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It's amazing, really, that after all the vociferous objection from people like ourselves – ordinary people, that is, who place some value on common sense and proportion – there are still pundits in high places whose view of the world has become so blinkered that they think they have a right to dictate to the rest of us. Luckily there are places like Spiked capable of taking an informed, critical look at the more pompous and self-righteous utterances of our betters ... ... by Luke Gittos ... This week, the British children’s campaigning group Barnardo’s published data relating to care proceedings in England and Wales. It strongly criticised the delays experienced by families who are subject of proceedings under section 31 of the Children Act 1980. Under these proceedings, parental responsibility for a child can pass to a local authority where that local authority has demonstrated that the child is ‘suffering or likely to suffer significant harm’ and that the harm is ‘attributable to the care being given to the child’ or ‘the child being beyond parental control’. Barnardo’s said the fact that these proceedings can take as long as 62 weeks to get through the County Courts was ‘damaging vulnerable children’. The time spent awaiting a ruling in care proceedings places children in a ‘desperate limbo’ and leaves them ‘very possibly at risk’. The ‘evident lack of credence given to social workers’ today is one of the causes of ‘significant delays’, said Barnardo’s, before suggesting that a time limit of 30 weeks be placed on all cases, with a ‘fast-track’ system for cases involving children who are under 18 months old. Of course, if a long period of time is spent making a decision about the care of a child, that could be extremely unsettling for the child involved. But still, we should think carefully about what Barnardo’s is advocating. A fixed limit on the amount of time a court has to dispose of a case would be extremely unusual for England and Wales. With limited exceptions in the criminal courts, there are no statutory time limits to force the conclusion of cases. Courts have the discretion to allot an appropriate amount of time in consideration of the complexity of the facts in an individual case. This discretion is particularly important in relation to care proceedings, where determinations can vary hugely from the straightforward to the enormously complex. The language employed by Barnardo’s suggests that it thinks the decisions taken during care proceedings are simple. Its campaign materials flippantly use terms like ‘abusive households’, with children straightforwardly categorised as ‘at risk’ and ‘not at risk’. With such a black-and-white, abstract worldview, where everything is defined almost in terms of good and evil, it’s no wonder Barnardo’s thinks the amount of time spent on care proceedings should be capped and everything should be sped up to ‘save children’. Yet anyone familiar with the law in this area will know that there are many intricacies involved. The courts have frequently disagreed on how to apply various provisions in the Children Act and have developed reams of case law attempting to formulate applicable definitions. The job of the practitioners in this area of law is to apply these concepts to the breadth of circumstances being weighed up in court. It is often a painstaking process. And considering that the proceedings can result in the state removing a child from its family – a very serious move – it is only right that it is a painstaking process. We should feel reassured that it often takes a long time to make these life-changing decisions. Of course it is true that there are many unnecessary delays in the family courts. Concerns about such delays are not new. In 2006, the UK Department of Constitutional Affairs published its Review of the Child Care Proceedings System in England and Wales. It identified a number of factors causing unnecessary delay in hearings relating to the Children Act, including: the poor quality of legal representation; poorly prepared applications; the scarcity of judicial resources. But none of these issues would be solved by enforcing a Barnardo’s-style time limit; instead we need greater investment in the UK’s sclerotic civil legal aid system, which currently fails to provide legal protection for the poorest in society from some of the state’s most draconian powers. Fixing legal aid, however, is not something Barnardo’s is very interested in; it only wants to rush cases through the courts. This is because Barnardo’s is not really concerned with the ins and outs of various complex cases, but rather with pushing its own interventionist agenda. In the aftermath of the horrific Edlington assault case, in which two young boys were jailed following a prolonged assault on a nine-year-old boy, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, Martin Narey, criticised social services in Britain for ‘trying to fix families that are completely broken’. He went on to say that ‘if you take a baby young and get them quickly into a permanent adoptive home, then we know that is where we have success’. In May 2010, Barnardo’s assistant director for policy, Enver Solomon, said at a conference on service provision for vulnerable children that social services had ‘failed to crack neglect’ due to their ‘reluctance to make proactive decisions to remove children living in chronically neglectful circumstances’. It seems that, for Barnardo’s, taking children away from families should be a priority, and care proceedings are simply a question of how quickly a child can be removed. This is why the administration of the law should not be influenced by the prejudices of individual charities. The law should not bend its rules to suit campaigners’ simplistic classification of legal problems in black-and-white moralistic terms. The issues dealt with by the family courts are frequently complex and carry the most serious consequences for those on the receiving end of the state’s powers. As such, the courts should be free to determine the amount of time required for the proper consideration of each matter on a case-by-case basis. Barnardo’s may like to think that the decisions made in care proceedings are simply a case of deciding who is and who is not ‘at risk’ – thankfully, adhering to due process is never that simple. ... so basically, according to Barnardo's, the fact that social workers have won themselves such a bad press recently is deplorable, and steps should be taken to ensure that they can continue to interfere in the lives of ordinary families whenever they feel like it. OK, we can see their point. We're sure that young parents who have their children wrenched away from them for no good reason, whose lives are torn apart, who are permanently scarred and falsely labelled as child abusers, will see that if it saves the life of just one child, it's been worth it ... won't they? Then there's this from Rob Lyons, deputy editor of Spiked ... Stop smoking or your children will die The redefinition of smoking in cars as ‘child abuse’ is about guilt-tripping parents into changing their behaviour. Last week, Dr Steve