Children taken to Ireland by parents must return to UK

[Oscy]

Link here
www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0322/1224266805630.html

I am surprised there was no mention of this here, as I know of one MP on this site advising parent/s that Ireland is more "friendly" to families facing care proceedings in the UK.
Looks like the Irish courts are well aware of what is being attempted.

These are children already born and who were already in the court system, the hague convention would of course apply in this situation.

This case has not as far as I know finished in Ireland, but it relates to a situation where court proceedings were started in England before the family went to Ireland.

The Hague Convention does not apply unless court proceedings have been applied for in England before the family leave.

"The Hague Convention does not apply unless court proceedings have been applied for in England before the family leave. "

Didn't I just say that?

Pleased to see the Irish are being sensible about this. I imagine a load of countries will get fed up shortly with the export of children at risk of significant harm and the drain on their resources.

atlantis there is an important technical point here.

Prior to this case the assumption was that if there was a court order in place that the Hague Convention would apply, but not unless there was a court order.

This case changes the situation to when an application to court has been lodged.

It remains that Ireland will still resist Hague Convention proceedings where a care plan for adoption exists.

I would argue that adoption is so common in the care system in England that it should be taken as "probable".

Most of the cases I deal with, however, are ones where the Hague Convention does not apply.

Jh, I think you're twisting around trying to find a way to prevent children being protected in the English courts and now you're trying to do the same in Ireland. At the beginning of proceedings you cannot say how likely adoption is, parents might pull things together or kinship placements ( usually best option ) prioritised. For you to want to block children returning and allow parents to show such contempt for the law is unfitting for an MP imo. I just don't know how you are peaceful with your actions, I would be very frightened for the children.

"This case has not as far as I know finished in Ireland, but it relates to a situation where court proceedings were started in England before the family went to Ireland." Quote from JH.

I thought the case was heard in the Supreme Court last week? I understood it was finished. Interesting that the parents represented themselves. Had they any assistance from others I wonder?

Also, in relation to this quote (not picking on you JH, but genuinely interested in the points of law in this case):

"It remains that Ireland will still resist Hague Convention proceedings where a care plan for adoption exists."

According to Justice Geoghegan, "Here, the making of an adoption order by the English courts was only a possibility and there was no current proposal for adoption."

So can someone clarify for me, in black and white, does the Hague Convention apply in this case, given that the judge felt there was no immediate option to adopt the children when back in UK?

"but not unless there was a court order."

Now that is a grey area jh because I was always lead to believe that the moment anyone applies to the court then the hague convention would kick in, that parents needed to leave before any papers were logged in court (unless the child was unborn).

"does the Hague Convention apply in this case,"

It's my understanding as per the explaination above that the hague convention should apply in this case because ;

a) the children are born
b) the children are subject to court proceedings in this country

The Supreme Court is the one in Ireland. Although I know of this family we are not supporting them in the same way as we would do for a mainstream case. That is their choice not a decision from ourselves.

wahwah doesn't really understand what is going on.

The Child Protection systems across the world vary in their qualities from the depressingly bad system in England to really quite good systems in other countries.

My advice to anyone fleeing the country to get away from the system here is to cooperate with the authorities where they end up.

Our Child Protection system does a limited amount of good, but also harms many of the children it encounters.

atlantis is basically right.

Actually, JH, you're right, I don't know much about what is going on in this case, but I think I picked up from the article that the 'risk' of adoption was insufficient to be any sort of argument against return.

I do however have a great deal more experience of the child protection system than you do and have come to a very different conclusion to you about interventions and outcomes.

I think you are a great concern, but if you didn't already exist, then someone else would be in your place, so it's not a personal thing.

JH - while I agree that things could be better in the UK I think they are still far from "depressingly bad". Currently around 50 children per year die at the hands of their parents/caregivers in the UK. There is definitely no room for complacency because even one death is one too many. However, it is important to understand that this figure has not changed in 30 years and only a few countries better us (one being Spain which I know you agree has good safeguarding procedures). As we actually compare very well to many countries I think to say that our safeguarding children procedures are "depressingly bad" is incorrect. But - we can never be complacent.

Death isn't the only possible harm that can befall a child.

Although death is not the only harm we should protect against the figure of 50 deaths per year in England is in fact an understatement.

The number of serious child care incident notifications following the death of a child have been going up recently.

