Are social services really stealing children?

[user1491583343]

Hi all,

I just seen a terrible documentary in Portugal where some parents living in the UK where asking the government to help them with their children, which were taken away by social services unfairly.

I know some of this documentaries can be only one sided but really made me wonder as they seem pretty terrified and genuine... I am also pregnant so this was really distressing to see. Some of the cases there in my opinion shouldn't lead to the kids been taken into fostering or adoption - they were too extreme and cruel.

To give one example a mum there, had her 2nd baby and noticed something wasn't okay as the new born baby seemed to shake every now and than... She took the baby to Hospital a few times (she showed all the letters and videos of the baby "shaking"). Apparently different doctors told her that was "hiccups" she was always sent home. 5 days latter her baby dies and social services take away her 3 year old as doctors believe she had "shaken the baby until he passed away" - even though the case was still under investigation the 3 year was given for adoption (not fostering), even though she had her grandparents living also in the UK with all the conditions to get custody of the child.

It's super scary but basically more medical exames have showed latter that the baby could have died due to epilepsy as their was no signs of agression, abuse etc... but as the child was placed into adoption this was already too late.

I am sure some details are missing but seemed so cruel that I decided to ask for opinions and see if anyone here has had any experiences.

The documentary also showed the pressure SS get to meet their targets and how it's not the first time that they are accused of lying etc...

Some parents in the documentary have showed concerns on seeking help from professionals due to this extreme procedures - for example another case their was a woman who got post-natal depression. She got her baby taken away after going to GP to discuss this matter, because the GP reported her to SS who have assumed she wouldn't have the ability to look after a child. We all know that woman can get depression but what is creating the problem is the fact that close family don't even get offered to foster. Children are given away and in most cases ends in adoption.

Would love to hear experiences and your thoughts on this.

Adoption doesn't make anyone any money. So what if there are thousands of adopters waiting for babies - there is still no incentive to provide them with babies. Adoption costs the state lots of money and makes them nothing.

I've been horrendously let down by social services in my childhood and I'm incredibly angry at social services in one area of the country particularly

I've worked in a role that requires contact regularly with social workers and definitely know some excellent ones and some who I just wish would get a clue as they're clearly in the wrong job and fucking up lives with their stupidity

However as an adult I have also been personally supported by them after having a daft assessment one who plain out lied to cover her back rather than simply stick to facts, she embellished her assessment like a tabloid paper and was very new on the job. Thankfully the one who actually took on the case had a lot more common sense in a different area of the country and could not praise them more highly. I do however attribute this strongly to the fact I was willing to work with them and ensured I was always polite and engaging despite the bullshit that had been written by the first woman

I'm an adopter, and don't believe what I'm about to say happens on a large scale, but I'm reminded of the social worker in 'The Queen and I', who comments on the children being better where there are 'whole shelves of Ladybird books' rather than on the council estate with their parents.

If I were minded to believe in conspiracies, then the 'gain' from adoption would be for society, if children where taken from 'the underclass' to be given to 'worthy' 'middle class' families. Not dissimilar to the awful things that happened in Canada and Australia, to wipe out cultures. I don't believe this happens, but for those who wish to believe in 'stolen children' being given to 'childless middle class couples', which of course not all adopters are at all! For those who buy into this myth, I can sort of see how they form that idea.

Gallavich and user, you asked what the incentive was, you didn't specify financial incentive. Wasn't there a government minister a few years ago who said he wanted to make sure there were more adoptions and they were done more quickly?

Like I said, I'm not disbelieving anything you say about how the process works, just explaining what people might think the incentive is.

"Adoption costs the state lots of money and makes them nothing."

But once the child is adopted the adoptive parents are financially liable for the child, which is not the case for fostering or children's homes.

"If I were minded to believe in conspiracies, then the 'gain' from adoption would be for society, if children where taken from 'the underclass' to be given to 'worthy' 'middle class' families. "

Things like Sure Start/Flying Start childcare aimed at poor families are a more benign version of this - the belief that toddlers are disadvantaged by being in a house with uneducated parents.

Our current government are very pro adoption, and have shut down Surestart. That's less to do with austerity/finances, and everything to do with ideology.

The ideology is out there. I think these conversations are important to have, but unpalatable.

