To wonder why so many people think social services steal babies

[Abbinob]

Recently the local police posted on fb about a young woman who had gone missing with her baby. The baby was in care when she's went missing with him.
Cue a hundred posts of how social services and their secret courts and forced adoptions and 'bonuses' for adoptions etc are to blame and that she had no choice etc.

no DNA was carried out -

I highlighted many aspects to SS to explain why I had PND psychosis eg he insisted his mum was in the delivery room when dd was born;

He was on record as to having committed GBH.

It shouldn't be what is "fair on dad" it should be what is in the child's best interests - her aunt/uncle GP's could've provided a stable environment where my interaction was phased back in - instead they put her with her dad who moved her 7 times in 6 weeks - no stability at all.

birds my case was settled in 2 hearings - the sheriff's words were "what have SS been doing?"

In my case the judge said that the only justification he could see for it being brought before him was that somebody at social services took being disagreed with very personally.

I think they have a really, really difficult job.

Like most things, humans are fallible so some mistakes might be made, but I imagine these would be picked up long before removal as there are many more stages to get through (manager, panels, court?).

Some SWs will be malicious, just like there are malicious doctors, nurses, teachers, police, bankers etc etc. But again, hopefully these wouldn't get to the removal stage.

I also think that there are so many people who have had their DC removed who are either ashamed, in denial or even so disturbed that they truly believe they did nothing wrong.

You even see it here on Mumsnet, women who neglect their children by insisting they won't split up with a man who abuses the DC. They don't think it's a big deal. It's not hard to imagine that in even more extreme cases of abuse that the same denial would occur.

I have personally known two seperate women involved in seperateddaily mail stories where social services were completely villainised as being child stealers. The first woman lost her child from her care After passing out drunk and the child dell out a second floor window. The other was a mother who refused to leave her violent partner and were both involved in a gang who beat a homeless man to death... Yet neither can see anything wrong with their actions.

My nutter of a mil made a claim to social services about my dd, it was obvious it was malicious and social services didnt even give it the time of day of a ohone call to us...

He also said he found them to be disingenuous.

It is the miscarriages of justice that understandably terrify people.

It happened to Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter three years ago. They took their 6-week old baby to hospital and the baby was taken into care and adopted. Even though last year they were completely exonerated they will never see their baby again.

The QCs involved in the defence wrote:
How many other deaths and miscarriages of justice must take place before action is taken; and what of the savage legal aid cuts, rushed adoptions and restrictions on expert funding in the family courts leading to such skewed evidence being the only evidence presented to the family courts.

MrsDe its all about budgets!

My boys are very likely to end up in residential schools as i wont be able to care for them at the level i am, for much longer.
If i had a break occasionally, it would make a massive difference!

Bird because society as a whole is incredibly hostile towards people actively refusing to add fathers to BC's alongside the fact that unless it's something often far more serious than the mother thinks it's incredibly easy to get a fathers name added to a BC.
All it takes is a legal approved DNA test and a declaration that's if you can't be arsed to go to court and if you do whilst it may not always be quite a slam dunk in most cases it is.

You may not remember but we have spoken about fathers on BC's several times and I am a huge fan of leaving crappy fathers off but it does not change the fact that it is a very easy legal thing to rectify if you do.

I can't remember who posted this bit it costs ££££££ to issue care proceedings and half the time you don't achieve removal, hence the children who are 'left by ss' in shit situations

But you cannot use the fact that a case does not meet the legal criteria at the same time as saying it is not SW who do it,it's the courts who do it. If a case does not meet the required criteria then it does not. This is the courts doing their job if the child is being left in a situation that warrants removal but the courts do not agree then you have not done your job.

We had Ss involved breifly last yr after an incident and the poliice reported I too Ss they came round checked the house which was uncarpeted and undecorated as we had only been there a couple of weeks , checked we had food in the fridge freezer etc, checked the bedrooms and washing facilities that the kids had access to toothbrushes and toothpaste checked the schools had no concerns ds2 goes to a special school and spoke with ds1 ds2 is non verbal bit humiliating but that was it no further involvement and really all the things they checked where the very basic things children should have .

I'm not disagreeing with that needs, I'm saying the checks and balances are there are also pointzing out that when children are 'left' by ss they often don't have a choice.
Courts make wrong decisions too.

SS don't stay involved with a family unless there are real concerns - they have too many other families to support to stay involved and take action unless it is really necessary! The problem is that obviously people don't want to admit they are terrible parents, so they will say that SS are harassing them needlessly. And before a child is actually removed from parent/s things need to be pretty horrific - but again, nobody is going to admit to that so SS are demonised.

vince I have never heard social services criticised about leaving a child in horrendous situations when they have actually taken court action.

That's usually when they have had referals or opourtunities to sort things and haven't responded or have responded but not seen what everybody else has.

