Social services acting unlawfully

[Mumursoold]

Hi , Moved here 8 years ago fleeing a stacking violent alcoholic rapist father. Both children are diagnosed with Dyspraxia and hyper sensory. The local authority wouldn’t accept their diagnosis reports. My son became suicidal and my other son was severely bullied. So I took them both out of school. So the head teacher wrote a nasty letter to social services and we were targeted and had our lives turned upside down. They took me to court twice but it didn’t meet the criteria for removal of my children. So they then spent 2 and half years , making our lives an absolute living hell. They told the violent father where we live and gave him one of their solicitors and treated him like a king. Gave him a positive parenting assessment and they gave me a negative parenting assessment. Social services use narcissistic abuse to provoke a reaction out of you. They use silence to make you feel uneasy. I was very aware they were recording me in my home. We were terrified of them. This is abuse. They absolutely hated me and made me suffer for 2 and a half years. They said my children aren’t disabled even thou they both told them they are. They said, it was me putting ideas into their heads. They took me to court for fabrication of illness and I was completely taken apart and made to look like a peadophile and a child murderer. They are corrupt. They actually wanted to take my children away. They won with their own biased judge. Interestingly they took me to court in a different area. 1 and a half journey out of this area. So they have my 13 year old innocent vulnerable child isolated from the people that love him. I haven’t seen him for 6 weeks and they don’t like him seeing his 17 year old brother because he’s a bad influence on him. They have been showing my children photographs and letters and trying to make them watch videos of their father. Both boys witnessed the father hit me in the face in the supermarket. I suffered 9 years of abuse from the father and his brother and sister. My children witnessed horrific violence during contact at the grandparents house.Their is police log to back this up. But the authority choose to not listen and ignore the evidence. My boy’s are being forced against their will. My children are absolutely terrified. Both children are going to have mental health issues for the rest of their lives. This authority only knows how to punish people and they do that very well. There is no care here. Your expected to drag your children to school kicking and screaming. Interestingly they don’t have any screening here for the children. They absolutely hate disabilities. Which is very cruel. I’ve been told that I will have to go back there to see my children. I won’t be able to see my children ever again. I will end up dead. This is beyond cruel. I’m also diagnosed with PTSD. We have been treated with total disregard. This is malicious punishment. I’m totally isolated and on my own. I’m really frightened for my son , he can’t defend himself. They said in court that he is easy. My very tearful and emotional. I don't know what to do or who to talk to for fear of this authority. Has anyone else experienced this before..? I could do with some support.

I'm.not saying that all social workers are good - there are some who are incompetent - but the idea that there is a huge conspiracy to deliberately remove children unnecessarily is wrong.

There are no quotas to remove children. That just doesn't happen.

No school arranges for a child to be places in care for 24 hours in order to claim Pupil Premium. It's not possible for a school to have a child placed into care. Schools do make referrals to SS if they are concerned about a child. They don't fabricate concerns for financial gain.

Some of the conspiracy theories on here are ridiculous

It was the SW needing an explanation. Just what we needed. Not!
She’s a very young girl with no emotions. She has a real sharp edge about her with this glazed over look.

Youre saying a social worker turned up at your house at 5.10 in the morning? I call bullshit on that. Social work teams have skeleton staffing out of hours, a duty team that is very thinly spread - if they had concerns at that time in the morning they’d send the police because if the social worker leaves the office there’s no one else to take other emergency calls.

Besides which if social work had concerns at 5.10am sufficient that an immediate visit was needed they’d have the police remove the child under emergency powers. What you describe, if true, is something that could absolutely wait until office hours for someone in the duty team to attend to.

Sorry I realise you said 5.10pm, but the same applies, social work aren’t going to come at 5.00pm to do a parenting assessment for two hours - besides which a parenting assessment takes place over a number of pre-arranged visits it’s not a “one and done” process.

Exactly! Yes! I had many 2 hour parenting assessments over a 2 and a half year period.
You are quite clearly missing the point.
They were trying to grind me down.
They were having a large laugh at my expense.
We all know the correct way to behave.
It all depends on which area you come from..?
This area is particularly malicious. Families are being seriously harmed.
Change needs to happen and I don’t quite know how to tackle it yet.

