No legal aid = baby adopted

[CFSKate]

I saw this on Channel 4 News yesterday, I only saw it part way through, but it went something like this, there was a couple who were accused of abusing their child, they couldn't get legal aid, the court had the child adopted, and then it went to court again and new evidence said there was a medical condition and the parents weren't guilty of abuse, but the adoption is final, they can't get their baby back.

I'm glad I don't have to make the decision.

The only similar case of which I had personal knowledge is the one I mentioned up thread in which the child found its birth parents and siblings at age 18 and is now NC with its adoptive parents. These parents kept meticulous records of their fight to keep their child and of their exoneration which came too late.

The adoptive parents didn't tell the child any of this and withheld letters and cards from drop box. No doubt believing this was for the best for the DC.

If the DC in this case stays with the adoptive family I hope they don't make the same mistake. If the DC is returned to its birth parents I would hope they would allow contact if that's what the adoptive parents want.

as far as can be seen this adoption was rushed through the court in order to beat the decision of the criminal court by minutes on the assumption that once it got through it would be irreversible.

if it is allowed to stand then that just gives full license to go ahead with this kind of immoral practice and there is no disincentive to racing ahead of criminal rulings. the opposite in fact - it encourages this to be done with the 'don't worry as long as we beat the criminal case by minutes the child is secured'. THAT cannot be allowed surely? surely no one wants a situation where this kind of terrible practice is encouraged and sanctioned?

you don't have to be a birth parent to empathise with the birth parents in this case - a child could just as easily be wrongfully taken from parents by adoption.

no one wants a state that can wrongfully take children, be proven to have done so and get away with it because it's the biggest gang in town and it's power 'the law' is untrumpable?

Agree with PP - this particular case amounts to kidnapping by the state and everyone ought to be extremely concerned by it.

Why would any adoptive parent in their right mind want a child who had been forcefully removed from loving natural parents?

bathtime
Where have you read/seen that the AO was granted minutes before the criminal proceedings concluded?

It is undoubtably a tragedy for everyone involved, and there is no solution that will make everything ok.

Taking this child from its home, from its mummy and daddy, will not fix things. The long term damage would be immense. I can't believe there are many people here who could explain to their toddler why they have to go and live with different parents. To suggest that could work for the child, even with support for the transition, is ridiculous.

This is about damage limitation now. But it is absolutely heartbreaking for the birth parents.

tattie how the hell do the adoptive parents go on positively with the child? at what point would/should they explain that they have perfectly ok birth parents who were desperate to have them back but that this mummy and daddy decided to keep them because they had a piece of paper (based on lies) that said they had the legal right to?

at what age do you think that a child, teen, young adult should find out that a medical diagnosis error and a matter of minutes between court rulings and their adoptive parents choice decided they were to be taken, and kept from, their parents?

what positive outcome can you see for the relationship between adoptive parents and child (perhaps adult by then) when they discover this?

damage limitation for all concerned is to remedy this asap. better to come to terms with being wrongfully taken and then returned and needing a lot of help to deal with the trauma induced by state mistakes than to find out that you were knowingly then kept from your parents even after that mistake was uncovered and that the state, your adoptive parents and any therapeutic workers you trusted and worked with in childhood were all complicit in that.

This is only a "tragedy" if you consider gmthe state to be a tragic hero and overreaching its legitimate power as its tragic flaw.

Except the state isn't suffering for its crime, it is inflicting all of that hurt on innocent victims and claiming the right to inflict that hurt at its will and without justification.

Taking this child from its home, from its mummy and daddy, will not fix things.

Well it was apparently totally fine to do this a few months ago, so why is it suddenly unthinkable?

The child's rightful parents were known as mummy and daddy within its memory.

They are not, as has been outrageously suggested earlier, "strangers" to this kid.

Turner said he presented expert evidence to the family court within a few moments of the final adoption order being made. He told the Today programme: “[The expert witness] said immediately not only are these not fractures, but this child has eight classical signs of infantile rickets. I served that report on the family court within moments of them making the final adoption order. Do they review it? No. They confirm the final adoption order.”

