It may be that we have lost the only marble we have left, (the chipped blue one with the yellow stripe running through the middle) but as we were reading this article, which was posted on ChildQuest’s Facebook wall, we suddenly had an earth shattering moment (one of only two, so we feel a little fragile).

The article is about a mother who was reunited with her son, eight years after he went missing. It turned out that the child’s godmother had kidnapped him the night she was asked to baby sit and was not seen again with the little munchkin, until now. You will be relieved to know that the godmother has since been remanded in custody and mother and now not-so-little munchkin, will be reunited shortly. But what does this have to do with the family courts?

The part in the article which sent us into brain-melt territory was the second to last paragraph, which read, “A Children’s Protective Services spokeswoman said they will consider counseling and other services to help the mother and Miguel, who is now 8 years old, to become reunited with a minimum amount of stress and confusion for the child.”

And then, we thought about the Websters. 

Told by the family courts they could not have their children back on policy grounds, despite a possible miscarriage of justice, we started to wonder what the difference was between a parent who had had their child wrongfully taken from them and a parent who had had, well, their child wrongfully taken from them. Did it matter whether the wrongful taking was an individual or the state and if there was a distinction, could it be justified? The answer, we thought, had to lie in the word ‘wrongful’.

The courts would argue that to return a child after a certain period of time would have a detrimental effect on the child, and yet in abduction cases, we see parents being reunited with their children often, sometimes after not having seen their children since they were newborns and therefore having no recollection of the parent, at all. This sentiment is even more poignant when considering that the Webster’s children did know their parents, very well indeed.

And if a team like the one in the article above can attempt to reunite abducted children and go on to support an attempt at helping the mother and child bond, why can’t we offer that support to parents who have had their children wrongfully taken by the state?

But surely, the argument couldn’t be that simple. In our concern that we may have overlooked something very obvious, we wondered whether the law in the UK for reuniting abducted children with their parents was different to the law in the US – did we allow children to go back to their parents after what might be deemed a significant lapse of time in terms of bonding and emotional attachment or did we allow the abducters to keep the children, “Ogh, go on, you have him! It’s been three years and he won’t recognise the mama anyway!”

Then we had a good, hard think. And we did the only respectable thing a researcher can do. We Googled. And we found a mass of literature and news items on parents in the UK being reunited with their children, sometimes after three years or more. There was no issue there over whether or not the child would bond with the mother or father. It was assumed that returning the child to its rightful parents was the right thing to do.

We really may have missed something and if we have we would be very grateful if someone could put us out of our misery but until they do, we feel very uncomfortable about the double standards in law and would like these unhelpful distinctions to be removed so that barriers to fairness, justice and child welfare are stripped away and relegated to historical cautionary tales, where they should remain, enshrined in every social work and legal text-book, forever.

The Websters, unable to have their other children returned to them, due to ‘Policy Grounds’

This is a slightly unusual award for judge of the week (not because we have not given Judge of the Week to District Judge Crichton before but because it is not for a decision in any one case), yet we make it for many decisions Judge Crichton himself has made whilst working in the Family Drug and Alcohol Court.

The Family Drug and Alcohol Court, affectionately known as FDAC has been implemented in the UK and managed by District Judge Crichton and has been very successful. It has doubled the number of ‘returns’ of children to their biological mothers and has saved the government money. It is progressive, ahead of its time and because of that, sneered at on occasion by less imaginative legal minds, which is exactly what happened on Radio 4’s Law in Action podcast this week.

At Researching Reform, debate is very important. We encourage it, not only on our site but in other projects we work on but the quality of that debate is what makes the difference between an interesting discussion and one that has very little merit. We were very disappointed by Joshua Rozenberg’s rather superficial foray into the Court and its implications and even more disheartened by the way in which he chose to end his interview by saying “The admirable Judge Crichton as I like to think of him, demonstrating that a man with a mission can make a real difference to children’s lives, so long as you don’t mind a judge playing the role of a social worker”. Mr Rozenberg’s nasal sarcasm is hard on the ear at the best of times, redolent of public school boy chicanery, but when coupled with banal commentary, makes for painful listening.

