I think the children are getting ignored in this debate.
Camilla Cavendish's article from today's papers is below. She has also done sterling work in exposing miscarriages of justice. No one is saying the family court system never works well, just that sometimes it goes wrong and it can be improved. I am sure all the professionals on this thread would agree with me. It is the speed of rushing to adoption which she says is wrong in this case.
Also i don't like children not being able to contact birth parents, chat on skype, whatsapp and facebook to those parents just because they happen to be in foster care sand not even on supervised visits to parents the parents and children be able to talk about any subject they want even if both want to say they think the social workers are rubbish or brilliant. Let those involved have freedom speech too . Let the parents say we are working so hard to get you back we love you. It is the secret state and censorship and petty rules which makes many parents baulk at the system.
"Four years ago I convinced the last government to make a historic change in the law. The secretary of state for justice, Jack Straw, ended decades of secrecy when he agreed to let the media attend hearings in the family courts.
Until then the decisions made by judges to take children into care, or have them adopted, were made with no public scrutiny. Desperate parents were prevented from speaking out, ostensibly to protect the “privacy” of their children, even while those children were being pictured in adoption magazines. In waging my long-running campaign in The Times to expose miscarriages of justice I had to fight law after law protecting overzealous social workers and unaccountable experts.
So you might expect me to be outraged about Alessandra Pacchieri, the 35-year-old Italian whose baby was delivered by caesarean section against her will when she suffered a breakdown on a trip to England. Her Italian lawyer has likened her experience to living in Nazi Germany, a Milanese judge has said the saga resembles a horror film and she herself has spoken movingly about how her body was “invaded”.
To wrest a baby from a woman’s womb is an act of extreme violence by the state. And yet, I fear, this case is not as simple as billed.
The headline “Operate on this mother so that we can take her baby”, in a newspaper last weekend, was deeply misleading. Dissecting the court documents, it is clear the decision to operate was made by a court that acts for adults who have had a mental breakdown, on the advice of doctors who knew that a woman whose first two children had been born by elective caesarean was at risk of uterine rupture if she tried to have the third naturally. The decision to adopt the child was made later by a family court on the recommendation of social workers.
It is not clear that, faced with an unusually difficult challenge, the authorities performed maliciously. The case does, however, raise some very serious issues.
First, about where decisions should be made. When England is facing exponential growth in the number of children in care who have foreign parents, it seems odd that this case is not being heard in Italy.
Second, about adoption. Was it right to decide so quickly that this child should go to English strangers, not to any relative?
And third, about openness. Had the court documents about Pacchieri been published earlier, we might not have had the flood of misinformation that hit the press last week. While some campaigners are using the hysterical headlines as yet further proof that journalists cannot be trusted, they are in fact a strong argument for completing the reforms that Straw began in 2009 — to enable the public to see properly what is being done in our name.
Quite why a pregnant woman with bipolar disorder should have come to England for a two-week training course to be an air hostess, when she had stopped taking the medication that kept her sane, is unclear.
What we do know is that Pacchieri is troubled. She admitted in court to having suffered manic episodes since 2007. She has been sent three times to Italian psychiatric hospitals, once voluntarily and twice under duress.
So, while being sectioned in England under the Mental Health Act must have been deeply traumatic, it was not an outrage. It is a standard necessary response when someone has a mental breakdown and it was something she had already experienced twice back home.
We also know her two elder daughters have been removed from her by Italian authorities and live with her mother. Italian social services records say Pacchieri “had a sincere affection for her daughters and a desire and wish to care for her children, but was not able to do so in a suitable way because of her condition, which interfered with her ability to maintain her own life and therefore those of her children”.
The three children have different fathers: the first two are American; the father of the baby who was born in England is Senegalese.
When she arrived in England last summer Pacchieri was four months pregnant. She says she had run short of money while staying at a hotel at Stansted airport and the stress of this brought on panic attacks so severe that she called the police. They took her to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, where, she claims, she was kept waiting for 10 hours.
“I really lost my cool,” she told Sue Reid of the Daily Mail. “They would not let me see a doctor and they would not let me go either.” Eventually she was taken to see two male psychiatrists who said they were going to section her under the Mental Health Act.
Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, says this is standard procedure. The Mental Health Act “would have been used in order for her to get medical treatment. People become paranoid: some even deny they’re pregnant. We can’t say how severe her condition was at that point.”
