to wonder why on earth this child had not been removed from his parents?

[Bogeyface]

Shaun Binfield, 45, and Sally Dent, 33, of Belper, Derbyshire, had both denied the charges and were convicted after a trial at Nottingham Crown Court.

Two-year-old Riley Pettipierre died in March 2012 after drinking Dent's prescription methadone which had been poured into a child's drinking beaker..............................The court was told that police found evidence of heroin and cannabis hidden around the house and scientific tests showed traces of both drugs in strands of Riley's hair.

Ms Coen said it was highly likely Riley had consumed heroin and cocaine in the months leading up to his death.

Quoted from www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-21064982

Why in the name of all that is good was this child still with these parents? He must have been a heroin addict at birth. Drug abuse should surely be a reason to remove the child at birth?

good point. i do think that some people are just very damaged and cant be helped. but the problem is, you cant necessarily tell at the outset that someone should be written off. if you just remove children from anyone who is an addict, you risk doing terrible emotional harm to that child. its about trying to find the balance ofharm. it is really difficult and wrong decisions are made. but i think the alternative - blanket removal - is worse.

spero makes a good point about the emotional damage caused to a child when he/she is removed from their parents, however bad the parents are. They are the devil they know, and the thought of going into care is terrifying for these children. And, despite the best intentions of some wonderful care workers, DH being one of them, a life in care is hard. Generally the care homes are small because of the complex needs of the children and there has to be a high ratio of staff - low paid staff who are willing to be assaulted, spat on, bitten etc on a regular basis. Sometimes, because of lack of places a young child will be place in the nearest available care home, often with older teens showing terrifying levels of violence towards staff and other youngsters. It can be a lonely and frightening place and no matter how hard to try to explain to a youngster that this was the better option, they wont thank you for it. Not initially anyway! The careworkers then become the focus of the child's anger because "you took me away from my mum" and there is a mountain of work to be done to help rebuild that child's trust.
DH currently has an 8 year old who asks him regularly to be his daddy and take him home. DH explains that he cant but T replies "yeah, you just dont want me either. You should have left me with my mum, she loved me!"
She may well have done, but mental health issues and addiction made it unsafe for him to remain with her any longer and now she doesnt want him back ever. T doesnt know this yet. he will probably be in care for the next 8 years and then turned out into the world to do what? Go where? Institutionalised and alone. So, i think my point is, going into care may have saved his life, but believe me it isn't a comfortable rosy option.

I think part of the problem is lack of prirotization within children's services as to which cases they are going to take on, which ones they should start care proceedings for.

For example, Coventry social services were roundly criticized by a judge for wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs chasing a family with very flimsy reasons. I'm sure that at the same time in Coventry there were many children in dire need of quality social work whose needs could have been met if those funds had been properly allocated and someone had advised Coventry that they needed to prioritize their resources.

I have a good friend, ironically herself an experienced barrister who specializes in family public law, who has been forced to leave the country due to children's services. In the country she moved to, it was found that her dd needed therapeutic psychiatric care and is currently in a children's psychiatric hospital and that absolutely the worst thing for this child would have been to have removed her from her mother - yet this was exactly what children's services in the uk wanted to do. The social workers where she is, even after seeing all the material which was sent from the UK, cant believe that social workers in uk were applying to take her dd into care (and they got the order as well in her absence).

My friend was terrified at the idea of her vulnerable child going into foster care with god knows who, she was terrified her dd would commit suicide as she had spoke of it before. Childrens services have wasted thousands in legal costs in her case, doing more harm than good and meaning that chikdren who truly needed their support were going without. If she'd have gone into care, she'd have taken a 'spot' in a foster home from another child or gone to a ridiculously expensive care home when what this child needed was therapeutic psychiatric care.

Hopefully, the social services won't pursue her abroad, other than contacting social services in the country she's in which they have done and which is completely fine of course, but they may petition the courts abroad for the return of the children. That would be a disgraceful use of public funds and she may go to the papers at that point (who have said they are very interested but she hasn't until now to respect her dd's privacy).

There needs to be more accountability in the system rather than just pleading 'damned if you do, damned if you dont'. It's not that simple and when you have courts which look at a balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonab,e doubt, the margin of error becomes much much greater.

