Cleared of child abuse? Baby already adopted, tough luck.

[creampuff]

Breadvan72 said:

Define "quite regularly", please. It happens, it shouldn't happen, but does it happen often? I don't know.

The case in OP is the first that I know of which have ended up in adoption, but there are many cases reported in the press over several years which have resulted in removal of children from parents against the will of the parents and all the reported cases involve the disease of rickets. So this seems to happen regularly and given that is seems that removing children if they present with undiagnosed rickets is standard procedure, at least in some NHS trusts.

At one point my wife and I were considering having our child born in mainland China. In China, the thought of the state taking our child did not enter our head. It just does not happen. When my wife gave birth in the UK instead, the thought of the state taking our child was in the back of the mind of both of us, resulting as I said in me getting them a foreign passport ASAP.

=

The other thing is there have been many cases of children removed from their natural parents due to rickets not being diagnosed, but bonehead social services, NHS and local authorities appear not to have learned anything from past mistakes. They still oppose return of the children to the natural parents even when they get presented with evidence that the child has/had rickets and that no abuse had occurred.

Edited by creampuff on Monday 12th October 12:20

[anonymous-user]

From memory, another Article 8 case was about the child of a sperm or egg donor who wanted to know the identity of the genetic parent. If people want to know of their parentage, I think that they should be allowed to know, and as mentioned above there might be a good medical reason for needing the info.

[jjlynn27]

AJS- said:

No evidence of it at all, no. Though that site seems to think so in a few places. It's hard to cite them as it tends to be big long lists of articles but a couple of snippets.

Ms Wileman fled with him to Spain, Sweden and then the Republic of Ireland, pursued at each stage by the Abduction Child and Contact Unit. In each country the authorities found her to be a good mother.
From http://forced-adoption.com/reforms/ About 1/3rd down

On the continent in France, Spain, Italy etc. children are only taken from parents if they have suffered severe physical harm. The concepts of “emotional harm” and “future risk” quite rightly do not exist there!
From http://forced-adoption.com/reforms/ about 2/3rd down

Anyway, regardless of how good or otherwise their social services and legal systems are, the point is you can escape the clutches of our own overbearing SS without moving to the backwoods of Montana.

You are quoting from the site that posts this;

forced-adoption.com said:

'SACKING YOUR SOLICITOR AND YOUR BARRISTER !

Most solicitors and barristers in the family courts are PROFESSIONAL LOSERS and you are better off without them.Usually they are there just to GAG you (nobody else can do that,not even the judge !) to make sure you say nothing to upset social workers , cannot present your case, and to make sure that you lose ,and to make sure they stay on good terms with the local authority from whom they get a lot of work !'

[saaby93]

jjlynn27 said:

You are quoting from the site that posts this;

forced-adoption.com said:

'SACKING YOUR SOLICITOR AND YOUR BARRISTER !

Most solicitors and barristers in the family courts are PROFESSIONAL LOSERS and you are better off without them.Usually they are there just to GAG you (nobody else can do that,not even the judge !) to make sure you say nothing to upset social workers , cannot present your case, and to make sure that you lose ,and to make sure they stay on good terms with the local authority from whom they get a lot of work !'

Although they may have an extreme point to be aware of

[saaby93]

Burwood said:

I think a lot of people want to know where they come from. What they do with that information is a different matter. I can think of some practical advantages with medical history. To some that could be critical. What if you had siblings.

There may be a few practical advantages but most people who dont know, manage without. Just present the symptoms and treat them
Arent there some things for your own sanity youre best off not knowing about.

It's a digression from the thread topic

[AJS-]

So is it a total fabrication? It seems to be citing real cases though usually anonymously obviously. Genuine question - I'm not saying it's all accurate and the author clearly has his own views.

With the case in the OP and the apparently large and growing number of adoptions in the UK compared with similar countries it seems like something that is worth looking further into.

[anonymous-user]

It looks to me like a polemical site, and a rubbish source for an evidence based opinion, but you have with disarming frankness already said that you have no evidence to support the opinion in question. Refreshingly plain speaking by PH standards!

