This is NOT high praise for a job well done, in fact the Judge even
points out the clear failings of the Social Worker and Local Authority whilst
thinking she’s berating the parents – this is not a joke
The article which can be found on the Community Care website is below, I’ve annotated in Red where the craziness starts.
Local authority praised for lengths it went to in attempting
to assess and organise contact for parents who launched Facebook and YouTube
campaign against 'kidnap' and 'forced adoption'
A judge has
praised a local authority who went ‘far beyond what would normally be
expected’ to work with parents who campaigned on social media against the
‘kidnapping’ of their baby. It is their actual job to initiate
and facilitate the contact, wherever the parents might be.
This is an actual fact in the Processes for
Standards on the HCPC website.
Southampton
council made ‘tremendous efforts’ to engage the boy’s parents and grandparents
who refused to work with child protection and legal processes and set up
Facebook and YouTube pages about the proceedings and demanding his return, Her
Honour Judge Black said.
The YouTube
videos include a recording of a phone call by a social worker to the couple –
currently living in Portugal, the mother’s home country – unsuccessfully
attempting to persuade them to return to England to attend the care order
hearing, see their son and be assessed.
I have listened
to this phone call; the parents were in fear of returning to the UK as the
Local Authority had the police issue an arrest warrant. IT IS CALLED SELF PRESERVATION
Sitting in the
Family Court in Portsmouth last week, Judge Black said she was unable to find
the parents had capacity to care for the child now or in the future: How, how can the Judge find this when no assessment was ever
carried out?
“The[ir]
behaviour and the misguided campaign they have pursued is evidence of them
having no understanding of their child’s needs. Even meeting the most basic
need of forming an attachment with their child has been failed by their parents
as they have not seen him since the 4th March, and instead they left the
country.” The Local Authority and Social Worker took
that attachment forming away from the parents by placing the baby in Foster
Care.
She was
satisfied by the evidence that they had abandoned their child and there were no
other options apart from adoption. The child had been under an interim care
order since he was a week old.
What evidence of abandonment? How did the couple abandon their child when
the local authority already had the child in question? The local authority took that away from the
parents, they did not abandon their child.
Judge Black
noted the steps the local authority had taken to promote contact between the
couple and the child, and explore options for him to live with them or his
extended family. These included:
- In the initial
stages, seeking an urgent hearing to address the parents’ lack of
engagement in proceedings and offering a parallel planning approach to
allow them more time to consider participating in the process.
- Following the
parents’ failure to comply with the original ‘contract of expectations’
for contact, by not accepting advice and displaying threatening and
disruptive behaviour, the council requested the court’s permission to
refuse contact. However, it agreed to a new twice weekly arrangement if
the parents attended a meeting to discuss how they would manage contact.
- Extending the
window of time initially agreed in a court order for the couple to take up
the offer of a parenting assessment
- A number of
attempts to assess the mother’s parents in Portugal, both involving the
Portuguese consulate and local children’s services, and by independent
social workers commissioned by Southampton.
- Delaying filing
the final care plan to take further steps to try and assess the
grandparents. The grandfather was described as ‘aggressive and
obstructive’ and echoed the parents’ views that child trafficking and
kidnap were taking place and that ‘the nurse receives money to kidnap
babies’.
Anyone faced with losing their child
or having already lost their child would be aggressive and obstructive because
no one wants their child taken away from them.
Health concerns
Concerns about
the risk of harm were first raised when the parents asked to be discharged from
hospital as quickly as possible after the baby was born and did not register
his birth. They refused to allow midwives and GPs into the home in the
subsequent days to check on him.
It
is not a mandatory need to allow a midwife into your home, even the midwives admit
this. The baby left hospital as most
hospital operate a 1 day 1 night stay, you then have 42 days from the birth of
a child to register the birth https://www.gov.uk/register-birth/overview: Register a birth. You must register
the birth of your baby within 42 days of the birth in England and
Wales. If you can't go to the district where your baby was born you can go to
another office and the registrar will send your details to the appropriate
district office.
The Local Authority became involved at 6 days old.
However, they
took the baby to hospital when he was six days old where he was found to be
jaundiced and dehydrated. The consultant was concerned that the parents
had not recognised that he needed immediate treatment. There were
inconsistencies in how they reported on the child’s health; the father had made
an initial phone call to the GP, worried that the child was unwell but then
denied making it. Whether or not the father made this phone call
is not the issue, the point is the parents DID recognise that their child
needed medical intervention, which is why they took him the hospital in the
first place.
Staff were
concerned that the father, who was English, may have administered a solution
equivalent to industrial strength bleach to the baby indirectly through the
mother’s breast milk. He sold this alternative medication as a treatment for
cancer and autism online, including paraphernalia for giving it to babies. This simple statement
actually falls within the Governments own guidelines within the Equality Act
2010 – Discrimination by Association, the Social Worker discriminated against
the father because of his job. There is
no evidence that the father administered Bleach, and the mother even states
that the baby was exclusively breast feeding so how was this even possible?
Because of
concerns that the parents may abscond or block enquiries about the baby’s
health, he was removed under police powers of protection and then looked after
under an interim care order until the case management hearing. There is no
molestation order so even the police had no legal power to do this.
Judge Black
said that the concerns around the father’s medical beliefs could have been
allayed at that stage if he had been able to reassure the court that he would
not administer the solution to the baby, or if it was satisfied that the mother
would be a protective factor in preventing this. Alternatively, there was an
option to make orders for the mother to care for the baby on her own if the
court was not satisfied in relation to the father.
However
initial optimism that the parents were drawing a line under what they called
misunderstandings and confusion around their communication with social workers,
health and legal professionals “was short-lived”.
The parents
sacked their lawyers for the remainder of the proceedings. At one hearing, the
mother read a prepared script questioning the authority of the court and the
parents were removed twice for not respecting the court.
Contempt of court
The local
authority applied for injunctions to stop the parents posting about the
proceedings on social media. Orders were granted but they continued to add to
the Facebook and YouTube pages. The High Court judge who made the injunctions
adjourned the council’s subsequent application for the parents to be committed
for contempt of court but gave a judgment which he asked to be transcribed in
English and Portuguese for the parents and grandparents.
In it he said
their apparent belief that the baby had been stolen for a ‘forced adoption’ by
the council in collusion with medical staff and the courts was ‘completely
untrue’.
“If the
parents believe it, they are deluded. If anyone is encouraging them in that
belief, they are acting in a way that is wholly contrary to the interest of
this child and his parents… There is a very real danger that, by continuing
with their current internet campaign, they will only achieve the very thing
they profess to be trying to avoid – permanent separation from their son.”
Well I’m deluded then.
Because nothing here has made a reasonable case and completely
contravenes article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 – the Right to respect for
private and family life
The case came
back before Judge Black following the unsuccessful attempts to assess the
grandparents. She found she could only conclude that they did not wish to be
assessed as carers and they, like the parents, had been given a clear final
chance to engage in the process.
Making care
orders without the parents’ consent was therefore a necessary and proportionate
interference in their article 8 rights to private and family life, she said.
“Simply demanding through the media for their baby to be returned to them is
not something that the Court could start to take into account as a plan or an
option without there being first a full assessment to understand whether that
would be not only a realistic option, but a safe option for the child.”
Article 8 is a qualified right -
Government interference with these rights is allowed in special circumstances, and only when necessary in a democratic society. The interference must fulfil a pressing social need; pursue a legitimate aim; and be proportionate to the aims being pursued. An example is government restrictions on the rights to assembly and association, in order to calm a riot.
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