District Judge Crichton on the other hand, remained unflappable in the face of albeit weak criticism (the best the programme could do by way of critique was accuse the judge of blurring the lines between social work and the judicial role) and made very valid and poignant points about the largely misunderstood benefits of the Court and why it operates well within procedural guidelines. Another criticism levelled at Nick Crichton, although indirectly in commentary, was that rolling out the scheme to other parts of the country would be impossible due to varying standards of judicial competence across the country and as such the model might fall prey to judges misunderstanding their roles – but surely, we can apply this to any model the system rolls out, including the current structure we see before us?

Yes, the whole programme was disappointing, from analysis of the Drug and Alcohol Court to the way in which the court’s work was covered, but perhaps the greatest disappointment of all was the seemingly uninterested presenter who failed to understand the very special and important work the Family Drug and Alcohol Court do and its place in the future of family law.

For being so gallant in the face of small-minded commentary and criticism, and for his ground breaking work at FDAC, District Judge Nicholas Crichton is our Judge of the Week.

When we read this headline we knew immediately that it could only be a quotation from the one and only District Judge Crichton. How did we know this? We knew this because Judge Crichton had made the same observation at our Westminster Debate on children and the Summer Riots, in December.

This time Judge Crichton is making this observation in a Law in Action Podcast, with Joshua Rozenberg, who discusses various legal issues on the programme including London’s Family Drug and Alchohol Court (FDAC), which Judge Crichton has been responsible for implementing and overseeing and which now faces the fear of being shut down due to a lack of support.

The programme is going to be aired on radio 4 at 8pm this evening and is going to look at whether FDAC has been successful or not and whether it represents value for money. The podcast is available now: check it out, and see what you think.

District Judge Nicholas Crichton

The Ireland Report has been a very welcome piece of research for the family justice system, whether it feels comfortable bearing its Achilles heel to the world or not and has helped to highlight the courts’ darkest troubles in the form of poor psychological reports, reports which are not only life changing but can have devastating consequences for children.

But the Ireland Report alludes to a bigger problem – that of the legitimacy of conventional thought, diagnosis and treatment on and of mental health issues. This article in the Jerusalem Post which we’ve just come across addresses that problem head on, as it talks about a new book written by Professor Jerome Kagan, an emeritus professor at Harvard University, who co-directed the Mind/Brain Behavior Inter-Faculty Initiative, there.

Professor Kagan’s book, Psychology’s Ghosts, looks at the popular practices and assumptions of psychologists and challenges the way in which the sector works. Kagan identifies four problems in contemporary psychology:

1. The indifference to the setting in which observations are gathered, including the age, class, and cultural background of participants and the procedure that provides the evidence (he questions, for example, the assumption that similar verbal reports of well-being reflect similar psychological states)
2. The habit of basing inferences on single measures rather than patterns of measures (even though every action, reply, or biological response can result from more than one set of conditions);
3. The defining of mental illnesses by symptoms independent of their origin and
4. The treatment of mental disorders with drugs and forms of psychotherapy that are nonspecific to the diagnosed illness.

The article beautifully summarises the current problems perceived by Professor Kagan in relation to contemporary psychology and notes that Kagan is especially tough on psychologists’ identification and treatment of mental illnesses. The article also mentions that, “in recent years, [psychologists] have replaced the broad concept of madness with a host of illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolarity, autism, ADHD), differentiated by “presenting symptoms,” largely because insurance companies demand a standard diagnostic label. All these things of course, are not motivated by the primary concern, which should be that of discovering new avenues to working out legitimate ways to diagnose and treat patients.

Another insightful observation made by Professor Kagan is that, “Episodes of depression lasting a month or two, provoked by illness, job loss or the death of a loved one, are normal reactions and not mental disorders. Nagg, a character in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, noted, “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”

Professor Kagan also goes on to talk about the pharmaceutical industry and the need for care when creating and selling drugs as well as the administration of those drugs to patients, detailing what he calls the ‘corrupt alliance’ between the industry and physicians and therapists.

It’s a fascinating article, with much more to say than we’ve mentioned above and well worth a read. We’re going to check out the Mind/Brain/Behaviour website now……

Professor Jerome Kagan