Why are police so happy to ‘hunt’ innocent parents?
One thing which has puzzled me as much as any about our strange “child protection” system over the last eight years was again recently highlighted by a curious case which made national headlines for several days. A huge police hunt had been mounted for a 40-year old woman who had “abducted” two young children. More than 100 police officers, we were told, had been involved; dozens of houses were searched, and an alert went out to police across Europe.
The woman’s 62-year-old mother and sister had been held in police cells for 30 hours. It was all made to sound as if the children might be in danger from the woman, and when they were eventually tracked down 15 miles from home, the police were quick to reassure us that they were “safe”, although they were being investigated for any “psychological harm”.
Very unusually for a “child protection” case, the names of this woman and what turned out to be her own sons were allowed to be published. And when journalists interviewed friends of the family, a very different picture emerged. Samantha Baldwin was described as “a devoted mother”, who had never done any harm to her two boys who “doted on her”.
Her only offence, it seemed, was that when a judge ordered the children to be removed from her, to cut short a protracted “access” battle with their father, she was so shocked that she took them into hiding. The grandmother and sister had only been held in custody because they were adamant that they did not know where the runaways were.
What I have never managed to fathom in the hundreds of cases I have followed since 2009 is quite why the police seem so quick to comply with any request for help from social workers and the courts.
In the very first case I reported, a father was arrested on his children’s school premises and taken by the police to a mental hospital for protesting when his three-year-old son was snatched from his wife’s arms. After a months-long nightmare, all their three children were returned home. Since then I have reported scores of similar cases where the police seem to have gone way over the top in assisting courts and social workers, arriving mob-handed to snatch new-born babies from their mothers’ arms or screaming children from their beds.
Too often there has turned out to be no good case for seizing the children at all, and in not a few instances, after months of misery removed from a loving home, they have eventually been returned to their parents. In one case two boys were, on the orders of a judge, snatched from their beds at 7am on Christmas morning, only for them to run back to their mother so often that eventually even the social workers accepted that they should be allowed to remain with her.
I have asked police officers under what legal authority they seem so ready to comply with these requests, since it is evident that some are very unhappy to take part in such work. I have never yet had a proper or satisfactory reply.