Pacchieri underwent the caesarean section after several months in psychiatric care. “I begged them not to do the caesarean,” she told the Daily Mail. “The due date was four days later and there was no reason for me to have such an invasive operation with anaesthetic. I wanted a natural birth.”
This testimony is surprising, given that Pacchieri had already had two elective caesareans in Italy. Doctors might well have believed she would have chosen a caesarean had she been in her right mind. And there would have been genuine risks had she attempted a natural birth: I know this because I have had three caesareans myself.
The decision to operate was made at the request of the National Health Service by the Court of Protection, which acts for adults deemed to be mentally incapable. The transcript of the court hearing in August last year shows that Mr Justice Mostyn had ruled that the medical evidence was “clear”. It also says that Pacchieri was displaying “delusional beliefs”. Campaigners are angry that she was not consulted; but she may not have been in a position to make a decision.
“The caesarean could have been essential,” says Wallace, who adds that she has heard of a caesarean being done in similar circumstances once before.
The bigger question, it seems to me, is why the baby was so quickly put up for adoption. It seems unlikely that the authorities could at first have had all the information they needed to judge what was right for the child. And even if adoption is the right answer, an Italian child should surely be adopted in Italy.
Wallace believes the decision to remove the baby permanently was “unacceptable. Normally you’d expect them to have waited for her [Pacchieri] to resume her medication, regained insight and capacity, before any decision was made. What I think was unforgivable was relying on evidence from unnamed and unaccountable experts, people who didn’t know her, did not know what she was like before she was acutely ill and who, as far as we know, didn’t have access to her notes.”
Bipolar disorder, Wallace says, is a fluctuating condition that affects one in 100 people: “No two psychiatrists will be able to predict how soon someone with bipolar might recover or how severe a lapse will be.”
She adds: “There are many thousands of mothers with the condition who may have found pregnancy and childbirth challenging and are at more risk of postnatal depression. But they are managing the condition and their children.”
Given Pacchieri’s history, it seems unlikely that she was going to be one of those mothers. That is broadly what Judge Newton had concluded in February when he decided that the adoption should go ahead.
Under section 31 of the Children’s Act, a child can be removed only if it is thought to be at risk of “significant harm”. The court found this to be the case “because of the mother’s very severe ill health at that time”. It is hard to disagree.
It is not unheard of for children in this country to be taken from their mother in the hospital ward shortly after giving birth. This immensely traumatic experience is usually visited on mothers who have already had older children removed. Some mothers are drug addicts, some have been in care themselves. But right or wrong, most have been known to the authorities for years. Pacchieri was not.
It is one thing to take a child to safety while her mother cannot care for it. It is another to decide to have that child permanently adopted.
Pacchieri has been quoted as saying that the British authorities “planned to adopt my daughter from the very beginning”. The transcripts show that social services applied to take the baby into foster care after it was born. But adoption was clearly also considered.
Did Essex county council do enough to contact the Italian authorities and relatives? The council claims “social workers liaised extensively with the extended family before and after the birth of the baby to establish if anyone could care for the child”.
The father did not attend the adoption hearing in February and was not represented. Pacchieri has told the press, however, that other relatives have offered to help bring up the child.
Who is right? Andy Elvin is chief executive of Children and Families across Borders (CFAB), a charity that advises courts and councils on international child protection cases. Although CFAB has not acted in Pacchieri’s case, he knows about it.
“My understanding is that the local authority has been round the mother’s family extensively,” he says. “It would be exceptionally poor practice if they hadn’t given the grandmother first refusal in this case. But I don’t think anyone has put themselves forward.
“You often end up placing three or four kids with a grandparent, but it can get to the point where the relationship with their own child becomes very strained. This woman [Pacchieri] could have more [children]. It’s possible that the grandmother has just said ‘no more’.”
British law states that the wider family should adopt wherever possible. Yet Elvin says the UK has been historically bad at placing children back in their home countries.
“Most countries just say ‘they’re the grandparents, why wouldn’t you [give them the child]?’ The standard of evidence required in the UK is higher. And this can be multiplied by attitudes towards the country from which they come.”
This reluctance to trust relatives may explain why the number of children in care in England with family overseas is growing exponentially, at a rate of 10-15% a year. Individual local authorities do not collect the figures but the overall numbers could be considerable.
