family courts - times campaign

[tatt]

I've no personal experience of these courts but the stories I have read make me pretty concerned about the secrecy around them. Read the story here and if you are also concerned sign up to their campaign

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article4271773.ece

expat the answer to your question might be that SS cannot find a foster home capable of taking on 20 kids, or be able to afford the £400 per week per child they pay for them to be in care!

We don't have Family Courts as such in Scotland - following some pretty appaling Scottish cases this was established:

www.scra.gov.uk/home/index.cfm

clearly no system is without fault but we don't appear to have the same level of problems as experienced in the rest of the UK.

expat, no one can 'answer' your question because all we have are what other people are saying about things they have read about/seen on telly. I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes in the Man with 20 kids - for all I or you know there is a team of social workers desparately trying to keep the family together and who knows, next week care proceedings could be issued.

this is the danger. People are getting het up and afraid when they know probably less than 1% of what is really going on in a particular situation. and yes, we do need to find a way to calm this down.

But Edam how are your comments helping? I've never said 'social workers are victims'. Just that I feel a lot of sympathy for them a lot of the time. The social workers in teh Rochdale case genuinely believed that the children had been abused and they were trying to help. Yes, their interviewing techniques were beyond inept and in some cases cruel but how are you helping? This kind of attitude just turns off those who might want to make a difference. If they make a mistake there is a witch hunt with you baying for blood.

We all have to learn from our mistakes. An earlier poster called for 100% accuracy in these cases which I'm sorry is just naive beyond belief.

Family cases ARE reported. You can access a lot of reports on line. Fiodyl, I will try and find the case and link it here about the young woman whose baby was first taken without a court order. it is pretty clear that she has some serious problems.

What is your solution. That we just ignore everything doctors and social workers say? That because children in care have a crap time we should just leave them where they are?

And ffs you can't have your cake and eat it. If you don't want children languishing in care they have to be adopted as soon as possible. That is what these adoption magazines are for. And sorry, people are funny this way they do like to know what the children look like and a little bit about their personality. These magazines only go out to people on adoption register. Only in most desparate cases are wider publicity measures taken.

Again, I hear a lot of vitriol here which doesn't seem to be based on much real experience of the family court system, and no real suggestions for improvement, which i think we all agree is sorely needed.

Family LawJordans Legal Publishing. Family Law ? the leading authority for all family practitioners ... To request a free trial to Family Law Online click here ...
www.familylaw.co.uk/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages

Sorry, I am crap at links, but just google Jordans Family Law. You can get a free trial for a month, you can search for cases. i don't want to sound patronising but I think some posters here would find it helpful to read what the judges are actually saying about these cases, rather than relying on newspapers/tv which seem to want to whip up a storm rather than debate this responsibly.

well, what a surprise.

Yes they are online if you know where to look and have the time, but they are only reported after they are already over and the childs future is decided. I think they need to be more widely available and known about(not necessarily sensationalised) and crucially while the case is stil ongoing.

I have posted a few ideas about what could be changed on here but don't profess to havean answer for everything by long shot.
I'm probably biased by my experience but I do feel that alot needs to change to stop something similar happening to another family and if it does a system in place that holds those responsible to acount and compensates the victims.

I'm going to go now and try and find what the judge in my case said as all I remember is him saying yes to the social workers alot!

Well, I?m of the school of thought that says Justice needs to be seen to be done, but we haven?t yet discussed the practicalities of how this could be achieved. Spero, what are the implications of allowing the press and other interested parties access to the court proceedings and documentary evidence, under reporting restrictions on the name of the family? As other posters have said, it is done in rape cases so why not in the family courts?

Fiodyl, do you think there would have been a better outcome if there had been public scrutiny of your case?

And in the light of this terribly damning report from Ofsted, I think another plank should be added to this campaign to drastically improve the quality of care for children who end up in the system: it is horrible that the children who most need help are let down so badly.

spero in the clear cut cases you talk about I doubt if most families would want publicity - because their neighbours would not appreciate what they had done. But some families are desperate to publicise what they see as a miscarriage of justice and willing to forego anonymity to do so. And sometimes their children wish to have publicity too.

What did you think of the Ofsted report?