I have various sources for these figures. Not only the WHO figures, but prosecutions, serious incident notifications and Serious Case Reviews.

If you want the figures I can provide them.

Thank you John - yes I would be really interested to see these figures. I agree that death is not the only thing we need to look at.
Do you think looking at the child death rate (as a result of abuse) is erroneous (wrong word maybe (accepting that we will never prevent all deaths from abuse)? Should we be looking at other outcomes instead/as well.
I am genuinely interested in this as I work with children and families where child protection plans are in place although I am not a social worker so don't necessarily have access to all the info they do.

I am not in my office at the moment. Probably the best thing is to upload them in a web format so that people can get at the source info.

Alternatively I can upload them somewhere in excel. What would be preferred?

Interesting stat JollyPirate

So that raises the question of whether harm is done to children if they are brought into the safeguarding system unnecessarily.

If it is shown that it is, we need to look at what level of harm can be justified to the 1000 to protect the 30.

Do we prioritise saving lives at the expense of children and their families getting caught up in the system unfairly?

Or do we try to minimise intervention in the lives of families at the possible expense of some of those 30?

I would favour the second approach, many on here would favour the first I imagine.

I think it is very important to recognise that a very interventionist approach that takes a "better a thousand children were removed from their families unnecessarily than one child dies at the hands of their carers" can cause a lot of suffering to those 1000 children.

My understanding was that the life outcomes for LACs were so poor that the only reason a child would be taken into foster care would be if their outcomes with the parents would be worse.

My experience was that, while many social workers favoured the idea of 1, they ended up doing 2 due to budgetary constraints.

And I think your figures are best presented as Excel-friendly .xls or .csv please.

the only reason a child would be taken into Local* Authority Care that should have been

Outcomes for these children have been poor, but are improving significantly all the time. There is an enormous amount of work going on here. I know many who have been helped enormously by being in care and many graduates. Nothing they hate more than being told they're inevitably going to have a dreadful life.

I'm not sure why the Spanish CP system is touted as being so great, never met a Spanish SW who had anything but admiration for ours, but I expect its not a like for like comparison and our stats are collected better...last few week it was all how wonderful the Irish one was, until an Irish SW contradicted...However, if we can learn lessons from other systems, then we really should. Oddly it's our arrangements for LAC that Australia want to replicate, because they are seen as being very good...

To be fair I only have the statistics as presented in the lecture today. I will be doing some further reading to see how they marry up with outcomes. I assumed (and I could be wrong) that he was talking in relation to preventing child deaths. Certainly these things are never predictable if we could say that X will definitely cause Y in relation to child protection then we wouldn't have this thread or need it. The problem is we are left only with risk factors with which to determine the liklihood that a child will be at risk of serious harm. Certainly it is never going to be easy in child protection.

I think that skidoodly has a very good point here and it's an uncomfortable question. Everyone wants an ideal where no child is harmedby carers or by being removed from carers but that's simply unrealistic imo.

It is a good point that skidoodly has raised and the Professor discussed the same issue today. As he says there is a certain threshold used to decide when social services get involved. If we set the threshold too high then the number of children who die or are seriously harmed increases, however, the lower the threshold is then the more likely it is that families will come into the system who really should not be there as their children will probably be okay whatever. It's certainly a point to think more about.

As for other systems such as Spain - I honestly don't know enough about their safeguarding programmes. Just know their child death rate is lower than ours. I do get frustrated in seeing our system described as terrible as it's the only one we have at present and does the best job it can given a lot of uncertain variables.

I think I have done this so that people can look at it without signing into google docs.

Alert: People may not wish to look at these things.

Notifications of deaths of children

Source and destination figures these are important, but not related to deaths.

Proseuctions from DPP

Unicef Report Card

I have looked at my more detailed analyses which I am going to have to stop working on until after the General Election now, but the 2008 figure looks to be 96 deaths confirmed from child abuse or neglect in England.

I am aware that the figures used to be reported as lower. The trend figures from the serious incident notifications demonstrate a material increase in the numbers of deaths particularly of babies. Whether this is better reporting or not cannot be certain, but I don't think myself that it is just better reporting as there always has been a reporting system and the serious incident notifications are not a new system.

Strangly I think that the Spanish system has fewer deaths in part because they have a higher threshold for intervention.