Welcome to another week. The government, say MPs working on the Public Accounts Committee, is not doing enough to help children in care. More than this, the Committee noted a distinct reluctance by stakeholders, like the Department for Education to play an active role in improving services and securing better futures for children in care.
Amongst some of the criticisms levelled at the Department for Education, were its defensive attitude to the problems, overt attempts at limiting responsibility for the failings noted and not doing enough to ensure that local authorities are run competently.
Our question to you, then is this: what other failings do you feel the government is responsible for when it comes to protecting and nurturing children in care, and elsewhere?
Researching Reform 
If the government were really serious about protecting children it would stop GAGGING children in care.Children taken into care inevitably find that their mobile phones and lap tops or tablets are confiscated to isolate them from family and friends.
At contact children are forbidden to complain of abuse in care by social workers,care workers, or members of the foster family,They cannot discuss their case or cry for help and if despite this as teenagers in a care home they complain they are usually dismissed with contempt and told that they have made a “career choice.”
We do not need new laws to deal with this ;we just need existing laws to be enforced.
Freedom of speech,freedom of movement,and severe punishment for those giving under age children alcohol,drugs,and finally abusing them.All practices that are now largely ignored in so far as they concern children in State care.
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The sheer numbers of children taken into foster care must have a negative effect on the quality of care received, and also calls into question whether the advertising campaigns stressing the financial benefits available for carers are attracting the wrong kind of people. It seems that under the current system that when a child is 18 it is goodbye and good luck, we need your bedroom for another (paying) child. It is only then that the child discovers that the person they had been calling Mum or Dad for the last few years was only in it for the money. There is no doubt that fostered children will certainly suffer emotional harm and yet children are still being removed on the basis of possible future emotional harm. LA’s lose so few cases in family courts that something must be wrong. It is mathematically impossible for LA’s to be right and families wrong as often as family courts would have you believe. To underline this fact, why are so few parents actually even prosecuted, never mind convicted in criminal courts? To take a families children from them is in itself a very Draconian measure and should only be done as a last resort. The burden of proof in family courts must be changed to “Beyond reasonable doubt” It is the only way we can put a stop to this vile fostering/adoption industry which is little better than child trafficking. This would mean far fewer numbers of children in care and far more resources able to be used properly to give these unfortunate children a better chance in life.
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Hi Mike, couldn’t agree more!
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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Natasha, your twitter flicker made a reference to stigmatisation. The research doesn’t mention the stigma of being in care. It is still believed the kids in care did something wrong. I brought this to the attention of both Carcass firstly and then the Judge, useless article, in front of the other professionals in court, more useless articles. It was totally ignored! They didn’t even reply when I mentioned all the social worker jargon that a child in care has to learn and becomes the language that separates the child from his/ her peers! They clearly have a lot to learn!
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Hi D, yes, I think that was just in reference to family units.
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Yes Dana, The attitudes of so-called professionals involved in family court cases when you question their opinions are in general so very arrogant, kind of looking down their noses at you for daring to hold a different opinion. No matter how many times you demonstrate clearly that they are wrong and that their are better alternatives they ignore you and carry on playing their little game with children’s lives.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2997499/Inside-fly-infested-house-boy-5-badly-neglected-didn-t-know-bath-told-foster-carer-Santa-doesn-t-come-house-more.html
In the link another case of REAL child abuse and the mother and stepfather walk free, this is not “In a child’s best interest” when thousands of parents and grandparents are wrongly accused in a court that is closed and families cannot produce evidence that they did not harm a child they loved so much and yet on hear say are guilty of WHAT, but steal the children as the Governments do and then ALLOW how many thousands to be sexually abused by many in governments is a crime with a BIG BIG cover up as all is now coming out, and so if I as a layperson knew of Savile and one other 30 odd years ago what does that tell you, untill the family courts are CLOSED down no kid is safe. I wonder why when and by who thought up the idea of the closed family courts, OH SORRY was it the paedophiles in Governments who made the law oh yes closed family courts ha ha ha lets get the kids and put a gagging order on the families, then if they speak out ha ha ha send them to prison that will shut them up and we have their kids to F—— ha ha ha,
Now in my 70s If I am at heavens door god help the paedophiles I will promise you all you will be sent to the devil and abused.