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/09/parents-cleared-of-abuse-launch-legal-battle-to-win-custody-of-adopted-baby

It is worth noting here, wherever you stand, that until this is reviewed by the family court and they decide that the child is not at risk of abuse from the parents, nothing can happen. The adoptive parents do not have the ability to hand back the child or facilitate contact now, even if they wanted too.

The family court may accept the criminal courts findings, but as the family court requires a much lower standard of proof, they may not. The family court may decide that although there is not enough evidence to prove abuse beyond reasonable doubt, it was likely to have taken place. They may decide that as the symptoms didn't continue with the foster family, the baby was still being cared for inadequately. They may clear the parents completely.

The parents will no doubt take this back to the family court, because even if there is no chance of reuniting with this child, they will need to clear their names for future children. They will also need to exhaust our legal system to take it to the ECHR.

The legal principles are quite close to the Webster case so precedent states their child will not be returned, but they will likely try. We'll probably know more when that happens.

I wouldn't want to make the decision in this case. I'm not sure if I even know who'd do a good job of it.

Today 06:59 BoboChic

Agree with PP - this particular case amounts to kidnapping by the state and everyone ought to be extremely concerned by it

Why would any adoptive parent in their right mind want a child who had been forcefully removed from loving natural parents?

Absolutely !

bathtime

Earlier you said "This adoption and the conclusion of the criminal case which exonerated the rightful parents of this child took place within moments of each other."

That's not what the Guardian link says. The Guardian link says their lawyer presented a report at the Family Court within minutes of the Adoption Order being granted. I.e he presented his evidence too late, the adoption order had already been granted.

This case is clearly shining a light on some bits of the system that don't get seen in the cold light of day very often, and I think 'they' need to think very carefully about a lot of it, but to suggest there was a conspiracy (or the world's biggest coincidence) between the family courts and the criminal courts about the timings of the hearings doesn't help anyone.

This is only a "tragedy" if you consider gmthe state to be a tragic hero and overreaching its legitimate power as its tragic flaw.

What rubbish. Tragic hero? What ARE you on about? There is so lack of logic and thinking on this thread but that takes the biscuit.

It is tragic because there are two sets of parents who have been/will be hurt (I'm not going to get into quantifying it because I cannot) and a child who has been hurt and will continue to be hurt whatever happens.

The fact that this should never have happened makes it tragic; a tragedy.

Any way I'm done. The lack of reason and empathy from some posters on this thread is infuriating. If I'm charitable I suspect it's a lack of imagination with the simple inability to extrapolate beyond the lived experience but the conspiracy theorists and personification of the State with evil social workers as it's evil minions is just stupid.

What Anchor says and the point I made much earlier about burden of proof.

Stories like this terrify me. I have EDS. I bruise easily and dislocate relatively easily. DD appears to have inherited it too, and there is a chance any future children will too. To think that I could have one or all of my children taken away from me and adopted out before I'd even had a chance to defend myself. And to then have no right to have my child back, the child I carried and gave birth to and raised for however long - all for the crime of passing on a hereditary condition. It's terrifying.

I posted earlier enquiring what happens anytime from age 10-12, when the child investigates their history online and some adoptive parents were very scornful at the idea that this history would not have been explained from an early age.

Reading comments now, it seems some think "in the best interests of the child" they shouldn't have contact with their biological parents.

Without hiding the miscarriage of justice - lies by omission - how do you prevent a child from going online and Googling for their own parents ?
Then running off to find them.

What about the rights of future biological siblings to know this child and for the child to know them ?
This could mess up even more kids.

The child would read about their case, explode with anger and never again trust the adoptive parents. Especially if they learn about longlost siblings.
Would the child have the right to apply themselves aged say 12 to return to the adoptive parents ?

If the policy is lies / omissions in childhood to prevent this, the child would surely be entitled to the truth aged 18. So the explosion happens then, wrecking uni.

Looks like the adoptive parents can either become longterm, close aunt & uncle, the least bad solution
or
remain adoptive parents, struggling to explain the unexplainable, taking ever stronger measures to keep a confused child from time with their biological parents. Then NC from age 18 or earlier.

The child and both sets of parents deserve massive punitive damages under the Human Rights Act, for this dreadful infringement of their right to a family life.
The European Court would surely award damages if the State doesn't do so.