[AJS-]

It is polemical, but it cites real cases. There's a synopsis of the Wileman case in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/0...

Regarding emotional abuse and future risk.

Emotional abuse seems quite subjective away from the most severe and blatant cases. I would be interested to see how this is applied.

How is "future risk" ascertained? it seems like a reason for social services to monitor and offer assistance but not a reason in itself to take children away.

Should SS wait until harm is actually done? Probably, yes. Taking someone's children away is an extremely serious thing to do. Unlike a future risk or a suspicion of emotional abuse it most certainly will have a lasting negative impact on the children and the family as a whole.

I also wonder what impact this has on how open people are to letting social workers help them when they genuinely could.

[anonymous-user]

creampuff said:

Breadvan72 said:

Define "quite regularly", please. It happens, it shouldn't happen, but does it happen often? I don't know.

The case in OP is the first that I know of which have ended up in adoption, but there are many cases reported in the press over several years which have resulted in removal of children from parents against the will of the parents and all the reported cases involve the disease of rickets. So this seems to happen regularly and given that is seems that removing children if they present with undiagnosed rickets is standard procedure, at least in some NHS trusts.

That's not a very quantitative answer! Big assertions need good evidence to back them up, don't you think? You may be right in your assertion, but can you not do better than a rather vague reference to several cases reported in the (always unerringly accurate and unbiased, of course) press? There may perhapsy be some peer reviewed research somewhere on how often care orders are made and how often they turn out not to be justified. Bear in mind that the normal hoo-hah is that a child was not protected by the State and suffers at the hands of his/her parents or guardians. One child being wrongly removed from parents is one too many, but I am not surprised that a large system operating in difficult circumstances with limited resources sometimes (how many times as yet unknown to me) gets it wrong.

[creampuff]

Breadvan72 said:

That's not a very quantitative answer! Big assertions need good evidence to back them up, don't you think? You may be right in your assertion, but can you not do better than a rather vague reference to several cases reported in the (always unerringly accurate and unbiased, of course) press? There may perhapsy be some peer reviewed research somewhere on how often care orders are made and how often they turn out not to be justified. Bear in mind that the normal hoo-hah is that a child was not protected by the State and suffers at the hands of his/her parents or guardians. One child being wrongly removed from parents is one too many, but I am not surprised that a large system operating in difficult circumstances with limited resources sometimes (how many times as yet unknown to me) gets it wrong.

Well if you look at "reputable" press sources, there seems to be at least one case a year where undiagnosed rickets leads to wrongful removal of an infant child. That's the reported ones. As noted previously, NHS trusts, social services and the like are bound by confidentiality and are unlikely to be included to blab anyway, so we may not be hearing anywhere near the true total number. We also don't hear about parents with better financial resources who immediately hire a well qualified solicitor and barrister to stop the process in its tracks before it receives media attention. We also don't near from people with zero financial resources who can't afford representation and never get exonerated and their child is also not returned. By the time the case in OP had made the news, they were already being represented by a QC.

Equally telling there have been many cases with exactly the same thing happening - that is the NHS trust and social services have evidence of rickets presented to them and they do not believe it and they continue to oppose returning the child to the natural parents. They appear to never learn from past mistakes.

So it seems to me that an innocent trip to A&E can easily end up in removal of your child if you are unlucky, with the only solution years of misery and legal expense.

Edit (and sorry for Daily Mail link) - seems this is not the first time it has ended up in wrongful adoption. This family had 3 x children removed against their will, all adopted out by the state:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1141811/Co...

Edited by creampuff on Monday 12th October 19:19

[anonymous-user]

You suggest that a trip to A and E could "easily" lead to the child being hoiked off by the State. You base that, it appears, on about one case a year reported in the less rubbish papers. Given the numbers of parents who take children to A and E each year, it sounds like your definition of "easily" is not quite the same as mine.

