One of our long-running and deeply-felt causes here at GOS has been the outrageous system of secretive and arbitrary Family Courts which can make life-changing (in many cases life-ruining) decisions and enforce them on innocent families without even the need to prove that any wrong-doing has taken place. The system allows social workers free rein to remove children from their families on the flimsiest of evidence - remember the soldier whose baby was taken away for a year because being a soldier he must have a violent disposition and was therefore more likely to abuse his children?
We're pleased to see that influential newspapers like The Times share our concerns. Two recent articles have caught our attention ...
Family courts system accused of hiding evidence from parents
Parents fighting in the family courts for contact with their children are being denied access to their personal files by a corrupt system, a leading parental rights campaigner has said. Alison Stevens, head of Parents Against Injustice, has called for Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to force social services and individual courts to comply with the Data Protection Act.
She said: “Local authorities have to send the requested files within 40 days . . . but they are often not following public law guidelines. It’s corruption within the system. They are playing God, and there must be some reason why — perhaps to hide things they have got wrong in the cases.”
Evidence is gathered from a variety of sources before children are taken from their parents in family courts. Tracking down and obtaining these documents can be very difficult because they are held by various bodies and must be applied for in different ways. Ms Stevens said: “Parents should be entitled to their files — not just social services files but all files: from health visitors, GPs, different hospitals, the ambulance trust, psychologist reports, paediatrician notes and so on.”
The Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has written to all MPs calling for a parliamentary review into the operation of the family courts. He said: “One of the ways legal practitioners prevent parents from fighting cases is by not giving them the paperwork. Often the paperwork doesn’t add up, so if parents got hold of it they would see what was going on.”
Many parents have welcomed the call for greater accountability. Roland Simpkin (not his real name) received his social services files seven years after his children were taken into care in 2001 amid allegations of abuse. When the allegations were shown to be unfounded, he sought to obtain the evidence held on him by social services to find out why he was still not allowed to see his children. He was sent his files last year, after pursuing his case through a series of letters, complaints and court orders, but he found that parts of the notes had been crossed through with black pen, words had been deleted and sections of paragraphs had been removed during photocopying.
Mr Simpkin said: “Despite being repeatedly found not to have harmed or posed a risk of harm to my children or anybody else’s, the sheer amount of delay introduced by the sluggishness of the social services department to share information is likely to be a serious negative factor in any potential repeated contact.”
In another case, Marc Tufano, an actor who has appeared in EastEnders and The Bill, has not seen his two sons for seven years because he cannot obtain the documents that he needs to bring his case to appeal. His children were given residence with his partner in 2003 after their relationship broke down. Though he immediately tried to launch an appeal, he said that he had found it impossible to obtain transcripts of the original court hearings because the court authorities had been slow to reply to his requests and had since claimed to have destroyed the documents.
Mr Tufano said: “I have begged these government agents to leave me alone so as I can see my sons without being harassed by endless arguments over the paperwork they require. It is made impossible for parents to get hold of the documents they need.”
Sezgi Kapur’s two daughters were taken from her in 2003 amid allegations that her violent attitude towards care professionals could be harmful to her children, allegations she denies. Before the hearings in the family court, her requests for her social services files were ignored or denied, and she was forced to apply for court orders to disclose the documents. Without them, Ms.Kapur was unable to respond to the evidence gathered against her by social services and care workers, and so was unable to fight her case effectively.
After the files were provided, she discovered that the minutes from high-level social services meetings about her case had been withheld and that memos had been circulated to those who attended asking them to “destroy all previous copies” of notes from the meeting.
Ms.Kapur said: “These meetings painted a picture of me as a volatile, aggressive, threatening individual who was alienating professionals, who might one day emotionally harm my children through this purported alienation. It was incredible to read this. I fired six sets of solicitors because they failed to get disclosure of all my documents. If the parents do not get a fair trial, the children do not either.”
Interesting to see what Ms.Kapur's alleged crime was - not violence towards her children, but perceived threats towards the professionals (social workers, presumably) who were pestering her. You mustn't stand up to social workers, you see, because social workers are God.
In another article The Times highlights a case in point:
A baby was placed into care and is facing adoption after a psychologist misdiagnosed the mother’s mental state. The child has been in foster care for six months even though experts have said that the mother posed no immediate risk. A psychologist told Ipswich County Court this week that she had inaccurately assessed the mother as having factitious illness, formerly known as Munchausen’s by proxy. That assessment resulted in Suffolk County Council putting the baby on the childcare protection register.
The diagnosis was based on accusations that the mother had made up illnesses for her son from another relationship, which she denied. The diagnosis was changed after a psychiatrist said that there was no evidence that the mother had fabricated anything about her son. The psychologist said that she had since concluded that the mother had narcissistic personality disorder, where sufferers can believe they are special and have difficulty showing empathy. This disorder was not a barrier to successful parenting, the psychologist said.
