Yes,they gag parents to "protect their privacy" but allow local authorities to advertise their precious children for adoption in the Daily Mirror,and other periodicals, with first names ,colour photographs,birth dates and ethnic origins  rather like pedigree dogs ,who of course do not need privacy  ! HYPOCRITES ALL !

These are the ten reforms advocated by the Times newspaper and who could seriously disagree?

WE believe that wholesale reforms are needed, which can be summed up in ten points:

1. Open family courts to the press in all but exceptional circumstances (as recommended by the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee).

2.Let any parent or carer accused of abuse call any witnesses they need in their defence. At the moment, they are routinely refused permission to do so.

3.Give automatic permission for parents who are refused legal aid to get a lay adviser to help them present their case. This is routinely refused.

4.Remove the restrictions that prevent families from talking about their case (as recommended by the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee).

5.Review the definition of “emotional abuse” across local authorities, to make sure that it cannot become a catch-all for overzealous officials.

6.Provide an automatic right for parents to receive copies of case conference notes and all evidence used against them in court, just as they would in a criminal trial.

7.Create an independent body to oversee the actions of social services, with proper sanctions. If that body is to be the General Social Care Council, make it easier for parents to go directly to that body rather than having to face delays from the local authority.

8.Let children in care waive their right to privacy if they wish to speak out. For gagging children is surely not consistent with promoting their welfare.

9.Restructure CAFCASS, the Family Court Advisory Service, from being an organisation that reports on the parents to the courts to one that actively promotes the parenting needs of children. The primary focus should cease to be assisting the court process. It should be diverting parents away from contested hearings into the making of parenting plans.

10.Review the recent legal aid cut-backs that are deterring lawyers from taking on these complex family cases. It is quite wrong that desperate parents are unable to find a lawyer to help them in their time of need.

Child protection: MPs must act on the scandal of seized children

Britain's child protection system is off the rails, and only the politicians who built it can fix it, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
The Sunday Telegraph 30 Oct 2010

Britain's social workers took a beating again last week. On the orders of the children's minister, Tim Loughton, full versions of two harrowing case reviews of the Baby P tragedy were published. They found fault not only with Haringey's social workers but with lawyers, the police and health professionals, Under pressure from social workers, reviews of two similar cases in Yorkshire are still being kept under wraps. Meanwhile, an Ofsted report found that 119 children died or suffered serious injury last year through social workers' failure to intervene.

Still largely hidden from view, however, is that other scandal, in its way just as disturbing, in which the failure of our child protection system is the very opposite: the seizure of thousands of children a year from loving homes, for no good reason.

In recent months, as I have followed dozens of these cases and been briefed on many more by such experts as John Hemming, the MP who runs the Justice for Families campaign, and Ian Josephs, the former councillor who has helped hundreds of families through his Forced Adoption website, a startlingly consistent picture has emerged. What follows is not based on exceptional cases but on the typical workings of a system which has gone horrifyingly off the rails.

For parents who fall foul of this system, often on no more evidence than malicious hearsay, the first shock is to find themselves treated like dangerous criminals. To seize children, social workers seem able to enlist the unquestioning support of the police, who arrive mob-handed, six or eight at a time, beating down doors, tearing babies from their mothers' arms, holding parents in custody for up to 36 hours while their children are removed into foster care.

The parents must then wrestle with a Kafka-esque system rigged against them in every way. They find themselves in courts where every normal principle of British justice has been stood on its head. Social workers may give written evidence to a judge which the parents aren't allowed to see. The most outrageous hearsay evidence may be accepted by the court without the parents even being allowed to cross-examine on it.

A key part is played by evidence from supposed "experts", psychiatrists or paediatricians who may be paid up to £35,000 for their reports, and who receive regular work from the social workers involved. Parents are forbidden to call their own independent experts to challenge a case made against them. They are, all too often, pressured into being represented by lawyers who, again, work regularly for the council, who fail to put their case and who turn out to be just part of the same system.

Parents may be forbidden to testify on their own behalf, but must listen for hours, even days, to everyone else involved – including their own lawyers – putting what amounts to a case for the prosecution. The guardian appointed to represent the interests of the child may never have met the child and merely endorses whatever the social workers say.

Not surprisingly, these bizarre practices are so geared to the interests of a corrupted system that, in the latest year for which we have figures (2008), of 7,340 applications for care orders made by social workers, only 20 were refused.

Meanwhile, the children themselves are handed over to foster homes, which receive £400 a week or £20,000 a year for each child, and where many are intensely unhappy and not infrequently abused. Foster carers and social workers routinely conspire to tell bewildered children that their parents neither love them nor want them back. Children and parents meet at rigorously supervised "contact sessions", where any expression of affection or attempt to discuss why the children have been taken from home may be punished by termination of the session or denial of further contact.

The purpose of all this, funded by hundreds of millions of pounds of public money, is partly to keep in being the vast fostering industry, run by dozens of agencies, often owned by ex-social workers, which also receive £20,000 a year for each child they place. Of course, there are many good and responsible foster parents, but statistics show that children in care do very much worse on almost every count, from health to performance in school, than children living with their birth parents.

Another purpose of the system is to ensure that as many children as possible are adopted (at a cost of £36,000 per placement), in accordance with Tony Blair's personal commitment a decade ago that the target for adoptions in Britain should rise by 40 per cent. Councils are still receiving millions of pounds a year for meeting adoption targets.

Yet virtually none of this reaches the outside world because the system is hidden behind an almost impenetrable veil of secrecy. The nominal reason for this is to protect the identity and interests of the children, but secrecy has been so extended that its real aim is to protect the system itself and all those who do so well out of it.

Parents are forbidden to talk to the media or even to their MPs about the injustice they are suffering. Several times in recent months, councils have sought injunctions to prohibit me reporting anything at all about a case, even though no person or even the council itself would be identified. More than once, parents have been threatened with contempt of court and prison if they talk to me or anyone else about how they are being treated.

Very occasionally a judge or senior lawyer breaks ranks by speaking out against such abuse of state power, as when one Court of Appeal judge recently compared the conduct of a council's social workers to what went on in "Stalin's Russia or Mao's China". But in general this cruel, dishonest and venal system continues on its way, hidden from view, accountable to nobody but itself.

The only people in a position to reform this system fundamentally are those who set it up in the first place under the 1989 Children Act – the politicians. But they have, with one or two shining exceptions – notably John Hemming – walked away from the Frankenstein's monster that Parliament created. It is now up to them to support Mr Hemming and all those horribly maltreated families who are campaigning for one of the most out­rageous scandals in Britain today to be brought to an end.

At half past 10
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In these courts happy loving families are ruthlessly split up to feed the adoption "juggernaut" .An adult teenager was recently told by a judge in the family court ,"Your baby sister is no longer your sister because she has been adopted so you will never see her again !"

 The following summary of the problems with social services and the family courts together with the remedies that could and should solve them can be read in a short version as follows:- 

 PUNISHMENT WITHOUT CRIME

Kangaroo court

A kangaroo court or kangaroo trial is a colloquial term for a sham legal proceeding or court. The outcome of a trial by kangaroo court is essentially determined in advance, usually for the purpose of ensuring conviction, either by going through the motions of manipulated procedure or by allowing no defense at all.

A kangaroo court's proceedings deny due process rights in the name of expediency. Such rights include the right to summon witnesses, the right of cross-examination, the right not to incriminate oneself, the right not to be tried on secret evidence, the right to control one's own defense, the right to exclude evidence that is improperly obtained, irrelevant or inherently inadmissible, e.g., hearsay, the right to exclude judges or jurors on the grounds of partiality or conflict of interest, and the right of appeal.

ALL the above applies to family courts when the "SS" apply for an interim care order to remove children from their parents and family to place them with strangers in fostercare ! 

YES UK FAMILY COURTS ARE KANGAROO COURTS!!

I was sent the following by a distressed parent ! 

Sunday  Telegraph:-

Christopher Booker Column 16 July 2010
 

Never in all my years as a journalist have I felt so frustrated as I do over two deeply disturbing stories of apparent injustice which cry out to be reported – but which, for legal reasons, I can refer to only in the vaguest terms, This is because to report them as they deserve, and as the victims so desperately wish, would challenge a part of our legal system which has been deliberately shrouded in an almost impenetrabkle veil of secrecy.
 Two weeks ago I described four examples of what I described as one of the greatest scandals in Britain today – the seizing of children by social workers from loving families, on what appears to be the flimsiest and most questionable grounds. The children may then be handed on to foster carers, who can receive up to £400 a week for each child, or are put out for adoption by strangers, in a way which too often leads to intense distress for both the parents and the children involved,
 One case I referred to concerns a north London couple whose five children were in April seized by social workers from Haringey council and sent into foster care. The mother was pregnant and her baby was born last month. Shortly afterwards, at 3 am, according to her version of what happened, nine police officers and social workers burst into the hospital room where she was lying on a bed breastfeeding, to wrest her baby from her arms with considerable force. They then discovered they had nowhere to take the baby, so it was put in another part of the hospital, where the mother was taken under escort four times a day to breastfeed her child until she was discharged four days later. She has not seen her baby since.
 Having talked at length to the mother, I found this story so shocking that I put a series of questions to the council, to get their side of the story. The response of Haringey which, since the national furore over its social workers’ failure to prevent the battering to death of Baby P, has been somewhat sensitive on such matters, was to ask the High Court to rule that I should not be allowed to write about the case at all. Although the court did not go so far, the Sunday Telegraph was reminded of the comprehensive restrictions on reporting such matters,
 Last week, after spending several hours with the parents, looking at their neat home, the little beds where their children used to sleep and the cot prepared for the baby, I came away more convinced than ever that something had gone very seriously amiss. I found the wife impressive in her detailed account of all that had happened, clearly a devoted mother who feels herself and her children to have been the victims of an extraordinary error - the nature of which, alas, I cannot reveal.
 This week two days have been set aside for the mother at last to put her case to a judge, Despite the tragedy that has torn their family apart, the parents have never previously been given any opportunity to challenge the council’s version of the story,  I only hope the court takes particular care to check out the evidence put before it’ and that in due course I can report the full story of a case which sheds instructive light on the workings of a system supposedly devised to protect the interests of the children but which too often seems to result in the very opposite,
 Also this week the fate of another family hangs on another court hearing. This is the story of a couple who last January were rejoicing at the birth of their first child. Some weeks later, concerned by a floppy arm and faint bruising , they took the baby back to the hospital to seek medical advice, This proved to be the start of a nightmare, which led to them being arrested, handcuffed and driven off separately to a police station, where the mother was held for nine hours without food. The father was imprisoned overnight,
 It emerged that the doctor they saw had reported her suspicion about the child’s injuries to Coventry social workers. The couple were put on police bail, ordering them to surrender their passports and only allowing them to sleep in one of two named houses (the other being the father’s family home). But because no charges had been brought, the social workers allowed the baby into the care of its Irish grandmother, a respected primary school headmistress. To avoid the baby being seized, she took it to her family home in Dublin, where it is supported by a band of relatives with the approval of Irish social services,
 Determined not to be thwarted, Coventry’s social workers then asked the Irish courts to rule - in a case to be heard this week - that the baby must be sent back to them in England,. The hospital doctor has meanwhile contacted the Irish medical authorities demanding that in no way must they carry out specific medical tests on the baby which might account for its minor injuries.
 On Thursday I spoke again at length with the mother, who reported that her own police bail had been lifted and that she was therefore free to travel to Ireland. But the child’s father has been told that he may face criminal charges for injuring his son, a possibility they find incredible. This will be reported to the Irish court, leading them to fear that their child may be deported to England and that they may never see him again.
 This kind of thing is now happening so often that another meeting I had last week, in the House of Commons, was with the one politician who has done more than any other to expose what is going on. John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Yardley, Birmingham, not only set up the Justice for Families website, which contains details of many similar cases, but recently assembled an official All-Party Group of concerned MPs to campaign for the radical overhaul of a system which seems so horribly off he rails, and too often to be betraying the very principles it was set up to uphold.
 Not the least startling feature of this system is the secrecy with which it has managed to hide away from the world almost all it gets up to, As is confirmed by Ian Josephs, a remarkable businessman who runs the Forced Adoption website and has helped hundreds of families in similar plight, one of its most glaring flaws is the extent to which aggrieved parents are deprived of any right to put their case, not just to the courts but to anyone who might be able to help them.
 It is a system hermetically sealed off, in which the fate of parents and children can be decided by an incestuously closed community of social workers, police, lawyers, doctors and other professional ‘experts’, who all too often seem to work together in an alliance which seems ruthlessly oblivious to the interests of the families who fall into its clutches. Again and again I have heard of the misery of children torn from their distraught parents, forced to live unhappily in the hands of inadequate foster carers, and whose only wish is to be returned to those they know and live.
 The more I learn about this scandal, the more I understand why in April an Appeal Court judge, Lord Aikens, savaged the actions of Devon county council social workers in a forced adoption case as having been ‘more like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China than the West of England’. The council’s lawyers were told to read a judgment by Lord Justice Wall, now head of the High Court’s Family Division, which condemned Greenwich social workers as ‘enthusiastic removers of children’.  It is high time the veils of secrecy were ripped from this national outrage, that politicians intervened to call the system to order and that the press was free to bring properly to light family tragedies such as those I have only been allowed to hint at above, 

Forced adoption is doubly wicked because it is a "life sentence" where the adopted children are permanently deprived of contact not only with their parents but also with their adult siblings, grandparents,aunts, and uncles . The parents are ruthlessly jailed by secret courts (more than 200 per year) if they dare to protest publicly or reveal identities of any witnesses.

Worse still blameless brothers and sisters are more often than not adopted separately and are forced to lose all contact with each other as well as with the rest of their families(grandparents etc) at least until they are 18 and usually for the rest of their lives.The damage done to these children by heartless judges is simply horrendous......

"What about Baby P? " I hear you cry !Well, physically injured children like baby P,Victoria Climbé,and others are not good adoption material .They are in any case avoided like the plague if there is a brutal and often drunken boyfriend or stepfather on the premises to intimidate the social workers. Such children are more often than not, callously left to die !Meanwhile social workers move on to easier targets and accuse respectable and more compliant parents (especially single mothers)of posing a "risk of emotional abuse" to their children, and even to their unborn babies !That is how the "SS" work now . 

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, May 10th 2010

Christopher Booker writes..... 

Mother in court over a birthday card

Next Wednesday, Maureen Spalek, a spirited and loving mother, will be in Runcorn magistrates’ court to face a criminal charge of having sent a birthday card to her eight-year-old son – having already been arrested and held in a prison cell for 24 hours for the same offence.

Mrs Spalek is charged with breaking a court order forbidding her to have any contact with her three children, even though she has an order from another judge explicitly permitting her to send them birthday and Christmas cards. Yet a few days after she sent her younger son the card, on April 15, she was visited by two police officers who threatened to beat down her door unless she gave them entry. She was then taken to one of Runcorn’s 30 police cells where she was held in very unpleasant conditions for 24 hours.

Mrs Spalek, the former wife of a naval officer, lost her children some years ago after one of her sons was taken to hospital with a broken leg from a bicycle accident. When she complained about the attitude of a doctor who was treating her son, social workers were called in. When she then, in turn, complained about the “hostile” attitude they had shown to her, the affair escalated to the point where her three children were taken away, on the grounds that she had “problems working with professionals” – even though it was agreed in court that she was an “excellent mother”, that the children were well-behaved and well-looked-after and that they had suffered no physical or emotional abuse. Two were adopted, one lives with their father.

One of the many serious issues not raised in the recent election campaign, because all three parties have agreed not to discuss it, is the growing scandal of the abduction by social workers of children from responsible and loving parents. In too many instances, this gives the impression of a tightly closed system, in which the social workers, who have in the recent past been set “adoption targets” by central government, are aided and abetted by the police, by certain family court judges and even by those lawyers supposedly acting on behalf of the parents. I shall return to this very disturbing issue after Mrs Spalek's case this week.

 This case illustrates a colossal loophole in the family court "secrecy and gagging system" !Any parent that like Maureen commits a minor criminal offence (usually breaking an injunction thus committing  contempt of court !) If that parent pleads not guilty and represents him/herself the whole lot can come out in court with no reporting resrictions and can be debated openly !It takes guts to do this but look at the publicity and public outrage that Maureen garnered to help her get contact with her state stolen children ! 

Are there any "quick fix" solutions that could stop these injustices?There are at least 10 vital reforms needed that are discussed later(see my reform section) but for now I will name the two most important....

1:- 

NO CHILD SHOULD BE FORCIBLY TAKEN INTO CARE FROM A PARENT UNLESS THAT PARENT HAS COMMITTED or HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME AGAINST  A CHILD. All such cases would then commence in the criminal courts WITH THE RULES OF EVIDENCE AND STANDARDS OF PROOF OF THE CRIMINAL COURTS including the right to ask for a hearing by jury if the possible sentence was severe.If the verdict returned is "not guilty" or if charges were dropped the children should be returned immediately.All I ask is that we give imperfect parents the same legal protections that we at present give to murderers but deny to all those unfortunate enough to appear before the UK "family courts".

Meanwhile however civil courts decide........... 

Any parent who is threatened by a care order or adoption for their child should have the right to a hearing by a jury.Any burglar facing a possible 6 months or more in prison can demand a trial by jury but mothers who risk losing their babies or young children for LIFE to forced adoption are denied this right.No jury would take a newborn baby from a mother for "risk of emotional abuse".

 At present juries in civil courts decide complicated cases of libel,slander and even city fraud.They would be more than competent to decide whether or not a child should be removed from its parents and they would not be so ready as  "establishment" judges to side in nearly every case with social services against parents  desperate to keep their beloved children. In 2007 the "SS" applied for 8173 care orders and only 21 were refused !Rubberstamping by "establishment judges"!Time to bring on 12 men (or women)good and true!

2:- Parents and their teenage children are ruthlessly gagged to prevent them revealing their own names, or names of witnesses in the family courts.It is indeed wicked that mothers whose babies are snatched at birth by social services for "risk of emotional abuse " are jailed if they protest publicly and the press are restricted in the same way. Surely parents who have had their children removed should, like rape victims be free to waive anonymity and go public if they so choose?It is outrageous that in our "democracy" hundreds of babies are taken from their mothers at birth and if these mothers identify themselves by public protest they are jailed.(Harriet Harman admitted in parliament to at least 200 parents per year imprisoned by judges at secret family courts. )Not only are parents gagged when children are taken they are gagged again at "contact" visits when they are forbidden to tell their children they love them and miss them or to discuss their court case .If they do not obey contact is cancelled immediately and sometimes stopped permanently.The threat of stopping contact is a weapon that the ss exploit ruthlessly to subdue "difficult" parents.

The UK is the only EU member to allow "forced adoption", and the only EU country to gag parents and jail them if they protest publicly.Both "forced adoption" and "the gag" must go !

The imposition of criminal procedures when matters of "public law" are decided in the family courts,including the right to hearings by jury and also the removal of the gag would not need complicated legislation and would prevent at least 90% of the present injustices.

 Mark Harris waved to his daughter; he was handcuffed and jailed!

Maureen Spalek sent a birthday card to her son; she was hancuffed and jailed! 

Sarah white sent an email to her children;she was handcuffed and jailed !

For these so called "serious offences" defying the family courts ,three parents were jailed,but was justice really served? 

Adoption Targets still exist ! Local authorities are still urged by Ofsted to arrange as many adoptions as possible so as to hit their targets ! See "Early Day Motion" 958 by John Hemmng MP. 

Hemming, John
That this House notes that the Government abolished the adoption target BV163 in April 2008; considers that the Government should have abolished PAF C23 at the same time, a performance indicator that has the same definition; is concerned that Ofsted continues to put pressure on local authorities to increase the number of adoptions; recognises that the only significant way in which this can be done is to increase the adoptions of babies and toddlers; notes that the disparity between Scotland and England in respect of this issue is blatant; and calls on the Department for Children, Schools and Families to stop pressurising local authorities through Ofsted to increase adoptions and to abolish the performance indicator PAF C23. 

Adoption system is UK's shameful secret

Britain is the only country in Europe where children are routinely removed from their parents without consent, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
Sunday Telegraph 10 Oct 2009

This week I return to one of the most disturbing stories this column has ever reported. It began on a morning in April 2007 when the home of a respectable middle-class family in Sussex was overrun by 18 policemen and two RSPCA officials, supposedly looking for guns. When the father, a professional dog breeder, volubly protested, he and his pregnant wife were arrested and handcuffed, to the horror of their watching five-year old daughter (whom I call, for legal reasons, "Jenny").

East Sussex social workers were then called to remove the little girl. Her mother had a miscarriage while in custody and returned to an empty home, left in chaos. Jenny has remained in foster care ever since, and despite her parents pleading for her return through 74 legal hearings, the ruling by a family court judge last March that she be put out for adoption was upheld in July by the Appeal Court.

Having now seen further documents relating to this saga, I can understand why the family's GP wrote that in 33 years as a doctor he had never come across "such an appalling case of injustice". The first document was her parents' careful chronology of every step in the story, including transcriptions of many of their telephone conversations and meetings with Jenny, invariably under strict surveillance by social workers or the foster carer.

The dominant impression from these recordings is of Jenny's desperation to be reunited with her parents, and of an increasingly distraught child who cannot understand what has been done to her. The parents claim that pressure was put on her constantly to say that she didn't want to see them again. Why did the family court judge not allow this evidence to be heard in court, although she did admit accounts of these "contacts" by the social workers?

A second document is the judgment by Mr Justice Bodey in the Appeal Court confirming that Jenny must be put out for adoption. No evidence had been produced that her parents ever caused Jenny physical or mental harm. His ruling centred on two points. One was evidence that her home was a mess on the day of the raid, although those who knew the house well testify that it was normally clean and tidy. The other was that, when the family's home was invaded by 18 policemen (a figure confirmed by one policeman in evidence), the father verbally abused them in colourful fashion (but didn't attack them physically). Are these really adequate grounds for tearing a child and her parents permanently apart?

A third document is the book Forced Adoption by Ian Josephs, a businessman who has taken an active interest in the removal of children from their parents by social workers ever since he was a Tory county councillor in the 1960s. He acted in part of the Jenny case as a "Mackenzie friend", that is, an informal assistant and adviser.

Mr Josephs shows that Britain is almost the only country in Europe which routinely allows children to be separated from parents without their consent. Indeed, he reproduces a press release put out in 2003 by Hammersmith & Fulham Council boasting how, under a Local Public Service Agreement, it had received a reward of £500,000 from central government for hitting its target of 101 adoptions in the year. This particular, highly controversial scheme of cash bonuses has, thankfully, since been abandoned.

The impression given by these documents supports the GP's view that this is an "appalling case of injustice". Social workers, lawyers and judges seem enmeshed in a system heavily skewed towards putting children out for adoption – by a process so shrouded in secrecy that it seems designed more to protect the system itself than the interests of the child. Most alarming of all is that there seems no one with the authority to intervene in cases such as Jenny's, where that system appears to have left both a loving family and justice horribly betrayed.

It is clear that the child protection system created under the Children's Act 1989 has gone horrifyingly off the rails, leading one High Court judge recently to compare it to the kind of thing which went on in 'Stalin's Russia or Mao's China'.

Two general aspects of this system failure are particularly shocking, One is the callous disregard the system shows for both parents and children in failing to uphold the central principle it was set up to protect: the interests of the children.

The other is how the system is shrouded in such secrecy that its workings remain almost entirely concealed from public view.

What is remarkable is how consistently this system displays the same fundamental flaws. From the moment social workers intrude into their lives, the parents find themselves treated like criminals, plunged into a Kafka underworld.

When their children are seized, on suspicions which too often turn out to be unfounded, this is almost invariably with full support from the police. When one mother was recently breast-feeding her newborn baby at 3 o'clock in the morning, no fewer than nine police officers and social workers entered the hospital room to wrest the baby from her.

The parents then find themselves caught up in a court system which seems almost entirely geared to taking their children away. There seems no one outside the system they can turn to. The judges seem predisposed against them, Even their own lawyers can seem as much part of the system as those acting for the other side. When independent experts wish to put their case, their evidence is often ignored.

As parliamentary figures show, the number of applications for care orders averages around 8,000 a year. Of these only between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent are refused.

Often just as evident as the distress of the parents is that of the children, who find themselves placed in the care of strangers for reasons they cannot understand. Where 'contact' is allowed with parents this is ruthlessly supervised by the social workers, so that if a mother speaks 'inappropriately', as by showing any sign of affection to her child, the contact may be instantly terminated.

All this appears to be in flagrant breach of the original Act, which purports to put the interests of the children first, not least in prescribing that wherever possible if they are taken from their parents they should be kept with their siblings – as so often they are not – or placed with relatives.

Yet Parliamentary figures show that only in one per cent of cases are children placed with 'kinship carers' – whereas in Denmark the figure is 45 per cent.

Part of why social workers seem so zealous in seizing children on the flimsiest of evidence is that until recently councils were given ambitious 'adoption targets' by central government, rewarded with funds running into millions a year. Huge sums of public money are still available to fund this system. Social worker-approved foster carers can receive up to £400 a week for each child, and not a few social workers are foster carers themselves.

Almost as alarming, however, is the way the system manages to blanket its operations in such secrecy. Nominally to protect the interests of the children, it is forbidden to report anything which goes on in court or which might identify them. But this often goes so much further, as when social workers instruct parents that they must not talk about their case to any outsiders, that the secrecy seems designed to protect not so much the children as the system itself.

Ian Josephs, a businessman based in the South of France, first became concerned about this issue when he was a county councillor and has helped hundreds of distressed families through his Forced Adoption website. High on his list of recommendations as to how the system could be reformed is that parents who find themselves victims of the system should no longer be gagged from speaking to outsiders.

There should be an end to Britain's system of 'forced adoption', almost unique in Europe. Instead of judges deciding behind closed doors, parents should be allowed to put their case to a jury. Contacts between parents and children should no longer be controlled by social workers but by a judge.

Family courts should no longer be allowed to accept mere 'hearsay' evidence, Social workers should no longer be allowed to snatch children simply on vague suspicions that they might suffer 'emotional harm'. Finally, the courts should no longer be allowed to exclude evidence from independent experts just because this might challenge the social workers' case.

With these reforms, says Mr Josephs, much of the rampant injustice of this system might be removed. Since Parliament gave social workers such extraordinary power over other people's lives, politicians have by and large stepped away from the hideous abuse of that power which has resulted, Only the politicians can now get this tragically corrupted system back on the rails.

And if FOUR articles from the Sunday Telegraph are not enough read two from the Times !

Family Courts are the B-side of the Law
Camilla Cavendish, The Times December 26 2006

What a strange, fumbling kind of justice system it is that condemns a woman as an unfit mother for the heinous crime of trusting her husband. Yet this is what seems to have happened in a recent case that I feel compelled to write about, even though legal restrictions force me to leave out much of the detail.

The nub of the case is this. A woman, let us call her Janie, gave birth to her first and only child a year ago. That baby was taken away from her and subsequently put up for adoption. Not because of her own failure to care for the baby — her own love and care never seem to have been in question. No. She has lost her baby because of a suspicion that her husband John may have injured another child in his previous marriage almost ten years ago.

The suspicion was no more than that. John was never charged with anything, let alone convicted. Social workers were never sufficiently worried to take that first child into care. Since his divorce John has shared custody of that child perfectly amicably with his ex-wife. Yet the same local authority which left the first child with him has forbidden him to see this new baby. And his new wife, despite having nothing to do with the first case, may never see her baby again.

Unless this case is overruled in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, where it is now heading, it will set a peculiar precedent. For it implies that any British mother could be penalised for choosing a partner to whom the State has taken a dislike: penalised with the loss of the thing that is most precious to her in the world.

It cannot be this simple, you are thinking. Well, not quite. The child of the first marriage is disabled, and did seem to have suffered an injury — I am not permitted to say more. But no one knows how. Both John and his first wife have always protested their innocence. They had a second child who came to no harm. No court will ever truly know whether John was innocent. But the fact is that he was never found guilty. For the local authority to leave him alone with a child that it thought he had harmed, and to take away another that had not been harmed, is utterly hypocritical. No court should be able to punish you for a crime you may commit, when there is no evidence.

