Mother 'not clever enough to raise child' has baby snatched by social workers

[Heated]

story
What do we think?

Leonie - you beat me to it!

John Hemming - you especially need to see the last paragraph of NanaNina's post of Sat 30-Jan-10 23:45:25 on there!!

Been lurking on this thread and that one.

Have no knowledge or experience with SS but am very worried at the secrecy of the family courts.

Grew up near Cleveland and distinctly remember my Mum hoping I didn't ever need to go to A&E .

Sweden is very different from the UK, I would imagine the success of child protection there is related to other structures within the country too. They may well have a child protection system that works well, but it is not necessarily transferable to the UK.

Sweden has a more supportive system generally. However, if we are concerned about child protection and treating children well then we should be willing to look at all aspects of the system - not just those with the "child protection" label.

Additionally we should not refuse to consider any change of any part of the system on the ground that not all the system is changing.

Your first paragraph is what I mean. But I don't mean that we should refuse to consider change.
However I think it goes beyond even immediate services for families, Sweden has a far smaller population and beyond policy, social factors are different too. I am just pointing out that wile Sweden may seem an ideal, it has to be put in locational context.

I don't think we disagree on this.

There are some strange people who think our aggressive and punitive child protection system that so frightens particularly mothers, but also fathers, is so one of the best in the world.

The statistics alone demonstrate this not to be true.

My understanding of the unicef report cards (which is the only really good international comparison) is that the more aggressive child protection systems also have the highest number of deaths from maltreatment.