Field, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), was in the news for endorsing the idea that overweight people should be told that they are ‘fat’ to encourage them to do something about their weight (er ... wait a minute ... isn't that happening already? It may be illegal and punishable by a thousand years' solitary confinement in Parkhurst to shout “Oi, wobble-bottom!” at some lard-arse in the street, but haven't there been several stories in the papers recently about perfectly ordinary, healthy-looking children being sent letters informing them that they're obese and at risk of dying a horrible death from diabetes, scrofula, piles and various other dreadful diseases? - GOS) In Sunday’s edition of the Observer, he continued his attack on people who have the ‘wrong’ lifestyles in a piece arguing that smoking in the home or the family car should be recognised as a form of child abuse. For Field, it seems that emotional blackmail and dubious medical claims (That's it. We've written several times that there has not yet been one single authenticated and verifiable case of someone dying from secondary smoking. We're not denying that it could happen – but just prove it, OK? You can't, not so far) are all valid tactics in the pursuit of making patients – and especially parents – do The Right Thing. Field says he approves of the tone of the new Lib-Con government’s health policy. He sees the move from nannying the public to encouraging them to take personal responsibility as a welcome shift: ‘In the space of three months, the thrust of public health policy has shifted towards a desire for individuals to take more personal responsibility for their health and the health of their children. It is a dramatic change in emphasis from the last government, sometimes accused of wanting to remove all our personal freedoms and make big decisions for us.’ He continues: ‘The truth is that too many of us neglect our health and this is leading to increasing levels of illness and early death.’ This seems a rather strange assessment, given that life expectancies continue to rise steadily. In fact, the Lib-Con government is now fiddling with pension arrangements and retirement ages in an effort, we are told, to stop the ever-increasing number of older people from bankrupting the nation. How does that fit with ‘increasing levels’ of early death? Field clearly sees himself as a straight-talking kind of guy. Unfortunately, he’s not so much talking straight as talking fearmongering nonsense. Field’s piece in the Observer, which has hit the headlines in other papers subsequently, takes aim at parents in particular. ‘I believe that parents who smoke in cars carrying small children are committing a form of child abuse’, he says. This kind of melodramatic exaggeration might be suitable for a stroppy teenager, but it is laughable from the head of a high-profile medical body. Not so long ago, children could be expected to make immediately for the top deck of the bus to and from school, where they would sit in the fug of smoke produced by their schoolmates, other commuters and themselves. Yet somehow these children survived. Now, a high-profile doctor fills newspaper column inches by comparing a whiff of smoke from a parent’s cigarette with child abuse. All sense of proportion and perspective has gone out of the window. However, Field is only getting into his hysterical stride: ‘Parents need to act as role models from early on and take control of their children’s eating habits by providing sensible, appropriate portion sizes and by not feeding them rubbish … Unless parents exert more control over their children’s diets, they are risking a lifetime of health problems and even premature death – death before their parents, which is almost too sad to contemplate.’ More to the point, it is too rare to bother contemplating. Children dying before their parents remains very, very unusual. A report published in the Lancet in March 2009 suggested severe obesity – which affects only about two per cent of the UK population – could knock 10 years off life expectancy on average. So even in this case, it would still be unusual for even the very overweight – never mind the majority of much lighter people who also qualify as ‘obese’ – to die before parents who are 20, 30 or even 40 years older than them. Given Field’s tone, it would be easy to conclude that the country is being swept by a tsunami of premature death. A quick reality check is in order. In 2008, excluding newborns, there were just over 2,000 deaths among children under 16 in England and Wales out of, very roughly, 11million children. So the most obvious point to make is just how remarkably little chance there is of a child dying, full stop. Childhood mortality, once commonplace, is now extremely rare. Looking at the broader picture, the UK Office for National Statistics recently announced that mortality rates for the population as a whole have never been lower. Yet according to Dr Field, it is at this moment that we need to turn the screws on parents to be more responsible. Field may claim to want a different style of government intervention – with a greater emphasis on nudging us towards the approved lifestyle rather than endless hectoring and regulation – but his Observer article shows that there is no sign of the moral blackmail coming to an end just yet. For example, he clearly believes that if parents won’t stop smoking for their own sake then they should be browbeaten into doing it for the sake of the children. In March this year, Field said: ‘Parents wouldn’t intentionally let children breathe car fumes or carbon monoxide, yet passive smoke exposure is affecting the lives of around two million children in households in the UK. We must take urgent action to stop children’s lives and their health being blighted.’ Field is another in a long line of (almost) self-appointed guardians of the nation’s health who feel free to demand that we conform to their vision of appropriate behaviour. Sunday’s Observer referred to Field as ‘Britain’s top GP’ (almost as if there were some kind of medical profession league table) while BBC News suggested that he ‘represents 42,000 GPs across the UK’. In fact, Field was elected by a few dozen members of the RCGP’s governing council, elections for which seem to attract a derisory turnout. It is on this basis that he gets a platform for his tendentious views. Enough already. While there is a lot of talk about finding the appropriate balance between personal responsibility and state intervention, there is very little discussion of personal autonomy. We do not need busybodies like Field telling us how to live our lives. Even knowing the risks of certain habits - like smoking or drinking - we may carry on because we simply enjoy doing these things. That should be our choice. Instead of pontificating from the pages of the Observer, Field would do far better to treat his patients – actual sick people who could benefit from his years of medical training and experience – rather than stirring up misplaced panics about our health. either on this site or on the World Wide Web. Copyright © 2010 The GOS |
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