As you will read in the link the mother and stepfather walk free after abusing a child screaming to be heard, and untill the laws of the land are changed then the wicked evil paedophiles and parents will ALWAYS walk free ITS CALLED JUSTICE “In a child’s best interest”
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Whenever I read about ‘real’ abuses that have gone through the criminal court as opposed to the family courts, I noticed there is always photographic evidence of the squalour the child has endured and other tangible evidence. Usually the parents go to prison for cruelty. In family court lots of allegations by social workers and ‘expert’ psychologists and psychiatrists, that have just met the parents, are made about the family and their home but there is no collaborating evidence, photographic or otherwise.
If you were to ask someone in the street, who has not been through the family court, for their perception of child abusers, they would describe parents as in the above article. They have no idea that family courts take children on the say so of a social workers/experts fabricated opinion! The parents subsequently have their child removed and their under 5s put up automatically for adoption, they are not given a criminal record but are often given a mental health diagnosis, usually some ‘disorder’ based on a single meeting or maybe two, with the ‘expert’ employed and paid for by the same local authority that it’s social workers have written reports to remove the child! A clear conflict of interest! It’s farcical!
The fact that very few care orders are rejected by the courts show that once proceedings are started it doesn’t stop until the child is removed. The courts have alternative orders but they don’t exercise their discretion and instead act as a figurehead for the legal removal of your child to the care system or for adoption.
Grandparents spend thousands of pounds, (they don’t get legal aid) in the forlorn hope of trying to keep their grandchikdren out of the care system but they too are found wanting by the same social workers involved with the parents, despite never having spoken to them or know anything about them but their reports, often copied from others reports, are accepted by the family courts!
Trouble is no one knows about this until it’s too late! This has been allowed to continue unchallenged as the family courts were secretly ‘disposing’ of children to the care system or adoption. To my mind the still closed family courts, despite Mumbys rhetoric, have never been opened but should be closed permanently!
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Yes Dana, I am one of those Grandparents, having spent £75,000 in total to no avail, including £50,000 on a leave to apply for a residency order, under the notorious Judge Dodds at Liverpool family court, which he refused (leave) on the grounds that the process of the application would if unsuccessful undermine the placement.
Justice denied without being given the chance on a very dubious technicality. I could have appealed and probably would have won the appeal, but then I would have had to start the process all over again with a different judge, the costs of which dissuaded me from making the appeal.
I would have had to dip even further into my pension pot, which would have put at jeopardy my own future and the future of my Grandson.
Do I feel I was treated fairly and received Justice? Of course not, The Foster carer was proven to have lied about the child allegedly soiling an hour after arriving home from contact, according to her diary, it was 4 days later, and one day after a big fight with another fostered child living with him.
Dodds ordered her diaries (700 pages) to be copied for all parties, then wasted a day to give the parties time to read them, then the next day made a great show of piling all the paperwork in a heap and complaining about the amount of paperwork (half of which was the diaries he had ordered copied) and then said that he had no intention of reading them and was not prepared to allow the Foster carer to spend days in the box being cross examined and suggested the matter be dealt with by submission, effectively saving the Social worker, contact worker and Guardian from cross examination.
He effectively wasted 3 days for which I still had to pay my very expensive barrister, and got the Foster carer off the hook for the numerous contradictions in her diary entries compared to her statement to the court. He also chastised the LA for allowing the foster carer to make her own statement?
If this had happened in an open court, the press would have had a field day, it was like a Monty Python Sketch, I even overheard The LA and the Guardian’s barristers suggesting that Dodds had lost the plot.
