This article by Daniel Foggo appeared in The Sunday Times on September 6, 2009 ...
Question a doctor and lose your child
Parents are being threatened with having their children taken into care after questioning doctors’ diagnoses or objecting to their medical care. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP, who campaigns to stop injustices in the family court, said: “Very often care proceedings are used as retaliation by local authorities against ‘uppity’ people who question the system.”
The mother of a 13-year-old girl who became partly paralysed after being given a cervical cancer vaccination says social workers have told her the child may be removed if she (the mother) continues to link her condition with the vaccination (in other words, she may lose her child just for expressing an opinion - GOS).
A couple had all six of their children removed from their care after they disputed the necessity of an invasive medical test on their eldest daughter. Doctors, who suspected she might have had a blood disease, called for social services to obtain an emergency protection order, although it was subsequently confirmed that she was not suffering from the condition. The parents were still considered unstable, and all their children were taken from them.
A single mother whose teenage son is terminally ill and confined to a wheelchair has been told he is to become the subject of a care order after she complained that her local authority’s failure to provide bathroom facilities for him has left her struggling to maintain sanitary standards.
In the first of those cases, Ashleigh Cave, 13, from Liverpool, began experiencing severe headaches and dizziness half an hour after being inoculated last October with Cervarix, which guards against girls contracting the human papilloma virus.
The schoolgirl was soon collapsing repeatedly; she lost the use of her legs and was admitted to Alder Hey children’s hospital. Nearly 11 months later she is still in hospital and is unable to stand or walk unaided. Her mother, Cheryl, has now been told that doctors believe her condition must be psychosomatic.
“The hospital brought in social workers from the local authority who have told me they are considering putting Ashleigh on an at-risk register,” Cheryl Cave said. She is convinced her daughter’s paralysis was caused by the vaccination.
Cave said that a social worker from Sefton council said she suspected her of having Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy or factitious illness syndrome — controversial conditions in which mothers are said to attribute illnesses falsely to their children in order to gain attention. Cave said: “The social worker said I should stop believing the injection has anything to do with Ashleigh’s condition because I am putting my thoughts on to her and stopping her getting well. Since Ashleigh was in hospital she has become incontinent and had double kidney infections and chest infections. Have I made all these up?”
In the third of these cases, Melvilina Gavin-Langley’s 16-year-old son Omar is terminally ill with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and restricted to a wheelchair. His mother is embroiled in a legal dispute with Birmingham city council over a partly completed extension intended to provide Omar with easy access to a bathroom. Gavin-Langley, 49, who wants the extension rebuilt because she says it was designed in a way that was dangerous and obstructed access to sewers, said: “I have had to carry Omar upstairs to bathe him but it was risking dislocating his shoulders and also I got a hernia from all the lifting. I told the council I could no longer lift Omar across my back.
They then turned that around and said I had said I could no longer care for my son. They say they have to put him into care because his hair has not been washed and he’s not getting a bath. They have just threatened me with this because they don’t like me taking legal action against them.”
A spokesman for Birmingham city council confirmed the council was seeking an interim care order but said social workers wanted Omar to remain with his mother. Sefton council did not comment on the Ashleigh Cave case.
Some of the comments from Sunday Times readers are both illuminating and disturbing ...
Suzy Chapman wrote: "Accusations of MSbP (FII) against parents of children and young people with ME, the placing of children and young people on the “at risk” register, threats of child protection proceedings and in some cases forcible removal of a child or young person from the home via court orders into hospital wards (sometimes on locked psychiatric wards or where parents are denied visiting rights) by social services, community paediatricians or paediatric consultants, in cases where a child’s diagnosis has been challenged by the family or where the family has rejected treatments such as CBT/GET or psychosocial management of their child’s illness have ... been taking place for years within the ME patient community."
Denise Longman agrees: "Thank you for bringing this into the open. I have been an ME patient for 24 years, in contact with several ME patients who have been forced or coerced into psychiatric wards where they have been abused by those who tried to maintain that the illness was "all in your head". When the psychiatric treatment did not cure them, nothing else was offered and they have been left to struggle on, hidden from the world, looked after by their families if they are lucky, marginalised and always under the shadow of being called work shy or scrounger.
Question their diagnosis, or lack of one, especially in neurological cases, and they try to shift the burden onto the patient, or in the case of children, onto the parents. This is more often the mother, who is often left holding the fort as families collapse under the pressure.
Neurological diseases have always been too much for the system - remember that Parkinson's Disease was blamed on the patients own psyche, as was Multiple Sclerosis, until better techniques gave the true picture. Now diseases like ME are denied any kind of treatment - very many patients are only offered cognitive behavioural therapy, and denied any recognition that their illness is real."
Julie Jones wrote: "I also have an 18 year old daughter who has suffered serious side effects to the Ceravix vaccine. She has had encephalitis and now has epilepsy. She was in hospital for 8 weeks but is now in a brain injury unit in Birmingham. I know that the vaccine cased my daughter's illness because she was perfectly fine until she had them. It has totally devastated my family and I will do everything in my power to get this vaccine investigated further. The vaccine should be suspended until Glaxo can prove otherwise before someone else is injured. I know of at least 8 girls who have had adverse reactions to Ceravix" (still, I expect the doctors know best. Probably - GOS).
Laurence Swift summed the system up perfectly: "It is really scary that a child, or even all the children of a family, can be taken away from their parents (or transferred fron the custody of one parent to the other) at the whim of a set of "social workers" who have no medical, legal or ethical training, without a prior and proper Court Order and serious medical investigation, and without the complete involvement of the parents and children concerned. The parents can appeal only after the removal of the children, when the damage of the trauma of removal from the parents has been done. But they have no right to legal aid as far as I know. This system is obviously too wide open to abuse by these so-called social workers, who are given far too much power. The system needs a drastic overhaul, to include the Courts at the earliest stage, with full rights of defence and appeal and all with Legal Aid for the defendants (for such are the parents, who are being "accused" of Munchausen's by Proxy) but are treated Guilty Until Proven Innocent. The kingpin of all British justice is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a Court of Law - and there must be no exceptions to this" (Laurence means, of course, a proper public law court, not some secretive kangaroo outfit laughingly known as a "Family Court" - surely an oxymoron if ever there was one - GOS).
John Bald sees this as political: "One of the key techniques of fascism was to exercise power without interference from the courts. New Labour is extending this technique to local councils, partly over relatively small issues such as parking fines, partly over big issues such as child care, in which justice is not seen to be done. There are many excellent social workers, but they are working within a system that could have been designed to promote abuse of power."
Paul Saigon goes further: "Simple: our children are not ours, they are the property of the state."
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