I agree with your points about wrong prioritisation and I have seen examples of it. But I make the same point over and over again - any system run by humans is going to fall foul of human problems - personality clashes between parents and social workers for example, so the SW sees everything the parent does with a very prejudiced eye.

Given that SW are drowning under every increasing case loads then the potential to make mistakes or misjudge a situation increases too. I think the real solution for vulnerable children and families is to have more and better help focused at an early stage.

By the time it gets to court it is probably too late for effective interventions and I don't think the problem is the standard of proof. Making everything 'beyond reasonable doubt' is going to add a whole new layer of problems. I know it is what people like Ian Joseph call for but how do they implement this? They think judges are biased and stooges so are they calling for juries in child protection cases?

All well and good but it is going to add enormously to the time and the costs of these proceedings. I would rather money is spent at the earliest stages before a family has been mired in chaos and dysfunction for many years. It is then incredibly difficult to turn it around.

I agree that you can't do beyond reasonable doubt in family court. But if you're going by a balance of probability, the statistically you're simply more likely to be wrong!

My barrister friend said that in many cases she dealt with, things could have been prevented from escalating with more intensive support for parents at an earlier stage.

Btw, I posted about my friend under another nn in legal. I didn't want to give away too many details then as she hadn't yet left but the reason I said she knew what she was talking about legally is because she is an experienced family law barrister who used to practice at a 'magic circle' inns.

She said magistrates nearly always go with social services and that they aren't even legally trained, I was shocked by that! I hadn't realized they aren't lawyers themselves!!

My friends dad was a m gistrate, he qualifications? Ex Bank manager.

They are almost always lay people who are given the job becuase they in good standing

I do see that it isnt practical to take all children of addicts, but I stand by what I said that heroin addiction (any addiction tbh) isnt compatible with parenting as the addiction will, by its very nature, always be the priority. How to solve the problem? I dont know, but it is wrong.

Gambling addiction led to the wife and children of an ex friend of Dh's becoming homeless. He went to prison for theft from his employers and she was evicted from their home as he hadnt paid the mortgage as he was spending all of his money and all of her contribution on his addiction.

He is now doing voluntary work at a charity shop and she is working 3 jobs to keep a roof over her childrens heads in the roughest area in our town :(

Sorry for typos, on my tab and I still cant work out the delete bit! It cuts and pastes instead!

I never knew that about magistrates. It's really scary. I don't think juries are the way to go but I wouldn't want my children's future to be decided by someone whose qualification is ex-bank manager. They should be legally trained judges at the very least.

www.gov.uk/become-magistrate/what-magistrates-do

So basically, it is the very people gossiping about you that make the decisions!

90% pf criminal cases are dealt with by lay magistrates. Again, its the money. Get rid of magistrates and pay judges to deal with all cases? you will need a lot of money.

All magistrates are assisted in court by a legally qualified clerk who advises them on the law. They have pretty extensive training. I don't think it is ideal but you are not being judged by people with no knowledge or experience.

Again, I don't agree that they 'always' go with the LA. But I do try to get cases moved up to the county court because I think generally care cases are too complicated for the mags. Sometimes they have problems organising a hearing for more than 3 days and a lot of the more difficult cases require 5 or more.

Are you sure your friend was a barrister? There is no such thing as a 'magic circle' Inn - there are four Inns of court and it is utterly irrelevant to your practice which Inn you are at. You just have to join one to qualify. What is important is your Chambers.

Yes, I'm sure she was a barrister. What kind of question is that? I probably have the terminology wrong because I googled magic circle once to see what it meant with regard to a solicitor who had said it and saw that her chambers (which is what I meant) is considered 'magic circle'. It's not something she ever said to me.

And, yes, she specialized in family law, especially public. And she got to the point where she wouldn't act for the la anymore, only the parents, who she felt got a raw deal. Ironic then that the la would then start proceedings against her!

I asked the question, because no barrister would say that and I thought it was weird. Fair enough, she didn't say that.

I am surprised that proceedings were started against her, particularly as she knows the system. But obviously you can't go into detail.

I am surprised that proceedings were started against her

Makes you wonder if they were pre-disposed to go against her as she was acting for parents against the LA. As we know, once they get the bit between their teeth, they wont let go. They never let the truth stand in the way of a good child abduction.

sorry op but that is just crap.

