Kids 4 Sale

August 24, 2013 permalink

British rules to protect children prevent disclosure of the names of children in state care. The rules prevent journalists from naming the child or the social worker or judge in their case, and the scribes can be punished for mentioning which part of the country the child is from. But all these rules are suspended when the children are advertised for sale/adoption.

When fixcas searched the web for the site suggested by Booker, British Association for Adoption and Fostering, it led to a web page Be My Parent with 84 profiles of a child or sibling group available for adoption. One is enclosed after Booker's article.

In a second article Booker follows up on a case of an accidental cut.

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Children advertised like pets for sale

Anonymity doesn't apply in the case of adoption. It is hypocritical, and the result is distasteful

Children can be openly advertised for adoption, which can be hurtful to the biological parent

Photo: ALAMY

By Christopher Booker, 5:13PM BST 24 Aug 2013

There are few things our “child protection” system is keener to enforce than the rigorous secrecy rules that it claims are vital to protect the identity of children who have been removed from their families. Although the laws passed by Parliament only require measures to be taken to conceal the identity of the children themselves, whose names or photographs must never be published, the courts have widened this out to make it illegal to identify anyone involved in care proceedings.

This is why when journalists wish to write about all those cases where the system seems to have made some tragic mistake, we are strictly forbidden, except very rarely, to name the judges, the local authorities or anyone else responsible for these travesties of justice – even the part of the country where they took place. All this is supposedly in the name of protecting the identity of the children.

But when it comes to sending these children for adoption, all the rules are suspended. Consider, for instance, 22 pages published on the internet by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, a charity which earns £2  million a year for arranging for children to be placed in new homes. The 114 children pictured, almost all with their real names, are given glutinous little profiles, describing them as “bubbly”, “bright”, “loving”, “likes cuddles”, “gorgeous, smiley, happy little boy”, and so forth. At least these don’t reveal where in the country the children come from, which means that their parents may be spared the agony of seeing their child being advertised, much in the same way that pedigree dogs or cats are offered for sale.

But I also have a similar advertisement from a national newspaper, in which all the children named and photographed are from the same council area, so that anyone living in Tower Hamlets might immediately have been able to recognise the child who suddenly disappeared from a neighbour’s house. In the case of one of these children, I am told, the parents sat quietly through the court proceedings by which their beloved daughter was being removed from them. But when the judge agreed that the local authority could advertise their child by name, the father’s patience finally snapped. He threw an empty plastic cup across the courtroom, which fell way short of the judicial bench. The judge angrily ruled that for this contempt of court the father should be removed at once to a prison cell. If I were to name that judge I could equally be punished for contempt – but only, of course, to protect the identity of the child.

Source: Telegraph (UK)

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SAKURA & DANIEL are half-sister and brother who are bright and generally happy, and have positive attachments to their foster carers. Sakura is outgoing and loves parties, dancing and swimming. She has some anxieties around food, which are lessened with clear meal time routines. Daniel loves cuddles, reading with his carer and pretending to be a builder. He has oral dyspraxia (difficulty forming words) and receives speech therapy. Needing: adoption

Source: Be My Parent

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Families are torn apart, but others are free to kill

A family has been split up because a teacher misinterpreted one trivial incident

British social workers are being overzealous with some families, but failed to catch the case of Daniel Pelka Daniel Pelka was murdered by his mother Magdelena Luczak and her partner Mariusz Krezolek. As in other cases, the warning signs were there

Photo: PA

By Christopher Booker, 4:47PM BST 10 Aug 2013

Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. What is is striking about all the examples of families being torn apart by social workers for no good reason that I report on, is how each may be bizarre in its own way, but how in other respects, they all reflect a similar general pattern.

Last year, for instance, I wrote about a French mother who brought her three young daughters to London for a short holiday with their father, from whom she was amicably divorced, and who lived here with his daughter from a former relationship. The day before she and her girls were due to return to France, she was having a bath while her ex-husband was downstairs cutting his eldest daughter’s hair. Accidentally, he slightly cut the girl’s head, drawing blood. When this was noticed by a teacher at school, the social workers were called in. The girl was taken into care and her father was arrested and charged with “assault, neglect and ill-treatment”.

Incomprehensibly, his other children were also then taken into care and his ex-wife was charged with “failing to protect” the older girl, even though she had been upstairs at the time. Found guilty, she was given a suspended sentence, but her

ex-husband was sent to prison for three years. The mother has stayed in London for 21 months in the hope of getting her children back, although within two weeks of her arrest, the social workers were already drawing up a plan for them to be adopted. Contact with her children has steadily dwindled, although the girls, who are in foster care (costing us all £60,000 a year), are apparently miserable and baffled as to why they cannot return home to France. Now the council is asking the courts for all contact with their mother to be stopped.

So one family is torn apart because a teacher misinterpreted one trivial incident, setting this whole tragedy in train. But when teachers recorded how four-year-old Daniel Pelka was being turned into a bruised “bag of bones” by the abuse he was suffering at home, Coventry’s social workers were nowhere to be seen. Is it surprising that our “child-protection” system is becoming a major national scandal?

Source: Telegraph (UK)