I had been planning this week to write about two sharply contrasting stories which exemplify the way in which much of the child protection system operated by Britain’s social workers has gone horribly off the rails. The first story, which last week made national headlines, was that of an official report into the mishandling by Birmingham social workers of the tragic case of Kyra Ishaq, the seven-year-old girl starved to death after months of physical abuse by her mother and stepfather, The 160-page report found that, although the girl’s death should have been preventable if the social workers involved had done their job – she weighed only 2st 9lb at her death – no disciplinary action need be taken. The other episode last week was just the opposite. This was the shocking outcome of a story on which I have reported before, illustrating the ruthless determination of too many social workers to seize babies or children from responsible and loving parents on the flimsiest of evidence, or no evidence at all, to place them with foster carers or send them for adoption in a way which flouts the principle on which the whole system supposedly rests, namely that the interests of the child are paramount. In this instance, the social workers pursued through the courts a doting mother, against whom there is not a shred of evidence that she harmed her child in any way. When they won their case, on highly questionable legal grounds, they left the court giving exultant “high fives” that they now had judicial authority to snatch the baby. Having previously spent hours talking to the now utterly distraught mother and others about every detail of this story, I am convinced that a terrible act of injustice has been done, and that it represents just as much of a failure of the system as that which allowed the death of little Kyra Ishaq. At the last minute, however, I have been legally advised that, in the circumstances of this case, I cannot report it in any way. In due course I am hoping that it will be possible to do so, because it is as alarming an instance as any I have covered of how utterly corrupted our system of child protection has become. The very fact that I am so far forbidden to bring this horrifying story to light in itself illustrates not the least shocking aspect of this system – the way it is able to shroud itself in legally enforced secrecy, so that so many outrageous and inhuman blunders can be hidden away from public view. In the meantime, I shall report on another story from last week when, for once, a judge was able publicly to expose a blunder by social workers – the latter, as so often, displaying an almost institutional inability to recognise the human realities of the people who fall into their clutches. A High Court judge, Mr Justice Baker, had before him the case of a severely handicapped 19-year-old boy with a mental age of two, who for years had been in the loving care of a foster mother. When allegations which turned out to be baseless were made against the foster mother, Manchester city council’s social workers took the boy from her without a court order, sending him to a care home where he was intensely unhappy at having been torn away from the one person in the world he knew, loved and trusted. Earlier this year Mr Justice Baker ruled that she and the boy should be reunited, on the basis that their separation was in breach of mental health laws designed to protect the rights of vulnerable people. Only last week, however, did the judge rule that the council could be publicly named. What particularly drew his ire was the arguments Manchester’s social workers used to justify their wish to keep the two separated, claiming that it was in accordance with an official policy which turned out not to have existed. The local authority’s case on the point, said the judge, had been “lamentable”. They should never have taken the boy away from his foster-mother without a court order. The only social worker involved whom he absolved from blame was one who had clearly not been given any proper training in the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act. This case may not have had quite the disturbing dimensions of the one on which I had intended to report this week. But yet again it shone a flickering beam into the murky machinations of a system which, if more of them were exposed, would shock the public as much as any scandal in Britain today.The shameful stories that can’t be told
Our heartless, blind and secretive adoption system has made
a nonsense of the central principle it was designed to uphold,
writes Christopher Booker.
Sunday, 1 August 2010
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