Dear God another one.............

[bossybritches]

it never ends

Quite why it has come out now when it happened in 2006 I don't know but at least her judge was able to release the details.

I read that in the p[aper tother day

I have a mate whose DS was taken off them after he was born at 25 weeks and developed CP

He is 6 now, and is still not allowed to be with my mate and her DH unsupervised.

They have a DD as well. SS have nevr once done anything to "protect" her from her parents (they don;t need to protect her, but what if they did? Anything could have happened to her.)

They do this - yet they fail so many children who are subjected to years of abuse, despite being known to the authorities.

FWIW, I think on the whoe SS do a sterling job, but this sort of thing seems to happen too much (once is too many times in my book)

so scary. What a nightmare for the mother.

No end to such stories. Very Orwellian. I am glad I don't live in the UK.

Terrifying. Yet no-one with any authority is doing ANYTHING about the endless succession of cases that demonstrate the same failings, again and again.

I expect if you are a SW or work in child protection on the legal or medical side you do get jaundiced and are more likely to treat parents as guilty until proved innocent - forgetting perhaps that most people are OK. Maybe that's part of the problem.

Quite Edam- would be understandable if they did get like that. However it still doesn't forgive the arrogance of those who ignore the advice of medical people (many of whom were unsure in this case) & overwhelmingly insist the woman is guilty just because no-one can say she isn't!

I DO appreciate it isn't so cut & dried in many a case & they DO have to act on suspicion in many cases where there is no concrete evidence but the draconian measures involved seem so extreme!

I know. That's why SWs and everyone in child protection should have continuing professional development that helps them reflect on their practice and keep in mind that they see the extremes, rather than getting biased - akin to the way docs whose only experience of obstetrics is a six month rotation as a junior will favour c-section. Because they only saw the difficult births.

I've just been reading some interesting stuff about the latest psychological research on the importance of biological relationships, btw. Studies on identical/non ID twins, brought up together/apart and of adopted children and their biological and adopted families seem to show pretty clearly that biology has a massive impact on personality and environment very little (in normal-ish families - they didn't look at extreme situations).

People are like their biological relations and not at all like their adopted ones, even if brought up together from babyhood.

I think society/child protection seriously under-rates the importance of biological relationships. Yes, if children are in real danger, of course they should be removed but it should be something that is only done when it really needs to happen. And 'oh, you can't have your baby back, he is settled with adopted parents because we fucked up' is just not good enough.

Interesting Edam!

I found out recently that we are one of only two EU countries that have forced adoptions- the other being Portugal (I think..... I may be wrong on that one)

Says a lot

So what do other countries do with the children whose parents are definitely too dangerous to look after them but won't give them up?
Forced adoptions freak me out but I can sort of see why they are useful.

I starting working on the legal side of children in care about 3 years ago now and I have to admit I'm much more cynical than i used to be. I used to give everybody the benefit of the doubt but TBH, the things I've learned since doing this work makes me view each new case with suspicion. Sad, but true.

Not sure Kathy I'm interested too. I think they have foster homes where they can place all the family for 24 hour support/surveillance.

If the child is at risk they are placed in an experienced foster home so that family therapy can be given & if that doesn't work the child may ultimately be adopted but not straight away.

MamaG cynical in what way of the system or the families?

Everything bossyb!

there but for the grace of god go all of us.

shocking, shameful and hideous for all

makes my blood run cold

poor poor women and her children

In places I have lived, the only time a child will be removed from parents is when child is being seriously physically abused at home. Talking about broken bones rather than smacks here.

In that case, child becomes a ward of state if and only if there is no member of his family to offer him a home. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, etc all must refuse the kid for him to be taken permanently into care. Even then, family has to give consent for the child to be put up for adoption.

I have never seen, nor heard of, another place where babies can be taken away from their parents on expectation of FUTURE abuse. UK might be the only such place in the world

That's interesting about the involvement of family, Cote. In several of the high-profile cases here recently family have wanted to look after the child but been ignored.

agree with MamaG, when you actually work within the system it becomes hard to believe what some people are capable of

it has been a shocking thing to happen to their family and I hope it all works out in the end

what a sad story, made me almost cry
as a mother, i feel for her. she gone through so much.
i wish they do something about ss. its getting far too much, this will never end. so many families, and mothers will suffer.
sad sad for poor poor mother and her children

I wonder if we are the only place that has adoption targets for local authorities.

Disability Now has a story in it this month of the number of disabled parents who have kids removed by the SS, especially if they dare ask for help. Suddenly it becomes a child protection issue!
FFS, if you are disabled then you might need some respite help or whatever!

What can possibly be the rationale behind adoption targets?

The rationale was fine Cote - children generally do better once they've been adopted than in local authority care, and the idea was that targets would encourage councils to make an effort to find permanent homes for kids who would otherwise be languishing in care for years. Trouble is, what actually happened (according to some) was that to meet the targets they focused on the easier children to adopt, which meant the younger ones. So the situation didn't actually improve for the harder-to-place children, and may have encouraged some social workers to have children adopted when that was not actually the best thing for them.

I think the idea was that children in care generally do badly - don't get a good education, many end up on the streets/in prison/pregnant at a very young age. So it would be better if they were adopted. So, in a typical Blairite quick fix, the government introduced targets. LAs were rewarded for increasing the number of children adopted and criticised if they didn't.

Problem is it's not easy to find suitable adoptive parents for some children in care, who might be very damaged or have SN or be otherwise not your stereotypical cute baby. So you might be tempted to hit the targets by other means...

I would be interested to see numbers of children adopted before and after this adoption target system came into effect.

Just Googling adoption in France out of curiousity for anyone interested in reading a bit of French

If you go down to "Origin", it clearly says "French children available for adoption are very few. In fact, children can only be adopted if:

• Both of their parents or overall family consent to adoption.
• They are wards of state
• They are abandonned.

Most children adopted in France are foreign kids who are still living in their countries at the time of adoption.

that's very interesting, Cote. So how do the French handle the problems of families where kids are at risk of being hurt?

What's the French criteria for making a child a ward of state, Cote?

That could be a might big catch-all.