ABOUT THE ARTICLE

In this week’s installment of Global Child Rights and Wrongs, run in collaboration with www.saveyourchildren.in, we take a look at the child protection system in Britain, which has been, since the 1980s, at the cutting edge of experiments with child-protection laws. Britain was one of the first countries to introduce public-private partnerships in child protection, and today its child protection system is heavily commercialised. Britain has also been a leading proponent of “forced adoption” which is the adoption of children to non-related third parties even when they have parents or other family willing, indeed begging, to raise them. Britain is also the first country to propose a law against unloving parents—a Bill, popularly called “Cinderella’s Law”, was introduced in the British Parliament about two years ago that would make parents criminally liable for such things as ignoring a child, making it feel unloved and comparison with siblings. Many questionable theories of medical diagnosis of abuse, such as Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, where children fall ill repeatedly for no apparent reason, are diagnosed as “abused” by their parents, or “Non-Accidental Injury”, where parents are blamed for unexplained injuries or deaths of their infants, have either originated in Britain or found wider acceptance there than in any other developed country. In this essay, the well-known English journalist Christopher Booker surveys the dark consequences of these experiments with child protection. India, as a country that is in the process of implementing a Westerninspired child protection programme, has much to learn