I don't understand why you can on the one hand be angry that children aren't being removed, then trot out this nonsense that the child protection system is all about abduction.

make up your mind.

There are lots of people who want to adopt babies. If these babies were removed at birth due to the very high correlation between being an addict and unsatisfactory parenting, then they would all be placed in safe loving homes. In a small number of cases the parents might have been fine, but this madness of keeping kids with addict parents on the off chance they are ok baffles me.

it may baffle you Hermoine, but it doesn't baffle the European Court which is way if we whipped all babies off at birth, the UK would find itself hauled up time and time again for gross infringement of the Article 8 rights of all concerned, and I definitely include the children in that.

yes, lots of people want to adopt babies. nice, middle class, no familiy history of substance abuse, mental illness type babies. people may not be so eager to queue up for these babies as you think.

Spero the irony didnt escape me, I worded it wrongly.

It seems that there are too many cases of innocent parents being hounded at the same time as children like Riley are being left in unsafe and neglectful situations. How is that crap? Its a fact!

people may not be so eager to queue up for these babies as you think.

A hell of a lot more than want to adopt a screwed up 8 year old because his removal was left too late....

yes it is a fact that mistakes are made, often very serious ones.

But just as you don't assume that all GPs are out to murder you after Dr Shipman, nor can you make some throw away comment that all LA's just get the 'bit between their teeth' and just love a bit of abduction.

Part of the reason the system is in such a mess and so many defensive wrong decisions are made is due to the constant barrage of ill informed hysteria about the 'evil' system. Social workers are under immense pressure and over worked. Believe me, they are not looking for children to abduct. They are fire fighting on every level, reacting to emergencies instead of being able to intervene and plan sensibly for children.

op, you may want to live in a society where people's babies are removed at birth because they are a member of a particular group.

I don't. I think that would be a horrible kind of society.

A member of a particular group implies racial or cultural or religious.

Drug addicts are damaging to themselves, to their children and to society. They break the law simply by being possession of the drugs that they are addicted to, many break the law to fund their habits, many deal to fund their habits thus spreading misery further.

I simply do not buy the theory that a child should not be removed from a neglectful (at best) addict parent on the basis that the parent might be ok one day. One day will be too late, the damage is done. I would be interested to see how many of these so called "functioning addicts" there are compared to those who have lost their children either officially or because granny stepped in, or because the addict died.

There simply is not the justification for keeping a child in such circumstances, especially as the only person who suffers is the child, the one person in the whole sorry mess who cant speak for themselves and has no true understanding of what they are suffering. And in time, the cycle repeats because drug use, abuse, neglect, violence and crime are the only thing the child knows. It knows nothing of unselfish love, of kindness or living without fear.

Sorry spero, but I'm afraid that is not true of all social workers. I'm sure there are some excellent ones and I'm also sure that child protection is extremely challenging. But some of them are also wasting their time and precious resources chasing cases which are marginal at best with, seemingly, little accountability for which cases they decide to go ahead with. Look at the coventry case, how many resources were squandered there? Very much an example of 'bit between the teeth' although you're quite right that we shouldnt generalize to all las on the basis of one example (although i suspect there are many more).

And then the system is set up so that you have a layperson, who in criminal cases with a much stricter burden of proof can only give 6 months prison (is that right?) but who can make the decision to make a care order removing a child from his or her family until they are 18 with a much more lax burden of proof - and who rarely goes against what the local authority are proposing. In my opinion, removing a child from his or her family, while not punitive, has far more impact on a family than 6 months imprisonment.

I would never have believed how the system can operate and the power of las until I saw what my friend went through. One social worker wrote that she is manipulative and that is why she is so successful as a barrister, I mean, how inappropriate! When my friend complained, it was dealt with internally and she was told her complaint wasn't justified. And it's quite terrifying what may have happened if my friend would have stayed in the uk. Yet a magistrate quite happily granted an interim care order.

I'm sorry, the system in the uk is not a good system. What happened to my friend shouldnt have happened. I don't think our record on child protection is stellar or even better than in other countries, but we seem to be far quicker to take chikdren away than they are in other countries.

Functioning addicts exist. as do countless Functioning alcoholics, should we take their babies at birth too?