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Most grandparent are for life, first they are the parents who plant the seeds of love for the next generations they then spend untold years as a parent working to pay the bills and to bring up the children, these children then grow up to become the parents and then the grandchildren are born but as we know grandparents have no rights. Before the last elections Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg publicly said if they got into power they would give grandparents rights, I also have the letter from Cameron’s office to say so, but Cameron got into power and the door for grandparents stayed closed. For most Grandparents as a parent many could not always give 100% of their time to their children due to the pressures of working cooking cleaning and securing a future for their children but as a grandparent they now have 101% of time for their seeds of love, but now with many thousands of grandchildren being taken into care on allegations only grandparents become the silent witnesses just as the grandchildren are in care. It is via the help line I hear from so many grandparents who have spent their life savings or sold their homes to pay for legal teams to apply to the closed courts for a residence order for the grandchild/ren and as many say we have spent the grandchildrens money we had worked and saved so they could have a better life but now we have lost all and never to see our grandchildren again with many grandparents now left to live in poverty and sent to their graves but for many grandparents they have died mentally long before their deaths. It is not only grandparents who have no rights it is also the great grandparents aunts uncles and whole families brothers and sisters are seperated in care and who are adopted, and yet Mr Cameron and the likes always say publicly familys and family life is very important David Cameron on families – Speeches – GOV.UK
https://www.gov.uk/government/…/david-cameron-on-families – Cached
18 Aug 2014 … It’s family that brings up children, teaches values, passes on knowledge, instils in
us all the responsibility to be good citizens and to live in …
And yet Cameron and others are the ones who allows the private army and yes the NAZIS continuation of the SS to controle the nation by doing exactly what the SS did in the second world war and it is common knowledge that the SS stole untold thousands of babies and children from other parts of the now EU and took them back to Germany to foster and adopt out and here we are in the 21st centry so what has changed, it is not world war 2 but world war 3 on the nations children who could have lived with a loving grandparent.
21st Century Lebensborn: Children Screaming to Be Heard …
http://www.amazon.co.uk/21st-Century-Lebensborn-Children-Screaming/…/ 1910394971 – Cached
Buy 21st Century Lebensborn: Children Screaming to Be Heard by Timothy
Spearman (ISBN: 9781910394977) from Amazon’s Book Store. Free UK delivery
on …
But the GREAT BRITISH EMPIRE AS IT LIKES TO BE KNOWN
should be changed to
THE GREAT BRITISH EMPIRES CHILD ABUSERS
or
THE GREAT BRITISH EMPIRES PAEDOPHILES
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Cameron! The same Cameron who left his own child in a pub! Prime Minister Cameron who forgot about his own child!
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Yes, name withheld, I have heard of many cases that are practically a mirror image of what you describe and as a grandparent, who also spent most of my pension pot trying to keep my own grandchildren out of the care system, lost not just £ thousands but more importantly, lost one grandchild to adoption, a new born, that I was refused even direct sight of and two more to long term foster care, both of which I have been denied any contact with since. The dates “awarded” by the courts never happened!
Social workers have carte blanch to do whatever they want, without fear of recriminations because all they have to say is “it’s in the best interests of the child!”. This of course can be flexible because they can and do change their mind whenever it suits them. So, when they first say the children should be separated and the younger one adopted, as they did with my middle grandchild, suddenly that gets changed when the fosterers agree to have both. The reports supporting the initial adoption in the best interests of the child, hit the dirt and are forgotten! The youngest in my case was adopted, so they had their pound of flesh!
Having gone through the system if you had told me what the outcome would be I never would have believed it. I would have had you down as a conspirator, that you must have done something that made it impossible for you to look after your own grandchild and he/she had to be rescued and taken into care. Unfortunately that is the myth. You have to remember people’s perception of kids being taken into care are about those kids that have to be rescued from a dreadful life of pain and suffering from wicked parents, beating their children senseless while boozed or drugged up! These are the type of cases and even worst ones, that resulted in the death of kids like Victoria Climbie or Baby Peter, that social workers failed to save despite knowing how bad the family were. Harrowing stories fed to us by the media over decades and NSPCC & Barnardos adverts crying out for more money to save even more children and it’s no wonder people believe what they have seen on the TV and assume all cases must be the same.
There is a difference and the cases are in fact separated at the outset, some cases to the Criminal Court and the others to Family Court. My understanding is that Criminal court comes under the banner of the Ministry of Justice and is an open court and the person is tried in front of a jury and evidence is submitted. When sent to prison, as you will be, court is just a formality, visits with surviving children are made, as in the case of Baby Ps mother. After she was released she had parenting sessions and contact was resumed. Family Court however comes under the banner of the Education Department. The person is not tried in front of a jury but in closed court, based on the balance of probabilities. It is usually found that a parent/ grandparents cannot look after their child/grandchildren. Contact can be stopped under any social worker pretext, despite research stating a child’s mental health is better when links are kept while a child is in foster care. The law even says the LA should go back to court if contact is withheld, so they neatly sidestep that by saying your once loving child/ grandchild no longer wants any contact!