Everybody said, what lovely boy’s.
Everybody said , what well mannered and polite boy’s.
We are county people. I don’t even swear.
I’m a morning person, happy everyday.
Friendly, kind and caring . Care is my forte.
It stands out an absolute mile.
It looks like they just want us out of this area. Because of my younger son’s disability. Because they can’t offer him any help in school.
They said, We think this will continue.
The SW manager asked me,” do you think your boy’s are going to change their minds about seeing their father”? After 2 and half years of my boy’s saying that they don’t want to see their father. These are teenage boy’s. Their wishes and feelings were ignored.

Parenting assessments are so hard. They judge so harshly and on things that you wouldn’t even think about it’s designed to identify faults rather than strengths sadly

You are quite clearly missing the point.
They were trying to grind me down.

No I know the point you’re making, the point I’m making is that social work don’t have the capacity to do a home visit at ten past five on a Sunday evening - much less spend 2 hours doing a parenting capacity assessment. They don’t staff out of hours services to do home visits.

I was merely pointing out how inconsiderate and unreasonable they were being. They obviously have a different set of rules here.
My post clearly states 5pm. It was a weekday, not a Sunday. Sorry to disappoint you.

They definitely make everything so difficult. SW calls it challenging. I call it coercive control, mental abuse.
We we’re having conversations about whether my children eat pasta sauce on their pasta…?
How many times have your children been outside over the weekend..? I didn’t realise there was a limit on how long you could stay in your home. This is a real invasion of your privacy.

Your posts are very difficult to follow which means people will question what you're saying. In your first post your son is 17, then he's 16 in the more recent ones so I assume they are events that happened a while ago but you write as though they are happening now.

These are events over a 2 and a half year span.

What are SS rules around significant violence and sexual violence…?

My post clearly states 5pm. It was a weekday, not a Sunday. Sorry to disappoint you.

You’re not disappointing me at all, the way you wrote your post sounded like it was happening now, (ie that you had just been to hospital etc at the time of posting on Sunday afternoon), and that’s what I responded to.

But how true to life are they, really?

The problem with so many of these stories and programmes is that abusive parents can and do come out with sob stories knowing that there is no way that social workers can defend themselves because they can't release confidential information. I would be much more persuaded if the parents in question would announce that they are giving SS free reign to disclose any confidential information that they want so that the full picture can come out.

I can assure you. I am not violent or abuse in anyway. I don’t even swear.
My Boy’s have been raised with respect. Exactly the way I have been raised.
Everybody says how polite and well mannered my boy’s are. There are no health problems. There are no home issues. Everything is above board. Care is my forte.
It was purely about my boy’s disability ( Dyspraxia) which isn’t recognised in this area.
A severe punishment regime here.

The SW came to our home. She said, “ I’m hearing that you don’t know what this is all about.” I said, No!
She said, “ I expect you need an explanation “. I said, “ Yes please “. SW then said , very loudly “Which school “. It made me jump. SW said, again “Which school “. SW smirked and left.
SW phoned me at 9am the next morning and said, exactly the same thing. I said, sorry K, I have to go because I’m later for an appointment. SW frightened the life out of me.
I didn’t deserve that. That was abuse without a doubt.

Boom! There it is ( abusive parents) you get placed in the same category.
SW are wired to that behaviour and you all get labelled as an abusive parent.
They don’t want to recognise a descent family.
They tried for 2 and a half years using all kinds of manipulation.
This is why I need to speak out.
SW treated my eldest son appalling. SW would twist and turn his every word. SW called it challenging..? She was engrossed with that behaviour. She was feeding off his misfortune. It was unbearable for me to watch her doing that to my son. I had to intervene many times and end the visit.
SW has been forced and pushed against her will ,through her schooling years with underlying learning difficulties which haven’t been recognised. That’s how a narcissistic is made.