That report is one of the most depressing things I have read for ages, especially this bit: 'During inspections last summer, Ofsted officials had to intervene directly in seven separate cases to make sure that children being represented by Cafcass advisers were not at immediate risk of violence, neglect or sexual assault'. Those children were really better off away from their parents then, wern't they?

I don't think that calling for a 100% accuracy in these cases is "naive beyond belief" when it comes to children being forcibly removed from their parents, forcibly adopted and parents being forced to accept it and keep quiet about it or be arrested. It may not be achievable Spero but it is not wrong to think that it should be.

I think 100 per cent accuracy is necessary under a draconian system that means even if parents are cleared, the courts and SS turn round and say 'adoption is final, tough tit'. Even worse, people are told that there is no point continuing to argue their case because the child has been adopted so they can't even get their names cleared anyway.

If the decision made by those in authority is final, for ever, even if they are shown to be wrong, then they have to guarantee 100 per cent accuracy. If that is impossible, then you have to change the system. That's why we abolished the death penalty.

SS and the courts have a moral responsibility to come up with a system that means acknowledging mistakes and putting them right. The needs of the child include the need to know their parents and know that their parents did not harm them, where that is the case. Currently SS are allowed to tell downright lies, issuing a 'letter for life' to the child that was drawn up at the time of the adoption, even when they know the expert witness on whom the case turned has been discredited.

You could put it right with measures short of overturning adoptions if it is felt that adoption should never be undone. But they clearly can be overturned - a surprising proportion of adopted children are handed back. Funny how it can only be overturned at the behest of one interested party, not the other, though. Where exactly are the rights of the child in that?

We can't have 100% accuracy in ANY system run by and for human beings. All we can try to do is make as few mistakes as possible and to learn from those mistakes we've made.

I am not aware that ANY 'life story work' includes a precis of the expert evidence given!! the social worker works with the family to gather photos, family trees etc and in almost all cases i have dealt with there is 'letter box' contact between biolgical and natural parents at least once a year. Gone are the days, quite rightly, when adoption meant the child 'disappared' into another family. when the child is old enough he or she can seek out his parents. I'm not trying to say this makes everything ok as it clearly doesn't, but if a child is adopted that doesn't mean he or she is 'lost' forever and will never know the truth.

if you really believe that the child's interests are the most important in all of this, I think it is pretty difficult to argue that two, three years down the line a child should be removed from his/her adoptive home (possibly the only home he/she can remember) if that adoption was found to be based on the wrong facts.

The Rochdale case, cleveland et al were followed by gov inquiries. Victoria Climbie got an inquiry. But it will serve no purpose unless we address the lack of resources offered to the family justice system.

The ofstead report is deeply, deeply depressing.

But i really believe the fundamental problem is that the system is starved of resources at the right level - it is utterly pointless paying for expensive assessments when it is too late to turn a family around. there needs to be more, better trained, better paid social workers who can work with the family the moment problems arise.

I am really at a loss to see how opening up the family courts to every prurient tom dick and harry is going to deal with this fundamental problem. Can I just point out that Sally Clarke went to prison because a JURY of 12 ordinary men and women were convinced by Professor Sir Roy Meadows.

Now clearly, her defence team fucked up big time and didn't seek advice from the Royal College of Staticians, as they clearly should have done to pour cold water on his ridiculous '1 in 73 million' statistic. But having those proceedings open to the public didn't stop that collosal fuckup - it took the concerted efforts of her subsequent legal team (these awful corrupt lawyers) to over turn that.

So perhaps someone could explain to me how having the Sun in to report on the more salacious details of some of my care cases (ooo! mother had sex with her uncle! We're having a DNA test to see who the baby's father is!) helps anyone? Particularly the child in question.

Gizmo, in answer to your specific point, I'm not sure anonymity would work. Family cases by their very nature deal with the personalities of the people involved; there is a LOT of detail about people's sexuality, criminal convictions etc, etc.

It's not like a rape case where the jury is being asked to consider simply whether X consented to sex at the time in question. I just don't see how it would be possibe to retain anonymity if all the details were being published; certainly all those local to the family would know who they were.

the reason family cases have been kept private (as opposed to 'secret') is to lessen the burden on children who don't need to know a lot of this stuff and who certainly don't need their classmates to know about it too.

dodgy experts are another matter, but the court has to tread a very fine line. There is a real fear at the moment that we are running out of experts willing to take on child protection work as they are so worried what will happen to them if they make a mistake. And believe me, any lawyer acting for parents will be delighted to discover and expose those mistakes.