OP I think the answer to your question is pretty obvious: most people fear not ever seeing their child again, anyone could refer you to SS maliciously, and there have been many high profile abuse of power cases by SS.

I personally think it's wrong that parents who are exonerated should never be able to see their child again. I don't think that is necessarily the best thing for a child, to grow up believing that their parents hurt or abused them when it wasn't true.

Also from the little I see in the news, SS don't always cover themselves in glory. A few months back that headline broke about how many newborn babies were removed at birth in the UK, and the Today programme interviewed a very senior SS manager, she was national head of something or other.

The interviewer made the point that many of these babies are being removed from the same mum, ie the same mum having baby after baby taken. She asked if any thought was given to the mental state of these mums. The SS manager, who had been interviewing quite confidently till then, paused and sounded taken aback and said "well, we assume there's a natural recovery time for the mum..."

It just made me feel sick. I turned off thr news thinking that woman shouldn't be in charge of anything to do with vulnerable women.

And yes I KNOW it is not all about the parents, but as someone raised in a home that many on here would consider abusive, I still think parent-child bonds and love count for a huge amount.

I am a Social Worker, and I work in an assessment team in Children's Services. This means I take cases that have been triaged through the front door (called the MASH in ours and other local authorities) and have been deemed to require further investigation. This is beside the many many cases that require immediate investigation because a child has made a statement that could indicate that he or she has sustained a nonaccidental injury or a level of chastisement that is not acceptable.

I have recently held a caseload of 43 children, and at that time 5 of them (children of 3 families) were heading for Child Protection Conferences. When the decision is made that a case needs to go to such a Conference, we have 15 working days to get our case together, write the specialist report that is required, submit the invitation list (makes it sound like a party) to the venue, book the venue, and inform the world and his wife who might want to attend, arrange advocacy for the child or children. These are all legal requirements (rightly so), and take up much of our time, and in this case involved 3 families. Who, in the meantime, was working the cases of the other 38 children?

We do not take children away because we feel like it that day or because a random person has told us x, y, or z did such and such and we blindly believe them. We cannot actually remove children - the Police can make children the subjects of Police Protection Orders if they are deemed to be at risk of immediate harm (a case I can think of recently was when a 3 year old ended up in paediatric intensive care after drinking his mother's methadone because she had chosen to hide it in his sippy cup), or we can apply to the Court for an Interim Care Order which has to be approved by a judge, in order for us to remove a child.

But hey, let's not ever let the legal facts about what CS can or can't do get in the way of a good CS bashing thread.

cats it sounds like you would need a minimum of four other case workers before everyone would get seen to?
Which is why the system fails

I watched a documentary, BBC or itv, in which they looked at cases of forced adoption that had initially been secret, and the numbers of other instances that it had happened in recent months. They also spoke to parents who had come close to losing their children. I now know exactly why people may be (occasionally quite rightly) concerned that children are sometimes taken into care/ adopted unnecessarily .

I've also fostered and the combination of overwork/bureaucracy in social services that it is quite beyond them to make an appropriate decision sensitively. They had a genius for getting the wrong end of the stick and placing the child's emotional welfare at the end of a very long queue.

On this type of thread there always seem to be posters who say "I'm a social worker and have never a child taken into care unnecessarily ". All well and good, but it definitely happens sometimes and there is unjustified gagging of the press about it.

Cats I take my hat off to you and your colleagues, I really do.

Yes there may well be over zealous and incompetent social workers out there. In my professional life, I've come across some bloody fantasic social workers. The only trouble is, the really good ones don't tend to stay around for too long. Either they get promoted or move into a new team. I've seen the following pattern on a number of occasions... Family struggling with various issues, failing to engage with social worker, new very experienced social worker takes over, family starts engaging and things start turning round, social worker is then swapped again, things start falling back. Vicious cycle.

And to answer the OPs original question, no I don't believe that social workers set out to steal babies. I do believe that there are very good social workers and their departments who intervene quickly. I also think that a parent who has had their dc removed will almost always blame others because taking responsibility themselves is just too painful.

I think that where in the small number of cases it has been prove that there was no just cause to remove a child, then there should be some system to move forward. But what that system could look like, I have no idea.

That's what it must feel like to them.

There will always be mistakes made when humans are involved. There will always be a minority of sad cases where children are removed for physical abuse and then later found to have diseases that cause unexplained broken bones. Sadly, there is usually no repairing the damage that this causes to the family involved. However, people often cling on to these tragic cases as proof that Children's Services are corrupt and always wrong.

I'm on another forum and the demographic is very different to here. As a result, there are a plethora of posts from parents ranting about social workers and expressing concerns about child protection plans and care orders. There is one common theme; rarely do they consider their children's wants and needs beyond "but I'm their mum!". It's all about how the parent feels, their miscarriage of justice, their anger and their losses. That says it all really! When you dig deeper into these posters' history, there is usually a violent partner, police involvement, substance use and other issues involved.

