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Europe Marches Against Child Protectors

June 7, 2015 permalink

Christopher Booker reports on a rising tide of opposition to child protectors across Europe.

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A rising tide of anger across Europe at 'Nazi’ social workers

Last weekend, hundreds of Norwegians and foreign parents marched on the parliament in Oslo to protest children being taken into 'care' by the state

James Munby
Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division of the High Court, has said the public had a right to know “what is being done in their name”
Photo: BRIAN SMITH FOR THE TELEGRAPH

Even I was rather surprised to see a newspaper headline reporting that the president of the Czech Republic had accused the social workers of another European country of acting “like Nazis”. As it happens, he was not talking about our own much-loved social workers but those of Norway, who four years ago took two little Czech boys into foster care, after one of them told a teacher at nursery school that his Daddy had “groped inside his pyjamas”.

Although no other evidence was given for removing the children, and the strain of the case eventually led their parents to divorce, the Norwegian authorities have refused to return the boys to their distraught mother, who has only been allowed to see them for 15 minutes twice a year and forbidden to speak with them in Czech. It was this which prompted the Czech president Milo Zeman to compare Norway’s child protection system to the Nazis’ Lebensborn forced adoption policy.

Last weekend, hundreds of Norwegians and foreign parents marched on the parliament in Oslo to protest about this and scores of similar cases, such as that of a little Russian boy seized last October after he had told his classmates that his mother had “knocked out his tooth”. Although it was only a loose baby one, she was accused of “abusing” her son.

All across Europe there is a rising tide of angry concern at the readiness of social workers in various countries, including Britain, to remove children into foster care for similarly vacuous reasons. I have reported here on the three-year battle of a Russian-Latvian family living in Holland to get the return of two young twins who were removed kicking and screaming by Dutch social workers and police, because they spoke Russian not Dutch at home. This year a senior Dutch judge finally freed the children on the grounds that the reasons for their removal had been absurd. In 2013 I reported on how our Court of Appeal ordered the return to Slovakia of two small boys who had been held miserably in care for two years by Surrey social workers for similarly trumped-up reasons.

In February, after an extensive inquiry led by a Russian doctor, Olga Borzova, a Council of Europe report called on member states, including Britain, to stop the unwarranted removal of children in ways which breached families’ human rights. Last month there was remarkable meeting to discuss this issue at the Slovak embassy in London, attended not just by representatives of all the eastern European countries but by no fewer than 10 of our own High Court judges, led by Sir James Munby, the head of the Family Division.

There are signs that this immense scandal is at last being taken seriously by some of those who matter.

Source: Telegraph (UK)

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