Constance Marten case — I feel the police have some responsibility too

Err... seriously??

Pro adoption lobby?? What the fuck is that? Forced adoption only happens if all all other avenues to protect vulnerable children have been exhausted.
Now, in Scotland they are putting "scaffolding" around families to try and keep shitty, dysfunctional and selfish parents with their poor children.
I find that way more disturbing than "forced adoption"

The like of @Siff seem unable to grasp is that some people, whatever help and support they are given, are unable and/or unwilling to prioritise the needs of their children over their own wants and wishes. Sometimes there is a sad backstory of having a dreadful upbringing themselves that makes it more explicable, sometimes there are MH issues, sometimes there is nothing that adequately explains it. This case is an extreme and tragic example of course but the case files of every child protection team bear terrible witness to the fact that not everyone who produces a child can parent adequately and it is always the children who suffer. They are not possessions, they are autonomous human beings and their wellbeing comes before the feelings of their parents.

At least the 4 who were removed are still alive, unlike that poor baby.

Of course the pro adoption lobby will claim it isn’t the default option, and those against forced adoption will state that it is.
The truth is betwixt and between the two dogmatic beliefs on either side I suspect.

@kidscanwatchcbeebies its not a matter to being for or against adoption. Legally you can’t remove a child without showing clear evidence that there is no other way to provide safe care. That means you need to clearly evidence the risk to the child along with all the measures that have been taken to offer support and how these supports have failed.

The child is then taken into care and efforts are made to support the parent and improve their parenting capacity. The vast majority of children taken into care are returned to their parents.

For a permanence decision, eg adoption or permanent foster care, you need to evidence that efforts to improve parenting capacity have failed and that the parents are unlikely to be able to care safely in the foreseeable future.

So regardless of whether I’m pro adoption or not, I have to have a huge swathe of evidence from multiple sources to argue a child should be freed for adoption. It’s not a quick process or something done on a whim.

Can you explain whatcyou mean in thr first paragraph?

Well indeed, yes.

But in cases where she’s wanting to put them first but barriers are in the way, or she is putting them first but is not believed and the overriding opinion is that she will return to an abusive partner then those cases perhaps need another look.

Why wouldn’t I be OK?

There are certainly people/groups who seem to blindly opine against adoption irrespective of the specific facts of a case.

There also seem to be those who are doggedly 'pro' adopters and adoption regardless of the facts of a specific case.

Both positions are dogmatic and less than logical.

If the mother can't or doesn't want to leave then what other option do they have? Someone has to put the needs of the children first. If the mother can't or won't do it then authorities have to.

@Pancakesandcream33
Apart from the falling from a window and her partners criminal history I haven't read one thing that indicated her children should be removed
they sound good enough reasons to me!

We do - it's in the court papers. Repeated patterns of dangerous neglect, baby in utero being at risk when he pushed her out of a window (happened on the balance of probabilities according to a judge) and they couldn't be bothered to turn up for pre arranged contact arrangements .

Dangerous, neglectful parents who killed their 5th child because of their neglect for her welfare.

The whole thing is very tragic. We will never really know what happened. It's not worth us having an inquest about it. All I hope is that Constance now gets some care and attention which she sorely needs. Somehow I feel she will not receive that. A poor little rich girl story if ever there was one.

The priority was and had to be a vulnerable baby. End off

Save your misplaced sympathy for the children (living and dead) who had no choice to what happened to them . Both these horrible people should be sterilised to ensure they can never bring another child into the world.

I think you can seek to understand why these tragic events happen while utterly condemning the actions of the people involved. Life is complex.

It was handled the way it was because they knew the baby's life was in danger and making it high profile was the likely quickest way to find them. Unfortunately they didn't find them quickly enough.
To leave your dead baby in a shopping bag, with rubbish, says it all about this pair. I hope they both get a hefty sentence.

Pro adoption lobby? Are you ok??

For those who seem to think her family hold some responsibility because they were unhappy about her relationship with Gordon: how would you feel about your daughter having children with a violent rapist who’d already had a 40 year prison sentence for breaking into a woman’s house, threatening her with a knife and garden shears and raping her for several hours?