It should, surely, be a crime to remove a newborn baby from a mother who has never harmed it.

For that in itself is a form of abuse. Yet the secret State often chooses to abuse the children itself, rather than let them run the risk of staying put. They are at least alive, it calculates, even if it is a diminished kind of alive, deprived of the mother bond. And too often, it strikes the wrong balance. In 2002, the ECHR ruled against the British Government for removing a new baby from its mother in hospital and refusing even to let her cuddle it under supervision, when there was no evidence that the baby faced a serious risk at that time. The judgment came too late, though. The baby had already been adopted.

This is what Janie fears. The ECHR has agreed to hear her appeal and to consider whether the English court ruling breached Janie and John’s right to family life, to freedom of opinion and to freedom of expression. That is quite a ticket. But even if the ECHR finds in Janie’s favour, it may be too late. The local authority is already seeking families to adopt her baby. Her only hope is that prospective adopters will be put off by knowing of her appeal.

Any lawyer will tell you that family courts are the B-side of the legal system. The majority of judgments will never be read outside the courtroom. Perhaps judges fear the consequences if they do not support social services and social services are later proved right. They seem to start from the assumption that children are de facto wards of court who need protection from their parents.

Even then, Janie’s case seems extraordinary. Certainly the parents are not the brightest people in the world. They are not perfect. But the more I learn about it, the more I believe that Janie and John’s biggest mistakes were emotional. Janie seems to have been very co-operative. However, John has been irritable, even aggressive, which would support the view that he has a violent nature. But can you really convict on that basis? Which of us could control our temper if faced with losing a child to a bunch of hypocrites? In a Hollywood movie, anger is a natural reaction to injustice. In an English suburb, defiance makes you guilty. The legal system wants “remorse”. But how can you show remorse for something you haven’t done?

Until this case I had tended to be sceptical about the claims that the Government’s targets for adoption were leading to miscarriages of justice. I still feel that ministers were right to want to speed up adoption and to release more children more quickly from the hell of care. But I have now started to take more seriously the argument that these targets have created a perverse incentive for local authorities to take more babies into care. Babies are, after all, more attractive to prospective adopters than older children and therefore an easy way to reach those targets. In Janie and John’s case, you do have to wonder why the authorities have rushed to take away a healthy baby, when they did not take away a disabled one.

Janie’s case seems to me to make a strong argument for introducing juries. Why is a burglar facing six months in jail allowed to ask for a jury trial, but a mother facing the irretrievable loss of her only child is not? Mistakes will always be made when the ordinary, imperfect citizen is judged by the imperfect and powerful. Personally, I would rather face 12 men good and true.

The parents asked judge Munby to stop any adoption of their daughter until the European court at Strasbourg until a verdict had been given by the European Court in Strasbourg.Exceptionally Judge Munby published his refusal for all to see ! 

http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/library.asp?i=2946

Camilla Cavendish, of the Times replied to judge Munby as follows:- !  

The Times

May 24, 2007

Staffordshire social workers were also involved in the tragic case of Maureen Smith, the mother so desperate at the prospect of losing her two children that she fled to Spain, where she killed them before attempting suicide. As she wrote in her suicide note: “Social Services In Staffordshire and their policy of forced adoption are responsible for this.”

These are just two instances of the vast, long-running tragedy which Bob Geldof, launching a report last December on the “barbaric” chaos of our family law system, called “state-sanctioned kidnap”, whereby social workers, abetted by family courts and an army of complicit lawyers and “experts”, routinely snatch children from loving parents to feed the maw of the adoption and fostering industry.

Yet contrast this with last week’s report exonerating Kirklees social workers from any failings in the case of Shannon Matthews, the Yorkshire girl made subject, after years of neglect and ill-treatment, to a fake kidnap by her mother (described by local police as “pure evil”). Even though no fewer than 22 agencies had been involved with this dysfunctional family over many years, the report found that Shannon’s treatment did not justify taking her into care.

If ever there was a scandal which called for the full glare of publicity it is the highly secretive system which allows thousands of children to be sent for forced adoption, often on no proper pretext. Meanwhile the list of cases where social workers ignore all evidence in allowing the abuse of children to continue, grows ever longer.

It is not generally appreciated how adoption and fostering, organised by social workers, have become big business – quite apart from the fees charged by those lawyers and experts who are part of this corrupt system. Adoption payments and access to a wide range of benefits can provide carers with hundreds, even thousands of pounds a week. Still to be found on the internet (see the Forced Adoption website) is an advertisement by Slough Family Placement Services headed “Balloons and family fun to promote fostering”. This promised that Slough’s town square would be “bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling”, complete with a “David Beckham lookalike” (“bring a camera”), to launch “a new fostering allowance of £400 a week”.

I have recently reported the harassment and repeated arrests of Mauren Spalek, the devoted Cheshire mother whose two younger children were taken from her in 2006, and who faces trial on June 29 on a criminal charge of sending her son a birthday card. Last week it emerged, from an official register, what the occupation is of the woman who adopted her stolen children. She is a social worker.

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Forced adoption is a truly dreadful scandal

Social workers are removing children from loving families without proper justification, says Christopher Booker

Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2010

In recent months, I have been reporting on what is one of the most alarming scandals in Britain today – the secretive system that allows social workers to remove children from loving families without any proper justification, and to send them for adoption or fostering with no apparent concern for their interests.

Four more examples have come to light in the past week. The first came to my attention via Lynn Boleyn, a former councillor from Dudley, who first became concerned about "forced adoption" when she sat on various committees concerned with child care. Last week, she was in court with a mother of five girls, whose family tragedy began when her partner was sentenced to 14 years for abusing the eldest girl, who was sent to live with a relative. Although there was no evidence of their mother harming them in any way, the other four girls were seized by Dudley social services and placed in foster care. Three were kept together, separated from their two-year-old sister whom the council now wants to put out for adoption.

The three girls, aged 11, 10 and 7, are desperately unhappy, constantly asking to be reunited with their mother. But on Friday, a judge said he had no power to stop social services summarily withdrawing them from their local school to be sent to a new home. The 11-year-old was looking forward to being in the school play and the end of term Leavers' Service. She has now been torn away from friends she has known since she was four, the nearest thing to stability left in her life. The children's wishes were not taken into account.

A second case concerns another woman, for 20 years an NHS nurse who served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the first Gulf War. Until recently, she was a semi-professional dog breeder, living happily at home with her eight-year-old son (his father having walked out when she was pregnant).

In March, their home was raided by two RSPCA officials and five policemen, complaining she had too many dogs in the house. Her home was untidy because she was clearing an attic, but the seizing of the dogs (breaking the leg of one of them) left it a befouled mess.

Acting on a tip-off from the RSPCA, Leeds social workers then intervened, and expressed surprise that the house was tidier than they expected. Nevertheless, they told the mother to bring her son's clothes to school, from where he was taken into foster care.

After three months, during which he has only been allowed short supervised "contact" with his mother, the boy is miserable, constantly asking when he can return home. His mother has repeatedly had to draw the social workers' attention to various conditions, such as head lice and threadworm, which indicated that he was not being properly cared for. Last week they announced that they were moving him to another foster home.

Although there was no evidence that she was anything other than an admirable mother, apart from the temporary mess made of the house in March, the social workers say her son cannot be allowed home until they have both undergone "psychiatric assessments". These cannot be arranged until October. Nor has the boy yet been given a guardian to represent him, as the law lays down.

My other two cases come from Ian Josephs, the former county councillor and businessman who runs the Forced Adoption website and has helped hundreds of families in a similar plight. When, in January, a couple brought their newborn son to hospital with a fractured arm, Coventry social services were called in on suspicion that the child might have been injured by his parents. After the mother had been arrested, handcuffed and held by the police for nine hours, the couple were terrified that their baby would be taken from them. Although not charged with any offence, they are on police bail, which prevents them from leaving the country.

The child's Irish grandmother took the baby to Ireland, where he is now surrounded by a large, supportive family. Social services are attempting to get an order through the courts for the grandmother to return to England with the baby.

My last case is so shocking that I will return to it in more detail at a later date. It centres on a London couple who, earlier this year, had their six children seized by social workers on what appears to be flimsy hearsay evidence (I have seen the court papers).

The mother was pregnant again. Last month, after the boy was born, three social workers and five policemen entered the hospital ward where she was breastfeeding at 3am, wresting the baby from her by force. They then discovered that they had nowhere to keep him. The boy was put into intensive care, where his mother was taken to breastfeed him for four days, until she was fit to leave the hospital. She saw her baby for the last time two weeks ago.

I will return to this story when I have had some explanation from the council responsible.

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I live and work in Monte Carlo where I own and run a language school. I have an Oxford University law degree but I am not a solicitor or a barrister. So. . .  Who am I really? And why do I do what I do? 

I am NOT repeat NOT another "Mother Teresa" and I rarely give to charity (in case I end up paying for the director's Rolls Royce!) but fighting the often brutal actions of Social Services is a cause very close to my heart. Social Services have never hurt me, my family or anyone close to me so I have no personal axe to grind but I HATE THE ABUSE OF POWER and particularly the way the bullies in social services ruthlessly destroy the very families they are supposed to protect. As a matter of principle I never charge a fee and never accept any money whatever for any expenses.Anything a parent tells me is strictly confidential but if parents do want me to involve the press by way of protest I also solemnly undertake that if ever I get offered a fee by a newspaper for introducing a family or writing about parents whose children have been taken then I promise to give 100% of any money received to the family concerned and keep nothing myself.I have no wish to imitate those disgusting people who make money out of the misery of parents who have had their children snatched by Social Services!! 

 My site is different because it takes the form of a personal message from me to you, the reader and my promise to help you personally if it is within my power to do so! In exceptional cases I have personally refunded the travel expenses to Ireland of pregnant women(not addicted to alcohol or drugs and with no criminal record) who have been told by UK social services that their babies will be taken from them at birth.So far I have helped at least 20 avoid the horrors of forced adoption of their newborn babies.

The public find it hard to believe what is happening to THOUSANDS of parents in the UK.

6 Facts worth noting !

1:-The following extract from a judgement in the House of Lords confirms that alone in THE Council of Europe (except possibly Portugal) the UK CONTINUES to allow and encourage the barbaric practice of taking children from loving and desperate parents and giving them to strangers for closed and secret adoptions without parental consent.

House of Lords - Down Lisburn Health and Social Services Trust. Baroness Hale of Richmond. Judgement  

 There is, so far as the parties to this case are aware, no European jurisprudence questioning the principle of freeing for adoption, or indeed compulsory adoption generally. The United Kingdom is unusual amongst members of the Council of Europe in permitting the total severance of family ties without parental consent. (Professor Triseliotis thought that only Portugal and perhaps one other European country allowed this.) It is, of course, the most draconian interference with family life possible.

2:-Although the Children Act 1989 specifies that kinship placements(with relatives) are the preferred option in this country:-

3:-Two children in care die of neglect each week
The People, 22 June 2008
By David Collins

Children placed in care are three times more likely to die than others, a shock report has revealed.

In one year, 16 in 10,000 vulnerable youngsters died in care. The national death rate for children was five in every 10,000.

The study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that 800 youngsters have died in care over the last ten years - an average of two a week.

The "risk" of a baby or young child being emotionally abused by a parent at some future date pales into insignificance when compared with the horrors and terrible risks that await every child taken into care by the State !

4:-Extract from The Times, Aug 23 2007:  “Emotional abuse” has no strict definition in British law. Yet it now accounts for an astounding 21 per cent of all children registered as needing protection, up from 14 per cent in 1997. Last year 6,700 children were put on the child protection register for emotional abuse.  compared with only 2,600 for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse. Both of the latter two categories have been falling steadily. Meanwhile emotional abuse and “neglect” - which replaced the old notion of “grave concern” in 1989 - have been rising. Both are catch-alls. But emotional abuse is especially vague. It covers children who have not been injured, have not complained, and do not come under “emotional neglect

How can forced adoption by strangers of hundreds of babies said to be "at risk of emotional abuse " be justified? These babies and young children are permanently deprived of their parents and immediate families not for something that their parents have done but for something that a "hired prophet"(expert) thinks they might do in the future !

5:-In answer to a parliamentary question Harriet Harman (then Minister for children) admitted that more than 200 parents every year were jailed in complete secrecy in the family courts (probably for breaking gagging orders ).

6:- 

Care applications continue to rise at record levels

20th October 2009

Cafcass has today published care statistics for the second quarter of 2009-10 showing that the number of care applications made by local authorities remains at an unprecedented high level.

Compared to quarter 2 last year, care demand is up 47.2% (688 cases).  June 2009 (784 cases) was the highest care demand figure ever recorded for a single month since Cafcass began collecting this data.

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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Booker Column 5 Nov 2010
 There was a time when Britain took pride in offering a safe haven to the victims of vicious tyrannies in other countries. Today we see this in reverse, where scores of families each year are forced to flee this country as the only way to escape a vicious system bent on seizing their new-born children for no good reason. Last week I heard two more such horror stories and here is the first, in which I am legally compelled to disguise the names,
 Roger and Carol lived happily in Doncaster with their five-year old daughter. One day last November they had a marital disagreement, involving no more than raised voices. They were overheard by a neighbour who called the police, The couple were arrested and held for nine hours before being released without charge, But the police had summoned the social workers to remove the child, who had not been harmed in any way other than hearing her parents having a row, as countless children do every day,
 The social workers obtained an interim care order, on the grounds that the child was ‘at risk of emotional harm’, and gave her to Roger’s parents, both of whom have worked for the police, Although relations remained amicable, the grandparents insisted on working closely with the social workers. The parents were only allowed contact with their daughter in a filthy little ‘contact room’ in the local social services office. The social workers were constantly late in bringing the child to these meetings and, as is usual, the parents were told that if they showed any emotion their contact would be stopped, Under this strain, Carol in February had a miscarriage.
 Last June, puzzled at why the interim care order had not been renewed as the law requires, Carol called the court to be told that the order had lapsed three months earlier. When her husband confirmed this by a second call to the court, Carol drove to her parents-in-law’s home to explain that there was no longer any legal reason why her daughter could not be returned to her. Her mother-in-law protested, but the child was so overjoyed that she was free to go home that she ran to get into her mother’s car.
 The mother-in-law stood in front of the car but Carol reversed and drove off. When her daughter said she was hungry, they stopped at a motorway service station, The grandmother had alerted the police, the car number was picked up by a camera and before long Carol, now again pregnant, was being arrested, handcuffed and pushed into a police van, On entering the police station, she collapsed and was taken to hospital, Next day she was driven back to Doncaster and interviewed four times. The police confirmed there was no care order in place, but to her astonishment Carol was told she would be charged with assaulting her mother-in-law, although there had been no physical contact between them. After midnight she was released.
 When the social workers applied for a new care order, the judge reprimanded them for their ‘slipshod work’ but granted the order on the grounds that Carol had taken back her child ‘without thought’. Before the next hearing, the parents’ solicitors advised them to undergo psychological assessments. The psychologist found there was nothing wrong with Carol, but that Roger was ‘narcissistic’. They then underwent a second assessment, based on giving ‘true or false’ answers to 170 questions, such as ‘Last week I flew the Atlantic eight times’. This time the verdict was that Roger was normal, but that Carol showed ‘high probability of being a borderline alcoholic’, although she hardly ever drinks at all. They could have no further contact with their child.
 In September Carol was in court to face the assault charges, By two to one, the magistrates found that, although there was no direct evidence she had assaulted her mother-in-law, she had been ‘emotional’ in court which indicated the ‘possibility’ that she might have been similarly emotional during the confrontation. They therefore found her guilty, ordering her to return for sentencing in October.
 Two days later, it transpired that the hospital she had visited for ante-natal tests had told the social workers she was pregnant, Her daughter’s guardian told her that, when the baby was born, the social workers would seize it. At this point, Carol decided she could take no more, ‘I had already lost one child’, she says,’I had suffered a miscarriage of justice, After all I had been through, there was no way I was going to lose another child’.
 She carefully did her homework on the internet, not least through the Forced Adoption website run by Ian Josephs, a businessman living in the south of France, where she read many similar stories to her own. She discovered that a possible escape route was northern Cyprus, which has no extradition agreement with the UK.  Without telling her husband, she sold one of her cars to get money for the journey, and travelled overnight in a coach down the motorway, passing the place where her daughter’s last sight of her mother had been of her being bundled into a police van.
 At Heathrow she waited hours for her plane, terrified she might be arrested. Twenty four hours after leaving home she arrived in the middle of the night in Cyprus, all alone in an unknown land. But she had made it. The following day, being a resourceful woman, she soon began to find her feet, amazed at how friendly and helpful everyone was, including the authorities. Two days later, after she had managed to tell her husband what she had done, he flew out to join her.
 Today, a month later, set up in a spacious villa, surrounded with friends, they cannot believe their good fortune. A scan in the efficient local hospital confirms that they can expect the birth of a healthy son, As they begin to build a new life, Carol told me last week ‘we feel we have escaped from hell into heaven, The only thing which matters to us is that we have managed to protect our baby and future children from an outrageous, heartless business, bult round treating children as a commodity. Any other family in our situation really needs to take heed and get out. I don’t feel proud to be a British citizen any more because of what happened to us’.
 Meanwhile, back in Britain last week, the Sun and ITV’s This Morning show were celebrating ‘National Adoption Week’ by advertising a row of children for adoption, complete with names and winsome pictures. What neither would be allowed to do, however, is report the story of how those children came to be taken from their parents in the first place, In some cases this may genuinely have been in the child’s interests. But in too many others the story of how cruelly children in Britain today can be snatched from loving and responsible parents might make those Sun readers very angry indeed. 

This mother went on the run across Europe after social workers tried to snatch her son. Her crime? Letting him see her husband shout at her...
By Sue Reid
Daily Mail 16th August 2009

Angela Wileman never thought this day would come. She wraps her arms around her seven-year-old son Lucas, as if she cannot let go. 'I have fought to keep him and I have won. At last we can stop running away,' she says with relief in her voice.

Sitting in the garden of her home, with toys strewn on the lawn, this English mother is still stunned that earlier this week she eventually triumphed against social workers planning to seize her son and hand him to new adoptive parents.

For two years she has played a cat-and-mouse game as the British authorities spent thousands of pounds chasing her around Europe, decrying her as a bad mother and threatening to put her in prison. An MP is now demanding an investigation into the waste of taxpayers' money by Devon social services. 

Terrified of losing Lucas, Angela fled first to Spain and then Sweden. She now lives in County Wexford, Southern Ireland. The authorities in each of the countries deemed her a perfectly good mother to her son and let her keep him. 

But it had been a very different story back in Britain, where Angela, 33, fell foul of a disturbing new tactic by social workers.

In the past ten years there has been a 50 per cent rise in the number of parents who, just like her, have been accused of 'emotionally harming' their children. A quarter of forced adoptions happen after social workers allege that the child has been the victim of emotional abuse - far more than instances of sexual abuse or cruelty.

Last year, 6,700 'emotionally harmed' children were placed on the protection register. There were 2,600 registrations for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse.

Parents who social workers say might shout at, or even loudly reprimand, their children in the future have been branded as potential emotional abusers and had their toddlers or newborn babies removed from them.

'Emotional harm' is the latest buzz phrase in the social workers' lexicon - one that can condemn almost any family. Yet it has no strict definition under British law.

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HISTORY

This sorry story dates back to the six years 1960-1966 when I was a Kent County Councillor and a mother came to me for help because social workers had taken away her son, Trevor, aged 12 (and of near-genius IQ) because he got bored at school and played truant! She was denied all contact and when I asked where he was and if, as the mother's elected representative, I could at least see him myself I was told to mind my own business! I found him at a special private school (owned by the deputy leader of the Labour Party at the time) that was charging exorbitant fees more than 3 times those charged at ETON or HARROW! Young Trevor informed me that the boys were paid the sum of one shilling (5p) when required to sleep with any of their ‘over affectionate’ teachers at this very ‘special’ children's home! Eventually after acrimonious debates in the Council chamber and a court action he was returned to his mother and I was asked to help many other parents whose children had been removed for absurd reasons.

I applied in court for the discharge of care orders. I called the parents and sometimes the children themselves as witnesses in court against my own Council and I never lost a case so I was not best popular with my colleagues and the social workers! However after 6 years of neglecting my language school (then in Ramsgate) I decided not to stand at the next election as I really had to earn my living and look after my family so I reluctantly gave up the battle for a time.

In 2004 there was suddenly a lot of publicity when it was admitted that thousands of children had been wrongly taken from mothers who had been diagnosed with Munchausen’s Syndrome, meaning that mothers who took their children to hospital too often were deliberately hurting them to draw attention to themselves. This was one of the absurd notions of the now discredited Professor Meadows which had no scientific basis that could possibly justify attributing the syndrome to so many unfortunate women. Worse still was his completely unproved theory that two cot deaths in the same family were 70 million to one! Hundreds of women were condemned for murder. Their surviving children and babies born subsequently were taken away and given for adoption by strangers. Only later was it realised that genetic factors made it far more likely for cot deaths to repeat in the same family than elsewhere and odds reduced to about 60 to 1.

These cases were in the Criminal Courts so they got fully reported and this provoked me to write to the Daily Mail detailing some of my experiences on Kent County Council all those years ago. They published my letter and I was surprised subsequently to receive several requests from mothers and parents trying to recover - and in some cases just to contact - children snatched from them by Social Services. I am now comfortably off, my 7 children are adult and I am in my seventies, with the time and still with the energy to once again take up the battle with Social Services!

Couple who fled UK after social workers took their child are declared fit parents by Spanish officials and reunited with baby No2

By Sue Reid, Daily Mail
Last updated at 12:11 PM on 18th December 2010

A baby boy who was snatched from his parents on the authority of social workers has been returned after tests showed the couple are perfectly capable of caring for him.

Ten-month-old Daniel was back home with his parents last night after spending most of his young life in an orphanage.

The smiling boy was cuddled by his father and mother, Jim and Carissa, whose names we have changed for legal reasons.

They had deemed the couple 'unfit' parents who might emotionally harm their daughter in the future.

This decision was roundly criticised in the Commons by local MP Tim Yeo as 'tantamount to child kidnap'.

Daniel was still being breast-fed by Carissa in hospital when Spanish social workers, acting on a tip-off from Suffolk, took him and placed him in an orphanage in Valencia.

Now, in a snub to their UK counterparts, Spanish social workers say Jim and Carissa are no danger to Daniel.

Jim, a 42-year-old legal adviser, and Carissa, 32, plan to sue Suffolk social services for breaking up their family.

They are also taking their case to the European Court of Human Rights claiming their family life has been destroyed, as they prepare to fight a High Court legal battle to get Poppy back next month.

Last night Jim said at their home in Spain: 'The Spanish social services say we meet all their criteria for being good parents and we're delighted.

The authorities here did extensive psychological tests on both of us and found we are normal, and capable of caring for our children. We passed the six tests with flying colours.

'We hope this will lead to our family being reunited with Poppy at last, and the four of us being left to get on with our lives together.'

His parents had moved to Spain when Carissa became pregnant with Daniel and received warnings from Suffolk Council that he might be taken away when he was born.

Their daughter had been torn from Carissa's arms at 12 weeks old in October 2008 when social workers and police arrived at the couple's home in East Anglia.

They were acting on unproven allegations about Carissa from her ex-husband after a difficult divorce.

They refused to believe evidence to the contrary provided by the couple. But the brutality of the snatch led to the intervention by Mr Yeo. He said: 'Suffolk Council actively seeks opportunities to remove babies from their mothers.'

Meanwhile, Poppy is living with foster parents who hope to adopt her.

Suffolk social workers are not allowed to rubber stamp the adoption while Jim and Carissa fight the plan in the High Court.

The crucial test results on Jim and Carissa have been examined by the Daily Mail. We have changed their names and Daniel's because, under British laws, the identity of the family cannot be publicised while Poppy is up for adoption.

The return of Daniel is a breakthrough for scores of families who have fled overseas to escape the clutches of British social workers.

In a separate move, Jim and Carissa, along with 35 families, have launched unprecedented legal action against UK family courts which have taken 50 of their children for forced adoption. All were deemed at risk of 'future emotional harm' from their parents, a condition unproven in science and often used as the premise to remove children from families by social workers.

Jim said: 'To find our son had gone as she lay in the hospital was cruelty beyond belief.

'She could not bear to face the heartbreak again of having yet another child snatched from her. So she decided to be sterilised there and then.'

They saw Daniel on nine occasions after he was taken to the Spanish orphanage 10 months ago. 'He recognised us every visit and since he arrived home he has never stopped smiling at us,' added Jim.

Golden rules summary:-

1:- IGNORE SOCIAL WORKERS !! Don't talk to them ,allow them in your house,assess you, or send you to the psychobabble merchants ! The "SS" have NO authority so you are not obliged to listen to them or obey them !

Never ask them for help,think very carefully before you report a violent partner(especially if the abuse is only verbal) or even a sexual molester(especially if the children beg you to say nothing) as once social workers or police are involved you risk losing your children for "failing to protect them"  Never let social workers in your house without an appointment,,never go alone to any meetings they hold,never agree to voluntary care for your child,never admit to any fault (they don't!),never be rude or unfriendly to them,but never obey them either!NEVER,NEVER sign anything even when they pressure you!Remember social workers are not police,and have no legal authority to give you orders as only a court can do that . They cannot stop you seeing your children as they come out of school or receiving emails from any public library,or receiving reverse charge calls from any call box if they dial 100 unless you have been served with a specific court injunction forbidding all contact.

IF the "SS" threaten to take your children for adoption,make sure they never forget you .Hug them tight at "last contact" so they cannot easily be removed while you repeat to them that wicked people are stealing them for money ,and to say no to adoption when they try to give them a horrible new mummy and daddy ! 

THIS AT LEAST SHOULD HELP TO SABOTAGE ANY UNWANTED ADOPTIONS AND MAKE SURE YOUR KIDS WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU AND GET IN TOUCH LATER .Not many "adopters" will want to take in a child who has been told to say "NO" to adoption in any case ! 

2:-Family Courts:- 99.7% of parents lose against the "ss" in court and those who win are usually those who represent themselves as most legal aid lawyers in family courts are "professional losers" not on your side at all ! .If you are a couple let one have a lawyer and the other act in person.State facts not opinions , never interrupt and you will at least have been allowed to speak unlike many parents who lose their children to adoption for life without saying a single word ! Answer all questions from police or barristers whenever possible by "yes","no" or "I don't know" and never complain about any social worker or police officer in court.Never say there is a conspiracy against you,say instead that social workers try desperately to COVER UP THEIR MISTAKES in your case and that civil servants are notorious for trying to cover up mistakes rather than admit them ! 

3:- Only agree to using the parents assessors,psychologists, and other professionals who are listed on this site as contacts (find them just after the golden rules).Avoid the so called "professionals" selected by the "ss" who are regularly paid outrageous fees to discredit you !

4:-Remember there is no forced adoption in Ireland (no passports needed on the ferry) ,Spain,France,or Italy and no extradition from N.Cyprus! Escape legally (nobody can stop you!) whilst pregnant or well before court proceedings have started and you will be safe !

YES THEY CAN BE BEATEN  

 Detailed GOLDEN RULES!! (summary above) 

Do PLEASE remember the golden rules: (By all means print this off and keep the copy near at hand if SS approach! Show these rules to your lawyer or social worker to prove that you KNOW your rights!)

REMEMBER THESE EVEN IF YOU FORGET EVERYTHING ELSE I HAVE ADVISED! 

1: NEVER contact social services (child protection) for help or advice. You should consider very carefully before you report a partner who batters you or even a stranger who sexually assaults your young child, as if you do the SS will as often as not take your children into care (and later for adoption) to "protect them" from risk! If they have your children and you are fighting to get them back, NEVER NEVER tell social workers how you think you are going to defeat them, or what you are going to do next!Remember, without mentioning it to "them", that even if your children are "in care" social workers do not have the legal power to stop your children going to any call box (without any money) to dial 100 and asking the operator to reverse charges and to put the call through to their parent(s) ,or from going to any public library and e-mailing you, or even meeting you for a meal as long as they return "home" to the fosterers afterwards! 