Anecdotal blah: I have had to take my daughter to A and E three times in eleven years (bumped head, quite big asthma attack, cut knee wide open). On each occasion the clumsy and slow moving State failed to snatch her and, incredibly, let her go home again after treatment. Many people whom I know who have youngish children have taken a child to A and E at least once. Again the sleepy snatchers have failed to make the grab.

[peaches36g]

I'm a social worker and reading what's happened with this case is horrible and shocking. Iv been a front line social worker in Scotland for 12 years, in its largest and busiest local authority. In my time I,v only been directly involved in removing a child\ren on 5 occasions. Laws in Scotland are similar in terms of meeting the thresholds for a care order in England I.e 'at risk of significant harm', however, we have the children's hearing system up here and things can get very messy very quickly for local authorities if trying to keep children away from parents without good reason. I have never once heard of a child being removed for having rickets, maybe that's just me.

I earn 35k, top of my payscale. I have 49 children on my current case load. I love my job and work really really hard to keep families together. (Everyone I work with does the same) I didn't enter social work to snach kids from parents.

[eldar]

Breadvan72 said:

You suggest that a trip to A and E could "easily" lead to the child being hoiked off by the State. You base that, it appears, on about one case a year reported in the less rubbish papers. Given the numbers of parents who take children to A and E each year, it sounds like your definition of "easily" is not quite the same as mine.

Anecdotal blah: I have had to take my daughter to A and E three times in eleven years (bumped head, quite big asthma attack, cut knee wide open). On each occasion the clumsy and slow moving State failed to snatch her and, incredibly, let her go home again after treatment. Many people whom I know who have youngish children have taken a child to A and E at least once. Again the sleepy snatchers have failed to make the grab.

All well and good, you are part of the vast majority who have been well and properly served. But, as you say, mistakes are almost inevitable.

My concern is where the mistakes and errors are exposed in family law. Civil and criminal, fairly straightforward - the wrongly imprisoned can be released, and if appropriate compensated for the damage to them and their family.

This case, though, it appears the response to the finding of guilt and sentence of child removal being wrong is to obscure things. And not right the wrong.

Can you really accept that the response to this apparent injustice is ignore it? Do the wronged family have no access to recompense either in the form of knowing their child is OK or financial?

[TeamD]

peaches36g said:

I'm a social worker and reading what's happened with this case is horrible and shocking. Iv been a front line social worker in Scotland for 12 years, in its largest and busiest local authority. In my time I,v only been directly involved in removing a child\ren on 5 occasions. Laws in Scotland are similar in terms of meeting the thresholds for a care order in England I.e 'at risk of significant harm', however, we have the children's hearing system up here and things can get very messy very quickly for local authorities if trying to keep children away from parents without good reason. I have never once heard of a child being removed for having rickets, maybe that's just me.

I earn 35k, top of my payscale. I have 49 children on my current case load. I love my job and work really really hard to keep families together. (Everyone I work with does the same) I didn't enter social work to snach kids from parents.

I have the deepest respect for those like yourself that want to do the best for everyone. However, would you not agree that an injustice has been done here?

[jjlynn27]

Breadvan72 said:

...

Anecdotal blah: I have had to take my daughter to A and E three times in eleven years (bumped head, quite big asthma attack, cut knee wide open). On each occasion the clumsy and slow moving State failed to snatch her and, incredibly, let her go home again after treatment. Many people whom I know who have youngish children have taken a child to A and E at least once. Again the sleepy snatchers have failed to make the grab.

It's easy for you, as per that idiotic website; solicitors/barristers are obviously in cahoots with social workers. I bet that first thing that you do when going to A&E was to say to reg 'lisen matey, I'm a barista, don't mess with me, I know all the social workers around, so just be quiet'.

[creampuff]

Breadvan72 said:

You suggest that a trip to A and E could "easily" lead to the child being hoiked off by the State. You base that, it appears, on about one case a year reported in the less rubbish papers. Given the numbers of parents who take children to A and E each year, it sounds like your definition of "easily" is not quite the same as mine.

