Safeguarding children from their parents

Where it seems that the transgender issue had the greatest negative impact is in how it affected the behaviour of professionals. That I think should be the issue of great concern to us all.

Exactly. I haven't read the judgement for a while and don't have time now but, if I recall, the child had been referred to Tavistock and the mother had even stopped co-operating with them as soon as they did not buy into her disordered thinking about the child. So many red flags ignored.

The issue in this case wasn't whether the child was trans or not trans, but Mum's disordered thinking. And Mum wasn't malicious. But Mum had (accidentally?) hit on exactly the right issue to disguise the emotional harm she was doing, because all the professionals could see was - trans or not trans?

Cross posted @nightshade!
The judge is clear that this is about a mother harmfully imposing her beliefs on her child and causing him emotional harm:

I consider that M has caused significant emotional harm to J in her active determination that he should be a girl. I find that she has overborne his will and deprived him of his fundamental right to exercise his autonomy in its most basic way. Whether J chooses to present as a girl or not, ought to be his choice. This is not a case about gender dysphoria, rather it is about a mother who has developed a belief structure which she has imposed upon her child.

Where it seems that the transgender issue had the greatest negative impact is in how it affected the behaviour of professionals. That I think should be the issue of great concern to us all.

Look at training materials that breach safeguarding principles:

Training packs telling teachers that they can keep a child's disclosure confidential
Transgender guidelines undermining a child's right to consent
Guidelines that state that parents shouldn't have information about their child shared with them

The only people protesting about this seems to be feminists. It is breathtaking that this is not being formally challenged.

Organizations like Gendered Intelligence & Mermaids are very good at promoting their approach, running workshops for teachers responsible for safeguarding & child mental health. Teachers & school counsellors, who have the best intentions find it hard not to accept their guidance. I think there is a lot of unrecognized misogyny in middle class society.

@MrsUnderwood
The extracts quoted are from the judgement in the court case about child J - I've linked the full judgement in the second post on the thread. There were no siblings.

The whole judgement is really worth reading as it demonstrates how a parent can undermine the systems that we have put in place to safeguard children. It is often noted in serious case reviews (when a child has died) that a child's welfare can go unnoticed by professionals charged keeping them safe, in the face of aggressive, hostile and obstructive behaviour. In this case the judge is repeatedly clear that too many professionals were reluctant to challenge emotional abuse because the issues of transgenderism almost silenced them applying their professional skills.

When the school and other agencies made a number of safeguarding referrals about possible emotional abuse of J (then aged 4), social services dismissed them all seeing the schools's concerns as a form of religious intolerance!

J was removed from his mother and now lives with his father - because his mother has developed a belief structure which she has imposed on her child. One of the judge's conclusions was:

Transgender equality has received a great deal of attention in recent times. I believe that in this case the profile and sensitivity of the matters raised by the mother blinded a number of professionals from applying their training, skills and, it has to be said, common sense. They failed properly to investigate M's assertions, in part I suspect, because they did not wish to appear to be challenging an emerging orthodoxy in such a high profile issue

It is worth noting that Mermaids mounted a campaign against this judgement.

The initial case seems to have been taken under private law by the father...social services then being ordered by the court to investigate as a result of proceedings...

In some ways the transgender bit is a red herring and is what has obviously thrown the initial response to referrals out...the main points at play were the physical neglect of child lack of schooling lack of pa rental contact adversity from the mother to professionals....these are generally facets of any protection case and with every new social phenomena social workers need to learn to look past to the actual evidence of harm as a result of the care giver..

Whilst I am not justifying the social work response it is unlikely that at the point they would have had solid grounds to go straight for a care order and in reality that the absent parent was en couraged to take protective measures to apply for residence under private law....which in turn resulted in a full investigation and direction from the court to remain involved via care order..this would have been normal practice in my experience as it is an easier process to achieve safeguarding of child under residence arrangements to an absent parent than trying to go directly via care order to local authority...

Very interesting case...thanks for posting..

Don't disagree with you @rowdywomen1 however it will be individual cases not blanket policy is the point I am making...I would imagine there have been other factors at play for the case to have got there in the first place ie the parenting as opposed to the transgender bit per se...if you see what I mean?

