about this case in 2009, I have come to recognise many of its features in dozens of others I have followed: the mob-handed involvement of the police; the seizing of children for no good reason; the inability of social workers to admit they have made a mistake; the way lawyers supposedly acting for the parents seem to be on the other side; the refusal of judges to look objectively at all the evidence, and their willingness to accept nonsense if told to them by social workers and their “experts”. Too often, these proceedings get away with standing every honourable principle of British justice on its head.
Such is the Frankenstein’s monster created by Parliament in the 1989 Children Act. Yet apart from the tireless John Hemming, and a handful of other MPs shocked into awareness by individual cases in their constituencies, the majority seem wholly unconcerned. So what do we pay them for?
This article attracted no fewer than 343 comments from Telegraph readers. Most were aghast, though predictably and very sadly there were still a few of the “no smoke without fire” variety. Not all Telegraph readers have actual brains, it seems.
The story becomes even more more sinister when you read what Booker wrote over a year ago about this same case:
A judge has condemned the "disgraceful" conduct of social workers over an adoption case
The revealing of the names of those responsible for the killing of Baby P reminded us yet again of the failure of Haringey social workers to avert the child's death. What a shocking contrast this provides to the behaviour of East Sussex social workers in the case I reported a month ago, which led to their seizure and putting out for adoption of a girl, now seven years old, from a respectable middle-class home, to the anguish of both her parents and the little girl herself.
The chief reason offered by the social workers for abducting the girl two years ago was that her home had been left in an appalling mess after a raid by RSPCA officials and 18 policemen. They ransacked the premises looking for non-existent guns, and released into the house a pack of dogs kept in kennels outside by her father, a professional dog-breeder. The parents were arrested for protesting at what was happening (the mother suffering a miscarriage while in police custody) and the social workers were summoned to remove their daughter.
Everything about this case is bizarre, not least the apparent complicity of social workers, lawyers and the courts in determining that the child should not be returned to her parents, as she wishes, but rather, after two years in foster care, sent for adoption.
I have now been able to read through many papers relating to the case, including the judgments resulting from the 74 hearings in which the parents attempted to get their daughter back. What stands out is the startling contrast between the two totally different versions of the case given by the social workers and the courts on one hand and, on the other, that presented by the parents themselves and by many who knew them. The latter include their GP, who recently wrote that he had never "encountered such a case of appalling injustice".
The most impressive document was a report by an independent social worker, based on many interviews with those involved, including the child herself and the chief social worker in charge of her. In measured terms, this made mincemeat of the council's case. Nothing about it is more suspicious than the contrast between descriptions of the "clean and tidy" home reported by those who knew the family well and the mess allegedly found by the policemen who burst into it mob-handed on the day in question.
The report found an equally glaring contrast between the social workers' insistence that the child was quite happy to have been removed from her parents, and the abundant evidence, observed at first-hand, that the little girl had an extremely good relationship with her parents and wants nothing more than to be reunited with them. The courts seem to have totally ignored this report, whose author last month expressed astonishment that the child had not been returned home.
What has also come to light is a remarkable judgment by Lord Justice Thorpe and Lord Justice Wall in the Appeal Court last year, in another case which also involved the apparently ruthless determination of East Sussex social workers to send a child for adoption. The judges were fiercely critical. The social workers' conduct, said Lord Justice Thorpe, could only reinforce the suspicions of those who believe "councils have a secret agenda to establish a high score of children they have placed for adoption".
Lord Justice Wall described East Sussex's conduct as "disgraceful – not a word I use lightly" and also as "about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years". "The social workers in question," he said, appeared "not only to have been inadequately managed, they do not appear to have been properly trained". As for the barrister who represented East Sussex (and who also appeared in most of the hearings in the "dog-breeder" case), Lord Justice Wall said "her attitude came across, to me at least, as – in effect – so what?" She had demonstrated, he said, "profound misunderstanding" of the council's legal position vis à vis adoption. He ordered his comments to be circulated to family courts and adoption agencies across the land.
Though the circumstances are different, anyone reading the documents could not fail to be struck by how many of the judges' comments are relevant to the case I reported. The same council's social workers have again pushed for a child to be adopted in a way which prompts the family's GP to say "the destruction of this once happy family is, in my opinion, evil". And that barrister who was involved in both cases is now – a family court judge.
Even before that, Booker had written about this case here.
Booker and the Telegraph are to be congratulated on their assiduous and forthright reporting on this issue – something that we ourselves have been doing in our own small way for several years. Here are some more of Booker's articles on the subject, which we're happy to pass on to you and hope you will read with interest and horror ...
MPs must act ...
Fleeing the tyranny of the social worker ...
BBC's flawed reporting ...
The evil Family Court system ...
The GOS says: And if anyone is tempted to write along the lines of "... if it saves the life of just one child, it's worth it ..." then I have to tell you that I have a little wax doll and a hatpin and I'm not afraid to use 'em.
It isn't worth it, all right? It just isn't.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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