Care home girl abused by 25 men in 2 years 

Source: Daily Mail Published: 27th August 2006
A 14-year-old girl placed in a council children's home was prostituted to a group of depraved middle-aged men because staff were powerless to stop her going out. The horrific story of 'Becky' is highlighted in a BBC television programme presented by Fiona Bruce this week which reveals how she was sexually abused by 25 men over two years - despite being known to social services and having been placed on the Child Protection Register. 
Even when she was put in a children's home - six months after her earliest allegations of abuse -staff allowed her to be used as a prostitute for fear their intervention might infringe her human rights. If the "SS" cannot prevent a young girl in their care from working as a prostitute then surely they cannot prevent other young people they "care for" from spending the day with parents if they so choose!Remember also that children of school age have a break so you can call them and speak to them through the railings without trespassing and nobody can stop you except a judge by serving a court injunction on you that will be too late to stop you reminding your children of their real family ! 

Remember also that if your children suffer visible damage whilst being fostered TAKE dated and timed PHOTOGRAPHS of black eyes,bruises,cigarette burns or other injuries and give them to the police ,your MP, the NSPCC then ring Childline  to make criminal complaints demanding prosecution of the perpetrators ! Don't take "no" for an answer from any of them !!

Remember also that if  children are 16 or more they will often be released from care.Sometimes however the "SS" take a particular dislike to a family and say they will keep the child until 18 when the care order must expire.

NEVER MIND!  There is a way out ! If a child marries at 16 then the care order ceases !A marriage anywhere in Scotland does NOT need parental consent.Take the hint !                   

2: Never believe a word "they" say and always insist they put their promises down in writing. Always be pleasant and polite to social workers,but never forget they are your ENEMIES !   Remember that they may deliberately try to provoke you into shouting or violence that they will exaggerate in court leaving you with a criminal record and no children! When they shout at you forget your "pride" and look very hurt saying "why are you being like this to me?" or "I thought you were so nice until now, please don't bully me!" Be very respectful "tongue in cheek", but remember THEY ARE NOT POLICE  so never follow their "helpful advice" especially if they say your only chance of getting your children back is to split from a partner, or parent you love and respect! They will try and turn you against each other as the "divide and rule" principle makes sure you are confused and demoralised when you lose your case  and your children too!If you are told to get a different solicitor to your partner I advise you to represent yourself and let your partner keep a solicitor (or vice versa) so that at least one of you will be free in court to tell your own story and to question social workers ! Quite often they arrange deliberately awkward contact times with your children. This can result first in the loss of your job and then as a consequence of that, your accommodation also. Object firmly and forcefully in court to their plans and fight hard to keep your job and your house or appartment. Remember that when they make the threat "do as we say or we shall take your children" they intend to take them anyway no matter how much you do to please them and they just want you to make it easier for them to win their case in court by seeing psychologists and parenting assessors they have chosen themselves and who they know will give you bad reports !  IGNORE THE SS!THEY HAVE NO AUTHORITY AND NO POWER . Every time you do what they say you make it easier for them to take your children so don't be taken in !

IF THEY ASK YOU WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE SYSTEM AND HOW YOU WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE IT,SURPRISE THEM WITH HOW MUCH YOU KNOW BY ANSWERING AS FOLLOWS:- !

3: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER sign any documents they present to you, even if they say "you have to!" Social Workers rely on BLUFF. In reality they have NO POWER and no right to threaten you or give you orders of any kind! Only a COURT via an order from a judge can give you orders, and you always have the opportunity to contest those orders in court either before or after they are given to you. No matter what threats,or promises they make, you can be 100% sure that if you get intimidated into signing they will break their word and expect you to keep your's! So, DO NOT SIGN! Answer "yes", "no" or "I don't know" to questions WITHOUT further explanations that could be twisted to be used against you! If the "SS" do not have enough evidence against you do not "cooperate" by supplying them with what they need even if they threaten you.If your enemies run out of ammunition ,do NOT send them over a box of bullets to help them out  ! Once the SS have applied for a care order remember their main object is NOT the welfare of the child ,it is to WIN their case against you ! Disregard any threats that you must "do as they tell you ". Be polite and even apologetic when you refuse to obey them !

4: Never, never agree to let your children go into foster care (especially if they say it is TEMPORARY OR VOLUNTARY) Never "agree" the thresholds even if you are advised that this will ensure the return of your children, because if you do you will have admitted neglecting or abusing your child and the only question left will be to decide if you have really repented and are capable of "change"! Usually the answer is no! Sometimes your own lawyer may tell you to agree the thresholds and/or agree to an interim care order otherwise "you will never see your children again! "That is a wicked lie designed to save the lawyers work and to help you LOSE your children! Sometimes lawyers will tell you there is no need for you to give evidence as they will speak for you; that way you may find you have lost your children very quickly without being allowed to say a word, so BEWARE!Most of the "legal aid lawyers" in the family courts are rightly known in the trade as "PROFESSIONAL LOSERS"!! Many of them pretend to work for you when in fact they are really on the side of the Local Authority.

www.solicitorsfromhell.net  is the site where you can find the very worst solicitors listed by name !!

A very few will say "we will fight social services for you and try our best to get your children back !" Those are the lawyers to keep and to value as they are rare !

More often alas you will have to sack your lawyers and represent yourself simply because they will not let you speak in court! Never admit to social workers (who are your ENEMIES) that you have been at fault in even the smallest possible way,(they certainly will never admit to you that they were ever at fault!). You must never lie in court, but you should never never admit to any fault on your part unless forced to do so by a direct "yes or no" type question in court. Above all,NEVER NEVER plead guilty to something you have not done simply because they promise to" bind you over" or let you off with "a caution" if you do and threaten you with prison if you refuse !This just means they have insufficient evidence and are trying to trick you into pleading guilty so they can win their case !

 ESCAPE WHILE YOU HAVE TIME !You must never disobey a court order by taking abroad a child already in care, but if you are pregnant and threatened neither a court nor the "SS" can stop you leaving the country before the baby is born!If the children are already with you ,but you feel menaced by social services try to leave the country BEFORE any notice of care proceedings is served on you. Ireland is easiest and is cheap to get to.( No forced adoption allowed there,and if you take the ferry no passport needed!) www.irishferries.co.uk/ or www.stenaline.co.uk give good information so you can discreetly book on line! .The "SS" rarely work at weekends so a departure on Friday evening is a good way of avoiding altercations and clashes with frustrated social workers ! You are however advised to notify the Irish police shortly after your safe arrival as otherwise you might be posted in the UK as a missing person !

Remember you are 100% safe from UK social services if your baby is born in Ireland (or nearly anywhere in Europe except the UK ). The  Irish social services are mostly a friendly bunch who will not take too much notice if the UK lot contact them and rubbish you;They may even take your baby for a little while as a precaution but you normally get it back pretty quickly and never never risk the horror of forced adoption.

BEWARE the Sunnybank Hotel Glasnevin as it is half-owned with a social worker who cooperates wtih the Social Services in the UK. Stay clear of this place at all costs!!! 

IMPORTANT:- The European Court of Justice recently decided that Britons living abroad are still entitled to claim welfare benefits from the UK !!

Here is a Mumsnet thread re adoption in Ireland. A married couple can't give up a child for adoption even if they want to!! A single mother can give up her child for adoption, presumably for a fairly obvious reason. The Irish State cannot forcibly adopt a child against the wishes of a married or single mother!! :-

 http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/ad

mumshouseireland.ie.is a helpline for mums who flee to Ireland that you can reach by simply clicking in to the website of mumshouse !Try the link below if the one above does not work;

Parents of Irish citizen children

183 days(6 months) residence to claim full benefitsin Ireland  .

http://keepingyourhome.ie/rent.supplement.html.en   

 Even better is North Cyprus where there is a large British colony and NO EXTRADITION even for criminals ! www.northcyprus.com Fly from most UK airports but if you think you might get stopped there then it is 100% safe if you fly there from Ireland.  

See also Angela Wileman's "survival guide" reproduced a bit later on ( just scroll down).She escaped, beat the ss, and survived even though she had to flee from the UK to Sweden,and from there to Spain and finally with the "SS" still in hot pusuit to Ireland where the SS finally gave up wasting public money hounding her !!

5: When possible refuse to be assessed by so called "experts, "(psychiatrists, therapists, psychologists, counsellors, professionals, and the like)inevitably selected by those who are hostile to you. You should however agree if you are advised to do so by a judge.If it is only the "SS" who demand an assessment insist that your children are returned first as otherwise the process will take place in an artificial atmosphere with you as parents  emotionally distressed because your children have been taken.If for some reason that is not possible request at least that you share in the choice of "expert" so as to avoid the "regulars" who appear in court time after time and always find that parents have "personality disorders" or similar mental issues. Remember that if the "SS" insist on these assessments their sole purpose is to gather sufficient evidence to help them win their case against you in court!If you talk a lot and do not listen to them they will say you have mental problems or "PERSONALITY DISORDERS",so be "quiet and attentive" during assessments. Try not to answer questions  with more than 5 or 6 words (they write down anything unhelpful you may let slip). Try indeed to answer "yes" or "no" whenever possible.

Remember to be the OPPOSITE of what whatever faults the ss attribute to you !If they say you are too aggressive,act timid and vice versa!If they say you are too emotional act "cool" and vice versa!

Your whole tone" in Court "must be one of "sweetness and light" regretting that your children were mistakenly taken and that THEY (not you) suffered harm and anguish as a result! DO NOT LOSE your case by being hostile in court towards social workers and especially towards the judge !!Eagerly propose a supervision order as a much more suitable alternative for your children than fostering or forced adoption.Emphasise that you have nothing to hide and that if a SUPERVISION ORDER is granted instead of fostering or adoption, your door will always be open to health visitors and social workers wishing to check the well being of your children ! Your whole case must be that YOUR CHILDREN have suffered harm (not yourself) and that you are taking action for their sake not for your own! If you are accused of "being unable to work with the professionals", reply that you will work 100% with them if they say their objective is to reunite your family by eventually returning your children, but that it is unfair to expect you to work with anyone whose objective declared to the court is to put your children into care or worse still have them adopted!

 NEVER COMPLAIN NEVER EXPLAIN! Complaints about individual social workers ,lawyers,or policemen are a waste of time as they investigate themselves and you risk being diverted from the more important task of keeping or recovering your children.Complaints against social workers often result in them taking your children or redoubling their efforts to keep them if they already have them !They are a vindictive lot ! 

 Never explain or elaborate when questioned as this only gives extra material to those who wish to discredit you. If asked when,why,or whether you did something or went somewhere,answer "yes","no" "I don't know"or "I don't remember" but never try to explain WHY you went there or did something (unless asked specifically) and even then reply "because I thought it the best thing to do at the time" or something similar as explaining and talking too much will enable a crafty local authority barrister to seize on something you let slip and turn your case from winning into losing !

Never make angry personal attacks on anybody or threaten to sue the "SS" or police at a later date, as it just makes YOU sound bad.They may even seize on your resentment as an excuse to diagnose you with PARANOIA !

If you are accused of wild conspiracy theories and thinking all the world is against you,then replythat social workers are desperate to COVER UP THEIR MISTAKES IN YOUR CASE RATHER THAN ADMIT THEM; also that you can't help believing what the most senior family judges say !

By all means quote this extract sorrowfully from "The Times" April 13th 2010,saying even the most dedicated social workers can make bad mistakes ! 

"Lord Justice Wall (The Senior family court judge) said that the determination of some social workers to place children in an "unsatisfactory care system" away from their families was "quite shocking".In a separate case on which Sir Nicholas Wall also sat, Lord Justice Aikens described the actions of social workers in Devon as "more like Stalin's Russia or Mao's China than the West of England" !

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article7095791.ece 

Summary of how to talk with psychologists etc;

If a judge tries to ridicule your testimony by asking "Do you think we are all in a conspiracy to take your child"? Answer"No of course not ! It's just that social workers never change their minds once they form an opinion even if later events show they were wrong. They stick to their original story come what may to COVER UP THEIR MISTAKES and the courts nearly always side with them.Ask " Who am I to disagree  with the senior family court judge when he says the behaviour of social workers is shocking?" 

BEWARE the "Official Solicitor" !http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6493681.ece If you get too upset or too excited the judge may decide you are not capable of instructing a solicitor or representing yourself and will appoint this parasite to represent you instead.He is by law forbidden to put on a case for you as his job is simply to agree with the "SS" ,to refuse to let you speak, and ensure that you lose your precious children without being allowed to say a word !! Even if you stay calm but still show hostility the judge may appoint a psychologist recommended by the "SS" to give you an IQ test and if through nerves etc your results are poor once again the Official Solicitor will be appointed to "represent" you.Alas,thanks to him, you will be gagged, and your children will be lost to forced adoption .An article from the Sunday Times (see link above) states that 588 cases in which parents have been gagged and the Official Solicitor has given away their children have taken place in the family courts from Jan 2006 until june 2009 . 

Remember that the SS often "brainwash" children in care by telling them that their mother is too ill to care for them or worse still does not love them or want them any more, but when they are adopted they will have a lovely new "for ever mummy and daddy"! These children are often traumatised for life wondering if they are evil and if that was why their mother abandoned them.Better to avoid this trauma by telling them the initially upsetting truth.Make sure you hold them tight to stop interuptions when you tell the children that "wicked people have stolen them for money and that you will never stop fighting to get them back" ! Whisper this in their ears or calmly make the statement out loud in spite of horrified supervisors  who may then try to shout you down !Even children as young as 3 will remember all their lives such a brutal but necessary message. Vital however it is, as it will eventually make a stable adoption impossible to sustain !Your reluctantly adopted children will as a result seek you out and come back to you in the end !

IF the "SS" threaten to take your children for adoption,make sure they never forget you !  

THIS AT LEAST SHOULD HELP TO SABOTAGE ANY UNWANTED ADOPTIONS AND MAKE SURE YOUR KIDS WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU AND GET IN TOUCH LATER .Not many "adopters" will want to take in a child who has been told to say "NO" to adoption in any case ! 

Once adoption proceedings have finished there is no more confidentiality ,so plaster your children's names and photographs all over facebook and the rest of the internet together with names of the social workers and so called "experts" who have stolen your children !Make it hard for adopters and ss alike as that's your best chance of eventually seeing your children again !The ss may seek an injunction to remove the display so it is prudent to have a third party actually put on the photos etc with your complete story on facebook,twitter,and all the other similar sites ! 

If you find your adopted child 's address or school MAKE FACE TO FACE contact immediately !Do NOT SEND EMAILS OR CARDS IN ADVANCE or make any phone calls that could warn the adoptive parents and send them to court for an injunction !Also your children were probably told that you abandoned them and did not love them so they might even avoid meeting you without finding out the truth through nervousness .For these reasons, give no advance notice of your intentions to call on them.

6: Protect yourself against social workers with NO COURT ORDER barging uninvited into your home by fitting a small chain inside your front door. This means that if you do not unlatch the chain when you see who is calling that person would have to push the door hard enough to break the chain which would be a "forced entry "and a criminal offence if committed without a document from  the court such as a "recovery order" specifically allowing entry using reasonable force. Unless they intend to actually arrest someone or have good reason to believe someone in the house is in danger of severe physical harm, police also would have to have a warrant before breaking the chain. Usually they will not have one and would have to convince a judge that a serious crime had been or was about to be committed before one was granted.

7: If social services request a look at your medical records (probably to try and find something to discredit you) ALWAYS write to any doctor or psychiatrist that has seen you as follows:

"I respectfully request you to keep all my medical notes strictly confidential as I intend to take legal proceedings against social services and any other persons who might obtain my medical details without my express authorisation".

8: Never write a letter to anyone connected to Social Services as you might include something that could damage your case in the family court. Only accept a solicitor if he/she promises to allow you a free hand to speak in court! You should be asked this simple question in the witness box "Have you anything you would like to say to the court?" Without this promise you may be "gagged" and as already explained in Rule 4 you can lose your case without being allowed to say a word!

Remember this:- IF YOU CAN'T SPEAK IN COURT YOU RARELY WIN !!!

         Remember above all that your objective must be to WIN YOUR CASE ! Not to "score points", and not to discredit social workers,guardians ,police,judges or the system itself,as these tactics though satisfying will make sure you lose ! Never be untruthful in court but never antagonise the judge by openly disagreeing with what he says even if secretly you think he is a pompous idiot !If the judge in a final care case hints strongly that you will recover your children if only you will accept the findings of fact from the previous hearing or maybe if you agree to see yet another "expert" to assess you ,then humour the judge and accept what he says ! Remember that judges finally do have authority over you, whilst social workers have none  Always present your case calmly and factually based on evidence not opinions so that it becomes obvious to all that it is in the children's best interests is to stay with you !

--------------------------

USEFUL CONTACTS TO HELP YOU! 
(If your cause is just these professionals really will be on your side not that of social services !)

If you find a solicitor,barrister psychologist,psychiatrist,parent assessor,or children's help line that has taken your side against the ss and really helped you to win your case please LET ME KNOW and I will add their names to the list on my site !

www.lawstuff.org.uk is  a free advice centre for children; Freephone 08088020008

 

Need to talk?
Call ChildLine 

Calls are free and confidential

Childline counsels more than 3,000 children in care

Report calls for advocates for looked after children

One in 26 looked after children contact ChildLine about failings and weaknesses in the care system, a ChildLine report has revealed.  Over the last five years, the number of 'looked after children' contacting ChildLine has increased by over 30 per cent.  In all, 3,196 looked after children – some as young as five – contacted ChildLine over 2009-10 with problems about being in care. Many were suffering physical and sexual abuse and neglect and felt lost and helpless in the care system.

The report calls on local authorities to ensure looked after children always have an adult to speak up for them when they need help. At present, children only have a right to an 'advocate' if they want to make a formal complaint about their care.

Some children were deeply unsettled and traumatised after being moved several times a year, some as many as 15 times. Others complained of emotionally abusive or uncaring carers and being bullied by other children. Many looked after children had to be counselled about self-harming or running away. They talked about being 'sick of life' and wanting to 'give up and die'
Get support on the message boards

Other ways you can talk to ChildLine

NYAS

The National Youth Advocacy Service (NYAS) is a UK charity providing children's rights and socio-legal services. We offer information, advice, advocacy and legal representation to children and young people up to the age of 25, through a network of advocates throughout England and Wales. NYAS is also a community Legal Service.

NYAS is committed to working towards full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in particular Article 12 which concerns the right of every young person to be consulted in all matters affecting them.

NYAS seeks to provide and develop its services through the active participation of young people, who are involved at all levels of the organisation.

Our mission statement : "To enable children and young people to have a voice by providing independent and confidential advice, information and advocacy services"

NYAS provides a safety net for children and young people who have nowhere else to turn.

 Children use freephone:-

 0800 61 61 01 or text :-07773334555

Adults contact legal dept,

TEL:-0151 649 8700

SOLICITORS:

Want to sue the police for harassing you or even jailing you for contacting your own children?Ring 08008047547 freephone for a free consultation about your case on a no win no fee basis ! 

 Solicitor That Will Take Action Against the Police or Sue the ...

Amanda Neill ,B J McKenna & Co  Certainly a good option for normal cases in the family courts.

182a Heaton Moor road, Stockport SK4 4DU

Tel 01614325757

enquiries@bjmckenna-solicitors.co.uk  

 Essex solicitors & UK Lawyers Essex, Home Counties, S.E England

•  
•  
• www.solicitorsfromhell.net  is the site
•  where you can find the very worst solicitors listed by name !
•  
•  
• But here is a list of very rare people ! Solicitors who are honest and will fight for you ! 

•  
• : http://www.justice-for-families.org.uk/ or
• emily.wilson-gavin@justice-for-families.org.uk  are the email addresses for "justice for families, an organisation headed by John Hemming MP with an excellent team who help those who do not trust their solicitors! 
•  
•  Organisations that can help:-

  Michael Markham
  07546078676
  Email: familyrightsandjustice@zoomshare.com
  Web:
• www.familyrightsandjustice.zoomshare.com

• Barrister DARREN WATTS
  TANFIELD CHAMBERS, 2-5 WARWICK COURT,
  LONDON WC1R 5DJ
  Tel (0207) 431-5300
• BARRISTER NEIL ADDISSON:-

• Contact Me

   Like all barristers I can only represent someone in Court if I am instructed Via a Solicitor through  my Chambers.  If you need to contact me for any other reason, for example to discuss a possible training seminar or to provide media comment then I can be telephoned at 07970981352 or E-mail Neil Addison

• Barrister MICHAEL BAILEY
  TANFIELD CHAMBERS, 2-5 WARWICK COURT,
  LONDON WC1R 5DJ
  Tel (0207) 421-5300
• 
  Exceptionally however you can contact some barristers directly via the "public access directory"
• www.barcouncil.org.uk/about/find-a-barrister/public-access-directory
• Help by phone from the Bar Council
• Tel:-02072420082
• or http://www.barristerweb.com/index.html

PSYCHOLOGIST: Dr LOWENSTEIN tel 02380692621 and website = www.drludwigfredlowenstein.com

Dr Peter Dale (parent assessor) 

Email: info@peterdale.co.uk 
Phone from UK: (01424) 424504 
Phone international: +44 1424 424504 
Fax: 08700 941 477

www.peterdale.co.uk
 
i just wanted to write and update you after having been assessed by peter dale i am allowed to keep my baby peter dale has also said my children have been harmed in ss care and that it has not been in their best interests as a result ss have taken a completely different attitude with me. i want to thank you for all your support and advice over the last 4 years and your attendance at the conference. i will be taking the matter further to the echr and have already launched civil proceedings for compensation. 
ss have been ordered to fund private therapy for my children and i owing to the harm we have all suffered from them.
thank you so much ian 
jane (webb)
 
This is our support line number from outside Ireland  353-76-6024871

 Yours sincerely

 David O Hanlon

 www.fact.ie

McKenzie friends:-

JULIE HAINES pennylilac@yahoo.co.uk

Yvonne Stewart-Taylor:-    ivanawatson@aol.com

Want to track down your adopted child or missing parent?

www.i-am-adopted.com can help you !

If you go to the main library in London or ,Manchester .Look in the files of birth ,deaths ,marriages ,and there are also adoption records ,which only tell you the person's adopted name, date of birth, and date of adoption on the record .So you copy all the records then you work through them and eliminate say your child was a boy ,you eliminate all girls,all twins,and so on ,then when you have got it down to just a few you can send off for a copy of adoption certs which give you all the details .People think they can't trace their adopted children . This would shock the social services if they knew how easy it was to trace adopted kids ..

A woman traced her adopted daughter on my forum this way

Don't forget you can use facebook,twitter,genes united,friends united and countless other similar sites. Once found ask me for help in reuniting your family.

Dear ian some really great news the girls are now at home living with us as a family ....The adoptive parents have agreed with it and are willing to do what they can to get me back my parental rights and for the girls to collect all there belongings etc from the adoptive home we are all very happy and quite shocked at the moment ...Kind Regards Tracey 


First however you have to find your forcibly adopted child.If you need help in this some of the following organisations might be able to help you.

www.dadpeter.co.uk
(Help parents trace their forcibly adopted children !) or

www.iwasadopted.com 

THERE ARE BARRISTERS AND SOLICITORS WHO ACT FREE OF CHARGE IF YOU CANNOT GET LEGAL AID:- 

aHome|About the Centre|About pro bono|Photos|News|Sponsors|Contact Welcome to the National Pro Bono Centre website. Please navigate using the menu above. << STOP PRESS: The Centre launches officially on 19th October >> The National Pro Bono Centre houses the profession's national clearing houses for legal pro bono work delivered in England and Wales: the Bar Pro Bono Unit, LawWorks (the Solicitors' Pro Bono Group) and ILEX Pro Bono Forum. The Centre is designed to be a "hub" for pro bono charities in the sector and will support the wide range of pro bono projects and brokerage which the charities support, helping individuals and community groups all over England and Wales. The coming together of the three branches of the profession in this way is an unprecedented move. It will improve joined-up thinking, co-ordination, collaborative working and a more efficient service to all stakeholders in pro bono - members of the public, and the lawyers and voluntary sector agencies serving the public. The new offices provide a central resource for people seeking pro bono legal advice and representation, making it easier for people in need to seek and receive help. This website is a contribution in kind from The Access to Justice Foundation © The National Pro Bono Centre 2010. Registered charity 1137708. Accessibility, Privacy & Disclaimer

  Please note well,you can appeal any lower court decision,whether it be a magistrates court or county court,or even crown court ! Anyone who tells you differently is a barefaced liar ! If the judge as sometimes happens says "I refuse leave to appeal" then appeal against his/her refusal,and demand an oral hearing !Go to the court and ask for the correct form for your appeal.Do not take it home ,just fill it in while you are there and ask the staff to explain the meaning of any question or anything else you do not understand.Do not delay or they may say you are out of time !Get a receipt when you leave your appeal form with the court staff ! 

The process is the same if you want an adoption order revoked or care order discharged ; you must ask the staff for the correct form fill it in, then hand it in and get a receipt ! 

 
To sack your solicitor and your barrister just download form N434 !If you do not do this the court will usually send all future correspondence and sometimes vital statements of evidence to your solicitor even though you have told all concerned that you wish to represent yourself.form N434
http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/HMCSCourtFinder/GetForm.do?court_forms_id=581
 
 Let me repeat!How to appeal , to apply for contact,or to oppose the renewal of an "order"(interim , contact or injunction for example)
Go to the same court in the morning and ask the staff for the correct form when you have explained what you want to do.Stay in the court to fill it in and ask help from the staff if there is a question that you do not understand.They are paid to explain legal terms but NOT of course to help you make your case.Do not go home before you have finished completing the form then get a receipt after you have handed it in for the staff to file.
 



Welcome to the Personal Support Unit Website



The PSU is an independent charity, based in the main building at the Royal Courts of Justice in Strand, London. The PSU provides non-legal advice, help, information and support to litigants in person and to any member of the public attending at the Royal Courts of Justice who may need help or assistance. We also operate at the Principal Registry of the Family Division at  First Avenue House, High Holborn and at Wandsworth County Court.

The PSU was established in January 2001 and achieved charitable status in January 2002. It is a company limited by guarantee with a board of 9 Trustees.

The Courts are a daunting and intimidating place for those involved in legal proceedings. For those who do not have legal representation the difficulties are made worse. We try to overcome these difficulties by providing practical advice and support.

What we can do for you -

• We can go around the court building with you.
• We can go into court with you and stay with you during the hearing. (When the court is sitting in chambers or in private, we will need the permission of the judge and other parties).
• We offer emotional support and practical information about what happens in court or at the RCJ offices.
• We have a room where you can wait, talk through your case or just have a cup of tea.
• We can normally help you straightaway - just ring 020 7947 7703 .

• LITIGANTS IN PERSON:- www.courtroomadvice.co.uk

• If you are representing yourself in court, you may be worried about what to expect. ‘Litigants in person’ as they are called, often appear on their own behalf out of necessity. Although you may not think it at the moment, it can in some circumstances be quite advantageous to represent yourself. You know your case better than anyone else, and the judge and the lawyer for the other party have to help you to understand the legal issues in your case.

  The Judge’s Duty

  When dealing with a litigant in person it is a judge’s duty to ensure that they are not disadvantaged. In practical terms this means that the judge will often explain the law to you, and any procedural aspects that you need to understand for the purposes of the hearing. If the other party is represented by a lawyer, they also have to ensure that they point out not only the elements of the law that assist their case, but must also tell you the law where it assists your case (i.e. that is detrimental to their own case.)

  Duty Of The Other Side’s Lawyers

  Lawyers representing the other side have to balance their obligations to their own client while not taking unfair advantage of an unrepresented party. This may mean that the lawyer has to limit their duty to act in the best interests of their own client. Although the lawyer has to help you to a certain extent, they must also be careful that any assistance you provide does not create a contractual relationship between you and the other side’s lawyer. This may happen, for example, if they provide advice that you subsequently act upon.

