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Defending the indefensible

In a sense we have a judge here who is not really defending what has been going on as he recognises that it has not been good. Others still defend the actions of the Family Courts (including the Court of Appeal).

Quoting from the article

"It is perfectly usual in this court to be removing the fourth, fifth and sixth children from such parents," the judge says. "It's not unheard of for it to be the eighth or the tenth."
As I try to grasp what it must mean for a mother to have 10 children taken permanently into care, he caps even that extraordinary figure. "In one case, I have removed the fourteenth."

District Judge Crichton's main concern is, naturally, for the child's welfare.
"We are achieving nothing for these children," he tells me with studied understatement. But there is also the cost of care proceedings and paying foster-parents to bring them up. "This is colossally expensive," he says.


To be fair to this particular judge he is also looking at how to keep families together. That is, however, not really his job. His job is to be a judge. That relates to the law. The underlying problem with the Children Act 1989, however, is that there is very little law although quite a bit of procedure. The judges are made to act as social workers deciding what is in the "best interests of the child" which means different things to different people and therefore is not a legal test. I do welcome his work to keep families together, but as we redesign the system of public family law we need to have judges who deal with the law.

However, "the system" should be resourcing keeping families together rather than splitting them up. The evidence is that taking a child into care is in itself a damaging step.

What this reveals is that a woman has been acting as the slave of the state and has been forced to give up 14 babies in sequence to feed the state's adoption machine. If any newspaper tells her side of the story they are in contempt of court. Not a good situation.

Where the article does defend the system however is here:
Children are taken into care because there is no parent capable of looking after them. Research suggests that in 70 per cent of these cases the mother has a problem with drink or drugs - or both. In the Inner London Family Proceedings Court, where District Judge Crichton presides, the figure is higher still: 80 or 90 per cent."

In the many cases I have been looking at this is simply not the case.

Comments

bobm said…
This is completely off topic - but I was searching for information on the Treasury's Economic Model and I noticed that you, JH, seem to have some. Specifically I was interested to know whether or not the model factors in anything related to population size or growth. I am interested in situations (Japan is a current example I believe) where populations are shrinking. How do modern economic models deal with this? Is it possible to have a 'growing' economy with a 'shrinking' population? Thanks for any help.
John Hemming said…
It is off topic. The treasury should tell you this, if they don't I will find out via email contact, but not via a comment on an off topic blog entry.
moira said…
I've heard similar things and I saw one couple who kept having children when they couldnt look after them on TV. In this cases they were blind and their 12 year old daughter was looking after 6 children and she was pregnant with her 7th.They wanted children so someone could look after them.

I just thought they seemed very low in intellect.If this is the case with other parents that keep having children even though they know the consequences,then couldn't social services or anyone educate them about contraception and give them some counselling.
John Hemming said…
Whatever the solution is a simplistic application of S31 of the Children Act is not it.

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