There is a tendency, developed or made more palpable over the past 50 years, that our children are first and foremost a state acquisition. The belief has perhaps been in greater evidence nowhere more than in the state education system, with its national curriculum designed to inculcate whatever values a passing government stipulates, and teachers trained in accordance with a prescriptive code which none dare abjure and no headteacher dare repudiate, lest they fall foul of the Gestapo at Ofsted. Any parental assertions of ownership, as with homeschooling, are increasingly viewed with suspicion, with such parents made subject to a level of monitoring usually reserved for suspected paedophiles. And the absurd belief that a parent ought to be informed about their child’s acquisition of contraception or their 14-year-old daughter’s application for an abortion is viewed as an unacceptable incursion into the child's 'right' to privacy, of which the state is now the self-appointed guardian. But even these gross assertions of state orthodoxy are trivial compared to the disturbing rise of the power of the Family Courts.
Christopher Booker told yesterday of a disturbing account of one woman’s harrowing fight for justice against a Soviet system of state kidnapping. It is likeThe Changeling nightmare, and even Erin Brokovich would concede that hexavalent chromium is a walk in the park compared to the state’s determination to avoid another Baby P.
Mr Booker says he is legally barred from identifying the mother at the centre of this case or giving many other details, which in itself is a censorship designed to neuter the victim, who would like nothing more than for her story to be shouted to the four corners of the earth. Her level of desperation is unimaginable.
Essentially, after a difficult pregnancy, she gave birth to a daughter. Two months later, she had an accident which left her paralysed from the neck down. Soon afterwards, a nurse handed her a phone: It was a social worker from the local council, to tell her that her daughter – who was being looked after by her sister – was to be placed in care and put up for adoption within six weeks. “I was so paralysed,” she says, “that I couldn’t wipe the tears from my eyes.”
She passed all psychiatric tests and it was established that posed no risk to her baby or to herself. Yet the social workers proceeded with an application for an interim care order. ‘She was told that this was because her baby was at “potential risk of harm” due to her “suicide attempt”, and that she was in a “violent relationship” – whereas there had been no man in her life for over a year.’ Booker continues:
The interim order was issued, as is routine, but the social workers were told to produce evidence for their case, and the baby was allowed to remain with the mother’s sister’s family. The mother was given a hair-strand test which, she was startled to be told, showed “traces of cocaine” and “chronic excessive drinking”, though she rarely drinks, and a re-test for cocaine was negative.Any visits the mother made to her baby had to be supervised. Yet the supervisor was not permitted to write the reports by which social services made any determination. Indeed, there was apparent falsification of evidence which the supervisor queried on the mother’s behalf. There was a formal request for the council to examine how the notes had been ‘edited’, as a consequence of which ‘the supervisor was suspended from the case and has subsequently been given little work by the council’.
In March, another hearing was cancelled because the council’s documentation was not yet available. In April, a case management conference was cancelled because the local authority was “not prepared”. Another hearing was adjourned in May because the council’s paperwork was incomplete, and in June it was cancelled, for the same reason.
In August, an order was made that the baby should be put into foster care, and that no family members other than the mother should see her. (The aunt’s young daughter, who had come to look on the baby as her own little sister, was heartbroken.) In September, the baby was placed in a foster home 35 miles away (making regular visits extremely taxing). A new contact supervisor, however, remained positive about the mother-baby relationship.We see here a perfect example of the systematic abuse of state power. If the mother speaks out, she risks prosecution and faces the certainty of losing her child forever to fostering or adoption. Every instinct for natural justice wants to name the woman and assist her, yet the local authority bullies, in partnership with inept social workers and private adoption agencies, would exploit the transgression and submit it as evidence that they and they alone are acting in the best interests of the welfare of the child.
In October, an Issue Resolution Hearing was cancelled at short notice when the council’s legal team said it had not been supplied with necessary documents. In December another hearing was cancelled for the same reason. The magistrates then said they wanted the case sent to a county court.
It now seems the next hearing will be in May, 18 months after mother and child were parted. Fortunately, the mother is a bright, determined and organised woman, whose child is the centre of her life. Otherwise, subjected to such treatment, like many parents before her she might long since have cracked.
Ultimately, of course, it is the rights of the child which are violated. His or her right to a family life is subsumed to the state’s definition of what that life ought to consist. The social workers are no longer pastoral, caring or compassionate: they have become agents of the state, programmed to implement social legislation in accordance with the demands of the state.
The Marxist-Stalinist ideology persists.
But when will Social Services start protecting young children from the ‘Pakistani rape gangs’ identified by Jack Straw?
When will Social Services clamp down on the systematic child abuse that goes on in the nation’s mosques?
When will Social Services do something about the thousands of girls in the UK who are subjected to genital mutilation or sold by their families into ‘assisted’ marriages (they are no longer ‘forced’) which is barely indistinguishable from what many would term ‘human trafficking’.
It is a topsy-turvy world indeed in which we are obliged to grant prisoners their ‘right’ to vote; in which we may not deport convicted foreign-nationals because of their ‘right’ to a family life or their ‘right’ not to be tortured in their own country. And yet a British mother who has been convicted of nothing has her child forcibly removed by the state and is then denied natural justice and all means of legal redress because of the labyrinthine bureaucracy of an evil system intent on nothing but its own survival.
This outrage is ripe for culling under the provisions of Mr Cameron’s ‘Post-Bureaucratic Age’.
Questions must certainly be asked in Parliament about this crypto-Soviet madness. The Family Courts are out of control and a law unto themselves. It is time for us to reclaim our children from all forms of state oppression.