@womanformallyknownaswoman

It wasn’t too clear the extracts cited by @rowdy - did the mother involved have other male children (and no daughters)? That might go some way to explaining her completely batshit behaviour- overwhelmingly desire for a little girl.

@TheGoldenBough It’s a combination of factors.

1. Gender stereotyping seems to be a lot worse now than when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, and it starts from before birth. Young children will take in these messages and if they don’t “fit in” with what society says is typical of a boy/ girl they may believe that they aren’t the right gender.

2. When I was a kid in the 1990s, I remember that if someone was labelled “gay” or “lesbian” it was the equivalent to being a disgusting pervert. Then gay people became more visible, stereotypes were being destroyed left, right and centre, and now we’re in a place where gay people are being accepted properly. I think there are a lot of people who have witnessed this quite seismic cultural change and don’t want to be on the “wrong side of history” when it comes to trans children.

3. Lack of critical thinking. People just take the “woman in a man’s body” statement at face value without really interrogating what that means.

4. Most parents just want their children to be happy, and if they think that their child is at risk of suicide because they aren’t supportive enough of their transition (which is what they are being told by transactivists) then they’ll probably go along with it because they believe it’s in their child’s best interests. Tavistock give sensible “wait and see” advice but they are far from the loudest voice out there.

The fear that your child might kill themselves and it will be your fault because you didn’t love them unconditionally, for who they are, must be very real. It takes a great deal of courage for a parent to resist the message that transition is the best treatment for gender dysphoria, especially when their children are getting indoctrinated on YouTube and Tumblr.

What is driving parents to want their children to transition? That's what I just don't understand.

Do they believe the gender stereotypes so much that it must be true?

Do they just want their child to be 'special'?

This is like the Satanic Abuse scandal all over again.

And who will be the ones most damaged by it?

The children who are being fed a web of lies; you'll have castrated young men; who having not been allowed to go through puberty, will either have a micro penis and low libido; or if they carry on and want SRS not have enough penile tissue to form a neo-vagina

Young women who will have had Hysterosalpingo-oophorectomy, & bilateral Mastectomy and all the side effects from long term testosterone.

• Potential for increased risk of female hormonal cancers such as breast, ovarian and uterine *Some studies warn of blood clots, strokes and increased risk of heart disease in women taking testosterone.

Not to mention the 'harmless' puberty blockers. Leuprorelin one of the most commonly used ones has horrible side effects even when used in the management of conditions it was developed for.

And they will all be infertile.

This will explode, but it will be to late for some.

nightshade
The judgement linked above in the case of child J established clearly that a child was suffering significant harm as a result of the mother deciding that the child was transgender. The judge evidenced how social services were totally caught up with the adult's views of her child and failed to listen to / observe the child at all (a very common feature of serious case reviews). The judge observed :
Transgender equality has received a great deal of attention in recent times. I believe that in this case the profile and sensitivity of the matters raised by the mother blinded a number of professionals from applying their training, skills and, it has to be said, common sense.
The consequence was that the child was removed from the mother and placed with the father and social services seriously criticised for their behaviour.
The judge was experienced in transgender cases apparently and acknowledged that some children do display signs of gender dysphoria at an early age. But it is the idea that no one may question a parent's diagnosis of transgender in their young child that leaves so many children at risk of harm. There should be no 'off limits' situations with regards to children's safety. I suspect that in some of these cases with young children we may be looking at parents suffering from fabricated illness (Munchasen's syndrome by proxy) but unless teachers, social workers and other professionals are allowed to ask questions, children will remain vulnerable, in these cases to emotional abuse. Again, it is transgender lobby groups who shut down these questions with allegations of transphobia - unheard of in safeguarding terms for any other issues or group of children.

And yes @MrsUnderwood but I'm reassured that the NHS website no longer points to Mermaids at the very least - seems a bit absurd to be promoting an organisation actively working to undermine your guidelines!

Very true @nightshade in fact I don't believe this is social service remit as such (and I'm wary of a creeping removal of parental rights) but there are many more organisations who ought to get involved.