If children are adopted out of the cycle of poverty/abuse, that is a way to break the cycle. The other way to break the cycle is to invest in education and support. I would like to think no one is looking at the big picture, and that's why we're, as a society, moving towards the first option rather than the second, but sometimes I do wonder if those in charge view this a societal engineering.

My take on this is that foreigners land themselves in hot water over complete ignorance and dismissal of what is acceptable in Britain and what is not, re. safeguarding children.
E.g. you cannot leave your baby in a pram outside a supermarket while you shop. Or all sorts of domestic violence. Maybe that is 'normal' wherever they came from, but here its simply criminal.

Also language barriers don't help.

They are damned if they do damned if they don't. If they don't act fast they are vilified in papers and blamed. If they do act fast they are "child snatchers". I have worked with many SWs and from what I have seen they do their best to let the child stay with their families, often plenty of chances to make changes are given unless the child is at immediate risk of significant harm.

Give them a break for gods sake they have gone into this profession usually (I'd imagine) for the right reasons but have limited resources, massive work loads and shit loads of stress. Of course you might get an ass social worker just like might get an ass doctor, nurse, teacher etc but damning the entire profession is ridiculous .

Where do the foreigners come in, Railgunner?

I agree saul I was accused of causing a 1mm bruise.(not sure how) I was racking my brain trying to think of everything, even thinking it could have been caused during her birth, it was below her third rib on her right hand side, one doctor actually had a go at the other people in the meeting, to determine whether she went on the protection list (she did, for 3 months) asking them to think of anyway I could cause this tiny pin point bruise whilst not breaking any skin, no one could answer yet all of them except our male social worker and the male doctor voted to put her on (they were all women who voted us on the list). Turns out it was a dilated vein which she still has at three years old and it hasn't grown.. they didn't find that out until causing her so much pain which every scan, extra and blood test they could think of that I couldn't refuse. They also told me (by asking when did I drop or hit her head) that she had bleeding between her skull and skin, thankfully the second opinion came back that there was no bleeding at all, I constantly felt like they were trying to trip me up. Me, my partner and our baby now two weeks old had to live with my mum for two weeks for, I kid you not, adult supervision. I've never been able to parent properly ever since and I'm constantly scared they are going to take her, I get pregnant with my second and the midwife reports me and cue another investigation. Once you've had social workers, anyone that asked professionally has to be told yes I have had social workers. It's humiliating.

Where do the foreigners come in, Railgunner?

Just heard many stories of immigrants getting into similar sort of trouble, and they genuinely don't get why they were wrong, it must be the British snatching blond, blue-eyed, very talented European children to sell for adoption, especially to gay (!) couples.
I'm not British myself. I also read foreign press, watch youtube, and lurk in chatrooms.

railgunner that's simply not the case.
The vast majority of families we work with are British, because the vast majority of residents of the UK are British.

Gwen
Of course it's cheaper in the long run for children to be adopted rather than fostered. That doesn't explain why social services would engineer removal of babies for the purposes of adoption unnecessarily though does it?
Adoption and SGO are preferred for children already in the care system who have been permanently removed for various reasons, one of which is certainly cost. There would still be no purpose in removing children unnecessarily in order for them to be adopted.

railgunner
There has been a rise in children from 'foreign' backgrounds being taken into care.
This is because there are now more of those particular backgrounds in the country than before.
And it is certainly NOT because they might leave a baby in a pram outside a shop.
I have worked with families who refuse to accept that hitting a child with a lump of wood is unacceptable or that regular attendance at school is important and that 13 year olds shouldn't get married.

It is very difficult for them to understand this stuff because they are still living within a very closed off community where this behaviour is normal. They are marginalised and oppressed wherever they go and do not trust anyone. This means that they will not engage and will obstruct, lie and generally bugger about without realising that this will just lead to more trouble.
BUT (and this is important) in many other countries they wouldn't get the chance to improve their parenting. Their children would be removed for being 'abnormal' or 'sub educational' and stuck into orphanages.

I think the majority of the time SS removes children for their own good or sadly cannot remove them. There are exceptions though when bad practice has led to bad results or worry for patent.