İ believe you OP. I went to SS for help when my dad was a tiny baby and I left her father in another country and needed help with finding somewhere to live as council wouldn't put me in temporary accomodation. İt was like stepping into a vipers nest. They put my daughter on a protection plan because I had a panic attack when they refused to help us. The whole thing has given me PTSD. When I saw what they wrote about me I thought I must be in a really bad dream. Luckily I had an amazing lawyer and they got SS ripped to shreds in court by the judge, who told them they weren't allowed to keep attacking my character. İt got thrown out after three months and my final social worker, when it got moved to child in need plan, basically admitted to me that there was incompetence in his department and they needed to learn to listen. He was highly experienced and senior and had just come back from setting up child protection systems in Australia. He said I should NEVER have been put on any plan or been through what I'd been through (locked up for three months in an abusive foster home, with a listening device in my room). There are good ones out there and there are awful ones out there, and they do lie to cover their backs. Basically they accused me of having psychosis for coming back to the country without a plan and then panicking when they wouldn't help me. British Embassy had directed me to go to them and called them themselves to forewarn that I was coming and needed assistance with housing until council would class me as settled in the UK again. (I'm British). So I did have a plan. Four psychiatrists were called and all assessed me as fine and just jet lagged and needed a good night sleep and somewhere to stay to feel calm again, and they couldn't accept that they just got it wrong (about psychosis) and started a character assassination. They tried to have me sectioned, so they could take baby off me and even police disagreed and said they wouldn't do that. (I didn't know this at the time until I later read the report). They said I was unkept (I have thick frizzy hair, don't wear make up and like to wear baggy trousers). They said that my history of backpacking prior to being pregnant was a concern for potential harm that I might just up and leave with my child one day. When I was in foster home, they said the fact I needed to stay in my room until 10am after being up all night breastfeeding my baby (I wasn't allowed to go anywhere though and wasn't allowed in the living room), meant I wouldnt ever be able to get her to school on time and was a concern (four years away?). They found out my mum has bipolar and said I was obviously having a bipolar episode myself. They hated me breastfeeding and said I was force feeding my child because she cluster fed constantly and was always experiencing a lot of spit up which couldn't be cured. They said I'd been deported, which I hadn't been. They refused to accept the fact that I had gone to their office under instruction of British consulate and kept saying I'd ended up in their awareness after being deported and was having psychosis, because I got upset when they refused to help me and sent me to the sofa of an alcoholic relative. They hated the fact that I went to the doctors one day wearing tracksuit bottoms and not dressed for an interview. My aunt was sending me some money and the conversation was overheard on the listening device and they wrote that I was sending money to my daughter's father, (who was in jail at that point). They said that me seeing a therapist before I came over to the UK showed I was hiding some sort of psychological condition. You can literally have therapy for anything, mine was becoming pregnant and going through those changes and processing them in a safe place. Even though I gave them contact details of all the organisations I was involved with prior to being involved with SS, who could vouch for my sanity, they didn't want to hear it. Eventually after a few months of being locked up, my lawyer got an independent assessment done by a post partum psychiatrist and he said to me that the person in front of him didn't match the report written to him. He wrote that I was fine and the only thing which confused him was how calm I was for someone who had been suddenly deported and had had all these things happen to her. Again, I had to get the court documents changed to state the fact again that I hadn't been deported, despite having told social services this multiple times. It became hilarious in the end, the things they were still writing about me. One day, after getting out of the foster home and onto child in need plan, the social services health visitor came to see me in my temporary accomodation. She wrote that I was unable to properly care for my dd because I had been at the children's centre at the end of the road and DD did a poo and I had run out of wipes. I had wiped her bum with wet toilet roll and come straight home ( less than five min walk), to find her standing on the steps. So she wouldn't wonder why my DD had poop on her bum, when she weighed her etc, I explained to her that I had been at the end of the road and run out of wipes and needed to clean her up a bit better as there was a couple of bits I couldn't get off in the changing room with wet toilet roll. So because my child had a bit of poo on her bum cheeks inside a clean nappy for five minutes, and I'd come straight home to sort it out, suddenly I was a concern again. She said it was important to always remember extra wipes if you're a proper parent, not that there's always a shop or toilet within five minutes of most places we would go, and these things happen. The same woman told me in a very toddler voice to always remember to wipe the poop off a bum before putting nappy cream on, and she was appointed the professional advocating for my daughter and knew better than me! The wet wipes event ended up being something ss wrote in their report as a concern for me to come off child in need plan. They jump on literally anything! They said I wasn't listening to professionals because I had a UTI one day and the foster woman told me not to breastfeed whilst I had a UTI as baby would catch it(!?) and I ignored her and kept breastfeeding. They wouldn't listen to my own research that babies don't get uti's from breast milk, nor take the time to research that themselves! One time I found headlice on me and DD, as we were around a lot of children there, and got I sorted and the doctor gave me a lotion for myself for the itching on my neck and it said it was for the treatment of nits and scabies. So they wrote on the report that I had contracted scabies in my previous accomodation and they were concerned about the living conditions I had put me and my daughter through. At not one point did they ask me if I had scabies, nor did I tell them I had scabies! They really do just make up whatever they feel like making up, with no substantial evidence. It made me so suspicious that they would find anything they had the slightest evidence for to cover up their own mistake with saying I had a psychiatric disorder and couldn't look after myself.. the police had instructed me to go the hospital when I first arrived back and ss wouldn't help. Then when hospital called ss to advocate, they shouted at me over the phone and asked why I had gone to the hospital? They wrote later that I had turned up there to create drama. No, the police told me to go there, and even wrote a report to back this up in my favour. Police told me SS we're useless and did this all the time. The police officer even had his head in his hands when he tried to call them to get them to help me and they were rude to him and said no, basically, she has to stay on the sofa of her alcoholic uncle's house (who had shouted at me to leave and never invited us there in the first place!). They wrote that I wasn't wanting to take my daughter to baby groups and they were concerned about her socialisation (she was three months old and we were in a foster house with children), when I wasn't even allowed to go out without an escort and the foster carer was too busy with the other kids and going to the gym to take me anywhere. There are so many other incidences I could write about but it's so traumatic still to bring them all up. I do remember a time moving into my new flat at the end of the experience and despite numerous requests by me, the social worker wouldn't apply for my free carpets the day before they closed for Christmas holidays (and wouldn't give me the form for me to do it myself) and I was moving in Jan 4 and we would have ended up with concrete floors covered in tiny bits of broken rubble for a few weeks and my DD was crawling, whilst I waited for them to get back from Xmas hols and the application to be processed. I took it upon myself to use my maternity grant to pay for carpets to be laid the day I moved in, by a carpet layer I knew, and the SS still used this as a chance to write belittling things about my financial choices, because I put my dd's safety first.

