Children being seized from foreign families by social workers in ever-greater numbers
One of the many disturbing features of our “child protection” system is the remarkable readiness of social workers to seize children from foreign parents working in Britain, for what often appear to be quite absurd reasons. A year ago, when I reported on one family who had managed to escape back to Latvia, despite an English judge ordering the Latvian and Irish authorities to arrest them, I noted that the numbers of such foreign families affected in Britain had been attracting shocked concern from the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and several eastern European governments.
The Polish government was reporting that more than 1,000 Polish children had been removed in this way. Latvian families affected had risen from seven in 2012 to 89 in 2014. In 2012 alone, 116 Slovak children were taken into “care”.
Last week I spoke with an experienced Portuguese lawyer, now living in Britain, who was recently shocked to discover from Facebook just how many Portuguese families are being similarly torn apart. When she expressed her concerns on the internet, she was approached within days by many, including 15 families affected, where invariably the children taken into care are forbidden to speak Portuguese to each other.
One example she outlined centres on a family who run a small business. During a party, the owners’ three-year old grandson was playing in the garden with some “adolescents” while his eight-month pregnant mother worked inside. Next morning, on noticing that his face had come up in bruises, she and the boy’s father took him to hospital for examination.
Social workers were summoned and the boy was removed into care. Shortly afterwards, no sooner had his mother given birth in the same hospital than they were removed to a council “mother and baby unit”, with cameras in every room, where she was watched night and day.
Several witnesses present at the party said that the boy’s bruises might well have been caused by rough play with the older boys. The only evidence for the local authority came from an “expert witness” who, solely on the basis of looking at photographs of the bruising, concluded that it was “nonaccidental” and most likely caused by the parents. Dismissing the other evidence as “not credible”, the judge accepted this and ruled that both children must remain in care.
After 27 years working in Portuguese courts, the lawyer found this case astonishing; experienced observers such as the former MP John Hemming have found there are so many others involving foreign families in Britain. It might seem extraordinary that, as the Justice Department confirmed to me last week, no record is kept of just how many of them there are, although by now it must run into many thousands. Even more puzzling, however, is why we are paying tens of millions of pounds a year to keep these children in Britain rather than sending them back to the authorities in their parents’ own countries. Invariably, on the very rare occasions I know of where this has happened, those authorities have investigated the families and found no grounds for concern.