I think the Sally Clarke case shed a lot of much needed light upon how 'god like' some experts become and how dangerous this is - I bet no one dared cross examine Prof Meadows with any great vigour as he had become this totem of his profession. but as i've already said above, his evidence WAS given in open court and no one picked up on it until much too late.

From my family's experience, even if you do spend the money and get independent professional reports, if they are deemed positive, the courts regard this as 'rounding up' professionals and is used against you.

So very, very sad.

Sir, As a clinical psychologist who has spent several years as an expert witness in child and family hearings, I would like to thank Camilla Cavendish for her excellent series of articles on family justice (times2, July 8, and letters, July 9).

There are a number of issues that are also worth raising.

First, there is the difficulty in reconciling an adversarial ?black and white? system of law with the much greyer fields of psychology, social work and so on. The latter are inexact sciences, regardless of how psychologists would like to pretend otherwise; shoehorning them into a court can be a very inexact fit, leading to experts withdrawing from the system for fear of being ?pulled apart? in a legal confrontation. I have been criticised for reading social services? files without obtaining permission from the court; this was perfectly justifiable clinically, but unacceptable legally. I have sat in meetings as barristers have incomprehensible arguments about cases that have little meaning clinically.

Secondly, social work is one of the most undervalued and pilloried professions in the UK, its members often working for relatively low pay and under huge pressure from swollen caseloads. We do not, and never have had, a perfect system ? errors are made, either when children are removed from families when they shouldn?t have been or when they are left too long in a family. We do not spend the money to invest in a root and branch reform of how services are provided to families at risk of breakdown.

Thirdly, there is the problem of parents with learning disabilities. Such parents have little chance of defending themselves in court ? there is something grotesque about people with the bottom 2 per cent of the intellectual range having their children being removed by the top 2 per cent ? and are sometimes classed as ?unable to instruct a solicitor?, at which point their case is handled by a stranger. Parents with a learning disability are almost certain to lose their children once in the court arena, despite having evidence against them that would not stand up against a non-learning disabled parent.

Finally, while I believe The Times is correct to wish for an increased level of transparency from the courts, there will be no such increase from some of the families involved. While I am sure that miscarriages of justice do exist, many families in cases which reach the courts have raised concerns for years; been through the GP/community mental health team/special educational needs co-ordinator routes; have not responded to social services? requests to alter parenting practice; and, even after court proceedings are initiated, continue to provide care which is not adequate to meet the needs of their children.

Camilla Cavendish is right to point out that the concept of ?emotional abuse? and ?neglect? are vague, but they do have clinical utility in highlighting for a court the potential outcomes for children if they are left in the environment they come from.

Dr David Fong
Clinical psychologist
Mansfield

(From Letters in today's The Times)

while the child's interests are the most important that doesn't mean that the parents shouldn't have some rights too. Increasingly they are unable to find lawyers to take on the cases if they need legal aid. They don't have a right to know what they are accused of or a right to call expert witnesses. Evidence can be given by "expert witnesses" who never meet them.

Children can be wrongly taken from the only home they have ever known and given to another family. It may sometimes be best for them to stay with that family but that wouldn't always be the case.

It does not have to be total secrecy or every detail of family life made public. Courts can impose restrictions short of total secrecy.

The times have suggested some ways of dealing with concerns about expert witnesses.

Dr David Fong is spot on. Says it much better than I ever could.

tatt, I don't understand what you say about parents not being able to get lawyers. Care proceedings are always funded by teh state, it is non means and non merit funded legal aid. And even if the parents have a crap lawyer, in care cases there is ALWAYS a children's guardian (who are usually very good) so it should be a very unusual case indeed where no one is paying any attention to the rights of the children and parents.

the maxim all professionals follow is that you keep families together whenever possible, but the child's right to grow up safe and well trumps that. Parents are given every opportunity to change but it must be within a time scale that suits a child's needs - its no good for eg a heroin addict parent of a six week old baby saying that they can be off drugs after a year's therapy.

smallwhitecat, I disagree. To say that we who work in this field do not appreciate that to remove a child from parents without just cause is extremely serious child abuse, is just wrong.

we are all well aware, as is anyone with half a brain.

the problem is that the alternative; getting it wrong and leaving a child in an awful environment is also very very wrong. That can lead to a child dying.

