I always roll my eyes when people naively say ‘children aren’t removed for X’. You’d be surprised how social workers - and Cumbria as in the OP’s link, are especially abysmal (remember Poppi Worthington) - can make leap after leap to get to the point where a perfectly good parent is having their child removed.
I’ve posted about this before but when my DD was 5 she made a disclosure about a male family friend. Thinking I was doing the right thing, I reported him to the police. Biggest regret I have. DD for the date of the allegation wrong because he couldn’t be in her presence at that particular time - but she gave a detailed description of what he did to her and children’s memories aren’t infallible. Anyway I thought as a family we’d get support. We didn’t - the police dropped it and meanwhile childrens services hung around looking for bad guys within the family. Including my older SS and DH. They claimed things were relevant, such as I was a victim of sexual assault 3 years before DD was born - parroted on about cycle of abuse. BecauE I didn’t disclose that from the off (why would I, this was about my DD) they said I was a ‘dishonest woman’.
I was distraught about the disclosure, and expressed this to my SW and said I was struggling to sleep and work - she used this against me and said she had concerns about my capacity to cope with the children.
Another ‘concern’ was that we didn’t tell more people in our family - even though my mum, best friend and MIL all knew and were supporting us but I didn’t want anyone else knowing.l and the police themselves told us we could t say anything to anyone.
They can take ANYTHING about you and make it look bad. Before you know it, they have built up a case against you, based on random information that’s irrelevant, and to social services it seems to be about quantity not quality.
Despite the investigation being dropped, they wanted to step up our case because we were ‘hostile’ to SWs (yes I am I was expecting support not accusations), we were ‘dishonest about our past’ (no I just didn’t say I was sexually assaulted in 2009 the second they walked through the door) and ‘refused to engage with family and friends’ (despite the police told us not to, but apparently that’s irrelevant).
They didn’t step it up but only because our solicitor stepped in, at a huge financial cost to us, and challenged their intention to step up.
they’ve backed off now but if my kids go to hospital with a broken bone, or if they say something odd in school, it could well be flagged up and SS are there once again popping up and building a case against us. If either of them are sexually assaulted in their teens or something, it starts again.
Rest assured, it doesn’t take as much as you think to remove a child and it could happen to you even if someone outside your family harms your child.