Once the baby was born, the mother and father were subjected to regular visits by social workers. The mother told one that her partner would feel like killing them all if the baby was taken away. A few days later the baby was taken into care
... because, once again, the only thing worse than harming a child is threatening to harm a social worker.
The psychologist said that the baby was removed despite there being no immediate concerns about its treatment. “I understand that there were never any concerns about [its] practical care. There were risks in the long term . . . in terms of consistency of parenting,” she said. She added that the mother craved attention, regardless of the welfare of her baby. The mother would find it difficult to put the baby’s needs before her own, she said, although there was no evidence she had done this while caring for the baby.
Experts also expressed concern about risks posed by the father.
The court was given insight into the numerous difficulties faced by social services in dealing with the case. All three experts who gave evidence agreed that the parents were evasive and that the father had told substantial untruths on several occasions. When the mother told the father on Saturday that she wanted to leave him, he had taken a knife and gone into another room — with the implication that he would harm himself if they were apart.
Two experts complained that they had not been given enough information about the case — only one of the three had observed the mother, the father and the baby. They emphasised that both parents would need significant therapy to overcome their problems. One of the experts said that the mother had suffered from depression and although she responded well to medication, she did not always take it.
The local authority took a measured approach to the circumstances. While it could have moved immediately to a care plan recommending adoption, it agreed to further assessment of the couple. The baby will be kept in foster care in the meantime, with a further hearing scheduled for July. If assessments are not positive, the child is likely to be adopted.
You note that last paragraph: Suffolk County Council could have "moved immediately to a care plan recommending adoption". Instead, it's going to keep the child from its parents and then have it adopted.
And this is not because the child has been harmed. It hasn't.
And it's not because the experts ("experts" are the ones who got it wrong in the first place, by their own admission) think that the child is likely to be harmed, because they don't.
It's because ... well, why is it? Because they feel like it? Because they haven't got a lot on this week, and need to keep themselves busy? Because Suffolk Social Services haven't been in the papers yet, and they're jealous of all the publicity Norfolk keeps getting? Never underestimate the rivalry between these two neighbouring counties. Ipswich v. Norwich may be the local Derby, but it doesn't even scratch the surface ...
The fact that The Times is now able to report this case is an excellent thing, and a great relief to those of us who feel strongly about the abuses of the Family Courts. Sadly, being reported in the newspaper doesn't necessarily make the problem go away - if it did, Gordon McBroon would now be but faint smear on the backs of our memories, along with most of his execrable government.
It's going to take a long time and a great deal of re-education before local authority children's departments accept that parents and children have rights, and those rights are a damn sight more compelling than those of social workers. And that chief among those is the right not to be snatched from your family on some flimsy pretext in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.
I pray sometimes that there really is an afterlife. I just warm to the idea that sometime, somewhere, a load of social workers are going to come face to face with the souls of the children they've kidnapped and the parents they kidnapped them from.
The GOS says: Yes, yes, I know, I know ... there are people all over the country raising their eyes to heaven and tutting under their breath ...
"What about Baby P?" they mutter. "What about Victoria Climbié? If we can save the life of just one child ..."
Actually this is the most despicable argument. It's illogical, emotive in the worst sense, and just plain unintelligent. If you can save the life of just one child, why the bloody hell didn't you get on and do it?
Why didn't you organise yourselves so that the child most at risk got the most experienced social worker, and that social worker had a workload that allowed him or her to devote adequate time to that child, and that he or she had adequate and appropriate resources? Why didn't you just behave as though you were rational, caring human beings with a bit of bottle and a lot of common sense, instead of either (a) ineffectual, inefficient wimps more concerned with your own safety that that of your charges, or (b) power-mad, responsibility-shirking, overpaid harridans who wouldn't go until they were pushed - and then threatened to sue!
Snatching children from their parents willy-nilly is no kind of answer to the problem. If it were, we'd ban all children from ever crossing the road as soon as one got run over, or drain every swimming-pool as soon as someone drowned. If children are at risk and it's your job to do something about it, the intelligent thing to do, the reasonable thing, the right thing, is not to thrash about getting court orders and calling the police just in case something goes wrong and you get the blame. The right thing is to do your job properly, not use your worst failures to justify you in doing ... whatever it is you want to do.
You often hear the expression "damned if you do, damned if you don't" in connection with this issue. But that's simplistic. The correct wording should be "Damned if you do when you shouldn't, damned if you don't when you should".
To cap one hackneyed cliché with another, it's not rocket-science.
P.S. There's a bit of a pattern emerging these days: children being taken from their parents because the parents are alleged to have been threatening towards social workers. I have a proposal to make. If you're a parent and you want to threaten a social worker, just get in touch with me and I'll do it for you. My kids are grown up, and heaven help any social worker who tangles with either of them!
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