As I've said above, generally speaking I think the forced adoption propaganda is rubbish and I believe that the vast majority of children taken into care desperately needed it.

Nevertheless, I am puzzled by cases I have come across where social services spend an inordinate amount of time on children who blatantly aren't at risk. For instance, there was one where a mother was unhappy about her child's progress at the special school she was placed in, and also put pressure on the school to deal with legitimate health issues that were fully endorsed by the medical profession. School didn't like it and reported her to social services. When she started a tribunal appeal to move her child to another school, that was triumphantly cited by SS as an example of her daring to question the judgment of those who knew better, and they suggested that medics only backed her up because she told them to. Then the original school's records came out showing that, on their own assessments, the child had made zero progress in four years under their tender care. The tribunal duly found in the mother's favour, and the new school reported absolutely no concerns about her parenting and had no problem accommodating the health issues. SS still took an awfully long time to sign the child off, and were bleating for months about getting the mother to sign some stupid parenting contract. If they're as busy as they claim - and I have no doubt they are - it's difficult to interpret their actions in a case like that as anything other than targeting an easy victim and trying to protect the SEN department's backs.

I had SS involvement when I had severe PND. The SW was a total bitch who made me feel like killing myself everytime she came round. There was no help offered, just go to the GP and get pills. Eventually they took her away and luckily she went to family for a while, there was talk of forced adoption.

I jumped through every bloody hoop to get her back again and they made it very hard. Sometimes I wonder how I summoned the strength.

Then they came around again after some busybody saw a bruise on DD and naturally the assumption was that I must have done it. They werent involved very long, second time.

Third time, after my sister reported me maliciously, they never bothered to come round. School had no concerns and that was that. I dont think I'll ever be truly off their radar though.

DD is very wary about women strangers, even though she was only 2 when she was taken away, I believe it left some lasting effect on her.

I still after all this time nearly have a panic attack whenever someone knocks on my front door, I dont think that'll ever go.

It is really difficult. I was a close family member to someone whose baby was forcibly adopted because she was a single parent with mental health difficulties. I know the road ahead would have been tough for both parent and child, but the mother was never allowed to try. Mother and baby went straight from giving birth in hospital into a mother and baby unit, and baby was removed from there to foster care. The court case hinged on the fact that a forensic psychiatrist spent 3 hours with her and decided that her MH history was so bad, it was inevitable that relapses would occur. However, what we felt was not taken into account was the fact that she had made huge positive lifestyle changes prior to the pregnancy that had resulted in a massive difference to her mental health, and she had a loving and supportive family 5 minutes up the road who were prepared to be very involved and take the child into their own home as and when needed. She was never given the chance to try and parent with the support we were prepared to provide, and provide long term.

This was over a year ago and although she has been heartbroken at the loss of her child she has not had any MH episodes at all, to the extent that she has been discharged from ongoing support.

It makes me really mad that a decision was made for her and her child based on probability and statistics. We spoke up for her and documented the amount of support we would provide to the court and they still felt we couldn't try.

I also feel that (based on a conversation with her social worker) they tried to get the child adopted as soon as possible because babies were easier to place than older children.

There was definitely a financial element involved in the decision making process. Her own consultant psychiatrist felt that she should have been given the option of being observed in a specialist unit, but social services wouldn't pay for it and the judge decided it wasn't a good use of money. I understand that there is a limited pot of funds, but I felt they wrote her off as it was the easier option. The CAFCAS guardian was very kind, but just wanted a clean decision; either that we would take the child or that they would be adopted. I understand that they believed they were acting in the best interests of the child, but their conditions were impossible to meet for us (mother would only be allowed to see the child twice a month, but we were also mother's carers).

There was no abuse or neglect at any time. All the reports from the mother and baby unit showed her to be a good mother, attentive to her baby's needs. The issue was all about the future possibilities. They admitted if she had a partner she would have been allowed to try.

I feel it was a draconian system for her. The individual social workers we came across were lovely and sympathetic, but totally overstretched and underfunded to be able to provide ongoing support.

Many people imagine that those that abuse/ neglect children must be monsters who don't love their children. In a small minority this is true (often the big headline cases of a child death after horrific abuse). The sad fact is the majority do love their children but are for whatever reason incapable (drug addiction being a major culprit) of taking adequate care of them. If you feel in your heart you love your children it is very hard to accept that you are causing them harm. These people can give very credible sounding testimony to a media who is all too willing to demonise social workers. This is exacerbated by social services being unable to counter claims made in the media due to confidentiality.

I don't doubt there are some social workers who are either bad at their job or down right malicious but they are firmly in the minority. Sadly a perfect system is almost impossible. I think children being left too long in terrible situations is far more common than injustice the other way.

You must live local to me OP. I was so shocked at the comments from people telling her to 'run and don't come back' - I'm so glad the wee boy is safe and I hope the mum can get help :(