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 don't have personal experience so maybe someone else can better answer that question. Still, I am fairly sure that "at risk of being hurt" is not considered grounds for forcefully separating children from their parents. Never seen it, read about it, or heard about it in close to a decade that I have been living here.

Either a child is abused or he is not.If the child is not being abused, nobody can take him from his family. If he is being severely physically abused he would be made a ward of the state and taken into care, but they would normally find a way to return him to the care of more trustworthy family members. Only if no family is around would adoption be considered.

Certainly there is no SS equivalent taking newborns from maternity units with suspicions of possible future abuse because a parent was depressed in the past. Not in France, nor anywhere else I have lived. I think UK might be alone in this.

You may be right. It's very, very odd.

On a different subject, but in the same vein, I spent some time before having ds, working in a psychiatric hospital. There were women there, in their 60s, 70s and 80s, who'd been put in a mental home (as they were called then) because they got pregnant out of wedlock.

I left in October 2004, and a few of them were still there. They became institutionalized over the years, and couldn't leave.

It says here that a child is considered a ward of state if there is no known family, if he is abandoned, or if parental authority has been taken from both parents (I am really bad at translating ). I think this last bit refers to situations where child has been removed from family due to abuse.

Desi it's true- I worked in Epsom general hopsital many moons ago & the local psyche place was home for many long term ladies whose only "crime" was to be an unmarried mother. To discharge them would be cruel.

We look backon that sort of judgement with horror & disbelief-but it was the percieved wisdom of the time. Please god we don't look back in 30/50 years time & say the same about the Family Courts now!

You didn't actually need to have sex outside marriage to be 'put away'. The records show some girls were shut away for crimes such as hanging around with boys, arguing with their parents or merely 'taking long walks'. My sister used to care for some ladies, now in their 70s and 80s, who had been put away under this system. There's also a novel by Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox about this - she refers to some of the sources she used at the end.

Also the Stephen Poliakoff drama (one of his best and least poncy) She's Been Away.