Diane Berresford lost her baby through a forced adoption and is now looking to be reunited with her daughter, Sarah, who turned 18 three months ago, in February.
An article in the Derbyshire Times offers more details, not just about Diane and Sarah, but about the child protection process and is a must read for anyone working in the sector.
Far too often families inside the family justice system feel as if they’ve been badly treated, ignored and bullied. Of her personal experience with child protection professionals Diane says:
“A day after my daughter’s first birthday they came to remove her from my care. They wanted her to go into foster care. I said ‘over my dead body’ but they said if I didn’t co-operate, they would call the police.”
She also goes on to describe the assessment process and why its flaws can make it all too easy to remove children from parents who with a little help and support could take care of their children without losing them to foster care and adoption. This is how the experience of being assessed made her feel:
“When you have someone watching you constantly you feel like you’re doing something wrong when you’re not. They were like vultures over my shoulder. It was difficult to show them I could be a good mum when I was having the supervised contact.”
That she was only given six months to try to demonstrate better parenting skills and didn’t appear to have any kind of support from social services is also important, however Diane’s experience was almost two decades ago and although there is still a lot of work to do, awareness of the above issues has grown.
Diane was receiving yearly letters until Sarah turned nine, at which point the letters stopped. It is not clear whether Sarah decided she didn’t want her mother to receive these updates or whether the adoptive parents just decided they didn’t want to send them anymore.
Now that Diane’s daughter is eighteen she is legally able to try to make contact, and this is what she hopes to do. If you have any information that could help Diane, you can find her over on Twitter at @candeebabe1979.
Researching Reform 
Is there a way of putting Twitter on your postings, please?
Jean
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Hi Jean, you’ll need to log in to twitter.
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If you already have Twitter, click on the hilighted blue link at the latter of the last paragraph. Takes you straight to her page 🙂 xx
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Reblogged this on tummum's Blog.
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Lovely lady. I will get this shared everywhere I can and keeping everything crossed they are reunited very soon ❤ xx
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Xxx
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Pingback: Urgent Appeal: Can You Help This Mother Find Her Daughter? | tummum's Blog
These brutal situations even happy today. I am tweeting in the hope something good happens for this poor Mum and child, When will the horrors of family courts etc be made FULLY aware to the public? WE ARE NOT A CIVILISED SOCIETY. Heartbreaking
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When will these officious busybodies learn that skillful intervention and support is so much better than punitive restraint, excommunication and forced adoption?
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Reblogged this on Musings of a Penpusher and commented:
When will these officious busybodies learn that skillful intervention and support is so much better than punitive restraint, excommunication and forced adoption?
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Reblogged this on No Punishment without Crime or Bereavement without Death!.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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There will no doubt be many tears flowing if this mother and her daughter meet again but the Anger will come when the child is told all the nasty little details about how the SS operated in her removal.
shurely this young woman will have received the information pack with all the details of her biological parents etc.
i think its all wrong that the biological parents dont also get some paperwork telling them what name their child is now under and what part of the country they live so that they can make an attempt to contact them and explain things.
i wish her good luck in her search.
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MESSAGE TO MOTHERS WHOSE CHILDREN HAVE BEEN FORCED ADOPTED !
All is not lost ,you have to try and find your adopted children.No law stops you plastering their photos when small with brief stories all over the internet,under facebook,twitter,Genes united,friends united, and other similar sites.They may even be looking for you right now !
Here are two success stories ;- 1:- Winona Varney and her sister Danielle in which I was very much involved who I helped to happily reunite with their birth mother, and 2:- Von and Tammy who look more like sisters than mother and daughter and were happily reunited for good once they found each other.
1 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7958099/She-defied-the-law-to-find-her-mother.html–
Remember also that social workers often LIE and say a child has been adopted when it is in fact still in care ! Only believe a letter from the court not words from the SS !
Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker The Telegraph
7:25PM BST 21 Aug 2010
167 Comments
For once, after all the shocking stories I have reported on the secretive system that allows social workers to seize children from loving parents for no good reason, to send them for adoption, I can at last report a story where a family torn apart for nine years has been reunited.
Winona Varney was reunited with her family through Facebook
When Winona Varney, now a pretty 16-year-old, recently fell into the arms of her mother Tracey at Truro railway station, they had not seen each other since she was seven. During that time, she and her 12-year-old sister Daniella have been living unhappily with an adoptive family, who repeatedly told them that their mother was a bad woman who did not love or want them. But when, in June, Winona managed to track her mother down, via Facebook, a short time later the two girls and their mother were again living under the same roof.
This harrowing story began back in 1997, when social workers from Cornwall county council received a wholly erroneous tip-off that there might be drugs in the house where Tracey lived with her partner. The day after the birth of their first child, a boy, they were made to sign an agreement that they would “work with social services”. Tracey then had two daughters, Winona and Daniella; but their father, who had been in care himself, had a strong aversion to social workers and eventually threatened one with violence.
On the social workers’ insistence, in order to keep her children, Tracey left her partner. She and they were sent to a mother and child unit in Staffordshire, where she often had to protect them from abuse by other inmates. Eventually, though there was no evidence that Tracey had harmed them in any way, the girls were sent for adoption, on the grounds that they were “at risk of emotional abuse”. They were taken in by a couple in a nearby Cornish village, and Winona was given a new name. (Their brother, however, was returned to his mother, after a year in foster care.)
Year after year, unaware of her daughters’ whereabouts, Tracey sent loving birthday and Christmas cards to them. But this could only be done through social services – who never passed them on. According to Winona, she and her sister were constantly told both by social workers and their adoptive parents that their mother was “a horrible person” who didn’t love them.
Tracey eventually found a new partner with whom she had two more daughters. In June this year, Winona managed to track down her mother through Facebook, and they arranged to meet at Truro station. They couldn’t believe their happiness at being reunited and more secret meetings followed.
When Daniella was told what was going on, she was initially wary, because of the lies she had been told about her mother. But twice the girls escaped at night through windows for further meetings, until eventually Winona rang the adoptive parents to say they were both going back to live with their mother.
Winona is so angry about what has been done to them that she has opened a page on Facebook entitled “Anti-Social Services Forced Adoption – We Can Help!”, to join up with other children in the same plight. She pays tribute to the advice she was given by Ian Josephs, the businessman living in the South of France who, through his Forced Adoption website, has helped hundreds of families who have fallen into the clutches of this corrupt and secretive system.
Not dissimilar was the case of Tammy Coulter, taken away from her mother by Derbyshire social workers when she was only seven months old, after an accident left her with a bruised cheek. After time in foster care, she was put out for adoption by a judge who said that, thanks to delays by the social workers, she and her mother would by now be strangers. Only after 17 years did she find her mother again through the website Genes Reunited, and was able to return happily to her birth family.
In 2006, Tammy told a London audience, which included judges, lawyers and Harriet Harman MP: “Finding out you’ve been adopted is one of the worst feelings in the world, because you feel that all of your identity, everything you’ve known about yourself, is a lie.” She said she was speaking out “on behalf of children and parents who have also been through the secrecy of family courts and the injustices that have taken place, and the devastation of one decision that determines the future of a child”.
After nine years of misery, Winona Varney would agree. She says that after going to college, she wants to get involved in child care – “but certainly not as a social worker, because I have seen what they can do”.
2 Von and Tammy on ITV local news – YouTube
Desperate woman loses six year adoption fight as High Court judge tells her she is no longer the child’s mother – Manchester E
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