Sorry to the essay. I just want it known that these things happen, and all the other professionals I was involved with- police, family court solicitor, mental health team, my final social worker- said it happens ALL the time. Even the judge had to tell them off, said they were attacking my character, and wished me luck.

I hope you can get a really good solicitor and my only advice would be to treat them like you would when leaving an abusive ex, just nod and agree with everything they're saying, so they feel like they're great at their job, and get the facts written down by your solicitor.

*DD, not dad!

Sorry I've read that back and was rambling a lot. It's a lot of trauma to write about properly all at once.
Just to clarify, I went home when I ran out of wipes because I had plenty of wipes at home.

The story was, going to social services first, under the instruction of the British consulate in the country I was in, who had engaged with social services first of all, before advising me to do that. Social services didn't want to help, when I did get there and said they hadn't heard of me. They sent me to my uncles house, who I said was an alcoholic and he didn't want us there. After a few days they never turned up to do an assessment and he had shouted at me to leave, so I went to police station. Police called social services who still wouldn't help me. So police advised me to go to hospital and that hospital would keep us there until social services helped. At hospital they called social services who still wouldn't help and asked to speak to me and shouted at me over the phone. I had a panic attack and asked to speak to a counsellor at hospital. Then the ss turned up and decided I had psychosis and put my DD on protection order, took us to court and put me in the foster home not allowed out, with listening devices for three months. Whilst everything was being sorted out waiting for court date, we were in hospital for a few days and they put various guards at my door and at one point one of them sat next to my bed whilst I slept. Social services would never listen that I had gone there under the instruction of British consulate, having had researched the situation, and was told that SS was the people to help with paying for temporary accomodation, when people came back from abroad because council aren't allowed help for the first three months. They kept creating this narrative that I had had a psychotic episode, left the other country without warning and turned up in the UK with nowhere to go and no plan. The refused to speak to the British Consulate who would clarify my story that I had come to SS under their instruction and their support and assurance of our fate, and that it had all happened after weeks of liaison, planning, getting DD passport etc. You can't just have a psychotic episode and leave a continent with a two month DD without a passport or any money overnight, but common sense wasn't there when they made up this story.

Thanks @tidalway . You validated our experiences so coherently and you really summed it up so well. They really are a bit thick.

It does feel good to share my experience, but also ever since the experience, I've been wary of sharing anything because I know how some people can twist anything to suit their agenda, and I'm always on edge since, waiting for someone to blame me for all the things I experience in life, or call me crazy. For example, my daughter had an accident a couple of weeks ago, and I was too scared to tell anyone what happened because of things being twisted. Actually it was caused by an outside company, whilst on holiday, but I was too triggered by their defensiveness to try and fight for a refund or better treatment by the company.

I think one of the worst things a parent can experience is being caused crazy, or mentally unwell. It undermines everything you think you're capable of.

Would love to talk to you more, as a social services survivor, if you'd have the time to?