I think it falls to the GMC to remove the licence of practitioners prescribing off label drugs to children below the age of consent when they've never met them. I think the Charity Commission should be able to remove charitable status from organisations who are actively lying about suicide statistics to scare parents into their preferred course of action. I also think that there's general press standards that ought to be respected about being honest about puberty blockers which don't paint them as a happy, time buying choice but serious medication which has significant side effects such as depression and osteoporosis.

I would imagine that any concerns in this area will be raised under private law..ie separating parents and residence contact issues..

Unless social services have evidence to show that a specific child is suffering significant harm at the hands of a parent..particularly in relation to physical sexual emotional or neglect then they will not actively go persuing trans children ...it would be unethical..

I agree, @FeministBadger, unfortunately the availability of information for parents in this situation is overwhelmingly on the side of obtaining puberty-blockers and encouraging social transition in order to prevent the child becoming suicidal.

We know that the Tavistock have a sensible watch and wait approach to children presenting with gender dysphoria - the problem is when parents are encouraged by groups with vested interests to circumvent waiting times by ordering "prescribed" hormones online from quacks who think it's possible to diagnose children as transgender following a 15 minute web chat. Especially as children are being trained via internet chat rooms about the right things to say to be diagnosed.

There needs to be significant clamp down on dodgy online doctors as a first port of call and a long, hard look into organisations that actively teach parents how to get around NHS guidelines.

@womanformallyknownaswoman
@UpstartCrow

Forgive me for barging in but I'm quite interested in the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases in the 1980s and 1990s and Crow is right, there are a lot of parallels.

The SRA cases started off in America. There was not one sole root cause, rather it was a combination of political, social and religions factors, combined with a whole lot of quackery around a now debunked theory of "suppressed memory syndrome".

Everything kicked off when a (quite mentally unwell) woman thought her son was being abused by workers at his nursery, and the child was coerced by his mum, social workers and therapists to "remember" all sorts of horrific and OUTLANDISH stuff about being forced to participate in Satanic rituals which involved sexual abuse, torture and the murder of infants. The people who worked at the child's daycare and others were arrested, and panic set into the community. Soon more and more children were admitting all sorts of horrible things being done to them (after being pressed by their parents that they MUST have seen something, something MUST have happened).

More and more cases started to spring up all over the country and in the UK, too. Strange behaviour and symptoms in young children (which could have be as a result of other, much more mundane factors), were being attributed to a completely unproven and, frankly insane phenomenon.

It took some years before the world came to its senses, but by then the damage was done and hundreds of lives were ruined.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia page. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

There's also a good book on the subject called Satan's Silence which goes into a lot of detail as to the origins of the phenomenon, which I think anyone who is interested in modern theories on transgender children would find illuminating.

We do not have a fantastic interlocking welfare system at all. It’s soley down to individual cases, people, professionals and many many more factors.

To think we have this perfect safeguarding system is a joke!

It’s run by humans and humans nororiously fuck up.

An extremely sensible and shrewd statement from the judge. I think a judge can speak about these matters without the pressures faced by professionals who are lower down the pecking order/ muzzled by their organisations. It’s absolutely VITAL people in positions of power and influence such as judges speak out like this - in well argued, legally consistent ways.

There is also the fact this is largely a middle class problem. In a crisis focused system there is not the resources for a child who is otherwise well cared for.

That's an excellent point.

The satanic abuse allegations back in the late 80s / 1990s (in the UK -
this was a world wide phenomenon) were based on the belief that groups of children in the Orkneys and Rochdale were subject to ritualised satanic abuse - the investigations resulted in children being removed from homes in dawn raids following allegations which subsequently proved to be false. Some children were kept away from their families for many years and two children were told that their birth mother was dead. Lots of professionals were drawn into this with training courses and conferences and subsequently after a major investigation which proved that the allegations were unfounded, significant damages were paid to a number of families.
It was complicated - there certainly was abuse involved in one of the Orkney families but as a result of an over zealous approach which failed to hold the needs of individual children at the centre, children were dealt with in a shocking way by the professionals charged with protecting them. This article gives an insight into some of the issues.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/oct/21/comment.children