I really don't think it is helpful to have a debate in the terms that you appear to be setting out.

Awful things are happening; I think it is to do with chronic lack of investment from the State in areas of child protection and family intervention; you say it is because professionals in the field don't appreciate the bleeding obvious.

I think we will have to agree to disagree.

Where there is a significant chance of 'children dying', I believe we would all agree that SS is right to remove children from their homes.

What we do not agree, it seems, is the greyer area of 'emotional abuse' and especially 'possible future abuse' in the name of which newborns are removed from their parents.

Where is the risk of dying under some obscure 'emotional abuse'? Does SS possess precogs a la 'Minority Report' who predict future crimes? And if not, how on earth can you justify removing babies from their parents who have not even committed any abuse?

Cote Dazur, the test is that there must be a risk of 'significant' harm. The real disservice that the newspapers are doing is trying to suggest that merely fanciful/remote concerns result in the removal of children. This is absolute crap.

Newborns are removed in the vast majority of cases because the mothers have had many children before and failed with all of them.

Or very young mothers with mental health issues have been assessed during pregnancy and the decision has been made that the baby will not be safe without considerable intevention.

Let me give you an example. I represented a LA who were dealing with a mother aged 17. She had an IQ of 68. Her toddler was 18 months old. social services visited her twice a day every day since the child was born. They simply couldn't keep up that level of intervention. If they had not I believe that child would have died. Not because the mother didn't love him - she did, very much. But because she could not care for him.

My mother got very irate after reading a Daily Mail article which said that social services were taking children away from parents with learning difficulties even though the children had not suffered any harm. I asked her to tell me how she thought these children should be protected and was she prepared to double her tax bill to ensure that each family had a permanent live in social worker.

Please, read the cases and see how carefully the judges analyse the facts and how high the bar is actually set. The risk is of significant harm either now or in the future.

and don't be so dismissive of 'emotional abuse'. It often has much more serious and long term ramifications than physical abuse.

You can't blame Sally Clark's defence team for not picking up on Roy Meadow's ludicrous claim - he came up with it in court, when it would have been too late for them to find an expert statistician.

And I never said adopted children should be taken away from their adopted parents. Depends on the individual circumstances. But they should be told the truth about their birth parents when those parents are cleared. And should have some contact with them.

Funny how it's OK to remove children from their birth parents but not OK to remove them from adoptive parents, though. Where's the logic in that?

And criticising Sally Clark's defence team is typical of the 'blame anyone other than those responsible for the fuck up' mentality amongst everyone involved in the family courts.

Margaret Hodge, the woman who refused to investigate child abuse in the children's homes for which she was responsible, pretended she would look at the implications of the Clark case for the family courts. Only she fiddled it. By asking SS depts to work out which cases had turned on expert assertions. SS depts were hardly going to say 'oh gosh, of course we will confess to our fuck-ups'. I know of one case where someone who had lost her children on the claims of Roy Meadows was told, by the SS dept responsible 'oh, this doesn't affect you'. A downright lie. Which seems to be routine for those in authority dealing with dubious cases.

Of course you can blame Sally Clarke's team - as one poster has already pointed out, the judge should have refused this evidence as he was NOT a statistician and did not know what he was doing. Or simply request leave to call someone from Royal college of Staticians to rebut him. A phone call away.

teh problem was that no one would have dared criticise him as by this stage he had been the preeminent expert in child protection issues for over 30 years. And that is a big problem, but unrelated to what Camilla Cavendish et al bleat about.

the logic in not removing from adoptive parents, is as i understand it; you remove a young child from his birth parents because a court has assessed that child at being at risk of significant harm if not removed. Several years later, you seek to remove the child from his adoptive home, possibly the only home he can remember to return him to parents who are now strangers. How does this help the child?

Children can have contact with their birth family when adopted. But it is entirely down to the adoptive family if they feel comfortable with that and when a lot of birth parents threaten to abduct children or bad mouth adoptive parents, you can understand why there is reluctance.

Edam, just out of interest, what would you have done to investigate past cases? appointed an independent reviewer to look at every case on social services files?

Raising money to fund that would be a more useful thing to do than writing to your MP saying how great Camilla Cavendish is.