  Difference Between Barrister And Solicitor

  The exact nature of the duty that a lawyer owes to an unrepresented party depends on whether the lawyer is a barrister or a solicitor. A solicitor’s overriding duty is to his or her client. A barrister’s duty, however, is somewhat different. A barrister owes equal duties to the court and to his or her client. This means, for example, that a barrister cannot knowingly tell a lie to the court on behalf of his or her client. This extends to you as an unrepresented party. A barrister cannot therefore make a statement to you that they know to be false. If they unwittingly tell you something that is not true, they have to tell you as soon as they become aware of it.

  Conduct Of A Litigant In Person

  If you are representing yourself in court and the other party is represented, it is important that you do not consider the other side’s lawyer to be your ‘enemy.’ Lawyers in this country are well trained at dealing with litigants in person, and are under a duty to be able to assist you with understanding procedure and legal concepts where applicable. The judge or magistrate hearing your case will also have experience of dealing with litigants in person, and will be able to help you with anything that you are unsure of. If there are elements of your case that they consider you have not covered fully, or if there is more information that they require, they will as you for it.

  Seeking Legal Advice

  In some circumstances, you may arrive at court and the nature or complexity of your case may be such that you really would benefit from seeking legal advice before pursuing your case. This may happen if, for example, your case raises significant technical legal questions, or if you may be eligible for legal aid but didn’t realise it, or if pursuing your case may mean that you are eligible to pay substantial costs of the other side if you lose (for example, a claim for judicial review) 

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• Here are some really appalling statistics for you.  If a Social Worker decides your child should be taken into care,do you think you stand a chance? Look at these figures from the England and Wales Judicial statistics.  Look at 2004′s figures for example when 8,493 applications for a care order were made to the court and only 11, yes I said 11 Care Orders were refused.  Great, that means you have a 0.01% chance of winning in court!  Why?Because the legal aid solicitors are "professional losers" so the only parents who win are those happy few who sack their lawyers and represent themselves!They at least have a nearly 50-50 chance !

  Much better to send children to Foster/Adoptive Hell where they are statistically seven times more likely to be abused and shockingly three times more likely to die during childhood than if they were at home with their natural parents.  Of course there are many foster and adoptive families who are doing an excellent job at bringing up their children, but sadly this is a rare phenomenon.  For most children, the care system is the last place on earth which could be considered a safe haven (see Hollie Greig case for example.)

  CARE APPLICATIONS 2004
  APPLICATIONS MADE 8,493
  ORDERS REFUSED 11
  NO ORDERS 306
  WITHDRAWN 201
  ORDERS MADE 7,796
  (only 11 times did a judge actually
  refuse a care order)

  CARE APPLICATIONS 2005

  APPLICATIONS MADE 9,146
  ORDERS REFUSED 10
  NO ORDERS 92
  WITHDRAWN 201
  ORDERS MADE 8,849
  (only 10 times did a judge actually
  refuse a care order)

  CARE APPLICATIONS 2006

  APPLICATIONS MADE 7,849
  ORDERS REFUSED 12
  NO ORDERS 289
  WITHDRAWN 325
  ORDERS MADE 7,222
  (only 12 times did a judge actually
  refuse a care order)

  CARE APPLICATIONS 2007
  
  APPLICATIONS MADE 8,273
  ORDERS REFUSED 23
  NO ORDERS 290
  WITHDRAWN 336
  ORDERS MADE 7,624
  (only 23 times did a judge actually
  refuse a care order)

  CARE APPLICATIONS 2008

  APPLICATIONS MADE 7,640
  ORDERS REFUSED 20
  NO ORDERS 245
  WITHDRAWN 258
  ORDERS MADE 7,077
  (only 20 times did a judge actually
  refuse a care order)

  SOURCE: England and Wales Judicial Statistics

 

---

From the law library o congress Republc of Ireland proving the point I think !

Northampton County Council v. ABF and MBF,18 the return of a child to England was refused,

because doing so would have created an adoption without consent of one of the parents. In this decision,

the Court relied heavily on article 41 of the Irish Constitution. It understood article 41 to grant the father

the right to enforce his rights as the natural father in a foreign jurisdiction. The Court believed that this

result was in concert with the protection of the rights of the father and the infant pursuant to article 41.

Baby Ann Judgments of the Irish Supreme Court made on 13 November 2006 We provide links below to the Judgments made by the five Supreme Court Justices in the hearing labelled by the media as the "Baby Ann Adoption" case. These judgments represent a landmark in family law. The principle of the case itself is simply that a baby cannot be adopted from a Married Family against the wishes of the parents. What is remarkable and commendable of the majority of the Justices (see Hardiman J., Geoghegan J., Fennelly J) is that they have seized this opportunity to reverse the slippage in the Rule of Law - the established law of the Family - that custom and practice, as exercised in the family law courts, especially the lower courts, has steadily eroded in the past 40 years.

 
A family that made a successful escape would like to give others some helpful advice !
 


Dear Ian,
I would like to thank you for the advice you gave me, it was the best think we did in coming here.. We found a lot of help and support from the entire community here and our case ended last fri after only meeting with irish social workers once.. There are so many ways that the people here help and guide you through, they also will willing speak up for you if needs be..
My advice to all parents who come is is to declare yourself and become an active member of the community, not to hide as i did for the 1st 3 weeks we where here, if i had my case would of ended 3 weeks earlier..
So once again thank you for your help and advice
Yours sincerely
Julia Hamilton
 
Dear Ian;

If you put my other email which is lil-imp@live.co.uk that would be the best one for me to use and my number is +353894486572.. I hope I can help others to get out of trap they set for us in the uk.. Many people here in Ireland help willingly, police, solicitors and even social workers here do all they can to help put you back on track and stop the damage thats been done..

Your sincerely

Julia Hamilton

 

Dear Ian We spoke with you on Tuesday 27/04/10 and left for Ireland the next day. We just wanted to thank you and to keep you updated on progress. Back at home, on DAY 1 [Wednesday 28th April], Social Services had the Police put Baby and Mother on the missing persons list, immediately. The UK Police paid aggressive visits, threatening the Mother's Parents and Ex-Partner with all kinds of action if they didn't tell them where Mother and Baby are. The Police and Social Services ignored an email from Mother, sent the next morning - Thursday 29th April. Yesterday [Friday 30th April] the Police paid more aggressive visits to Mother's Parents, Ex-Partner and Solicitor - we'd C.C.ed him on the email we sent to them - stating this was done so they could not refute the email's existence. The Police conducted more raids back home, also stating that Mother and Baby would be put on the National Evening News as missing, that night. We had to make all that go away, so sought advice from the Citizens Information Centre here in Dublin and on their advice, took Mother and Baby's ID down to the Police Station. They were kind and seemed sympathetic. We spent the rest of the day in the Police Station, baby was checked over by a GP, then we spent the evening in the Childrens Hospital and Mother and Baby saw Social Services there. The good news: last night Irish Social Services took the case from the UK. As you may remember, there were no care orders on Baby, just a CPP [Child Protection Plan] so it is easier in this case than for those who have already been rubber-stamped by a judge for removal from the family. Thank God we got out in time! And thank YOU for your help! We had a last few minutes of reflection that maybe we COULD make this go away if we stayed in the UK and moved town. Well we'll never know but if there was even a 1% risk of Baby being taken, it wasn't one we were willing to take. And now, FOR SURE Mother and Baby are FREE!! Yippee! Thank you so much Ian. Were it not for your website, we would NEVER have realised what was going on in the first place, until it was too late. You are brilliant, caring and kind. OK, now we're off to build a new life for the little one here, which we're so glad to be free to do! Best wishes Suzanne - Friend of Mother and Baby! PS:- Absolutely. We'd be delighted for you to post the email. You might also like to add the following info on travel/arrival if it'll be helpful to others.... The ferry was very cheap and easy. We didn't need passports. The Irish Ferries website tells you what ID you can use. We bought SailRail tickets for just £30 - a one-way fare, all the way from Euston Station in London to Central Dublin [where the ferry pulls in]. You can SailRail from lots of UK cities. Check the Irish Ferries website for the SailRail deal and travel/connection times. One tip: try and avoid the last ferry of the day if you are doing SailRail. The train stopped short of our train change point of Chester, and put us off at Crewe instead. This made us miss our connecting train. The Virgin Driver made an announcement claiming a train had broken down on the line just ahead. It hadn't - and according to the driver of the replacement train driver [of the non-Virgin train!] at Crewe, Virgin does this VERY REGULARLY. It meant we didn't make our connecting train. So instead we took a train from Chester to Llandudno Junction [part of the way to Holyhead] and luckily, the train guard knew the name of a cab firm in Conwy, which is near Llandudno. If anyone finds themselves in a similar fix, the cab firm is Castle Cabs and their number is 01492 593 398. We hired a big 8 seater which cost £60 - a smaller vehicle would be less. If anyone gets in this fix, ask around as other travellers trying to get the ferry in time will be more than glad to share the fare with you! The journey from Llandudno Junction to Holyhead by taxi was 40 minutes - and they're happy to stop at the cash-machine in Conwy if you need to. At Dublin: There's a cashpoint right outside the exit of Dublin Ferryport to draw Euros. Dublin Hotels can be expensive and many charge per person, per night. We got a room at Holiday Inn, in Pearse Street, Central Dublin, for 59 Euros TOTAL per night which is a good deal here. The room is huge and comfortable with an en-suite bathroom, and two vast double beds. They have cots if you need one and plenty of space to put them up. The Holiday Inn is in Central Dublin and very close to the Ferryport [do ask for the Pearse Street one, as there's also one near the airport!] OK, that's all for now. We'll keep you updated on progress and share any other information as we go, that might help others. Meantime, thank you again Ian! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   My Husband and I had to leave England because we had the S.S. trying to start an investigation to remove our baby at birth. Before I became pregnant I had been fighting for two years against the corrupt systems` false removal of my first child by a different father. I was fighting them just to gain steady contact which they had prevented every step of the way. Being pregnant meant I had to make a choice between continuing to fight for my first child or risk the loss of my second child at birth. As I had already been a victim of their system the first time round, I wasn't going to fall for their games again. As S.S were making their moves to destroy our family we made our own moves to save our family. We are now happily living in Turkey and our child is doing great, but it wasn't easy. Along the way we have met with all kinds of problems such as being in different countries with no permanent home or safety, and language barriers. We understand that it can be a lonely time moving away from everything that you know and the need for guidance along the way such as health care directions, someone that has been in the same situation and someone that speaks your language.   We have built up a good community of people around us and get free health care such as vaccinations for our baby But now things are great for us, and we have our baby, we are offering our help to anybody in the same situation as we were in. We can offer the support needed, as nobody knows how hard it is until they have been in the same situation.   We are offering to help in organizing a place for families to come for sanctuary such as staying with us and then move them to a place of their own.   Feel free to contact me on Israel03windowslive.com -------------------------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: argiz@europe.com To: ian@monaco.mc ; ianjosephs@monaco.mc Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:34 PM Subject: The destruction of the family and children Mr. Joseph: I have familiarized myself with the contents of your web site and decided to write you while hoping that my time and effort will not be in vain.  It is not easy to write on a complex and sensitive subject to a stranger but the nature of the matter is so important and urgent that I believe it is worth the effort while hoping that the other side will understand and act upon it. My name is Robert Argiz, former US resident now living in Spain and involved in matters related to any injustice or abuse against children in general, particularly in areas connected with rape and sexual exploitation, satanic cult rituals, and stealing and/or kidnapping of children by strangers or the State. What I learnt at your web site is that you specialize in legal advice to people who have been victimized already or could become victims of some criminal activity against their children such as forced adoption by illegal and false methods which in essence is child stealing.  I want to become involved in the legal aspect of your work but only to a certain point.  Following are the areas in which I could participate: 1) Assist women on how they can have their child born in Spain at home and not in a hospital to avoid official control of these places. 2) Assist families with language communication if they do not speak or understand Spanish 3) Explore the possibility of filing a criminal complaint against the social services at the European Court of Human Rights in Brussels to expose the criminal activity by social workers acting on behalf of the government. 4) Study the possibility to bring the on-going criminal practice of stealing children to the attention of the UN body of nations. 5) Assist in creating a fund to assist people who want to leave the UK and come to Spain due to the uncovered policy of stealing kids from parents. 6) Instill in people the urgent need to create UNITY to fight the criminals seeking the destruction of the traditional family and kids. I think that people are too vulnerable and need to know who and where they can call or go when urgencies arrive at their front door and having a phone number where they can call or an Internet address where they can write in their language can help or prevent a tragedy from taking place. There is much to say or write on this subject and since this mail is only an introduction, I will leave it here hoping that my sincere written words are given consideration.  Thanks for your time and attention. Robert Argiz      FRANCE ! Advice from Florence Bellone :-flobellone@ntlworld.com   For people with passports who have no ressources to live in emergency, here is a list for emergency residence and safe birth in Paris. CHRS means Centre d'Hébergement et de réinsertion sociale. If it's a big deal to go in a country without knowing the language, it's not such a big deal for young parents to learn French in France. Knowing English is a + when it comes to look for a job. Please don't go there with long term benefits life in mind, it won't work long and will just make people thinking that we push to a benefit tourism when it's all about keeping your children and looking for a decent life.   The 115 number is an emergency number for homeless people, victims of DV or other problem which you to be "in the street". If you call it they will put somebody speaking English to answer you. You will say where you are and they would pick you up and bring to a refuge. I think it's simpler to go directly to one when it is possible.   I recommand the refuges specialised in DV for British women when ss precisely wanted to take your children because of this in the UK. The concept of punishing the victim of DV by removing her children will make French ss sick and you will find sympathy after they would have asked you to repeat 3 times what they can't believe they heard.   I also can supervise every exit/arrival and providing a letter, and don't hesitate to bring any letter of family, doctor, MP, etc...  I will brief a refuge where you will come. (But Ian, please don't put my datas on your website as some critic will eventually denunce the journalist...) In the unlikely case where a zealous worker would tell British Consulate of your existence, they still can't bring you back to the UK without showing the crime that you have committed. For pregnant women, no risk at all as your child will be born in France. I advise to get him a French ID card first thing but don't come back anyway in the UK with him or her because ss have already snatched French ID cards thanks to I don't know which Brussels clause.   Right now a solicitor I can't name is using French court judgement saying that an English mom of 5 sent to court on British ss demand ( she was living in France) is a very good mother and that she should be left alone (unfortunately the mom had come back to the UK with her brood and French judges don't impress much the British ones). As long as you are in France the worse that British ss can obtain is to send you to court but we have no law to remove children if you didn't beat, starve or rape them. In France only French ss are allowed to check a family. British ss will queue for the Eiffel Tower if they like it. And the diplomacy has not yet beatten common sense when foreign police claim an innocent family.   The first refuge is the one I went to speak to the staff : Cité Saint-Martin - Le Village 4 rue de l'arsenal 75004 Paris CHRS tous publics, femmes, hommes seuls, familles. Admission immédiate en urgence. (230 pl). 01.44.61.89.90 01.44.61.04.07   Mission Sans Domicile Fixe - Médecins du Monde 62 bis, avenue Parmentier 75011 Paris Service d'urgence et centre de soins. Admission immédiate en urgence.           01.43.14.81.81 01.47.00.75.53 Maison d'accueil pour femmes "Églantine" site internet 21 rue de la Salneuve 75017 Paris CHU pour femmes avec enfants ou enceintes, régularisées et sur Paris (pour les sans papiers, l'admission se fait par le 115). Capacité d'accueil de 150 pl. (dont 40pl. en urgence) dans 60 chbres. Admission en urgence par le 115, ou par un travailleur social.     01.44.40.40.50 01.44.40.40.46 Halte Aide Femmes Battues 14 rue Mendelssohn 75020 Paris CHRS pour femmes avec enfants de + de 3 ans ayant au maximum 3 enfants. Admission immédiate en urgence. (30 pl). 01.43.48.20.40 01.43.48.81.50             Foyer Trévise du C.A.S.P. (Centre d'Action Sociale Protestante) site internet 12 cité Trévise 75009 Paris CHRS de stabilisation et d'urgence pour femmes seules. 45 pl.. Admission par le 115 (30 pl. réservées au 115 et 15 pl. au service d'accueil CASP)     01.48.24.54.79 01.48.24.54.79 . CHRS Crimée 166 rue de Crimée 75019 Paris CHRS pour femmes seules et avec enfants. Accueil d'urgence pour des périodes de 15 jours renouvelables. (123 pl). 01.40.36.17.60 01.40.36.19.46  ARFOG 21 avenue du Général Michel Bizot 75012 Paris CHRS pour femmes avec ou sans enfants . Admission immédiate en urgence. Pôle d'insertion collectif (68 pl.); pôle d'insertion en appt (98 pl.); et 1 pôle d'urgence (32 pl). 01.44.75.76.10 email 01.44.75.76.19   On the following lists it is need to check the kind of public they welcome in a choosen place because not all refuges are housing in emergency and they have often a speciallity, for example, women only or couples but no childre, etc...   Provinces : http://annuaire.action-sociale.org/?cat=centre-hebergement---reinsertion-sociale--c-h-r-s---214   Here another list : http://www.quiaccueillequi.org/fiches/activite.php?colonne=Acti_M&from=%2Ffiches%2Fresultat_recherche_simple.php%3Fkeyword%3D

 

 

March 21, 2010...5:17 pm

UK DV victims fleeing their abusers (ex partners,social services,family court judges,Cafcass etc..)- A survival guide

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The truth of the matter is since emotional harm was added into the children act as a form of abuse, UK government departments have branched out in all areas of emotional welfare concerning children and child protection.



Marco born in one of Malaga's hospitals

As with my own story one of the saddest situations for women today are those who are or have been involved with reporting domestic violence are at serious risk of losing their children. From the moment a mother picks up the phone to the police and reports her partner or ex partner for domestic violence her children are ear marked for removal and adoption. Brutal you say? yes the law is brutal unless you can prove you can protect yourself and your children from the abuser…but of course you say ‘is’nt it the police and criminal courts job to do that’..well erm actually according to the social services and a family court judge no injunction will protect mother because either father will not take notice or mother will break the order herself because she is weak and in love with him.

If you report DV more than once YOU WILL be branded weak and EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE  putting your love interests before the interests of your children (apparently). Social services will also throw in a few bits about the children being untidy or aggressive for good measure in their reports be it true or in most cases NOT.This is how social services persuade a judge to put a care order on your children so they can be removed from you and taken into foster care. Anyone who has read John Hemmings or LyndaMac blogs will know that doctors who are appointed by the family court otherwise known as  ’expert witnesses’ are in a league of their own. These doctors are paid for by the social services, Cafcass and your legal aid (if you represent yourself no wonder the court want you to get a solicitor asap or the expenses is down to everyone else!).

Now i am not saying all doctors are total quacks Mystic Meg’s ‘ I know it all’ types, but I would say in their own ‘field’ they most certainly think they know it all otherwise they wouldn’t be on the expert witness panel of Court certified Doctors would they? (you can find these  just google expert witnesses). I wont go into the Psychobabble of expert witnesses who are used as a weapon of mass destruction against you in court as I want to save this topic for the future and in great detail in my book. For now I want to concentrate on where does a woman who is in the situation where she is on the brink of losing her children? Ok please take note of the following..

Republic Of Ireland

Is classed as the ‘common travel area’ and the social security system is linked with the UK’s. If you are unemployed you can claim your benefits in Ireland just as you would in UK, what you cannot get away with is claiming in both countries, it is LINKED!. Emotional harm does exist in Ireland’s child protection (although only extreme harm and with EVIDENCE of such not like in the UK where it is on ‘possibility) but from my experience and knowledge they DO NOT take children from a parent who has suffered and/or reported domestic violence. So if that if your problem then go and build your children a new life away from your abuser. If you choose not to keep your abuser away then repeated DV will not go un-noticed and you may well both be pulled into court and have exclusion orders slapped on you, break these and your children will be at risk of going into care but not adopted as it is illegal to adopt a child against the parents wishes here. You will need in order

1) PPS number from your City social welfare/tax office (take as much ID as you can for you and your children) you can get your PPS numbers by ringing up after a few days ,quote your reference number)

2)Take your PPS numbers to your LOCAL social welfare office and apply for single parent whilst you find a job or not depending on what you want to do.

3) Go to www.daft.ie and find a landlord/property who will accept rent allowance

4) Find your local ‘Clinic’ this tends to be a doctors and in there will be a supplementary welfare officer for you to claim weekly money and rent allowance whilst your single parent claim goes through.Register at the doctors whilst your there and apply for  a health card and the health nurse. If you feel it necessary approach social services as i did and tell them why you are here they maybe able to offer you some assistance in a good form and not one that is intrusive or threatening  like what you have experienced with British social workers.http://www.welfare.ie/EN/Schemes/SupplementaryWelfareAllowance/Pages/RentSupplement.aspx

5) Apply for child benefit, to get this you must provide a letter from the local school confirming the attendance of your child or if child is under 5 a letter from your doctor confirming registration.

Spain

Do not go to Spain if you need to rely on the benefits system (unless you are a pensioner of course), this is most unfortunate for people with disabilities but i will find a solution eventually! To survive in Spain you must work, here is a quick survival guide.

1) Emotional harm does not exist in Spain so unless you have been accused of physical ,sexual or neglect against a child you WILL keep your children. For domestic violence issues it is pretty much the same as Ireland except they may well throw the woman into prison if you continue to break any exclusion orders against your partner purely because you are wasting police and court time reporting your abuser! In the high-profile cases of Megan Coote and Sam Hallimond and partner Vanessa both concerning Suffolk social services here is the difference…http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255458/British-parents-fled-Spain-stop-social-services-kidnapping-baby-week-old-son-taken-Spanish-authorities.html

The Spanish Authorities say Megan gets to keep her baby as it was future emotional harm that the UK were seeking to remove the baby for (doesn’t exist in Spain at the moment). Regarding Sam and Vanessa’s 1st baby ‘Daisy’  initially removed also on the basis of future risk of emotional harm, baby number 2 was removed by Spanish Authorities because Suffolk decided to change tactics from using emotional harm to at risk of physical harm. A risk and accusation Suffolk cannot prove according to the parents paperwork, so lets hope that if it is the case of Suffolk being liars the Spanish see this and return the baby. The problem UK fear with this case is if the baby is returned to Sam and Vanessa the 1st baby Daisy will surely have to be returned to the parents, if not there is a case for the courts of European rights if one country orders a child for adoption and another leaves child to stay in the birth family! The tax payer would be looking at paying a 6 figure sum for a case gone wrong like that as in my own case (I’ll get there).

2) After finding accommodation http://www.enalquiler.com go to your main police station with ID and apply for your NIE numbers (this is for residence the same as Ireland’s PPS) It is preferable to get someone to look after your children to do this and then present your children to the officer at the end. I paid someone 200 euros to queue for me (these people are easy to find) queuing starts around 3am to be guaranteed a ticket as the police only give out a certain amount a day.

3)When you have your NIE after about 7 days take this to the town hall along with your tenancy agreement and get your empadronamientohttp://valencia.angloinfo.com/countries/spain/empadronamiento.asp

4) When you have your empadronamiento take this paperwork to the social security office (Seguridad Social) and apply for your tax number. Apparently if you have a national insurance tax contributions certificate (E301) makes life a lot easier for the Spanish otherwise register as self employed for the minimum tax to pay a month or if you are lucky enough to get a job with an employer that will pay your tax you have things much simpler! As a single mother you can apply for 100 euro a month childcare if under 3 yrs of age and 100 euro a month child benefit but i think this is per household? someone please correct me. Also there is a new scheme where the housing department (find out at your town hall) where they will pay 258 euros a month towards your rent. There is also a payment from social security for mothers who can receive 2500 euros when they give birth but i was unable to get this as i had not been living in Spain for more than a year. I do understand however you might be able to claim this up to 2 years after giving birth if you continue to live in Spain.



Lucas holding Marco!

5) Take your social security number with your empadronamiento to the doctors to register you and your children for free health care and a health check which is needed to get them into state school. You can register with a european health card and get your child’s health check this way but most doctors will only issue you with a temporary card, if you do it this way you will have to say you are living temporary in Spain for a year maybe. 6)Get your children into school, you can put children in from age 3 but it is compulsory to have them in school full-time at age 6.

Finally i would like to thank the kind people who have helped me from Catholic churches in Spain and in Ireland, from having baby items such as blankets, carry cots, car seats, children’s clothes bought and even made with their bare hands. I once wrote a prayer whilst on the ferry over to france  on June 27th 2007 asking if their was a god to protect us from the British authorities  and let there be people during our time on the run who would be  kind enough to help us survive..and there was. Although a warning to people who are adamant on crossing boarders into other countries not everyone is so kind and there are people who will use your weaknesses to their advantage because they also need to survive. Just be careful who you tell your life story to because no matter which way you look at it you become even more vulnerable away from friends and family and your priority is to keep safe, survive and surround yourself with good people and the church is a good place to start to connect with.

Another successful escape !! 

hello my good friend, friend of humanity! Me and Amaani and Daddy have finally made it to Dubai! Got here last night, thought i will let you know. We were in France, yesterday, had taken a ferry to Cherbourg from Ireland  drove to  Paris, Paris to Bahrain, Bahrain to Dubai.My God it has been an adventure and tiring too! we are celebrating parental love my god how cheeky are the British Authorities to infringe on something so natural,pure and perfect, we will love our daughter, we will cuddle our daughter till earths end. My friend thank you, thank you for all your help and a cuddle for you too

 

kind regards

 

shahnaz

xxxxx

 

AND AGAIN !This time escape to N cyprus!