This is one reason I prefer long term fostering, never adoption.
However there was a barrister on R4 this week about this case who said due to all the contact there had been with the child and parents throughout it might be possible to over turn the adoption order. I hope that can happen.

We take chidlren from parents much too quickly in the UK and we don't allow all blood relatives a chance to take them and we rush off to get them permanently adopted. It is not good.

The lack of reason and empathy from some posters on this thread is infuriating.

You mean like your lack of reason and empathy?

Hand wringing about how it's all so terrible but that there's nothing that can be done and we'll just have to live with this level of state interference in happy families and boo hoo hoo, but it's all for the best really is not remotely empathetic.

People are allowed to be pissed off at obvious injustice done to a family and its child and infuriated by the self-serving hypocrisy of a system that inflicts such damage and then uses "the best interests of the child", a child whose interests have manifestly not been served at any point, as the justification for doing nothing to rectify the harm it has done.

The idea that this child will have no contact with parents it was wrongly taken from, parents known to it until recently, that whatever bond they had will be further destroyed while the family court takes its time deciding whether the very clear evidence of the state's own prosecution witness, is a further outrage.

Nothing can justify doing this to a family where there is currently zero evidence of any harm or abuse.

But yay for all the children whose parents (birth and otherwise) will now be frightened to bring them to hospital when they are sick.

This thread must have the highest concentration of expert child psychologists of any on MN. And they all seem to know this child personally. That's why they can be so certain about what is in the child's best interests.

Thanks to those who posted links to legal blogs. It would seem likely that the initial medical investigation would have considered the conditions mentioned, and that those tests have anything from a 8 to 22% chance of giving a false negative.

There may be other factors that led the family court to believe, on balance of probabilities that abuse had occurred. The first doctor may be right, and the defence doctor wrong. The medical evidence may not be clear cut.

All we have to go on right now is the birth parents and their lawyers account. It may be the whole truth, or it may not

That's not a reasonable comparison, Maryz.

I would just like to state, for the record, that I hope I'm not being put into the unsympathetic camp.
I never said the child should be just 'given back'. I do have limited understanding of how incredibly damaging 'moves' are on a child, and how important 'their life story' work is.

Throughout this whole thread I haven't been flippant about how difficult it will be to have done sort of reconciliation between the child and the parents.
I would just like that noted.

I didn't say anything of the kind BathtimeFunkster and you know it. Please provide some evidence for the accusations about me? From what I have actually posted please, not from your imagination. This was my very post on this thread and I think it debunks all of your accusations:

There are several issues here to be unpicked and although they are related not all of them need to be considered in a causal way.

Firstly all this talk about returning the child like it is a piece of property are not giving any consideration to that child at all. Remember this child will never have really known their birth parents and has got a strong relationship and bond to their adoptive parents. Would removing that child and giving them to people who they consider to be strangers be in the best interests of the child? I would suggest it would not.

However that does not mean that I don't think a huge injustice has been done to the couple who lost their baby and to the child who has lost the opportunity of a relationship with their birth parents. Financial compensation may well be forthcoming but in the context pretty meaningless. What needs to be done is a proper review to see where things went wrong and steps taken to ensure that it never happens again to anyone else.

I wonder if it would be possible to facilitate some sort of relationship between the birth parents and child while minimising the adverse impact to the child's home life? Perhaps visitation or contact? I don't know, I'm not an expert but I do feel something proactive should be done now rather than waiting until the child grows up and whatever it is should be done in the interests of the child first and foremost, not the parents.

Disagreement is one thing. Chucking around blanket and untrue statements referencing things that are not even posted on the thread is not. How is that even helpful? Why would you do that? It just stops people taking any sensible points you might have been making seriously.

Clearly I'm going to have to hide this thread because the temptation to try to reason with the unreasonable is too strong and too pointless.

I know several adoptive parents whose child has direct contact with members of the original family.

As an adoptive parent (happily with the agreement of my DDs first Mum) Ican cconfirm what others have said about living 'with' first family constantly in our lives. Our ccircumstances were fairly unusual, but elder DD used to visit first Mum for a few days each school holiday. The death of their first Mum was devastating for her in particular. That doesn't stop me also being her mother. And DD chose to live with me not first Mum, despite all these theories about the primacy of biological ties.