International cases are putting a huge strain on courts and social workers. In 2008 CFAB dealt with four cases involving Polish children. Last year it handled 120 cases from Poland alone. That should surely be an argument for the English authorities to transfer cases back to the home countries wherever possible.
Last week Pacchieri claimed that the American father of her eldest daughter had asked that the baby be sent to Los Angeles to live with his sister, who is already a mother. She also claimed that Essex county council had ruled this out because the American sister has no blood tie to the baby.
While it is not yet possible to corroborate this claim, I have certainly heard of similar situations. If it is true then the authorities have in effect chosen to place the child with English strangers rather than an American stranger who has a distant bond with the family.
Another big question is whether the authorities were too hasty to return the mother to Italy. The NHS seems to have discharged her because it needed her bed. But this has enormously diminished her chances of getting her baby back.
Pacchieri says she has seen the child only 10 times in 15 months. Whether this was accidental or not, I have certainly come across cases of social workers who reduce contact between mother and baby in order to bolster the case for adoption on the grounds that mother and child have not bonded.
Newton, who ruled that the baby should be adopted, also criticised doctors for the “undue haste” with which Pacchieri was “escorted from the UK . . . simply because she wished to go back to Italy”.
It is also not clear why the case is being conducted in England at all, given that everyone involved is Italian. Under a byzantine pan-European arrangement called Brussels II, family law proceedings can be transferred between countries. It is possible that the Italian courts do not want the case, given there was no existing case concerning the baby. But it would be interesting to know whether any attempt has been made to transfer proceedings to Italy — and if not, why not.
Pacchieri now has a legal team of lawyers from three countries, including the highly experienced UK solicitor Brendan Fleming. “If there were concerns about the care of this child by an Italian mother,” Fleming has said, “the better plan would have been for the authorities here to have notified social services in Italy and for the child to have been taken back there.” But for that to happen the Italians would have to co-operate. THE new orthodoxy is that this is not enough: that social workers are leaving hundreds of children in danger of neglect and abuse. But it is also true to say that mistakes are made in both directions.
Some staff are hoodwinked by truly evil parents, such as the mother who starved little Daniel Pelka, who bore clear physical signs of abuse. Other staff pursue parents who are innocent, some of whose cases are overturned on appeal.
The majority of cases turn on whether the child has suffered “emotional abuse”, or neglect, not on physical or sexual abuse. Emotional abuse is not visible, like a broken bone or a cigarette burn. It is harder to prove and therefore to disprove.
The real problem is the system remains too opaque for us to judge whether the right decisions are being taken in our name. I am proud of Straw’s 2009 legislation. But with the 2010 election he did not manage to see through all the changes he had hoped to make. For this reason journalists are still too often in the dark about what can be printed.
The issue is not anonymity: all respectable media outlets are in favour of keeping children’s names out of the press. The issue is that there is no right to see the evidence on which judges base their judgments — in particular, the reports given by psychiatrists and psychologists — the professionals who are determining someone’s fate.
The argument given is that families want privacy. But parents such as Pacchieri want to shout their case from the rooftops. Why not? Secrecy in the main serves to protect professionals from scrutiny.
John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley who chairs the Justice for Families campaign, says Pacchieri’s case shows that we need “greater public scrutiny and more independent evidence”.
The good news is that Sir James Munby, president of the High Court’s family division, has ruled that any future proceedings in Pacchieri’s case must be heard by him.
Munby has argued eloquently in the past that the only way to build public confidence in the family courts and the Court of Protection is to expose them to what he calls “the glare of publicity”. He does not believe the names of judges, social workers or councils should be kept secret. He appreciates that while family courts cannot jail people, the decisions they make to tear families apart are just as grave.
At the centre of this case is a 15-month-old girl who hardly knows her own mother. It is her future that is most important.
One of the many poignant parts of this tragedy was Newton’s description, in court in February, of Pacchieri’s feeling “in a rather perverse and tragically sad way that her daughter had saved her. It had finally brought her to the realisation of accepting that she is bipolar and that it is necessary for her to take and maintain her medication.”
When the judge ruled for adoption it was in a regretful, not malicious, tone. He took the unusual step of stating that he wanted the child to know, when she grows up, that her mother had not abandoned her: “I hope that she will appreciate that her mother loved her and wished for her to return to live with her and to bring her up.”
This is not a case in which there can be a truly happy ending. But with Munby in charge it could perhaps herald a new era of openness and public understanding of what are, in reality, fraught and complex decisions.