 

dear ian


i wonder if you rember me? i am abby ozari and you graciousely helped and advised me in january of this year on my alful fight with brighton social services with regards to my three small children.
 i had moved town to get away from an abusive ex husband and suddenly social sevices were in mine and my childrens lives, acusing me of infliecting emotional halm as they had witnessed  thier farther and i argue, yes just that! my children were put on brightons child protection list after my ex had left the family home in november 2009 and so begain the most helish two months of my life.
let me just say that my childhood was horrific. i was a child carer to my mentaly ill mother, missed years of school and was in and out of care.
dispite all of this nuthing could prpere me for the emotional termoil that ss in brighton in flicted on my family. as you often say ian, you couldnt make it up!
 thier farther cem stayed away as instructed by ss, i went to thier pointless dv classes, i enroled in parenting classes although my parenting of the children had never been in question.
yet all the time, day by day i had this mounting uneasyness inside, as if something truely terrible were about to happen.
i lost my first born son back in 2000 and since then have not been able to face the fear that something alful could happen to any of my three beautiful children.
at one social worker visit, i came down with  a miagrane, a condition i havdnt sufferd from in years, i belive due to the deep fear i had of my childrren being taken from me, and put into care. i didnt for a second want them to experance what i had 20 odd years back, especialy as the uk 'care' system seem to be 100 times worse these day. my children are very beautiful and bright. they stood out in the thier local state primary and witout sounding boastful, people in brighton would often stand and stere at them. i now belive my children were definatly ear marked for forced adoption by brighton ss, this was the source of my mounting fear though i could not articulate it properly even to myself until i thankfully stumbled apon you wonderful  forced adoption site late one night.
oh, what a help and a god send it was! each night as my children slept i read your site, over and over until i realised, along with a talking to you on the fone  that ss did indeed want my babies and i had to get them out of england if at all possible.

in many many ways i was very lucky, the farther of my children cem is terkish cypriot and his family have quite a big property out there.
as you know british law has no bearing in north cyprus, so if i could just get to cyprus  before a care order was issued, my children would be safe!
i worked closely with my  mother inlaw, who in a bid to isolate me and the children, had been forbiddern from  brighton ss to visit us, even though she had come from cyprus at christmas time just to see them!
together, we got the childrens passports, packed and with in about three weeks had tickets and were ready  to get the children out of the country. all this time thier farther cems supervised visits with the children had been rearanged and canciled i belive in a bid to make him flip and lose his rag with ss which to his credit he did not.
i had been presured by a wicked solicoter who was obviously in bed with brighton ss to get an injunction against cem although thier was no real violence in the relationship and he had never hurt his kids. this same soliciter told me that there were MORE CHILDREN TAKEN IN TO CARE FROM MY TINY COUNCIL ESTATE OF WHITEHAWLK IN BRIGHTON than the whole of london! if this didnt ring alam bells with me than i dont know what did!
at your advice i did not get an injunction against cem, althought i stalled and led ss in to beliving that i would. im so glad i did not as if i had cem would not have been able to take the children to cyprus with his mother and i would have been in prison for braking the injunction no doubt!
things had been bad between thier dad and me for some 2 years and we had just got a lovely council house in brighton with enough room for the children that we had been doing up.
as a child i dreamed of living in a 3 bed house with a garden when i grew up as my family life was non existant and i was reluctant to just up and leave the home id got for my children, they adored the house, every night my doughter mia thanked god for it in her prears.
i also know my family would be very hard up in cyprus as no benifit system, if i stayed and worked for a while i could at lest send money.
i also was afraid that ss would somehow follow us and take the children any way and as im bright i felt i could fight any care ordes issued win and at some point bring my children home to england if i stayed behind for a while.
brighton ss did issue a care order, issued by none other than the wiked judge coats herself! someone i  know youve come across before.
i rember at the first hearing she orded tipstaff and all sorts of legal cloat to go afer my children although they were in north cyprus!
i rember standing up, represning myself saying, 'my children have not been kidnapped your honour.'
maybe i should not have said that because i belive that gave the alful women idears.
i am not stupid and had given thier farther a letter signed by me stating that i fully agreed for cem to take his children to cyprus for as long as we both sor fit. i stated as we were still married he and i had full parental authority to do this.
even so, british ss promptly contacted the british embassy in north cyprus saying that I   had complaned to british ss that thier dad cem had kidnapped them! again, you couldnt make it up! what a wicked bareface lie. i knew that brit ss wanted my children badly!
i emailed my mother in law and thier dad, this very fact, they had to go to brit embassy and present my email and the letter i had given them the next day. if they had not i belive bitish ss would have gone to cyprus to try and snach my children!
luckily they belived us and not brit ss. a childs gardian went to cyprus to see the children and reported that they were doing very well and brit ss should drop the care order against my children which thnakfully they did. i had hoped that i could join my children abroad but it wasnt to be.
i had got a job and was sending money but i didnt realize we had to put my kids in private schools in cyprus as normal schools are not tought in english, at first i was happy as my kids are very bright and private schools thier are much cheeper than in the uk.
also my relatiship with cem had sufferd terribaly through all the stress of ss, they had really set us up against eachother, and what with our previouse problems soon he emailed me stateing that he wanted a divorce.
i was to lose my children, not to ss but to thier farher.
i am still living with this alful knowledge and pain and its crippling me. whilst im so greatfull that the children are safe and well, and i speak to them on scipe most days, i cant be with them everyday, and its aln alful greaf.
they left in jaunuary and i havnt been out to see them yet as thier farther insists on a divorce before i go out to see my childen,
also as i am sending most of my money to support them in thier private schools, i  havnt had the money to go yet.
even so i am so greatful that they are not in care, we get on ok and thier farther and i agree we will never bring them back to the uk for fear of ss trying to take them again, we just cant risk it.
i have met a new patner who is a business man and we have talked about bying a small property in cyprus so that i can spend evey holyday with my children. this would be a god send  and its something we are working towards.
i want to thank you ian so much for all your help and insight and i really want to help other familys like mine fight british ss. iv read the uk collum and belive brian garrish is a god send. the new acadamy schools will be used in the uk to brain wash our children and i am so thankfull in many ways that my childrern will not have to experance that as they will grow up in cyprus now.
if you would like to print any of my story or put my contact details on your website i would be very honnerd. the care order has been dropped and i have not been gaged!
i would love to become a mcenzi friend or write a book about my experances with child social services  to help others and i wonder if you have any advice on this?
please email or call me any time. my number is 07577889711.
thanks again for all your help and kindness, please give my deltals to other familys who might need advice from someone whos been where they are. i look forward to hearing from you.

from abby ozari


Don't just take my word for the rest of my allegations.Please read the following articles from the Daily Mail,and the Sunday Telegraph as they very accurately depict the mounting and highly justified public disquiet over the secret family courts and the "adoption industry".

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html ?in_article_id=465563&in_page_id=1770  

Courts won't reveal rulings in adoption cases

By Ben Leapman, Home Affairs Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:44am BST 08/08/2007

Pauline Goodwin’s baby was taken from her but she was denied a copy of the judgment. The court service has now apologised

Family courts are refusing to tell mothers why their babies are being taken away and put up for forced adoption.

Two mothers have told The Sunday Telegraph that their pain at losing their children was made worse by not knowing the grounds on which judges took the decisions.
 
Both women had their requests for copies of the judgments turned down repeatedly. As a result, they were prevented from launching legal battles to win their babies back, because appeals cannot be lodged without -written judgments.

Critics claimed that the cases are an extreme example of the secrecy that runs throughout the family court system. Earlier this summer, the Government abandoned plans to open up hearings to the media.

John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of Justice for Families, said: "It seems quite strange that somebody can have their child removed and adopted, and the system will not give reasons.

"This arises from the secrecy of proceedings and the fact that people are allowed to misbehave professionally in the family courts without any fear of sanctions against them."

The cases are the latest in a series highlighted by this newspaper which have raised concerns about the workings of the family courts and social services.

It included a professional couple who had their daughter taken away because the mother has a history of mental illness and the father was "confrontational" towards social workers, while another couple were told they cannot have their two daughters back despite being cleared of allegations of abuse.

Last year, 2,120 babies were taken for adoption before their first birthday, almost three times as many as a decade ago. Adoptions leapt after councils were offered cash incentives to increase the number.

One of the latest cases involved Pauline Goodwin, 39, from Merseyside, who suffered a breakdown after her marriage ended. As she struggled to cope, her baby girl, born in 2005, was taken away by social services at birth.

At a court hearing in June last year, held at a time when she was temporarily homeless, Judge Wallwork ruled at Liverpool Family Court that the baby should remain in foster care.

The mother says she was told that despite the outcome of the case, the judgment would not be critical of her. However, in the 14 months since the hearing, her repeated requests to obtain a copy of the judgment have proved fruitless. She has been told by social workers that her daughter has now been adopted.

She said: "They had my baby adopted, then they said they make no findings against me, but they won't give me the court order. I need the judgment because I want to lodge an appeal. It's supposed to be within 28 days but it has been more than 12 months.

"If they give me the transcripts I can prove the whole thing was wrong, and my baby wouldn't be where she is now, she would be with me."

Sharon Harkness, 37, also from Merseyside, won the first round of her courtroom battle when social workers tried to take her baby son away. In August 2005, at the High Court in London, Mr Justice Holman turned down a bid by a local authority to take the boy, then only three months old, into foster care.

However, at Liverpool Family Court in November, Judge Roddy reversed the earlier decision and granted the council a care order. The baby was removed from his family and is now living with prospective adoptive parents.

In the intervening 21 months, repeated requests by Mrs Harkness for a written judgment have been refused or ignored. She said: "It's within my rights to at least see the kind of care order they've put my son on. It's like they've taken my baby and forgotten to give me the receipt."

At one point she tried to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, only to be told that the court could not consider her case because she had no written judgment on which to base it.

At the end of last week, after The Sunday Telegraph took up the cases with the Judicial Communications Office in London, officials issued an apology within hours and finally pledged that both women would receive the vital documents within days.

In Miss Goodwin's case, a spokesman said: "Her Majesty's Court Service would like to apologise that in this case, the transcripts were not provided as requested. There appears to have been a breakdown in communications. The transcription company will prepare the transcripts next week and once they are approved by the judge, the court will send them out."

Regarding Mrs Harkness, the spokesman said: "There was an ambiguity in the original order which had not been corrected and caused a delay in the process. The transcript has now been produced and is with the judge, prior to being sent to the family next week."

Pauline (story and photo above) has learned a lot during her 3 year struggle with the "SS" .She now helps and advises other parents in distress and also organises demonstrations.

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My baby will be taken from me the moment it's born
By HELEN WEATHERS  
Daily Mail 6th September 2007

The link below connects to a video of a very informative itv programme:-

http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/Media/Bill-Bache_John -Hemming_Fran-Lyon_ITV-This-Morning02-11- 07.wmv

The daughter of teachers and with a glittering academic future, Fran was delighted when she became pregnant. But social services discovered the illness she thought she'd put behind her - and will confiscate her daughter when she is born... Fran Lyon is due to give birth to her first child - a daughter she has already named Molly - on January 3. But the prospect, far from being one of joyous anticipation, fills her with a dread that keeps her awake at night. It's not because Fran doesn't want the child. She does. Desperately. And not because she is frightened of the pain of labour. She is prepared for that. It is what happens afterwards that fuels Fran's anxiety. And there can be no preparation for that pain. For within 30 minutes of birth, barring any medical complications, Molly will be handed by doctors to social workers. They have instructions to take away Fran's newborn baby and place her in foster care. The 22-year-old will then be transferred from the maternity wing to a gynaecological ward, because Northumberland Council has decided that Fran - who has never harmed anyone in her life - is potentially a risk to other mothers and their babies. Fran has no idea if she will be able to touch her baby, even for a minute, before leaving hospital alone, or if she will ever get her daughter back. Her biggest fear is that she won't, and that Molly will be put up for adoption. 'It is incredibly upsetting not knowing if I will be allowed even to hold my baby,' says Fran, a charity worker. 'Until social services became involved in my life, I was having a normal pregnancy and was full of excitement. 'They have taken away what should be the most precious time in my life - and I will never get that back. I'm already in love with my baby. I can feel her moving, I talk to her. I've bought her baby books and clothes. You just can't undo that attachment.' Fran is an intelligent and articulate woman. She has nine A- starred GCSEs, five grade A A-levels and is in the third year of a neuroscience degree at Edinburgh University - which she is completing at home in Hexham, Northumberland.

However, what concerns Hexham Children's Services, which is part of Northumberland Council, is Fran's medical history.

Having had a difficult relationship with her parents, who are teachers in good state schools, from the age of 15, she started selfharming. Fran spent three years - on and off - in psychiatric hospitals.

Her problems appear to have begun when she was raped by an acquaintance at the age of 14. Diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, she was discharged from a therapeutic facility in 2002, where she had spent 13 months, and spent nine months as an outpatient.

Today, she needs no medication and, according to her former psychiatrist, Dr Stella Newrith, 'has made a significant recovery to the point where her difficulties are indistinguishable from those of much of the general population'.

In a letter to Northumberland Council, Dr Newrith, who treated Fran for a year when she was 16 and has known her for many years, stated: 'There has never been any clinical evidence to suggest that Fran would put herself or others at risk, and there is certainly no evidence to suggest she would put a child at risk of emotional, physical or sexual harm.'

Furthermore, she said: 'I would view the removal of Fran's baby as an extraordinarily heavy-handed gesture. It is also my professional opinion that doing so would be an infringement of Fran's human rights, as it would be much the same as removing a child from someone from the general population.'

Yet on August 16, a child protection case conference recommended that Fran's baby should be taken away at birth - a decision based in part on the contents of a letter from consultant paediatrician Dr Martin Ward Platt, who has never met Fran and could not be present at the meeting.

In his letter, Dr Ward Platt states that 'even in the absence of psychological assessment, if the professionals were concerned on the evidence available that [this woman] probably does fabricate or induce illness, there would be no option but to put the baby into foster care at birth pending a post-natal forensic psychological assessment'.

However, he warned that it was necessary first to establish as far as possible whether or not Fran does suffer from this illness - something Fran claims they have failed to do.

Fran has never been diagnosed with this condition, yet she has nevertheless been deemed by Northumberland Council as someone likely to suffer from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a controversial and unproven condition in which a parent - usually the mother - makes up or induces an illness in her child to draw attention to herself.

And so, unless a judicial review next week rules in Fran's favour, her baby Molly will almost certainly be taken away at birth.

'I can understand why they might have concerns about my past, but the speed with which they have come to this conclusion, despite the evidence of my own psychiatrist, is terrifying,' she says.

'I was at the case conference and it lasted just ten minutes.

'This letter from Dr Ward Platt was given to me just five minutes before the meeting started, and when it was produced, the chairman said there was no point - in the light of what this letter stated - even considering the other evidence which I wanted to present, which was letters of support from psychiatrists.

'I think they simply panicked, and when people panic they make, in my opinion, bad judgments. I left that meeting numb with shock. I'd had absolutely no time to digest the letter or argue my case, and I was so horrified at what they'd said that I just couldn't even begin to respond to it.

'I have never harmed anyone in my life. I have no criminal convictions. I believe I can be a good mother to Molly - but they are not even prepared to give me a chance to prove that.

'I have offered to stay in a mother and baby unit after Molly's birth for as long as they want, and to be monitored. I would be prepared to stay there for 18 years if it meant I could be with my baby. But that, it seems, is not even an option.'

Fran's case is far from unusual. Two thousands babies under one year old were taken from their parents last year by social services - three times the number ten years ago. Critics believe councils are doing this to help meet government adoption 'targets'.

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, chairman of the Justice for Families campaign group, certainly thinks so.

'How can it be in the child's best interests to take a baby away from its mother at birth? The reason why they do it is because it's much harder to take away a baby the longer it spends with its mother, and a healthy newborn baby is so much easier to find adoptive parents for.

'It is estimated that 97 per cent of babies taken away from their mothers at birth, on the basis that the mothers are "capable of emotional abuse", are never returned to them - and that is simply scandalous.

'Of course, there are cases where it is right to do so, but the whole public family law system is corrupt because of the secrecy which surrounds it. Decisions are based on opinion and conjecture, rather than fact and evidence.

'What does Fran's case tell us? That no woman who has been raped or had mental health problems can be allowed to have a baby, even years later?

'What could be more traumatic than for a mother to have her baby taken away at birth? It's monstrous. That, in itself, can cause mental health problems, which is then used by social services against the mother as a reason not to return the baby. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

'There has been a massive increase in younger babies being taken into care, before there is even any evidence of harm - and you have to ask why that is.'

Despite her own troubled past, Fran Lyon is convinced she can be a good parent, and is desperate to prove that. From the start, she has been open and honest with social workers about her medical history, but she feels this has been used against her.

Although she describes her childhood as 'difficult', she refuses to elaborate, other than to say that she is close to her mother and younger brother, but has no contact with her father.

The catalyst for her severe mental health problems was, she says, the rape she suffered when she was 14.

She told police that she was attacked while working as a Saturday volunteer in a charity shop in Northampton, when the shop's founder - a middle-aged man - drove her to an empty warehouse supposedly to pick up supplies for the shop.

When Fran reported the rape, he was interviewed by police. Three more women claiming they, too, had been attacked came forward and agreed to testify against him. However, in 2001 the man killed himself before the Crown Prosecution Service could decide whether to proceed.

'After the rape, I became clinically depressed,' says Fran. 'I lost a huge amount of weight and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after trying to kill myself with an overdose of tablets. It wasn't a cry for help; I wanted to die because of what he had done to me.'

She spent the next three years, on and off, in residential psychiatric hospitals in Oxford, Nottingham and London after being diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, in her case characterised by self-harming, instability and suicidal tendencies.

For the final 13 months, Fran went to a therapeutic residential clinic, where she attended individual psychotherapy sessions and group analysis before being discharged as an outpatient.

By the time she was 18, she appeared to have put her problems behind her.

She started to flourish, taking five A-levels at Orpington College in Kent and applying to study neuroscience at Edinburgh University.

At the same time, she worked for two mental health charities, Borderline and Personality Plus. It was through that job, two years ago, that she met the man who is the father of Molly.

'Of course, I was worried when I fell pregnant. I wondered how we would cope as a couple, because we weren't living together,' says Fran.

'But once that wore off, I was excited. I would go shopping with my mum to baby departments, buying books and looking at prams.'

But a few weeks ago, all normality ended. Social services suddenly became involved when Fran phoned the police after what she describes as a 'disturbing incident' with her partner. Fran's relationship with him ended immediately.

'The case was referred to social services and I was interviewed by two social workers, who said from the beginning that they would have to look at the whole family, not just one person in isolation,' says Fran.

'At that first meeting, they asked about my concerns regarding the baby's father, but then it became clear through their questions that their investigation was centred on me. I have never made a secret of my mental health problems. I felt I had nothing to hide.'

Fran was co- operative, she says, because she naively thought children's services would offer her help and support. She was stunned when she received a letter informing her that a child protection case conference would be held on August 16.

'That's when I became frightened and thought for the first time: "Are they going to take my baby away from me?"

'I couldn't believe how everything had happened so quickly. When you are up against a big system such as social services, it is very easy to feel overrun and overwhelmed.'

Realising the seriousness of the situation, Fran instructed a solicitor and contacted her former psychiatrist, Dr Stella Newrith, who offered her full support.

A second psychiatrist, who Fran knew through her charity work, offered a character reference stating: 'I have no doubt that her diligence and capacity, particularly in dealing with complex emotional situations, will stand her in good stead for the rigours of parenthood.'

Yet these testimonials, Fran says, were never even read out at the conference after Dr Ward Platt's letter was produced.

Northumberland Council insists that two highly experienced doctors - another consultant paediatrician and a medical consultant - attended the case conference.

Neither they, nor anyone else present - including Fran solicitor - made any objection. Feeling stunned and intimidated by what she had heard, she felt unable to speak out.

Everything she wanted to say will now be heard - with the help of a new solicitor who specialises in such cases - at appeal.

According to MP John Hemming, Fran should win her case; but there is no guarantee that she will. Both he and Fran are particularly concerned that last week social workers contacted the psychiatrist who provided a character reference for Fran. They believe this was done with the intention of 'pressurising' the witness into withdrawing his support, and undermining Fran's appeal.

It was seemingly suggested by a social worker to the doctor in question that Fran had given incorrect details about her health to hospital staff: in short, doubt was cast on the reality of an ectopic pregnancy Fran suffered on Christmas Eve two years ago.

'Is it ethical for social workers to go behind my back and speak to my witnesses, discussing my private confidential medical history and suggesting to them that I might have made things up?' says Fran.

'I did have an ectopic pregnancy, and I have the scars to prove that I had abdominal surgery.' Mr Hemming goes further, describing such behaviour as akin to witness nobbling. He also claims it is not uncommon for social workers to pressurise witnesses - a punishable practice in the criminal courts.

'There is a culture in which the end is seen to justify the means, and sometimes the means employed would not be tolerated in any other court of law,' he says. 'Yet if anyone tries to speak out, they are guilty of contempt of court. The whole family court system, because of the secrecy which surrounds it, is vulnerable to bad practice. Social workers are under pressure not to lose cases.' Northumberland Council, while legally prevented from speaking about individual cases, insists there is nothing sinister in their actions.

A spokeswoman said it was the court whichwould make the ultimate decision, after hearing legal representation from both sides. 'Safeguarding children is our top priority,' said a spokeswoman. 'We speak to all sides without bias or pressure. 'We would welcome a review of the family court arrangements, and support transparency, as long as this is in the best interests of the children.

'Safeguarding arrangements have been praised as good following a rigorous inspection by a number of Government departments. It was specifically noted that "good action was taken to enable parents to keep their children safe in the home and the communityî. Our duty to safeguard children is our only motivation, and we strive to keep children with their families wherever possible, or extended families if that is not possible.

'We do not have numerical targets for adoption; nor have we received any financial rewards in relation to adoption figures.'

As for Fran, the final four months of her pregnancy are filled with stress and uncertainty, and the nagging terror that her worst nightmare will become a reality and her baby daughter will be snatched away from her. 'Some days I feel positive,' she says quietly.

'But others I feel totally overwhelmed. All I am asking for is a chance to prove that I will be a good mother.'

Sadly, that wish may not be granted her.


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IMPORTANT! The miserable wretch who was chairman of the so called "Case Conference" that lasted 15 minutes should be  dismissed in disgrace. His name is BOB HILL and  he should never be allowed near any case conference ever again !

AND THEN? Fran flees the country, see the link below! 

http://www.fassit.co.uk/inquiry_team_videos.htm

Download Form N434, Notice of change of solicitor, Court Service Forms, Administrative Court. Just to emphasise important guiderules..... Remember that social workers ARE NOT POLICE and cannot give you orders or forbid you to tell your children that you love them,miss them and are fighting to get them back! It is absolutely essential that you blurt out "I love you and want you back but wicked childstealers have kidnapped you and these horrible thieves are stopping you from coming home !" Say this or words to that effect before anyone can stop you as SS nearly always tell children "mummy does not love you or want you any more" and the children MUST know the truth. Only a court can legally give you orders so do not be bluffed into signing documents or obeying orders from the SS !  Social Workers have a statutory duty to try and keep families together not split them up ,so they should be asked in court just what attempts they made to keep YOUR family together before taking the baby or the children ! QUOTE THE "HUMAN RIGHTS ACT"section 8:- Article 8: Right to Respect for Private and Family Life 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Article 8 guarantees respect for four things: a person’s private life, family life, home and correspondence. This guarrantee applies also to the rights of grandparents,siblings,aunts,uncles,and cousins to remain in contact with each other contrary to the forced adoption of a child by adopters whose names and locations are kept secret! Article 10, European Convention on Human Rights Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to freedom of expression. Before the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force, the right to freedom of expression was a negative one: you were free to express yourself, unless the law otherwise prevented you from doing so. With the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into English and Welsh domestic law, the right to freedom of expression is now expressly guaranteed. However, the right to freedom of expression in Article 10 is not absolute. Interferences with the right to freedom of expression may be permitted if they are prescribed by law, pursue a legitimate aim and are necessary in a democratic society, that is, satisfy a pressing social need. The legitimate purposes for which freedom of expression can be limited are: * National security, territorial integrity or public safety. * The prevention of disorder or crime. * The protection of health or morals. * The protection of the reputation or rights of others. * The prevention of the disclosure of information received in confidence. * For maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.   BUT see how they break the law by censoring what a mother can say to a 12 year old child! Most parents have to sign something similar or contact is stopped !   Supervised contact Supervised contact will take place three times a week. Currently there are two regular sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays, between 3;30 and 4;45pmLukes Social Worker will make arrangements on a weekly basis in regards to the third supervised session until a contact supervisor can be allocated. Contact betweenLuke and his mum wll be supervised by a contact supervisor at all times. The contact sessions will take place at the West Area Duty and Family Support Teams offices. Telephone contact is to take place only under Lukes foster carers supervision.Telephone contact is to only last five minutes and is to be initiated by Luke only. Ms Marques is expected to end the telephone conversation herself in an appropriate way once the five minutes have lapsed.  Luke will be transported from school and to the foster placement by a professional appointed by the West Area Duty and Family Support Team.   Ms Marques is expected to support Luke while he is staying with his foster carer. She is not to encourage Luke to have any other form of contact with her apart from what has been officially agreed with the Local Authority. The Local Authority is worried that ms Marques has limited insight into how her functioning impacts upon Luke and that there is a risk that Lukes placement will be de-stabilised and Luke experience further emotional harm as a result of this. Ms Marques is strongly advised ; to engage with Luke in a child centered positive way during contact. If she finds this difficult she is encouraged to request support/advice from the contact supervisor. The contact supervisor will from now on make activities available during contact. Ms Marques is advised to engage with these activities and encourage Luke to do so aswell. Ms Marques is encouraged to bring board games with her etc that she and Luke might enjoy playing during contact. Ms Marques should not discuss issues relating to the ongoing court proceedings. If in any case Luke brings up the subject himself she is to encourage him to discuss these issues with his social worker and/or guardian. Ms Marques should not make reference to herself and her current situation if this will result in Luke feeling worried/guilty about " mum being on her own". Ms Marques is to make reference to Lukes father and paternal side of the family in a positive way at all times. Ms Marques is expected to make reference to all professionals involved with Luke in a positive way.She is to encourage Luke to be open and trusting of these professionals. If Ms Marques feels anxious/unwell she is expected to seek help from her GP and /or her mental health key-worker. Lukes social worker is to be notified of this as soon as that is possible. If in any case contact is to be affected, then Ms Marques is expected to make contact with Lukes social worker immediately. Ms M is expected to keep to all the points made in this written agreement. If Ms Marques fails to keep to any of the expectations as set out by this written agreement; it is made clear that the contact supervisor has been instructed that contact is to be stopped, and Ms Marques will be asked to leave. The Local Authority will also review the contact arrangements and amend them as necessary to promote and ensure Lukes welfare and safety. This is not a legally binding document and all relevant parties are encouraged to seek legal advise if they wish to do so. Any changes to contact will take place only once an updated written agreement has been drafted and signed by all relevant parties.              Article 12 (child's right to participate in decision making) 1. Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child. 2. For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law NEVER,NEVER lose contact with your young children,just read the paragraphs below !! Send them your phone number buried in the middle of a cd rom (disc),written on a doll,written in invisible ink on a seemingly innocent postcard,or simply whispered in their ears at a suitable moment. Alternatively if your name is Jane for example,register an easy email address (eg)  mumjane@aol.com  Any child old enough to send an email will then be able to contact you no matter where you are or where they are! If the child has no easy access to a computer ,then a visit for "study purposes' to any public library will also allow free use of one of their computers to send emails free of charge !  If on the other hand your baby or toddler is being snatched insist on breastfeeding a baby as this gives you extra contact. http: //www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2003/850.html Citation: BLD 160403280; [2003] EWHC 850 (Admin). Hearing Date: 15 April 2003 Court: Administrative Court. Judge: Munby J. Abstract. "Per curiam. If the state, in the guise of a local authority, seeks to remove a baby from his parents at a time when its case against the parents has not yet even been established, then the very least the state can do is to make generous arrangements for contact, those arrangements being driven by the needs of the family and not stunted by lack of resources. Typically, if this is what the parents want, one will be looking to contact most days of the week and for lengthy periods. Local authorities also had to be sensitive to the wishes of a mother who wants to breast-feed, and should make suitable arrangements to enable her to do so, and not merely to bottle-feed expressed breast milk. Nothing less would meet the imperative demands of the European Convention on Human Rights."... Published Date 16/04/2003 This case establishes the right of the mother to breastfeed,and is often ignored both by SS and judges! Fight for parents,grandparents,aunts,uncles,and cousins all to have contact  under the Human Rights Act.  (see section "get your children back") Children of all ages even those as young as 6 or 7 years old for example ,can go to any public phone box and call parents reverse charges if they are quietly told how to do this,explained as follows:- Dial 100 from any private phone or public call box and you will be offered 4 options(choices) Choose option4 which asks if you want to speak to an operator.You then ask the operator for a call reversing the charges. The operator will then ask you for your name and the number you are calling.(this must be to a fixed line not a mobile)Your mother or father will then say ok they accept the call and no money is needed from you, the child who is calling! If your children are still with you or at least in contact get them to practice telephoning you reverse charge so that if the worst does happen and they are removed then contact is NEVER lost !!  Remember also that if no court order forbids you expressly and specifically from contacting the children there is nothing to stop you seeing them when they come out of school (even nursery school!).  Remember that all children "in care" have "personal education plans"that the SS are supposed to share with you.If you know where the school is you know where your child is !Ask the local education authorities(NOT the SS !) for a copy of these plans and ask also to be put on their mailing list so you can continue to follow  your children's progress even after they have been snatched !  What are the timescales for dealing with requests? Requests for information from pupils, or parents, for information that contains, wholly or partly, an educational record must receive a response within 15 school days. Unless a parent simply asks to see the official educational record under the Regulations, schools and authorities are entitled to receive any fee first (see below). Most requests for information are likely to ask for at least some information in the educational record. However, should a subject access request be made just for personal information outside the educational record, a response must be made  promptly and at most within 40 calendar days.  YOU MUST BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK IN COURT AND TO SAY ALL YOU WANT TO SAY,CALL ALL THE WITNESSES YOU WANT TO CALL,AND MAKE ALL THE POINTS AND ARGUMENTS YOU WANT TO MAKE ! Sack any solicitor or barrister that refuses you these very elementary legal rights OR worse still who advises you to surrender and go along with everything the SS demand.You do not need a lawyer to earn easy money by arranging your surrender !  .

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Baby P was 17 months old when he was tortured by his mother's boyfriend in spite of 60 visits by social workers and 3 visits to hospital. It all culminated with a visit from a specialist paediatrician who failed to notice that he had a broken back, 2 finger tips sliced off, several finger nails pulled out, 12 broken ribs and bruises all over his face and body concealed by chocolate. He would still be alive today if someone just once had given him a cursory physical examination but this was not done, probably because as usual Social Services etc. were intimidated by this brutal child abuser living in smelly and sordid surroundings with his sluttish partner and his Rottweiler dogs so they left the horrible family alone to look for easier prey; mostly amongst respectable and responsible households. 