Anecdotal blah: I have had to take my daughter to A and E three times in eleven years (bumped head, quite big asthma attack, cut knee wide open). On each occasion the clumsy and slow moving State failed to snatch her and, incredibly, let her go home again after treatment. Many people whom I know who have youngish children have taken a child to A and E at least once. Again the sleepy snatchers have failed to make the grab.

I fail to see your point. The babies which have been taken on the basis of undiagnosed rickets need to be very young so that they have both inexplicable bone fractures which only seem to occur in newborns and as a consequence being newborns they are also be unable to talk or respond to questioning. That your daughter went to A&E and nothing happened when she was 11 (or older) and presumably both quite able to talk and also well above the age where this disease appears to occur is therefore irrelevant.

You should be looking at the number of infants whose parents present them to A&E in the first few months after birth. That is a much smaller number. There are about 700,000 babies born in England/Wales each year. I don't know how many go to A&E in their first few months of life, but call it 10% or 70,000. There seems to be a report of a child wrongfully taken due to rickets about once a year. I stated before that that is only the ones we get to hear about, so say we get to hear about half of the cases, so say 2 children are taken a year. That is an odds of 1 in 35,000 that your child will be taken both against your will and with no abuse actually occurring. Does that sound like good odds to you, given the years of misery which are likely to follow?

You are also a trained barrister or solicitor, presumably with both plenty of cash and plenty of friends and colleagues who are barristers or solicitors and so your access to heavy legal muscle is a lot bigger than most people. I note the parents in the case of OP were denied legal aid. I doubt you worry about a lack of access to legal services should you need them yourself.

Even if you think 1 in 35,000 is acceptable odds, it seems pretty amazing to me that babies being taken after missed diagnoses of rickets has been happening for at least a decade and the same sequence of events seems to still be taking place again and again. That sequence of events is that medical evidence that the child suffers from rickets and no abuse occurred is presented to the NHS and case workers and they do not believe it and continue to oppose return of the child to the parents. Given that this sequence of events has gone down the same way many times now, the latest time resulting in permanent and wrongful adoption of the child, do you think that is OK on the basis that your idea of "easily" seems to differ from mine?

Edited by creampuff on Tuesday 13th October 01:10

[anonymous-user]

I do like probabilities when they are derived from made-up numbers.

[eldar]

La Liga said:

I do like probabilities when they are derived from made-up numbers.

82.6% of the population would agree with you.

[anonymous-user]

I also love creampuff's entirely made up statistics, which will probably now solidify into "there's definitely a 1 in 35,000 chance that you kid will be snatched if you go to A and E". Even if that completely invented number was accurate, it would hardly support creampuff's assertion that your child could "easily" be taken away, or support the "get yer passport" paranoid types in supposing that people should be deterred from going to A and E because of the risk of snatchage. He also seems now to be fixating on infant rickets, retreating from his earlier broad assertions as to A and E, not specifying age or ailment.

I reiterate that the case in question seems like one that went horrendously wrong, but to the extent that we are now discussing the risk of such travesties occurring, we still don't have any data here to measure that risk.

I add that absence of legal aid for cases such as this is itself an injustice, but try telling that to the PH massive.

[anonymous-user]

TeamD said:

peaches36g said:

I'm a social worker and reading what's happened with this case is horrible and shocking. Iv been a front line social worker in Scotland for 12 years, in its largest and busiest local authority. In my time I,v only been directly involved in removing a child\ren on 5 occasions. Laws in Scotland are similar in terms of meeting the thresholds for a care order in England I.e 'at risk of significant harm', however, we have the children's hearing system up here and things can get very messy very quickly for local authorities if trying to keep children away from parents without good reason. I have never once heard of a child being removed for having rickets, maybe that's just me.

I earn 35k, top of my payscale. I have 49 children on my current case load. I love my job and work really really hard to keep families together. (Everyone I work with does the same) I didn't enter social work to snach kids from parents.

I have the deepest respect for those like yourself that want to do the best for everyone. However, would you not agree that an injustice has been done here?

Er... did you read the first sentence in peaches' post?

Respect also, peaches. You people work hard in a thankless task and for mediocre pay, and get slagged off by the armchair experts and rubbish media whatever you do.