I don’t know why the family courts were set up in the 80s nor who set them up but if anyone knows…..!
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Dana, without doubt, the burden of proof before a child can be removed should be changed to beyond reasonable doubt, and legal aid should be automatically granted, “In the best interest of
the child”
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Mike, Aaahh…do they really do things in the best interests of the child? Methinks not! I agree with you, this opinion based evidence is all wrong! Open to abuse depending on who is looking at the case and what they hope to gain. If I could wave a magic wand I would take the money away so no one profits from a child in care.
Reading an article in The Peoples Friend about the Grandparents Association and how Gloria Hunniford supports the group, she observed ” Well, they’ve improved a bit, but the bottom line is that they (grandparents) still have no legal rights as I understand it and I think that you (grandparents) still have to apply twice to the courts even for the opportunity to see your grandchildren”
I don’t know if she was taking about private or public law but either way that’s two lots of court fees just to ask! Not going to get much change from £500 on those two court fees alone! How is that morally right?
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THE MASS SLAUGHTER AND MURDER OF THE BRITISH FAMILIES BY THE GOVERNMENTS OWN LEGAL ARMIES.
The first army in any ones life is the social services/worker with their allegations against families and children, then the ARMY of the court experts and should you be a grandparent unless they pay to be party to the proceedings they are not allowed into the closed family courts which again is another army with grandparents not allowed legal aid, and why is it a law that loving families who lose a child to the care system have to be legally represented by 2 differnt legal teams another army, then there is the army of doctors who prescibe drugs to kids in care, yes for many kids wrongly diognosed as ADHD then prescibed drugs equal to cocaine, and for many of these wrongly diognosed kids many do become drug addicts living on the streets. Then we have the army of the courts and judges who pass the buck back to the social services even if the judge did agree with the families so money spent in the courts and on legal teams is a no go, I wonder WHO made the laws for the closed family courts which is another army set up “In a child’s best interest” to take kids into care for the paedophiles as we all now know of the child abuse and cover up by the BRITISH EMPIRE who made all of the laws by creating their own armies to destroy a Nation along with the armies of the police who do nothing to help the abused kids and also cover ups of them in Governmrnts
The British Empire has the army the navy the airforce all go to war to protect the British Empire, so of course the BRITISH EMPIRE needed another army to slaughter and murder the Nation en-mass starting with the children.
As for the elderly, one can read that the armies are also controling their lives and money.
How the Court of Protection left a 94-year-old without savings or …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/elder/…/How-the-Court-of-Protection-left-a-94-year- old-without-savings-or-dignity.html16 Aug 2014 … By Christopher Booker … workers and lawyers the power to take over the lives of
people, most of them elderly, who are ruled not to be capable …
I have come to the conclusion that the Nation is to scared to march together as their own army to bring back justice but they would march to war for this so called British Empire.
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The Grandparents Association celebrated their 25th Anniversary last year and still no grandparents rights! As a chartity they raised £350,000 last year too. The Grandparents Association was set up by 3 grandparents who had lost their grandchildren to Care, to adoption and was denied contact. The same issues that beset grandparents today. There are 14 million grandparents in the UK and yet even with other groups such as the Family Rights Group nothing has been achieved to help grandparents keep their connection with their grandchildren.
It’s about time grandparents used their grey vote to send a message to the government that reforms are needed. Research into the mental health of children in care states quite clearly that contact with grandparents is beneficial but this factor is ignored by the government who, by ignoring it, can be said to have contributed to a child in care decline in mental health!
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One more thing, the Grandparents Association made £100,000 almost every day of the year last year but I wonder how many letters were written to the government about getting grandparent rights? How many letters written from all the other organisations too? Surely en mass something could have been achieved to help grandparents, which they were set up to do! A chat on the phone and sending out leaflets of which the contents are ignored by social workers and the government ,despite the Children’s Act saying what should happen, but in reality is ignored too, just doesn’t cut it!
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