Most people seem more intent on wreaking vengeance on the murderers of Baby P than preventing the same situation occurring again; may I therefore make a suggestion?

Social Services plead shortage of staff and financial resources as excuses for overlooking torture of children (even after 60 visits to Baby P). In other European countries they take children from parents only if they have been severely physically or sexually abused but in Britain we waste most of out valuable resources fighting cruel cases in secret and costly courts to remove children and even new born babies at “risk of emotional harm” and for similar lesser reasons. The parents of Baby P would never have gone to court to fight for his return if he had been taken earlier as parents that violently physically abuse their children avoid courts like the plague!

Physical torture KILLS KILLS KILLS!!!
Emotional abuse does NOT
Poor school attendance does NOT
A cluttered house does NOT
Witnessing domestic violence does NOT
Hostility to the “professionals” does NOT
A parent with learning problems does NOT

Where therefore should the “SS” priorities lie?

I’m only asking!!

I would have thought myself it was MORE IMPORTANT to concentrate on preventing babies being tortured rather than the more common rush to remove babies AT BIRTH from mothers whom some highly paid psychobabble merchants have decided may at some future date emotionally harm their babies!Crystal ball gazing?

If all the resources of child protection were used to examine thoroughly (looking for visible bruises and burns) say once a month, all those children suspected of having been seriously physically or sexually abused thousands of children’s lives would be saved. At present our resources are wasted fighting in courts to remove happy healthy children from their parents for risk of emotional abuse and similar non life-endangering symptoms. Only parents that truly love their children fight through the gruelling ritual of the secret family courts and against all common sense they nearly always lose. If they dare to protest publicly more than 200 parents a year are jailed (answer to a parliamentary question) for breaking the “omertà” wall of secrecy!! If only mothers facing a life sentence by losing children to forced adoption had the right to a hearing by jury most of the present injustices would disappear. In short, what is needed is simply concentration on eradicating physical child abuse and then introducing hearings by juries who would rarely take children in other cases such as “emotional abuse”, cluttered dwellings, poor school attendance etc.

'Evil destruction' of a happy family.
A system involving social workers, police and courts took a child away from loving parents for no apparent reason, writes Christopher Booker.
Daily Telegraph, 18 Jul 2009

Two weeks ago I reported as shocking a story as this column has ever covered. It described how a loving family was torn apart when the parents were arrested by police on what turned out to be wholly spurious charges, so that their three children could be taken into care by social workers. As reported on another page, it now seems this awful episode has come to a happy ending.

However a new case has lately been surfacing, if anything even more shocking. This also involved the arrest of two parents and the abduction of their child by social workers, in a story so bizarre that, at last week's Prime Minister's Questions, Gordon Brown was asked about it by the family's MP, Charles Hendry, who has long been concerned with the case because the mother is a vice-chairman of his local Conservative Association. The family's horrified GP says that, in 43 years of medical practice, he has never "encountered a case of such appalling injustice".

I first planned to describe this case in April, but was pre-empted by the draconian reporting restrictions on family cases, which, for reasons which will become tragically clear, have now been partly lifted.

The story began in April 2007 when "Mr Smith", as I must call him, had a visit from the RSPCA over the dog-breeding business he ran from the family home. He had docked the tails of five new-born puppies – a procedure that had become illegal two days beforehand. Unaware of this, he promised in future to obey the new law.

Three days later, however, at nine o'clock in the morning, two RSPCA officials returned, accompanied in cars and riot vans by 18 policemen, who had apparently been tipped off, quite wrongly, that Mr Smith had guns in the house.

Armed with pepper spray, they ransacked the house, looking for the nonexistent guns. The dogs, released from their kennels, also rampaged through the house. When Mr Smith and his wife, who was three months pregnant, volubly protested at what was happening, they were forcibly arrested in front of their screaming five-year-old daughter "Jenny" and taken away. Two hours later, with the house in a shambles – the dogs having strewn the rabbit entrails meant for their dinner across the floor – social workers arrived to remove the crying child.

Held for hours in a police cell, Mrs Smith had a miscarriage. When she was finally set free, she returned home that evening to find her daughter gone. It was the beginning of a barely comprehensible nightmare.

Her husband was charged with various offences connected with the dogs, including the tail-docking, but was eventually given a conditional discharge by a judge who accepted that he was "an animal lover" who had not been cruel to his dogs.

Far more serious, however, was that the social workers seemed determined to hang onto the child, now in foster care, on the sole grounds that they had found the house dirty and in a mess (the "animal entrails" played a large part in their evidence). This was despite the testimony of a woman Pc (who had visited the house a month earlier on a different matter) that she found it "clean and tidy". Two hundred horrified neighbours, who knew the couple as doting parents of a happy, well-cared-for child, were about to stage a protest demonstration when they were stopped by the police, on the social workers' instructions that this might identify the child.

For more than two years the couple have been fighting through more than 100 hearings in the courts to win their daughter back. From a mass of evidence, including psychiatric reports and tape recordings made at meetings with her parents (only allowed in the presence of social workers), it is clear she has been desperate to return home. It is equally clear that considerable pressure has been brought on the child to turn her against her parents,

One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have "been forced to have oral sex with her father".

After Mrs Smith alone had been subjected to four different psychiatric investigations, which came up with mixed findings, she refused to submit to a fifth, and this apparently weighed heavily with the judge who last December ordered that "Jenny" should be put out to adoption.

In the Appeal Court 11 days ago, Mr Justice Bodey ruled that, because the mother had refused that fifth test, indicating that the parents put their own "emotional wellbeing" in front of that of their child, the adoption order must stand. When this judgment was reported, an independent social worker, who had earlier been an expert witness in the case, wrote to Mr and Mrs Smith to say he was "horrified" to learn that Jenny was "not back in their care", having assumed for over a year that "she must have been returned home".

Their equally horrified GP, saying that he had never "encountered such a case of appalling injustice", wrote "the destruction of this once happy family is in my opinion evil". So shocked was their MP, Mr Hendry ,that he last Wednesday took the highly unusual course of raising the case with the Prime Minister at question time. Numerous others who know the family well have expressed similar dismay. One neighbour, herself a former social worker, whose own daughter often played with "Jenny", said: "I worked with children in social services for 25 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is disgusting."

What is clear in this case, as in so many others, is that a system involving social workers, police and courts in what is an obviously very close alliance should yet again have left a happy, loving family destroyed for no very obvious reason, Almost equally alarming is the way that system manages to shield itself from the world, through reporting restrictions which it claims are designed to protect the children but which too often end up by protecting only the system itself.

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CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL JUDGMENT

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Telegraph View: Child abuse won't be overcome until we define what it is Ed Balls will fail unless he gives guidance on what social workers should be doing. 10 Jan 2009

The horrific accounts of errors and incompetence by social services officials that we publish today will generate outrage and despair: outrage that officials could leave children with parents they know to be violent, criminal and addicted to drugs; and despair that despite the hundreds of inquiries, the hundreds of inspections, despite the repeated promises from the Government that things are getting better, nothing changes. The same mistakes are consistently repeated, with fatal consequences for children.

The persistent failure of social workers to protect children who are in very serious danger is made even more outrageous by the profession's propensity to remove children from parents who are manifestly no danger at all to them. Of the 35,000 children who are taken into care every year on the recommendation of social workers, a large proportion are removed on grounds of "emotional abuse" – a category so broad and ill- defined that it can include both praising your children too much and not praising them enough, or feeding them too many vegetables or too little fresh fruit. It appears that social workers, aware of their inability to intervene in cases where children really are at risk, compensate for that failure by intervening in families where they are obviously safe.

There is no doubt that those two bad practices are connected. The resources of social work departments are, as directors of those departments frequently point out, strictly limited. Time spent investigating parents who do not threaten or endanger the children in their care is time not spent investigating, visiting or intervening in the cases where there is a threat. If genuinely at- risk children are to be protected, resources have to be targeted at cases where parents pose a clear and present danger.

It is, in a literal sense, true that social workers do not know what they are doing. That is not their fault. Government "advice" on what they should do is, quite correctly, centred on ensuring that children are protected from "significant harm". But, in all the many hundreds of pages that both Labour and Conservative governments have issued on when social workers should intervene, the notion of "significant harm" has never been defined in a meaningful and precise way. The result is that it is left to officials to interpret the term as they see fit. And that means "significant harm" has as many interpretations as there are social workers: one can conclude that a child whose parents are violent drug-addicts is not at risk of "significant harm", while another can claim that a parent who "plays too often and too long" with her is so dangerous that the child should be taken into care.

The first step the Government needs to take in order to stop this malpractice is properly to define the notion of "significant harm". That will not prevent fatal misjudgments being made. But it will make those misjudgments less likely. It will save the lives of many children, and also prevent forcible removal from parents who love them and protect them, and who would provide them with a far better start in life than the dismal future that awaits those who are taken into state care. It will also make it possible for the inquiries and inspections that take place after a child dies to say something useful, instead of merely reporting (as they do at present) that "no one was to blame". So long as inspectors do not work with a clear and fixed notion of "significant harm", they are in exactly the same position as social workers: they cannot identify the kinds of practice that they ought to prevent.

Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, has insisted that he will take steps to end social services' persistent failure to protect seriously at-risk children. He will fail unless he gives clear guidance on what social workers should be doing – and he can only do that by defining the notion of "significant harm." We await his proposals.

The following statistics REFERRING TO NEWBORN BABIES REMOVED FROM THEIR MOTHERS AT BIRTH were researched by John Hemming M.P.   Year      Into care     Returned to parents     Adoption 2004      580      90      360 2005      600      100      320 2006      670      70      140 In each case fewer than 1 in 5 of newborn babies return to their mothers. I have expressed it as the situation where if mother stays then you have to toss a coin twice and get heads both times to keep your baby. The chances are, in fact, worse than that

THIS IS THE SITUATION(As at January 2009)
 
1: There really are SECRET COURTS in the UK. 215 MPs of all parties signed the "early day motion" below.

EDM 869

WORKING OF THE CHILDREN ACT 2004 26.10.2005


Pickles, Eric

That this House urges the Government to remove the veil of secrecy from the workings of the Children Act 2004; considers that the closed door policy of the family courts breeds suspicion and a culture of secrecy which does nothing to instil confidence in those using them, which affects not just the courts but the social services departments of local authorities; and believes that it is possible to preserve the anonymity of children involved in the proceedings without the cumbersome rules which obstruct parents from receiving advice and support, which in particular works to the disadvantage of parents with special learning difficulty. 

2: These courts take children from loving parents who have committed no crime. There are of course parents who brutalise and even torture or kill their children but such parents rarely go to court to recover their children; they stay as far away from courts as they possibly can! Common sense surely tells us that parents who care for their children enough to keep fighting for them in numerous very painful court actions ought to stand a good chance of winning them back. The sad fact is however that although judges often  severely criticise social services  in court they nearly always end up cautiously finding for the local authority and against the emotionally distraught parents. Parents are regularly condemned by "establishment judges" for neglecting their children, abusing them physically (or more often emotionally) not "beyond reasonable doubt" but "on the balance of probabilities"!  Lord Denning defined this in Miller versus Ministry of Pensions as "more probable than not"Statistically,this means that the judge has at least a 51% chance of being right and probably at best 70% chance of being right so at least 30% of all forced adoptions were wrong and families split up on mere "hearsay" (statements by social workers and other persons, not in court and who could not be questioned). Wicked deeds violating parent's basic human rights!

3: These parents lose their children for ever to adoption by strangers. The children adopted are refused access to records of their birth parents or siblings at least until they are 18, and usually for the rest of their lives. 

4: Parents are GAGGED and regularly sent to prison in secret proceedings if they reveal what went on in court. 

Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) Hansard source

My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts.

5: Establishment judges make decisions to take thousands of babies for risk of possible future emotional abuse.
Extract from The Times, Aug 23 2007:  “Emotional abuse” has no strict definition in British law. Yet it now accounts for an astounding 21 per cent of all children registered as needing protection, up from 14 per cent in 1997. Last year 6,700 children were put on the child protection register for emotional abuse, compared with only 2,600 for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse. Both of the latter two categories have been falling steadily. Meanwhile emotional abuse and “neglect” - which replaced the old notion of “grave concern” in 1989 - have been rising. Both are catch-alls. But emotional abuse is especially vague. It covers children who have not been injured, have not complained, and do not come under “emotional neglect”.  

6: No jury would take babies from mothers because some expert made predictions of their future behaviour.


(Extract from The Sunday Times, Nov 18th 2007):A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones. For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work is a lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.
“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.” 

7: Criminals facing 6+ months in prison can demand a jury; parents losing their children for life cannot.

8: Carefully selected pregnant mothers with vulnerable backgrounds but often with no criminal records or disabilities are told their babies will be taken at birth! Equally carefully selected are the "expert" psychiatists and psychologists who regularly "work" with the family courts and are eager to practice their latest "psychobabble theories". They are therefore only too willing to earn their generous fees and diagnose nearly every unfortunate mother presented to them by social services with a"borderline personality disorder" or to report that she "represents a risk of emotional  abuse" to her children. Sometimes they will even diagnose a really hostile mother as "unfit" to instruct a solicitor! "The Official Solicitor" is then appointed for her! He will inevitably agree with everything the local authority demands and will refuse to let the aggrieved mother say a word! The result in nearly all these cases is that babies and quite often all the other children from the same families are taken into care for eventual adoption by strangers.

  

9: Local authorities are rewarded by central government for reaching "adoption targets" hence adoption is prioritised.
10: Fosterers get up to £400/week/ child,special schools up to £7000/week/child,adoption agencies,experts lawyers all cash in lavishly!
 
SO: What to do?
 - Stop the secrecy and the gagging of parents forced to remain anonymous and unable to complain under their own names. 
 - Stop adoptions of children for emotional abuse or for "risk", and open adoption records to children already adopted.  
 - Stop judges deciding cases of long term fostering or adoption, and give juries the final decision. Better still abolish forced adoption altogether!
 - Stop excessive rewards for those who live off the misery caused by this wicked system!
 
This would be a very very good start!

Social workers are still too keen to split up families, says
Christopher Booker.
Daily Telegraph 4 July 2009

One of the most disturbing features of life in modern Britain has been the extraordinary powers given to social workers to seize children from their parents, too often – when those powers are abused – supported by the police and family courts. What makes this still more alarming is the legal bar on reporting these episodes, supposedly to protect the children, which again too often works to protect the social workers themselves at the expense of the children.

Details of yet another shocking case, which comes to its climax in a county court in eastern England this week, have recently been placed in the House of Lords Library. This follows a comprehensive investigation carried out on behalf of the family by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who, as a hereditary peer, does not sit in the Lords, but has passed his dossier both to an active life peer and to this column.

Until six weeks ago, Mr and Mrs Jones, as I must call them under reporting restrictions, lived happily with their three young children, two sons and a daughter, aged under 13. Mr Jones, a business consultant, is related to various European royal families and his brother is a senior Army officer seconded to the UN. If he has one weakness, as he admits, it is to refer to these connections, as he did to the heads of the schools attended by his two older children, saying that he was particularly concerned for their security. He asked that he could be allowed to drive into the school grounds when picking up his daughter, because he did not want to leave her waiting, potentially vulnerable, in the road outside.

The headmistress agreed to this, but, concerned about other children's safety, contacted the local police, who in turn passed on their concerns to social services. The result of this was that, on May 18, when Mr and Mr Jones, accompanied by their younger son, arrived at school to pick up their daughter, they were met by a group of strangers, one as it turned out a female social worker. She asked, without explaining why or who she was, whether he was Mr Jones. When she three times refused to show him any ID, he was seized from behind by two policemen, handcuffed and put under arrest.

He was driven by a policeman to a nearby mental hospital where he was told that, because of "a number of concerns", he was being detained under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act and "sectioned" under S.2 as of "unsound mind". His wife, it turned out, had been similarly arrested, for loudly protesting at the handcuffing of her husband and the forcible seizing from her arms of her young son. The three children had been taken into care by social services.

Mrs Jones was allowed to return to an empty home that evening. Mr Jones was permitted to attend court two days later, to hear the magistrates grant an interim order for the children to remain in the care of social services. Because he was "sectioned", he was not allowed to speak. The chief magistrate, it later emerged, was chairman of the trustees of the mental hospital in which he was being detained.

On May 28, Mr Jones appeared before a mental health tribunal which, after hearing all the facts relating to his case, gave him a complete discharge. He returned home to his wife and immediately contacted his MP, a local MEP, lawyers and others he thought might be able to help, one of whom set in train the investigation by Lord Monckton that led to this story appearing here.

Despite the finding of the tribunal, the social workers have remained determined to hold on to the children, with a view to their care being determined in a county court on Wednesday. The voluminous dossier setting out this extraordinary sequence of events not only includes lengthy statements from Mr and Mrs Jones but copies of detailed statements by the social worker and policewoman most closely involved in the case (along with a good deal more circumstantial evidence).

The only reason offered in these documents for the abduction of the children is Mr Jones's "delusional belief system" that special care should be taken of his children because of their elevated family connections. The only harm done to the children is their very evident unhappiness at being separated from their parents.

It must be hoped that the court this week recognises how grotesquely this tragic case has been blown out of all proportion, and rules that a loving family should immediately be reunited.


 

Wronged parents need the oxygen of publicity We hear the tragic details of children left in danger. But we must not silence the families of those removed unjustly
by Camilla Cavendish.

The Times 

March 6, 2009

"They're ripping lives apart and no one knows,” says one kind colleague who has rashly offered to return some of the phone calls I get from people trying to get their children back from social services, or to stop them being taken away. She is staggered by the volume of misery, powerlessness and desperation that this issue provokes almost every day. And that it is almost invisible outside.

We all see the tragedies that go the other way. Baby P is imprinted on our minds. When the Audit Commission warned yesterday that thousands of children may be at risk of neglect and abuse in parts of the country because of shambolic child protection systems, we all have vivid images of the horror that can result if social workers do not intervene.

Yet we have almost no idea of what happens when the same shambolic systems intervene in the wrong lives.

When children die, they have no “privacy” left, so the media tell their story. But if children are taken from loving families and placed with strangers, their “privacy” makes their views the property of the State, to be translated only by the State.

I know one child, now back with his mother, who was told by social workers that she didn't want him any more because she had a new baby. I have heard others say, on reaching 18, that they had assumed they were in care because they were evil. Many suffer the cruel ratchet of family contact visits being relentlessly reduced from maybe a few hours to an hour a week, to an hour a fortnight - awkward meetings in municipal rooms. This is done to wean children from their parents, for ostensibly good reasons but it also helps the State to claim that the “family bond” is weak and that the child would be happier with strangers. Of these things done in our name, we know almost nothing.

When we do find out, it is often too late. On Tuesday I went to the Court of Appeal to observe a strange case in which two teenage boys are protesting that the State is punishing them by keeping them in care.

The council apparently became concerned that the boys had refused to see their mother after she left the family home. A judge decided that their father was poisoning the boys' minds, encouraged by a psychiatrist who, it was said in court, had exceeded her remit. They were taken into care. The boys have since run away from two foster homes, repeatedly stating that they want to live with dad, not mum. The system has deprived them of both.

The mute expression of disbelief and fury on the face of the older son on Tuesday, when the judges dismissed the appeal, was eloquent. By that stage, my feelings mirrored his. But it was hard to be sure. This was the first time any of the evidence had been made public, because only now has it gone to appeal.

We need proper regulation of the care system. The Audit Commission report demonstrates that regulators are too weak to improve performance in children's services. We need a regulator who can spot problems early and make social workers accountable.  


A SOCIAL WORKER'S POEM

I am a social worker,
I'm really very nice.
I help you loving mothers,
And give you good advice!

Your partner has departed
Your income is too low.
I'm really very sorry,
All your kids will have to go!

Your partner is abusive?
He beats you black and blue?
We'll soon be there to help you,
And take your children too!

You have a learning problem,
You're really not too clever
We'll get your kids adopted
When can you see them?? NEVER!!

Your son is hyperactive?
You need a brief respite;
We'll soon take ALL your children
Give up the hopeless fight!

Your child was taken into care,
So many years ago
If now you have a baby
That too will have to go!

Foster parents love your kids
To get some more they seek,
For each one brings a tidy sum 
£400 per week!!

Children's homes are run by us,
Where paedophiles abound
Each time we cover up abuse
"The gutter press" come round

"They" said adoptions worked the best
We soon proved that they would
Fathers shout and mothers cry
Their kids are gone for good!

What happens in our special courts?
Our experts they will say
"You're a danger to your children,
So we'll take them all away!"

Your children may be healthy,
Happy and well fed
But one day you might hurt them
That's what our experts said

The judges know that we are right,
With us they will agree
They dare not risk another course
You have no chance you see!

Our special courts are secret,
So don't you breathe a word
Of what goes on inside those walls
No matter how absurd!

We'll get your kids adopted,
And don't you dare complain!
Or you'll end up in prison 
And I won't say that again!

We have adoption targets,
They must be met you see,
Failure means a reprimand,
So spare a thought for me!!!

by IAN JOSEPHS (a very social worker!)

_________________________



USEFUL INFORMATION

At last a BREAKTHROUGH!! Read the following article in the "LAW GAZETTE". You can now hit those "SS" people through their pockets! The more times you go to court the harder they will find it to pay for it all! Fight like a tiger and never give up and like countless other mothers (some of whom I have advised) You can WIN and get your children back!

Do not be fooled into cooperating with the "SS" when you are given their promises or those of your legal aid lawyers that if you go along with the "SS" everything will be alright! It WON'T!! All they want from assessments and psycho charlatans is more evidence to win their case so do not give it to them! The "SS" are not police who must be obeyed but they ARE your ENEMIES as long as their stated intention is to take your children into care or for adoption. When your enemy runs out of ammunition you should never send them a fresh case of bullets for them to fire at you!! Only agree to assessments and psychos if ordered to do so by a judge; otherwise refuse unless your children are returned to live with you first! Any other assessment or psychiatric examination cannot be normal or natural.

Lastly never get "conned" into putting your kids into voluntary care because more often than not despite what the law gazette says you may never see them again IF YOU ARE IN THAT SITUATION USE THE LAST PARA OF THE GAZETTE AS PROOF THAT THEY MUST BE RETURNED TO YOU WHEN YOU ASK! And the best of luck to you!


Care applications fall sparks safety fears
Law Society Gazette, 21 August 2008

Just 1,611 applications were made by councils in England and Wales between the beginning of April and the end of July, according to figures from the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass). This compares with 2,160 in the same period last year and 2,284 between April and July 2006.

Since May, councils have been obliged to foot the bill for child care proceedings as part of a government drive to make the courts entirely self-funding through fees. The move has resulted in a 2,500% hike in costs, with child care proceedings rising from £150 to £4,825.

Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass, told the Gazette that Section 20 agreements – where children are placed with grandparents or other relatives – ‘went up by several hundred’ in the same period.

‘Care applications have dropped significantly… I am concerned about the drop because it’s too large to be complacent about,’ he said.

Douglas added that the use of Section 20 agreements – voluntary arrangements between parents and local authorities that do not come under court scrutiny and can be rescinded by the parent at any time – should be kept under review.

_______________________

As a social worker for 15 years i have seen children taken into care unnecessarily,been ordered to lie in court,had the Dept.'s solicitor reconstruct my witness statement to put parent in a bad light,made to exagerate a parents problems or blow up a minor incident.I eventually retired on ill health

ian hughes, bridgend, britain  

 QUESTION THEM !!

Here are 4 important questions that SHOULD be answered by social services or by family court judges but which have so far been systematically ignored!

 

 

1: It must surely be the right of parents and anyone else in a democratic country wishing to complain against injustice to go to the media with details of everything that happened to them in the family court Most judges in family courts refuse leave to appeal and solicitors always back them up so the idea of appealing when leave has been denied is nearly always a "non starter". Parents are at present denied their democratic right to (like rape victims) shed anonymity and then go to the media under their own names to get public and political support followed by possible reform! How can this be justice?

 


2: Harriet Harman,(minister of state, Department of constitutional affairs )said in Parliament "Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy."

Surely those who still deny these facts cannot believe she was lying to Parliament! How can imprisonment with no public process be justice?  

 

3: Extract from The Times, Aug 23 2007:  “Emotional abuse” has no strict definition in British law. Yet it now accounts for an astounding 21 per cent of all children registered as needing protection, up from 14 per cent in 1997. Last year 6,700 children were put on the child protection register for emotional abuse, compared with only 2,600 for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse.

 How can taking newborn babies for "risk of emotional abuse" and subsequent adoption by strangers possibly be justified when the effect is to punish parents and abuse their babies not for anything they have done but for something that some hired prophet thinks they might perhaps do in the future. How can this be justice?

 

4: Any burglar facing a prison sentence of 6 months or more can demand a hearing before a jury so how can it be right or just that parents who risk losing their children for life to "forced adoption" are denied this option. Juries consider complicated medical evidence in cases such as murder, and compensation for injuries, also complicated tax laws in cases of fraud, and insider dealing. The simple decision whether a mother accused of risk of emotional abuse should keep her newborn baby or not would I think we must all agree be more likely to favour the mother if considered by a jury but records show that such cases nearly always favour the social services if decided by a judge. That is probably why juries are banned from the family courts but allowed to decide libel cases in other civil courts! To take a newborn baby from its mother and give it away for adoption by strangers is a far far worse punishment for her than any jail sentence as it condemns the mother to a life sentence and the baby to probable death later in life if it should require a kidney or bone marrow transplant or other medical attention in which a birth family member was needed but could not be located! How can this be justice?

 

 

The 4 obvious reforms would be:


1: Remove the gag and forced anonymity from parents involved in family court proceedings.


2: Forbid judges in the family courts to imprison any parent without a public hearing.


3: Abolish "risk" as a reason to remove children from a sane parent unless in addition to risk it can be clearly shown and proved that such children have already suffered significant physical harm.


4: Any parents facing the possibility that their children could be removed for long term fostering or adoption without parental consent should have the right to demand that the final decision be made by a jury not a judge.Better still abolish forced adoption altogether!

Re K D [1998] 1 AC p.812 letter B Lord Templeman stated; ‘The best person to bring up a child is the natural parent. It matters not whether the parent is wise or foolish, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, provided the child’s moral and physical health are not endangered. Public authorities cannot improve on nature.' 

-------------------
Boy, 5, forced into adoption with gay couple pleads: 'We want to stay with our gran and grandad'
by Jonathan Brocklebank and Michael Seamark
Daily Mail, 29th Jan 2009


The mother of two children who are being adopted by gay men even though their grandparents want to care for them wept yesterday as she told of her final meeting with her son and daughter.

‘I told them, “Listen, Mummy is not going to see you for a while”,’ she said. Her son replied: ‘But Mummy, I want to come and stay with you and Granny and Grandad.’

The row over the future of the five-year -old boy and four-year-old girl intensified yesterday after the Daily Mail revealed details of the heartbreaking case. Their
grandparents spent two years fighting for the right to care for the children, whose 26-year-old mother is a recovering heroin addict. She desperately wanted her parents to look after them.

But social workers said their ages – he is 59 and she is 46 – and their health – he has angina and she is diabetic – ruled them out.

The mother told the Mail that she had been ordered to say her goodbyes to the children last August during a trip to Edinburgh Zoo. ‘They told me not to cry and be strong so as not to upset the children,’ she said. ‘How can you tell a mother that when she’s never going to see her children again?’

She voiced her anger at the decision to allow her son and daughter to be fostered by a homosexual couple.

‘I did not under any circumstances want my children to be placed with gay men. I wanted them to have a mum and a dad.

‘They can’t be telling me that, within a 60-mile radius, the only people they could find to look after my children were two men.

‘I’ve got nothing against gay people. I’ ve got gay friends, but children need a mum and a dad, not a dad and another dad.

‘I’m ashamed of what I’ve done, especially what I’ve put mum and dad through because they have been brilliant every step of the way.

