At last, shockwaves over our stolen children – in France
On November 15, quite a shockwave was sent across France by a television documentary on Canal 5 entitled
Its theme, familiar to readers of this column, was the “barely credible” readiness of Britain’s social workers and secret courts to remove children from their parents for what too often appear to be wholly inadequate reasons.
Among the film’s expert contributors was Maggie Mellon, deputy chair of the British Association of Social Workers, who last year compared what happens in our “child protection” system today with the immense, long covered-up scandal whereby, in the Fifties and Sixties, tens of thousands of children, snatched from their families, were secretly deported to a miserable life in countries around the Commonwealth.
As the number of children taken into “care” in Britain continues to hurtle upwards to new highs – there are now well over 90,000 of them – one theme on which the documentary particularly focused, again often featured in this column, was the ever-growing number now being seized not because they have actually been harmed, but simply for what is called “the risk of emotional abuse”: the possibility that they might be emotionally harmed in the future, as in all those cases where babies are removed at birth simply because their mother was herself in “care” as a child.
The producers of the film, which drew an exceptionally large audience, were startled by the response. It won extensive coverage in the French press. Its expert contributors were invited to Brussels to address 20 members of the European Parliament on how Britain’s “child protection” system has gone off the rails. Two were asked by a special UN rapporteur to submit more detailed reports on how Britain seems to be in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And one told me how amazed he was, in the days after the showing, to be several times stopped in the street by French viewers wanting to say how horrified they had been.
I have written before about the rising alarm across Europe at what is happening here. But this is now increasingly being shared by senior figures in Britain itself. Even our most social worker-friendly newspaper,
recently ran a long article headed “Are we taking too many children into care?”, quoting David Hill, president of the National Association of Directors of Children’s Services, as saying “the number of children in public care is, I would contend, a national disgrace”. The scandal I have now been covering here for seven years is at last beginning to attract shocked attention in a great many often surprising places.