The majority though is poor parenting, something that will never be admitted. Soneone I know through fb and a friend is constantly banging on about SS being after her kids and from those who don't know her she's an innocent victim being bullied. She'd rather show that then admit her husband is an abusive bully and she keeps taking him back despite him hurting the kids.

"Adoption and SGO are preferred for children already in the care system who have been permanently removed for various reasons"

Adoptive parents generally want babies or toddlers though don't they?

Adoptive parents generally want babies or toddlers though don't they?

So do birth parents. So do most parents. Your point?

Gwen "Adoption costs the state lots of money and makes them nothing."

But once the child is adopted the adoptive parents are financially liable for the child, which is not the case for fostering or children's homes.""

However, this idea that the state might steal babies to order because adoptive parents want them won't do anything to reduce the number of children in care. If there are 100 children in care, costing the state a lot of money, stealing another 20 babies to hand over to adoptive parents (again costing a lot of money) isn't doing anything to reduce the burden of the 100 children still in care.

Lots of people come to adoption hoping for a baby or very young child but they start with a preparation course that leaves them in no doubt that this may not be possible. If they still want to proceed they have the whole assessment process during which to work out what it is they are looking for from adoption. If they are accepted as adopters but still want to proceed with a specific gender or age range they know they may have to wait longer.

Adoptive parents want babies or young children because babies and young children have the best chance of attaching to new parents and thereby flourishing in their permanent homes.
It is very hard to adopt a 7+ year old because those children know where they came from and have years of being embedded in their families of origin. Their attachment relationships are strongly formed and they find it harder to form new attachments meaning that adoption is unlikely to have great success for the child or the parent.

Whilst they can get it wrong it's rare.

My uncles children have been in fostering for 4 years. Their mum gave them up and he has MH issues aswell as form for drugs. Despite this social services have allowed him to have them weekends for all this time and weekdays they have a foster parent and he has respite. I won't go into my opinion on this but as you can see SS are more then accommodating.

I've had plenty of friends with PND too, I've even suffered terrible intrusive thoughts myself which my doctor was great about and reassured me. None of us lost our kids or were reported and rightly so.

I can appreciate the system has failed some, it's not fool proof. But in general SS arent monsters and it takes a lot to remove a child.

"They are damned if they do damned if they don't."
I totally disagree with DesperateforSleep. What a cop out that statement is. why resort to the 2 extremes? SS are criticised for the 2 extremes they go to. Rightly so. And so they should be. Multiple multiple failures were made in the well known cases, like BabyP, where SS did NOT intevene.

And also multiple multiple mistakes are made, on many many cases (not RARE cases, but many cases where this has been shown to be true) in the other extreme, where they step in too quickly, over cautious and damning wrongly of innocent parents.

What we are asking for is balance. For them to take the middle ground. Not for them to be too over-cautious. For them to be reasonable. But for them to be balanced. That should be their objective. Its not too much to ask.

But to take it to the extreme and say , oh they get criticised for that one extreme, so its best they are over-cautious. No. It's not best practice for them to be over-cautious. Surely, best practice for them to be balanced?

And the results of both extremes are irreparable damage. So lets try and aim for balance.

Oblomov puts it well: balance is what SS should aim for. Saying Oh we have to lean over in this direction because somebody else leant over in this direction seems a very irresponsible attitude.

At the same time, it hardly seems very balanced to be saying (as some other posters seem to) that if SWs can be proved to have made a mistake, everybody needs to fear completely different SWs in another place under other circumstances.

The doctor who operated on a relative of mine made her very ill by a completely unnecessary procedure for which he had not gained her prior consent. He was totally and undisputably in the wrong. She would have been well placed to make a formal complaint. But does this mean the responsible reaction would be to tell everybody they should avoid cancer treatment?

I'm sure social workers do aim for balance, but for eg. they might seem to go overboard about non-mobile babies with injuries when it could be accidental or the result of a medical condition, but the consequence of getting it wrong is reading in the papers about newborns shaken or stamped to death, thrown against walls. Of course, that is also no comfort to parents who have unfairly come under suspicion.

I am a teacher so I am a very small experience. The amount of neglect/abuse which is considered acceptable by SS is shocking.

While the outcomes for children in care is abysmal is better than the outcome of children who are left in abusive homes.