‘My children deserve so much love and my mum and dad were prepared to give them it, but social work snatched them away.

‘They are a mum and dad in a million and I know they would have brought my children up brilliantly.’

The mother also revealed that social workers have asked her to meet the gay couple under their supervision. But she will not see her children – or be allowed to know where they are going to be living.

The Mail revealed yesterday how the grandparents had fought a relentless battle for the right to look after the youngsters after deciding their daughter was unfit to do so.

But they were opposed every step of the way by Edinburgh’s social work department, which believed they should go to an adoptive family.

When the grandparents eventually caved in to what they describe as ‘bully tactics’ by the social workers, the department arranged for the children to be adopted by a gay couple in the Edinburgh area. They had already decided that, whatever the outcome of the battle, the children should not see their mother owing to her unstable lifestyle and history of offences.
graphic

Recalling her final, 90-minute meeting with her children, the mother said: ‘I was told that this would be the last time. They asked me to pick a place to take them and I decided on the zoo. The social worker was with me and kept saying to me I would have to tell them I was not going to see them any more and that I had to stay strong for their sakes.

‘At one point she said that my son was the spitting image of my mum and my daughter looked like her grandad. What kind of thing is that to say at a moment like that, when I’m about to tell them I won’t see them again?

‘I told them that I loved them and I would write them lots of letters and cards and that they would be going to a new house soon.

‘I got really upset and had to keep turning away so that they didn’t see me crying. The social worker said, “Just leave it there”. Ten minutes later, that was it.’

But the mother still had to help put the children in the social worker’s car. ‘My son grabbed me tightly on the leg and and would not let me go. It was just absolutely devastating.’

She said that the heartrending last meeting had happened while her parents were still fighting for full parental rights for the brother and sister, who have been staying with foster parents for the last two years pending a decision on their future.

Her parents’ last meeting with the children came two months later in October. By then, under mounting pressure from the social work department and concerned about months or years of further disruption to their lives, they had taken the agonising decision to withdraw from the legal fight.

The grandfather, a farm worker, and his wife say the social work department are effectively blackmailing them by telling them they will not see the children again unless they give the new adoptive arrangements their blessing.

Although the family desperately want to reverse the adoption procedure they do not now know how they can. Their previous solicitor has moved to a new job and would
be unable to represent them in her current role. They would also need to reapply for legal aid before taking any action – and time is running out.

The children have already had several meetings with the men who are soon to become their full-time fathers. They are understood to be seeing them for a few hours daily and have recently visited their home. The men are giving them a bedroom each – and the girl’s has been decked out with a ‘princess’ bedspread. The children have also been shown the wellington boots waiting for them at the back door when they want to play outside.

Under the adoption procedure, the children will see more and more of the gay couple, spending occasional nights in their home, until they move in permanently. The social work department will remain in contact with the new parents for the first year of adoption – then, providing there are no serious problems, contact will cease.

Thereafter the only official channel the children’s natural family will have for making contact with them would be through an adoption agency. The mother said: ‘The
social worker told me the kids are getting on really well with them. My daughter had apparently said to the social worker, “Come up and see my princess bed”. I just feel totally devastated.

Now they want me to meet the men. Social work phoned me to ask how I was feeling now about them being adopted by a gay couple and if I had calmed down.

‘They told me that out of the couples they had on their books they were the ones who were able to cater for their needs best. I find that very hard to believe. I’ll have to say
that to them when I meet them because it’s how I feel, but I don’t want the whole thing to become an argument. I will have lots of questions to ask them.’

Councillor Marilyne MacLaren, convener for education, children and families at Edinburgh City Council, said: ‘I have been assured that the professional view is that
the adoptive couple will provide a safe, secure and loving environment for these children.

‘These are always very complex cases but I think it is important to say that the grandparents have been fully involved in discussions about this case over a period of
time.’

----------------------

Social services Stasi should hang their heads in shame
by Amanda Platell 
Daily Mail 29th Jan 2009

Should proof ever be needed of the scandalous social engineering now so casually carried out by our state, it comes in the case of the loving grandparents of two small children who desperately sought to adopt them but saw them instead placed with a gay couple.

The decision was made to refuse the grandparents the right to raise their own blood relatives and instead give them away to two gay men ‘in accordance with who can best meet their needs’, according to the social services jargon.

But how can two strangers – gay or straight – best meet the needs of two children abandoned by a drug- addict mother for whom the only constants in their short, difficult lives have been their loving grandparents?

We don’t even know what the reasoning behind this perverse decision was, because it was taken in secret, behind the closed doors of a children’s court. Those who took part will not be held accountable and we are unable even to identify their victims.

This decision is one of particular cruelty. The decision itself is bad enough, but the grandparents’ description of how they were treated give us a chilling insight into the Stasi-like approach of modern social services.

They were told that if they so much as objected to the adoption of the children by the gay couple then they would never be allowed to see the children again.

‘You can either accept it,’ the grandparents were told by social workers, ‘and there’s a chance you’ll see the children twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.’ The Stalinist secret police couldn’t have put it better.

Further, the grandparents are not allowed even to know where the children will live, what the gay couple’s circumstances are and what kind of a home they will provide for the children. Equally astonishingly, it emerges the youngsters were not given to a gay couple for want of other alternatives: indeed there were several other heterosexual couples desperate and deemed suitable to adopt the children.

But the social workers and the courts opted for the gay men.

As the grandfather in this case says: ‘The mother is the cornerstone of any family and the most important person for a young child.’ That’s hard to argue with. His little granddaughter will no doubt have lots of female role models, gay- speak for women friends, but it’s not the same.

A little girl already wary of men, no doubt because in her young life she’s witnessed her addict mother being ritually abused by them, will have to turn to one of them one day, when she gets her periods, when she needs her first bra. It’s hard enough asking your own mother such things, let alone a gay man.

The only reason given for denying the grandparents the right to adopt their own daughter’s children is worries about their age and their health. The 59-year-old grandfather is a farm worker and has angina, his wife, just 46, is being treated for diabetes.

Plenty of people lead normal lives with diabetes – and angina.

And how outrageous to say a woman of 46 is too old to be a mother – particularly when it emerges she is still bringing up children of her own. Who’d have dared to suggest that Cherie Blair was too old – or to suggest it to the countless women who have healthy children in their forties?

When did the State decide to endorse such monstrously cruel social engineering? When did it decide to fly in the face of overwhelming evidence that children’s lives are best when they are raised by a mother and father living together – preferably married?

It appears that social services, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe that all relationships are equal when it comes to raising children. Indeed, in this case they seem to have decided that a gay relationship is preferable to a couple of opposite sex.

This is simply not true. They are not equal when it comes to the things children need most – commitment and stability. Yet is is regarded as heretical even to state the facts: which are that marriages last longer than cohabiting heterosexual relationships and they both last longer than gay relationships.

Those are the cold, bare truths. It is too soon to know the statistics on same-sex marriages as there has not been enough time to assess the trends and many same sex couples enjoy enduring and truly fulfilling relationships.

But if commitment and stability matter most to children’s happiness and success, the least suitable place for them to be raised is by a gay couple. That’s not homophobia, that’s not bigotry, that’s a fact – unpalatable as it might be to the Left consensus.

When you read of such shocking decisions, you can only wonder how any sane judge could put two small children with two men. Are they trying to meet some target they have been set for placing children for adoption with gay couples? Who knows, because shamefully all of this process is conducted in secret.

It also reflects how out of touch the state and the law is now, not just with the traditional family, but with the role of grandparents. Again and again we hear stories of grandparents cut out of their grandchildren’s lives after divorce or death and having no recourse to the law.

Grandparents have been written out of the modern liberal family narrative at a time, in reality, when they have never been more needed or more central to the revival of the extended family.

They help out with child care, work around the house, ferry children to after-school classes and even assist with finances.

But against all the evidence social services choose to take two small children away from their natural family and give them up for adoption – to a gay couple.

It beggars belief and seems guaranteed to do only one thing: to give those innocent children the poorest possible start to their lives, the slimmest chance of happiness and the greatest likelihood of anger, bewilderment and failure.

Those who made this decision should hang their heads in shame.

-------------------

My comments on the recent House of Lords debate concerning identification of sperm or egg donors are as follows:

All the noble Lords and Ladies seem preoccupied with children conceived by sperm donors or egg donors and the rare possibility of siblings adopted by different families meeting by chance at a later date and marrying!
They completely ignore the most flagrant injustices of all ,those thousands of babies and young children forcibly adopted against the will of parents who love them and want to keep them.These babies and young children are then issued with new fake birth certificates by a conniving and deceitful State!

This is how they "work" it!

"UK Certificates " offers a secure online ordering service for official General Register Office issued adoption certificates for England & Wales.

What Information will I receive?

An adoption certificate is a replacement birth certificate but in an adopted person's new name. It is used by an adopted person for all legal and purposes in place of their original birth certificate. The main difference between the two documents is the addition of court particulars on an adoption certificate.

We will provide an officially certified full version of an original adoption certificate for any event in England & Wales between 1927-present.

We can provide a short version if you prefer, which contains no reference to the fact of adoption.

Your "fake birth certificate" is ready!

And now for the "experts"!  

• So called "experts" in the secret family courts make crystal ball type predictions of "risk of future emotional harm" or "risk of neglect". Few families can defend themselves against future "predictions" so compliant family court judges almost inevitably "go along" with social service requests that the children be placed for adoption with strangers!Even when very rarely, parents are cleared by the courts, once the adoptions have been rushed through they are forbidden to know where their children are or to have any contact with them whether the children want it or not!
  A parliamentary question revealed that more than 200 parents a year are secretly jailed for daring to reveal details of those who accused them in court or for contacting their own offspring contrary to a court order. Parents are often forbidden from knowing whether their offspring are alive or dead, and if the latter they usually find out a very long time after the deaths occured. 
  Children are all too often split up and adopted by different families. This must be contrary to their human rights as all too often they are forbidden to contact their siblings and may not even know of their existence. If many years later a child needs a replacement kidney or bone marrow transplant the birth family records are rarely revealed and very often declared "lost". So the unfortunate child whose needs are supposed to be "paramount" is in fact callously left to die for want of a family donor!

'You can't see your son - but can he have one of your organs?' How social workers left one man with a terrible moral dilemma
By Alison Smith Squire
Daily Mail, 3rd November 2008

The letter from Hampshire Social Services was as brief as it was bewildering. ‘Please ring me on the above number,’ it said. ‘I have some information that might be of interest to you.’ This was quite an understatement, as Michael Shergold soon found.

A quietly spoken father of three, he finds that his life rarely gets more exciting than his weekly game of golf. But when he called the social workers as requested, he was confronted with a series of astonishing facts.

They said he was the father of another child - a five-year-old son from a previous, short-lived relationship. A former girlfriend, unable to cope with the demands of motherhood, had handed the boy over to foster parents.

Bewildered: Michael and Alex Shergold with his sons Peter and David last week. 'Our family seems incomplete', says Michael

A meeting with this new-found son was out of the question, he was told, let alone any sort of relationship. He was also informed that the boy was to be formally adopted and that the council was ringing merely to let him know.

His shock slowly turned to anger and then determination. Hurt to have been kept in the dark for so many years, Michael still believed he was responsible for the child - whom we shall call Andrew - and launched a legal fight to secure custody.
But there were extraordinary surprises in store for Michael and his wife, Alex. Hampshire Social Services wanted more than just his acquiescence.
Andrew, it emerged, had been diagnosed with a severe problem in one of his organs. For legal reasons, it is not possible to be more specific.
But the boy stands little chance of living beyond his teenage years without a transplant - from a blood relative if at all possible. The most suitable blood relative, it was explained by social workers, was Michael himself.

In a disturbing saga, this was perhaps the most unpleasant twist of all. It brought him to a damning conclusion - that Hampshire Social Services had made him aware of Andrew’s existence only to provide the child with a body part.

Michael tried to adopt his son but last year he lost the battle and was refused even occasional visiting rights, which were deemed too upsetting for the boy.

Like almost all cases that go through the family court system, the details were not made public.
Michael now has to decide whether to risk his own life with a dangerous operation for a son who, as things stand, he will never see.
‘Words cannot express the anger and bewilderment I feel,’ says Michael. ‘I simply cannot believe how Social Services can be so cruel.
To track me down, tell me I have a son I knew nothing about, throw my life into chaos and then tell me I will never be able to see him is nothing short of disgraceful.’
The Mail on Sunday asked Hampshire County Council two months ago about its handling of the case.
It responded by obtaining a legal injunction to prevent us printing Michael’s story, claiming that to do so might damage his son’s chances of settling down.


Determined that Michael should get the chance to speak, The Mail on Sunday has pursued a lengthy legal fight to lift the injunction, and last week we succeeded. Today, in this exclusive interview, Michael is able to talk about his ordeal for the first time.
‘To know my son has been adopted against my consent by strangers rather than his blood family, where he would have had a loving home, has been bad enough,’ he says.
‘But to know that, if I don’t donate an organ, my son might not live long enough to know me has put me in the worst situation of all. I’m in a dilemma about what to do. I feel I am being asked to make a decision in a vacuum. If I could just see my son and maintain some sort of contact, I would have absolutely no hesitation about doing it.’
Michael, 55, was speaking at his spacious three-bedroom house in Southampton, the city where he was born and where he has spent his whole life. Sitting by his side is Alex. Originally from Los Angeles, she moved to Britain in 2002, the same year the couple married, and she became a pastor with a Pentecostal church in Portsmouth.

This is not the first time that Michael, who works as a school caretaker, has suffered domestic drama. His 16-year marriage ended in 1996 when he discovered that his first wife had been unfaithful. He was given custody of the children - Peter, now 17, David, 20, and Susanna, 30 - and brought them up single-handedly.

As Alex serves home-made carrot cake and their cuckoo clock announces the time, the Shergolds seem every inch a loving family. Their attitude to their predicament is one of quiet anger and grief rather than unfettered fury.

‘We have a wonderful, close-knit family,’ says Michael. Peter and David, who still live at home, flit in and out as the couple talk. Susanna lives close by.

It is a particular irony that Michael has been employed by Hampshire County Council for the past 35 years, overseeing the repairs, cleaning and maintenance of a local primary school. As it happens, the job requires him to undergo criminal record checks every year and neither he nor Alex, who was also checked, has any convictions.

The letter that shattered Michael’s life came in January 2007, but the origins of the trauma lay five years earlier, when he had embarked on a difficult relationship with a much younger woman.

Despite their age difference, things went well at first after they were introduced through friends. ‘She was the first woman I’d dated since splitting up with my wife,’ he recalls.

‘At first I didn’t think of having a relationship with her because, at 29, she was much younger than me. But she was bubbly and got on well with the boys. It was only after a few months that I realised she was unstable and had a drink problem. She would swear in front of the boys and I ended the relationship.’

He had no inkling that she might be pregnant and that, he thought, was the end of the matter. Indeed, it was not long before he met Alex through a friendship website.
Like Michael, she has three grown-up children and, again like Michael, she had spent years bringing them up single-handedly. She worked for US military intelligence, where she studied for degrees in psychology and theology.
Michael and Alex married a few months after meeting and settled down to a domestic routine, enjoying rounds of golf, games of bowls, trips to the cinema and regular visits to church.

That all changed with Hampshire County Council’s bombshell. ‘It was a terrible shock,’ recalls Alex. ‘Michael was told by a social worker that his child had been put into foster care.’

At 53, Alex thought she had said goodbye to bringing up a child, but she was as determined as her husband to welcome Andrew into the family. ‘That was where he belonged,’ she says. ‘Not with strangers to whom he is not related.’

The couple, whose children had also come round to the idea of embracing a new sibling into their lives, visited Hampshire Social Services’ headquarters in Winchester, where they were shown Andrew’s picture.

With hindsight, they were naively optimistic. Immediately infatuated, they dug out Scalextric and Lego sets, embarked on plans to turn their loft into a fourth bedroom and even researched school places.

‘He looked just like his daddy,’ says Alex. ‘We were determined that although he’d had such a dreadful start in life, we’d soon make it all up to him.’

When, two weeks later, DNA tests confirmed that Michael was the father, the couple instructed a solicitor to stop the adoption order and begin their own custody proceedings. ‘I thought that once Social Services saw our happy family home and how much we wanted Andrew to be a part of it, it would only be a matter of weeks before he would come to live with us,’ says Michael.

But then came the breathtaking twist. ‘At our second meeting with Social Services a social worker told us, “Andrew needs an organ transplant and, as you know, an organ is best donated from a blood relative.” ’

The couple were left in no doubt that Michael’s co-operation was essential if his son was to stand a good chance of surviving. His mother, they learned, had initially agreed to be the donor but changed her mind on the grounds that it would hinder her chances of having another child.

Social workers told Michael that he, and his children, were the ‘next choice’. He admits: ‘I was taken aback but, of course, desperately worried and keen to help my son.’

Meanwhile, two independent social workers were assigned to assess Michael and Alex as potential parents for Andrew. It was, by all accounts, a rigorous process. ‘I was surprised to be interrogated by a total stranger,’ he says, ‘but I hid nothing.’ Yet, over a
dozen visits, the questions became increasingly invasive.

‘The worst questions were about our sex life,’ he says. ‘They kept asking how “healthy” it was - we took it to mean how many times a week we made love - and if we indulged in 'normal' sex.’

Alex, who admits she didn’t take kindly to the intrusion, adds: ‘I felt that side of our marriage was private and we didn’t see how it could be relevant. In the end I replied, “None of your business and I am not happy to elaborate further.” Perhaps it is because I’m an American and a Christian, but I found the Social Services’ attitude difficult to understand.’

Meanwhile, the truth about Andrew’s situation gradually emerged. Finding a permanent home was not easy, however. The boy’s illness demanded a special diet and regular hospital visits.

After his rejection by one set of foster parents, his photograph had to be posted on an adoption website before finally, in 2006, the couple who were eventually to adopt him came forward. ‘I couldn’t believe this could have happened to my son,’ says Michael. ‘I found it incredible.

‘Social Services told me in our first phone conversation that Andrew's mother had named me as the father. Yet, as far as I can see, they made no effort to find me. I have lived in the same house for 11 years. I am on the electoral roll and in the phone book.’

Hampshire County Council says it did its best to locate Michael. ‘A care order would not have been made had the court not been satisfied that every effort had been made to locate Mr Shergold,’ says council leader Ken Thornber. ‘We have apologised to Mr Shergold for our failure to find him during care proceedings.

‘All circumstances leading to a child coming into care involve a degree of human tragedy and require very finely balanced judgments to be made. The needs of the child must always be the paramount concern and the judge did conclude that the local authority did its best, when it discovered the difficult situation that had arisen, to communicate with Mr Shergold and establish what contribution he could make to his son’s life.’

Michael believes he was eventually traced only because doctors said Andrew would need a transplant. Indeed, he now believes that even his attempt to adopt Andrew was something of a charade. ‘We began to feel that Social Services had let us go through the custody proceedings for nothing - that the adoption was arranged and they had no intention of placing Andrew with us,’ he says.

The Shergolds were refused custody at Portsmouth County Court last November. The judge admitted the background had been ‘difficult and somewhat unsatisfactory’ but ruled that moving Andrew in with the Shergolds would cause him unnecessary ‘difficulty and disruption’.

Just two days later - suspiciously quickly in the view of the Shergolds - he had been formally adopted, leaving the Shergolds in the cold.

Even their request that Michael should be able to see him for visits was turned down on the grounds that it would be ‘unsettling for Andrew’, who was ‘bonding’ with his new family. Yet Andrew's mother, who was judged unfit, is still allowed to visit Andrew twice a year.

Meanwhile, Hampshire Social Services are still pressing Michael to donate an organ. Even if Michael decides to do so, it will make no difference. ‘I was stunned,’ he says. ‘I asked them what would happen if I gave him a part of my body. They said that even then, I wouldn’t be allowed contact. Andrew would not even be told who donated the organ as this would be 'too unsettling'.’

The dilemma has had damaging repercussions for the Shergold family. Michael says his children are wounded and that even his marriage has suffered.
The criticism they endured during the adoption process hardly helped. ‘Social Services accused me of being unco-operative,’ explains Alex. ‘They made it plain they didn’t like me. It seems being American was a problem and so too, I think, was the colour of my skin.’ Alex is mixed-race.

One official report on the couple expressed concern that Andrew would be brought up in a dual-ethnicity family. ‘They made out I was a foreigner who had no idea how to look after a child,’ she says. ‘I’ve raised three children. Despite the fact that they live in the States, we are incredibly close. I also think of Michael’s sons as my own.

‘I began to think that if I wasn’t around, Michael would have got custody. One night I suggested to Michael and his sons that I leave. Thankfully, they wouldn’t hear of it. But the stress has been unbearable. Undoubtedly, Michael and I would have split up if our relationship wasn’t so strong.’

And Michael adds: ‘Social Services have never given me a concrete reason why my wife and I are not suitable. That is because there is no reason.’

The couple did not qualify for legal aid and have spent £4,000 on solicitors. Now they have been told there is no further action they can take.

Overshadowing everything, however, is the decision to donate an organ. ‘If I don’t donate an organ, Andrew might not live long enough to meet me and the guilt would probably be too much to live with,’ he says. ‘If I do, it will be as if I am donating to someone who I don’t really know exists.

‘How can social workers sleep at night, knowing they have separated a boy from his real father, a good father who has already successfully raised three children? They won’t even pass on birthday cards.

‘They have stormed in and left us to pick up the pieces. I cannot believe that in this country someone can stop you seeing your own child when you have done nothing wrong.

‘Our family seems incomplete. If I see a boy in the street, I wonder if it’s him. I dream of him meeting his brothers and sister and joining us when we have big birthday celebrations. My only hope is that he can choose to trace me when he is 18.

‘But what if he doesn’t live that long or is told lies about me – that his father is dead or didn’t want him? It breaks my heart to think we may never meet.

----------

No complicated Bill is needed to remedy this situation. Quite simply every child should have access to their original and truthful birth certificate clearly identifying parents where known whether they be natural or donors.
The State should outlaw the production of deliberately fake birth certificates and should tell all children the truth about their parentage when asked. Forced and closed adoptions are both recent and equally undesirable innovations.They serve to demonstrate once again that parents should never be deprived of knowing where their children are, or worse still be jailed for trying to find out!

Mother ‘too stupid’ to keep child
The Sunday Times May 31, 2009
Daniel Foggo

A MOTHER is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.

The woman, who for legal reasons can be identified only by her first name, Rachel, has been told by a family court that her daughter will be placed with adoptive parents within the next three months, and she will then be barred from further contact.

The adoption is going ahead despite the declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”.

Her daughter, K, was born prematurely and officials felt Rachel lacked the intelligence to cope with her complex medical needs Baby K was released from hospital into care and is currently with a foster family. Her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day medical care.

Rachel said last night: “I have been totally let down by the system. All I want is to care for my daughter but the council and the court are determined not to let me.

“The court here has now ordered that my contact with my daughter must be reduced from every fortnight until in three months’ time it will all be over and I will never see her again.”

Rachel has now lodged an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, which has the power to stop the child being given to another family. She has also applied for a judicial review of the adoption order.

Her attempts to fight Nottingham city council’s adoption of her daughter have been hampered because her case was taken over by the official solicitor,* the government-funded lawyer who acts for those unable to represent themselves. He was brought in to represent Rachel’s interests because she was judged to be intellectually incapable of instructing her own solicitor. He declined to contest the council’s adoption application, despite her wish to do so.

After the psychiatrist’s assessment of Rachel, the court has now acknowledged that she does have the mental capacity to keep up with the legal aspects of her situation. It has nevertheless refused her attempts to halt the adoption process.

John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, who is campaigning on Rachel’s behalf, said: “The way Rachel has been treated is appalling. She has been swept aside by a system that seems more interested in securing a child for adoption than preserving a natural family unit.”

*BEWARE the "Official Solicitor" ! If you get too upset or too excited the judge may decide you are not capable of instructing a solicitor or representing yourself and will appoint this parasite to represent you instead.He is by law forbidden to put on a case for you as his job is simply to agree with the "SS" ,to refuse to let you speak, and ensure that you lose your precious children without being allowed to say a word !! Even if you stay calm but still show hostility the judge may appoint a psychologist recommended by the "SS" to give you an IQ test and if through nerves etc your results are poor once again the Official Solicitor will be appointed to "represent" you.Alas,thanks to him, you will be gagged, and your children will be lost to forced adoption .588 cases like this have taken place in the family courts since Jan 2006 until now (Sunday Times June 14 2009)

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Judges condemn ‘foul play’ on adoptions

Rosemary Bennett, The Times 2/5/2008

 

Two senior judges have strongly criticised a local authority that forced through the adoption of a baby girl against the wishes of her father.

Lord Justice Thorpe accused East Sussex County Council of being determined to have the child adopted “by means more foul than fair”, while Lord Justice Wall accused it of “disgraceful” conduct.

He ordered that copies of their ruling, handed down at the Court of Appeal yesterday, be sent to all family judges and every adoption agency in the country as a warning that the wishes of both parents had to be taken into account in care proceedings.

The case involved a child, known as J- L, who was adopted earlier this year. She was born in November 2006 after a casual relationship between her mother and father, known as MC. He only knew that he had a daughter after the local authority contacted him last summer to tell him care proceedings were under way and asked for a DNA test.

The mother had been living with her baby daughter in a special unit, but had abandoned the baby there. The local authority recommended adoption and placed J-L with foster parents in the meantime.

The father said that he was unable to take part in the initial care proceedings because he was in hospital after a heart attack. When he discovered that adoption plans were well advanced, he went to solicitors who immediately contacted the local authority to try to stop them. However, his intervention through a solicitor’s letter was ignored and never recorded formally at subsequent meetings. The local authority then allowed the adoptive parents to begin to look after the baby girl the day before the father’s legal case went to court.

A further attempt by him to stop the adoption was blocked by the council using the 2002 Adoption and Children Act. Yesterday’s ruling was in response to the father’s appeal on grounds of a breach to his human rights.

“The council’s failure to answer that letter and subsequent placement on the eve of the hearing give rise to the clearest inference that the council was out to gain its ends by means more foul than fair,” Lord Justice Wall said.

“There are many who assert that councils have a secret agenda to establish a high score of children that they have placed for adoption. When such suspicions are rife, a history such as this only serves to fuel public distrust in the good faith of public authority.”

People still find it hard to believe that in the UK secret family courts are taking thousands of children annually from parents that have never been accused or charged, let alone convicted of any CRIME. Yet that is exactly what is happening right now! These children are split up permanently from their grief stricken families for the rest of their lives. They are then given up for adoption to anonymous strangers so that government adoption targets can be met. Local authorities can then be rewarded by massive extra funding from central government under public service agreements. Just look at this answer to a parliamentary question by the Secretary of State!

Adoption: Standards

Tim Loughton: To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years. [151067]

John Healey: I have been asked to reply. 30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of ‘performance reward grant’ (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim

Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.


3 Sep 2007 : Column 1703W


Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Local authority	Amount of ‘reward grant’ paid (£)
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council	210,173.00
Blackburn with Darwen	307,367.00
Bristol City Council	307,512.00
Buckinghamshire County Council	526,958.00
Bromley (LB)	499,440.00
Camden (LB)	318,916.50
Cheshire County Council	685,134.00
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council	578,333.00
Durham County Council	502,675.00
Enfield (LB)	244,963.00
Essex County Council	2,469,200.00
Gloucestershire County Council	612,209.00
Greenwich (LB)	580,996.00
Halton Borough Council	153,938.00
Hampshire	1,675,619.00
Hounslow (LB)	165,019.00
Kensington and Chelsea (LB)	339,117.00
Kent County Council	2,156,583.00
Lewisham (LB)	602,854.00
Liverpool City Council	347,404.00
Luton Borough Council	400,027.00
Manchester City Council	984,877.00
Merton Borough Council	358,708.00
Northamptonshire County Council	1,119,115.00
Sheffield City Council	1,025,000.00
Southwark (LB)	435,242.00
St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council	83,845.00
Wandsworth (LB)	387,627.00
Warwickshire County Council	231,061.00
York City Council	203,620.00

GOOD NEWS!