Are you ok? Do you think she's a helpless child or something? She willingly and knowingly neglected 5 children, one of them to her death. She's an intelligent, entitled, delusional woman who was an active participant in all the actions that led to the neglect of 5 children and criminal manslaughter of a little baby. She's not a helpless victim. I really despise this narrative. It infantilises women and abdicates them of responsibility for their lives and choices.

I have commented on this before but on mumsnet there is a view that being in a relationship with a violent man means women's choices are never her own and she is incapable of making informed decisions about her life. This is simply nonsense. There are women who actively choose to remain with dangerous men because they want to. They subject children to egregious abuse and harm because they prioritise the man and they do this knowingly. As a social worker I've met some incredibly dangerous and abusive mothers who have ALSO been in abusive relationships but they are absolutely dangerous in their own rights. They tend to attach to similarly dysfunctional men and then have children within those dysfunctional relationships. Such women are rare I will grant you but they exist. The narrative of coerced, abused, confused victim is flawed in a small minority of cases and this is one of them.

You have beaten me to it. It's not immediately obvious, but when you read how they behaved with one another in court - the level of compulsive obsession with and co-dependency on each other - it's exactly the kind of psychological pairing that's reminiscent of Fred and Rose, or Ian and Myra. She was never, ever, going to end her relationship with Gordon, because it's what she wanted, above all else. It was a mutually destructive dynamic and the poor children were really just innocent bystanders in their love affair - however warped it actually was (and you don't get much worse than a man throwing his pregnant wife out of an upstair window and then refusing to call for an ambulance or let paramedics in to treat her).

I mean, who the fuck yawns and sighs throughout a court case involving the death of their own child, however it happened?!

We don't know why there other children were taking into care...

If she was someone like Karen Matthews there would be almost no tying in knots to justify her behaviour.

Don't be too sure.
I've seen people on here defending both Rose West and Myra Handley in the past.

I've little to no sympathy for her, she had so many opportunities to leave that man, so many options and given so many chances.

Her poor children and what they did with baby Victoria and her remains makes me want to cry.

I think this couple were deeply enmeshed, so strongly and dysfunctionally bonded to each other that the baby was a mere object to them both.
It has the feel of a very disturbing and ghastly kind of 'folie à deux'.

No, this is not how it works at all. What happens in family court is private and confidential and there are laws to protect that information (the press cannot sit in on these court hearings) and whilst this is very much to protect the children that those proceedings may be in relation to, it causes rumour and misinformation/ misunderstanding.

The Court and social services do everything in their power to ensure that children remain within their family unit (subject to safeguarding/ potential harm etc). In many cases, parents simply lack the self-awareness and insight to really comprehend how their actions may have caused their child(ren) to need to be housed safely with someone else. It’s not really about “fault”. It may be that they have severe mental health issues that prevent them from being able to safely care for their child. Whatever the reason, it isn’t because there’s a posh auntie or uncle that can pay for branded clothes or take them to Barbados. That parent, with a lack of insight, is going to cling onto whatever reason (excuse) they feel justifies their anger towards the Judge/ lawyers/ social services that took their child away from them and what they feel might gather some sympathy for whoever they share their story with. You cannot simply remove a parent's parental responsibility - the cases need to be fairly extreme to warrant this.

In this case, the public will not be privy to all the details in the same way that the court/ lawyers/ police are, and that is for very good reason. A balance has to be struck and sometimes, having information out in the public sphere does more harm than good (in my opinion). People cannot help but speculate. I have seen comments that seem to suggest there was no good reason for their children’s removal. There are safeguards in place to prevent information about vulnerable children being known to the wider public so you’ll never have all the facts to have an informed opinion however, if you understood the legal parameters surrounding the removal of a child, put together with the limited facts we have on the events that have since unfolded, it seems to me that on balance, the removal of those children was justified and necessary to prevent harm.

Does anyone know if they were imprisoned after the first trial? It says on the reporting that they sabotaged the second trial by not turning up, but I would have thought they would have been sentenced after the first trial and brought to the second by custody officers?