Thanks in some small measure to this site and all the others who have campaigned adoption targets were abandoned on April 1st 2008.The original insruction from the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to increase adoptions by 40% still remains in force however and social workers all know the way to gain "brownie points" with their bosses is to achieve as many adoptions as possible !


Adoption target met
by Hammersmith and Fulham Press Office 10/03/2008
101 children adopted in the last three years

More than 100 children have been adopted in the borough during the last three years, after the Council met a target from central Government target that many experts thought would be unachievable.

The Government target, known as a Local Public Service Agreement (LPSA), challenged the Council to successfully achieve 101 adoptions or secure placements during the last three year period in return for £500,000 of funding.

At the time, the Council felt that the bar was set too high, as in the previous three year period only 71 children had been adopted - a figure that was then considered to be very high.

However, H&F’s adoption team swung into action and pulled out all of the stops in order to meet the target.

 

 

A TRUE STORY

 

T'was the night before Christmas,the four children slept

The "ss" were coming,their mother just wept!

Five burly policemen soon broke down the door,

We've come for your children,we must take all four!

The "ss" have told you "keep perfectly calm"

Your kids are at risk of emotional harm!

So struggling and kicking and screaming with fright

Four little children went off in the night!

The mother sat weeping, her children were lost

Adoption the target, they don't count the cost!

They snatch newborn babies with never a smile,

Each one an achievement to add to the file................

 

IAN JOSEPHS

 

WHO PROFITS FROM THE ADOPTION RACKET?

Local Authorities(stars,beacon status, and financial rewards under public service agreements .(see above)

Very highly paid "professionals"  presume to "assess" the parenting skills of distraught mothers who have had their children taken into care.(around £3000 per 2-3 hour session ),"legal aid lawyers" (a case in the family courts costs an average of £70,000 per day so total legal costs of over £500,000 for one case are not unusual!  ,)Therapists, psychiatrists , and counsellors who are paid around £3000 for a few hours work eagerly predict that parents might "emotionally abuse" their children at some time in the future.  Tame medical experts  somehow always side with social services against the parents.(They also receive around £3000 for one afternoon session plus a report)

Foster parents(up to £400per week per child plus allowances for Xmas and holidays)Special schools charging up to £7000 per week per child(as shown on tv channel 4,) Adoption and fostering agencies charging up to £18,000 per placement.

 

 http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/reports/pdf/? inspectionNumber=478226&providerCategory

ID=8&fileName=\\ey\\SC\\SC_SC060131_20060502.pdf

 

----------------- --------------

Here at last is PROOF that all concerned in "child protection" are receiving vast sums of money for work that can at best be described as "destructive" and at worst "criminal"...... There is NO conspiracy,no need for one ! Just a lot of different people all earning a lot of money in their different ways.All keen to keep on doing so and with one view in common "Don't rock the boat !"

1: Fosterers typically £400/ week per child!
2: Special children's homes typically £7,000/ week per child!
3: Lawyers and court costs typically £500,000 per case!
4: Experts typically £28,000 for a simple report!
5: Adoption agencies make £millions (£18,000/placement)
6: Local authorities get £millions hitting adoption targets! 

 

1: BALLOONS AND FAMILY FUN TO PROMOTE FOSTERING

Hundreds of balloons will be released from Slough town centre to mark a special event to launch Slough’s new fostering Allowance Scheme.

Saturday, July 2 will encourage more people to consider becoming foster parents to local children and see the launch of a new fostering allowance of £400 per week.

Between noon and 4pm, the Town Square will be bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling. Football fans should be sure to bring a camera as a David Beckham look-a-like will be ready to pose for photos.

Janet Tomlinson, head of education and children’s services at Slough Borough Council, will make a short speech at 1pm before the balloon release.

Team members from Slough’s Family Placement Services will be giving out fostering information including the fostering freephone number, car stickers, bookmarks, keyrings, wristbands and balloons.

Janet Tomlinson said: "Fostering offers great challenges and great rewards. Even if you’ve never thought about it before, why not come down on July 2 to find out more?"

The freephone fostering number is 0800 073 0291.

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2. DISPATCHES: PROFITING FROM KIDS IN CARE

Channel 4, Thursday 25 November, 9pm

In 2004, caring for Britain's most vulnerable children is a multi- million pound industry. Children in care cost the taxpayer over £830 million pounds a year. That's an average of £2,500 per child, per week - more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton. Yet many homes are failing to provide children with even a basic standard of care.

In this programme, Dispatches goes undercover to investigate the consequences of the increased privatisation of residential children's homes. The investigation reveals how homes are run by private businessmen charging social services departments enormous and unethical mark-ups on services - many of which aren't even provided. Fees of £7,000 a week are not unusual yet Dispatches finds private children's homes which are failing the children in many respects. Homes often use untrained, and sometimes unvetted, agency staff to look after some of the UK's most at risk youngsters - many of whom have been the victims of abuse, prostitution and drugs.

The current system is failing thousands of children a year. According to a recent report, three in five kids leave care with no qualifications at all. One in five will be homeless after two years and one in three of the current prison population has previously been in care. Tragically, some don't make it at all, with approximately 60 youngsters dying in children's homes every year.

Information, advice and support for people who are in care, or have been in the past, can be found by checking out the following organisations and websites.

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3: COUNCIL MUST PAY £500,000 FOR WRONGLY TAKING GIRL INTO CARE
Clare Dyer, legal editor
The Guardian, Friday March 17 2006
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 23 2006

(The headline for the article below was misleading. As the story made clear, the £500,000 was the total cost to public funds. The council was ordered to pay the parents £200,000 legal aid costs and will have to meet its own costs. The child would also have been represented and payment of those costs will be met from public funds).

A couple had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason and kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge said yesterday.

Mr Justice McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings" and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the emergency order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds, were £500,000, including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000, which the judge ordered the local council to pay. The judge took the unusual step of making his judgment public after a hearing behind closed doors, although the family, the local authority and the magistrates court are all unnamed.

He laid down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which are certain to lead social services departments and magistrates courts to re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely no pleasure to have to record the multiple failings of the local authority in this case".

But to do so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion on the issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be learned for the future".

He said the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".

Mother and daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for psychotherapy and the girl had been put on the local child protection register.

The notes of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues. Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental to move."

But social workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy - now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of child abuse in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes illness to get attention. At the end of a case conference on the girl in November 2004, social services received a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.

They were told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong. Within hours and without any information from the doctor, social workers were at the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection order allowing the girl to be taken from her parents immediately.

They acted without telling the parents and without seeking any medical opinion to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical treatment before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.

The council's actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous" and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction of this family's ordinary life".

Those descriptions "do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took place on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader, who had no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to the magistrates, of which every one was "misleading or incomplete or wrong".

He ruled that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".

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4: THE EXPERT AS JUDGE AND JURY
After a host of miscarriages of justice based on discredited expert witnesses, calls are growing for radical reform of their use in court, writes Lois Rogers
The Sunday Times, Nov 18 2007

Yet another woman was sent to prison last week, following expert evidence that she had shaken to death a baby in her care. Keran Henderson, a 42-year-old childminder, was said to have killed 11- month-old Maeve Sheppard, by shaking her so violently she was left blind and brain-damaged. The infant died in hospital a few days later.

The case has grim echoes of those of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel, all of whom were accused of killing their children only to be found innocent later. Clark, a solicitor, who was released from prison after serving three years, died last March as a result of psychological trauma and alcoholism caused by her ordeal.

At the Court of Appeal, two days after the judgment on Henderson, a retrial was ordered in the case of Barry George, the loner convicted of killing the television personality Jill Dando in 1999 with a single shot to the head. Expert testimony as to the significance of a particle of gunshot matter in his pocket is being challenged.

There has also been the recent conviction of the true killer of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed, 32 years after the event – and after Stefan Kiszko had served 16 years for the sexually motivated killing, even though medical evidence could have pointed out his infertility proved his innocence. Once again the review of the evidence threw a spotlight on the role of expert witnesses, whose testimony is often crucial in criminal cases but can be unreliable.

Our blind faith in scientific opinion makes us reluctant to question pronouncements by “experts”, but while the law requires everyone from plumbers to nurses to be trained, registered and checked, there is no such requirement for witnesses who may be pronouncing on matters of life and death in court.

A study by senior barrister Penny Cooper of City University in London, has shown that the majority of lawyers and judges do not bother to check the qualifications of experts they approach to bolster an aspect of their case. She also found a substantial number of the expert witnesses had undergone no training to understand their legal duty.

The disquiet this arouses has led to a clamour for legislation to require expert witnesses to be regulated. But how to do that without calling into question thousands of court decisions will not be an easy task.

There is already acute unease over the proliferation of parents convicted of causing cot deaths, shaking babies to death, or harming them by creating symptoms of fictitious illness.

Henderson, for instance, a mother of two herself, a long-term childminder and stalwart volunteer of her local Beaver Scout group, was sentenced to three years in prison for shaking baby Maeve so violently that she was left with fatal brain damage, despite the fact there was no evidence of any “grip marks” on the child, which would normally be expected to accompany such an action.

Her husband, a former police officer, has said she will appeal and hopes to create a campaign similar to that run by Sally Clark’s family, to try to prove his wife’s innocence.

Many character witnesses spoke up for Henderson in court and the family has dozens of supporters in their home village of Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire.

Some even believe her prosecution was only pursued because of the successful appeal by Roy Meadow, the expert paediatrician whose evidence led to the conviction of Sally Clark.

Following the Clark case, in which Meadow quoted a completely erroneous statistic suggesting the chances of Clark’s babies having died naturally were one in 73m, he was struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for misconduct. The Court of Appeal agreed he had acted in good faith.

In the meantime, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted post-mortems on Clark’s two infant sons, was less lucky. His appeal against a GMC finding of serious professional misconduct was rejected. Williams was accused of tailoring his diagnoses of the nature of the babies’ deaths to fit the police case against Clark.

The GMC is currently hearing a claim of gross professional misconduct against paediatrician Dr David Southall. The council has received evidence alleging that Southall falsified his curriculum vitae.

Southall’s evidence has figured highly in at least 50 criminal cases and possibly hundreds of family court cases held in secret, which have led to children being removed from their parents.

Questions of how frequently babies really are shaken to death, and indeed if it is possible to do so, have divided medical opinion for some years. There have, however, been up to 200 convictions annually for related forms of violence against babies and young children.

After Clark, Cannings and Patel, another bizarre case was overturned. Ian and Angela Gay, who had been convicted of poisoning their three-year-old adopted son with salt, were cleared when it was revealed the boy was suffering from a rare, and fatal, congenital abnormality.

Recently, the attorney-general ordered a review of almost 300 criminal convictions and 30,000 family court proceedings where children were taken into care. Only four were referred to the Court of Appeal. This, according to critics, was a function of the way the review was done, with authorities being asked to review their own decisions.

Social workers say the crusade to root out dangerous adults is to some extent a reaction to a previous era of regular criticism of their profession when children were left to die at the hands of their parents. Although some acknowledge the pendulum may now have swung too far, others are furious: “Do people think we spend all our time trying to break up families for no good reason?” said John Coughlan, a joint-president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. “In comparison with the volume of cases, the number of errors is tiny. We never rely on expert witnesses alone.”

Others argue that the opinion of expert witnesses is often the decisive factor. And as we have seen most recently with Barry George, it is not just child murder cases that have turned on such evidence.

Last year the Home Office took the unprecedented step of holding a disciplinary tribunal against Michael Heath, one of its most senior forensic pathologists: 20 charges against him were upheld. One man was subsequently cleared of murder, and numerous other convictions have been called into question.

A spate of other convictions came from evidence supplied by Paula Lannas, another Home Office forensic specialist who was the subject of a long-delayed disciplinary hearing that collapsed because those investigating her said they had a conflict of interest. Not only has Lannas been deprived of an opportunity to clear her name, but dozens of prisoners who claim they were victims of her errors have been unable to get the evidence reviewed.

Police forensic scientist Peter Ablett, who is now chief executive of the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners, points out there are only three ways to prove a crime: a reliable eyewitness, a confession, or forensics. The advent of DNA technology and other advances in recent years has brought increasing reliance on forensics, yet only about 3,000 of the estimated 8,000 expert witnesses operating are members of the council and signed up to its code of practice.

He said many of those who are not are unaware that their duty is to give impartial evidence to the court, not to bolster the case of their paymaster.

City University’s Cooper, who is also a governor of the Expert Witness Institute, was concerned to discover during her research that not only have one in five experts undergone no training to understand this duty, but one in 10 was so arrogant they said they saw no need for it. “There should be a requirement for them to be trained, and there should be rules requiring judges and lawyers to consider their credentials before accepting them as expert witnesses,” she said.

Such a provision cannot come soon enough.

A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones.

For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work isa lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.

“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.”

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5: FIRMS CASH IN ON SHORTAGE OF FOSTER HOMES
Published: Sunday, 2 October, 2005, Evening Standard.

LONDON: Private agencies are making millions of pounds out of a critical shortage of foster homes for children. Firms are charging councils on average £800 per child per week, an EVENING STANDARD investigation revealed.

This amounts to £41,600 a year to find suitable homes for the most vulnerable children in society.

One head of social services said: “It is cheaper to send the children to Eton.”

London councils are so desperate to hold on to their foster parents that two are offering them free loft conversions - worth up to £30,000 - so they can take in more children. Britain’s largest independent agency Foster Care Associates had a £56mn turnover in 2003, the last year for which accounts are available.

Its eight directors - seven of them social workers who set up the company 10 years ago - paid themselves total fees of more than £2.2mn as well as sharing pre-tax profits of almost £900,000.

The directors awarded themselves on average £285,000 each - about 10 times the annual salary of a social worker.

There is an estimated shortage of 10,000 foster carers across the UK. This has driven up the prices charged by the 150 or so independent agencies.

It costs councils between £300 and £400 a week to place children with their own approved foster carers but they cannot meet the demand and have to turn to outside agencies. More difficult children can cost as much as £1,500 per week to place in foster homes.

The problem is especially acute in London, where out of 11,500 fostered children up to one-third are found homes through independent agencies. Many of them are ‘dumped’ in outlying towns around the capital. A total of 60,000 children are fostered nationally.

A spokesman at the department for education said: “We know there are too many children being placed outside of authorities. We commissioned a report last year looking at how we can reduce that number.”

Out of the 11,500 fostered children in London, half of them are teenagers, about 3,000 aged eight to 12 and 2,500 aged under eight.

Children are typically being sent from London boroughs to Kent, miles from their schools and friends. Some 330 problem children from London are being fostered in the Margate area.

This has prompted the Kent child protection committee to compile a report, sent to ministers, warning the town is now at a ‘tipping point’ and branding the situation ‘explosive’.

Paul Fallon, director of social services at Barnet council and spokesman for all London’s social services directors, said: “Every penny we spend on one child is a penny we can’t spend on another child. If I place a child with Barnet it is £400. But it costs me about double that to place a child in an independent placement.

“It is a sellers’ market and that will impact on prices. We are stuck. It is cheaper to send children to Eton.”

He estimated that in Barnet about 30 to 40 children - about 10% of the number needing foster care - are unaccompanied child refugees. They have helped to swell numbers of children needing placements, putting added pressure on social services.

A spokeswoman for Richmond council, where private places at £900 cost three times as much as council places, said: “In emergencies we will negotiate with another borough for a temporary foster place, but that’s very rare.”

The crisis has prompted Barnet council and Hammersmith and Fulham to offer grants of up to £30,000 to foster parents to build loft conversions to house more children. A spokeswoman for Hammersmith and Fulham said the outlay would pay itself back within one to two years even if it creates just one extra fostering place.

Defenders of private agencies point out councils often do not factor hidden staffing costs - such as administration and on-call social workers - into their weekly fees. Private agencies also point out they are often called upon to find placements for the most difficult children. They point out they also provide round-the-clock social worker support as well as educational support and therapy. Not all agencies are profit-making with fostering services carried out by charities such as Barnardo’s and NCH.

Marcelle Ibbetson, service development manager at NCH, which also typically charges £800 a week, said: “We don’t think local authorities have properly costed the real cost of foster care. Their behind the scenes costs are hidden. What we provide is private placements at the specialist end of the market.”

None of the directors of Foster Care Associates was available for comment. But in an interview last year Sally Melbourne, FCA’s director for the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region, said: “The majority of the fee we charge local authorities goes to the carer and on the welfare of the child. We are a business but we make very little profit, last year we made 5% profit.”

A spokesman for the company added: “The company specialises in children that are difficult to place. That is not necessarily behaviourally difficult children but it could be kids with five siblings that need to be kept together or from the ethnic minorities that needs to be placed in their own community. We offer a complete support structure including therapy and education, which is why the costing may look more expensive.” – LONDON - EVENING STANDARD.

http://www.fasttrack.co.uk/fasttrack/leagues/dbbtDetails.asp?siteID=6&compID=2503&yr=2011

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6: Written Parliamentary answers

 So many times have the "SS" denied the existence of adoption targets it is worth repeating again that they did exist and that local authorities greatly profited from them !
Monday, 3 September 2007
Children, Schools and Families
Adoption: StandardsAll Written Answers on 3 Sep 2007


Tim Loughton MP (East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years.

John Healey (Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government)
I have been asked to reply.
30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of 'performance reward grant' (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim

Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.

Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Local authority Amount of 'reward grant' paid (£)
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council 210,173.00
Blackburn with Darwen 307,367.00
Bristol City Council 307,512.00
Buckinghamshire County Council 526,958.00
Bromley (LB) 499,440.00
Camden (LB) 318,916.50
Cheshire County Council 685,134.00
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council 578,333.00
Durham County Council 502,675.00
Enfield (LB) 244,963.00
Essex County Council 2,469,200.00
Gloucestershire County Council 612,209.00
Greenwich (LB) 580,996.00
Halton Borough Council 153,938.00
Hampshire 1,675,619.00
Hounslow (LB) 165,019.00
Kensington and Chelsea (LB) 339,117.00
Kent County Council 2,156,583.00
Lewisham (LB) 602,854.00
Liverpool City Council 347,404.00
Luton Borough Council 400,027.00
Manchester City Council 984,877.00
Merton Borough Council 358,708.00
Northamptonshire County Council 1,119,115.00
Sheffield City Council 1,025,000.00
Southwark (LB) 435,242.00
St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council 83,845.00
Wandsworth (LB) 387,627.00
Warwickshire County Council 231,061.00
York City Council 203,620.00



Back to Barristers 'exploiting misery' as fees in family law cases rise 25% in 5 years
Daily Mail Online
June 19th 2008



Barristers have been making millions of extra pounds from the misery of families and children caught up in the family courts, according to new figures released by ministers yesterday.


Fees paid out of taxpayer-funded legal aid to barristers in family court cases have gone up by almost a third in five years and have now reached nearly £100million a year, they showed.


And there have been big increases in claims by barristers for obscure special payments that provide 'uplift' and 'bolt-ons' to their basic charges.


Jack Straw's Ministry of Justice lifted a corner of the blanket of official secrecy that surrounds the family courts to disclose that barristers who appear in them can claim bonuses including bizarre 'court bundle payments'.


These give barristers extra money if there are more than 176 pages to their court papers and extra still if there are over 350 pages. Yet another court bundle payment is paid if a barrister carries over 700 pages of papers.


Court bundle payments alone meant taxpayers were charged an extra £8.6million by barristers last year.


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The Times on line
June 19th 2008



The Bar Council, which represents nearly 15,000 barristers in England and Wales, will announce its proposals in a paper before an all-party meeting of MPs tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Legal Services Commission, which runs the legal aid scheme, has just released figures to show how much barristers are earning from legal aid work.



Crispin Passmore, the commission’s policy director for civil legal aid, said that the sum spent on barristers’ fees since 2003-04 had risen from £71 million to nearly £100 million.

The number of barristers earning more than £100,000 from family legal aid work had gone up by 14 per cent in the 12 months between mid2005 and mid2006, he added.


“The average annual earnings from family legal aid work is £140,000 – and that doesn’t include any privately paid work they might do. So we are not talking about the minimum wage.”

 

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Do we get value for money? Well this is what the BBC had to say!




Can children in care avoid prison?
Wednesday 15th MAY 2002




David Akinsanya was raised by the state and in a special BBC Two documentary he asks why so many kids leaving the care system end up in prison.

Government statistics show that 49 per cent of children in care go straight to prison. With 56,000 children in the British care system today, that means 28,000 are set to receive custodial sentences.

David Akinsanya believes the problem lies with the care system itself.

He says the care system is inflexible and does not offer appropriate care to young people.

Research found that 42 per cent of young prostitutes had been in care at some point

The "INDEPENDENT" 14 December 2006 

The Government's own research highlights how the care system is not simply a negligent parent but at times probably more dangerous than the family from which some children have been taken. A study commissioned by the Home Office has looked at the link between hard drug use, sex work and various vulnerability factors. The results are astonishing, if not heartbreaking.

Less than 1 per cent of the child population is looked after by the state, but the research found that 42 per cent of young women prostitutes interviewed had been in care at some point in their lives. "This is an extraordinary figure, which demonstrates that looked after children are very vulnerable to involvement in drug use and sexual abuse through prostitution," the report concluded.

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2 children in care die of neglect each week
The People, 22 June 2008
By David Collins

Children placed in care are three times more likely to die than others, a shock report has revealed.

In one year, 16 in 10,000 vulnerable youngsters died in care. The national death rate for children was five in every 10,000.

The study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that 800 youngsters have died in care over the last ten years - an average of two a week.

Malnutrition and diseases were the main causes of death.

Last year 12,000 kids in care had no immunisations, 9,600 had no health check ups and 8,400 never saw a dentist.

By law children should get checks within two weeks of going into care. In some local authority areas, less than 50 per cent do.

A Children and Young Persons Bill, which should improve matters, goes before MPs tomorrow.

Tim Loughton, Shadow Minister for Children, said: "Despite the efforts of beleaguered social workers, the system is failing."

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Extract from the Telegraph:-

Official figures show that only six per cent of the 60,000 children in care gain five or more A* to C GCSEs and more than a third are not entered for a single GCSE.

Conviction rates for young people in care are three times the rate for other juveniles. One in four girls leaving care is pregnant or already a mother. A recent case which caused outrage involved a 12-year-old living in a children's home in Blackburn who became pregnant while working as a prostitute.

WHY ,WHY,WHY, when social workers and worse still judges decide healthy happy children are "at risk" from their own parents do they not compare that risk with the horrific risks children run when put into the care system?

Leaving school with no qualifications,ending up in prison, or working as prostitutes (often pregnant from unknown fathers),or worse still dying violently either in care or soon after leaving it !

Even if they survive all the above horrors and settle down to form a new family with a loving and attentive partner the "SS" will rarely leave them alone !

Time and again the fact that the mother has been brought up in care is taken as proof that she is not capable of looking after her own children ! The unfortunate mother is usually put into an assessment process and more often than not ends up losing her children to adoption by strangers!In other words children are removed from parents deemed unsuitable by "experts" and then themselves deemed unsuitable to raise their own children such is the appalling standard of care inflicted on children hoping one day to be parents by an unfeeling state !

Dismal outcomes are the norm despite the £2.5 billion a year spent looking after them. It costs £100,000 a year to keep a child in a children's home, more than four times the fees at top private schools such as Eton or Winchester.

Fostering can cost up to £30,000 a year, compared with the £7,500 a year that state boarding schools charge parents for accommodation, with the £5,000 cost of education covered by the local authorities.

  Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) Link to this | Hansard source My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts, and with the important intervention of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, to open them up so that they act in the public interest while maintaining personal privacy.

Only in the SECRET family courts are punishments (losing their children to long term fostercare or worse still adoption by strangers) imposed on persons (parents) who have neither committed a crime nor even been accused of committing any crime!  THERE IS NO OTHER CASE IN UK LAW WHERE THIS  CAN HAPPEN!

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British justice: a family ruined
A chilling example of our secret State where a mother and child are forced into hiding
by Camilla Cavendish,The Times, February 21, 2008

Last autumn a small English congregation was rocked by the news that two of its parishioners had fled abroad. A 56-year-old man had helped his pregnant wife to flee from social workers, who had already taken her son into care and were threatening to seize their baby.

Most people had no idea why. For the process that led this couple to such a desperate act was entirely secret. The local authority had warned the mother not to talk to her friends or even her MP. The judge who heard the arguments from social services sat in secret. The open-minded social workers who had initially been assigned to sort out a custody battle between the woman and her previous husband were replaced by others who seemed determined to build a guilty case against her. That is how the secret State operates. A monumental injustice has been perpetrated in this quiet corner of England; our laws are being used to try to cover it up.

I will call this couple Hugh and Sarah. Neither they nor their families have ever been in trouble with the law, as far as I know. Sarah's only fault seems to have been to suffer through a violent and volatile first marriage, which produced a son. When the marriage ended, the boy was taken into temporary foster care for a few months - as a by-product of the marriage breakdown and against her will - while she “sorted her life out” and found them a new home. But even as she cleared every hurdle set by the court, social workers dreamt up new ones. The months dragged by. A psychologist said the boy was suffering terribly in care and was desperate to come home. Sarah's mother and sister, both respected professionals with good incomes, apparently offered to foster or adopt him. The local authority did not even deign to reply.

For a long time, Sarah and her family seem to have played along. At every new hearing they thought that common sense would prevail. But it didn't. The court appeared to blame her for not ending her marriage more quickly, which had put strain on the boy, while social workers seemed to insist that she now build a good relationship with the man she had left. Eventually, she came to believe that the local authority intended to have her son adopted. She also seems to have feared that they would take away her new baby, Hugh's baby, when it was born. One night in September they fled the country with the little boy. When Hugh returned a few days later, to keep his business going and his staff in jobs, he was arrested.

Many people would think this man a hero. Instead, he received a far longer sentence - 16 months for abduction - than many muggers. This kind of sentence might be justified, perhaps, to set an example to others. But the irony of this exemplary sentence is that no one was ever supposed to know the details. (I am treading a legal tightrope writing about it at all.) How could a secret sentence for a secret crime deter anyone?

Sarah's baby has now been born, in hiding. I am told that the language from social services has become hysterical. But if the State was genuinely concerned for these two children, it would have put “wanted” pictures up in every newspaper in Europe.

It won't do that, of course, because to name the woman and her children would be to tear a hole in the fabric of the secret State, a hole we could all see through. I would be able to tell you her side of the story, the child's side of the story. I would be able to tell you every vindictive twist of this saga. And the local authority knows perfectly well how it would look. So silence is maintained.

And very effective it is too. The impotence is the worst thing. The way that perfectly decent individuals are gagged and unable to defend themselves undermines a fundamental principle of British law. I have a court order on my desk that threatens all the main actors in this case with dire consequences if they talk about it to anyone.

Can that really be the way we run justice in a country that was the fount of the rule of law? At the heart of this story is a little boy who was wrenched from the mother he loves, bundled around in foster care and never told why, when she appears to have been perfectly capable of looking after him. When she had relatives who were perfectly capable of doing so. In the meantime, he was becoming more and more troubled and unhappy. To find safety and love, that little boy has had to leave England.

What does that say about our country? The public funds the judges, the courts, the social workers. It deserves to know what they do. That does not mean vilifying all social workers, or defending every parent. But it does mean ending the presumption of guilt that infects so many family court hearings. It does mean asking why certain local authorities seem unable to let go of children whose parents have resolved their difficulties. It does mean knowing how social workers could have got away with failing to return this particular boy, after his mother had met all the criteria set by a judge at the beginning. It is simply unacceptable that social services have put themselves above the law.

We need these people to be named, and to hear in their words what happened. We need to open up the family courts. We need to tear down the wall of secrecy that has forced a decent woman to live as a fugitive, to save her little boy from a life with strangers, used like a pawn in a game of vengeance. Even if the local authority were to drop its case, it is hard to see how Sarah could ever trust them enough to return. At home, for their God- fearing congregation, the question is simple: what justice can ever be done behind closed doors? And in whose name?


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Jailed: The man who helped his wife flee abroad as social workers threatened to take their baby
By FIONA BARTON, Daily Mail 7th Feb 2008


A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday.

The businessman's wife was heavily pregnant with their first child - and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers - when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris.

She had a second