The scandal of the baby snatchers

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kippaherring@hotmail.com - 09 Jun 2007 20:53 GMT

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=460863&i
n_page_id=1879&ICO=FEMAIL&ICL=TOPART

The scandal of the baby snatchers
By SUE REID - More by this author »Last updated at 23:02pm on 8th June
2007
Comments (14)

Two-year-old Crystal Walton smiles at the camera, her blonde hair
blowing in the wind.

The photograph of the enchanting little girl looks as though it should
have pride of place in a treasured family album.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

This picture was used to advertise Crystal's availability for adoption
- appearing in a tabloid national newspaper with an accompanying blurb
describing her as a "clever, lively, cheerful toddler" who likes
puzzles and swimming.

A phone number was printed alongside for anyone interested in becoming
her new parents.

Perhaps a million people saw the heart-breaking advert which had been
placed by a London council, and streams of callers offered to take
care of her.

Yet that is not the whole story. The truth is that Crystal had become
a pawn in an adoption system that should shame

In 2000, Tony Blair set new targets to raise the number of children
being adopted by 50 per cent - to a total of 5,400 every year.

He promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve the
targets. Some have already received more than £20million for
successfully pushing up the number of adoptions.

This sweeping shake-up in social policy was designed for all the right
reasons: to get older children languishing in care homes into happy
new families with parents.

But the reforms didn't work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash,
councils began to earmark those children who were most easy to place
in adoptive homes - babies and cute toddlers such as Crystal.

The resulting nightmare is that thousands of children of under four
have since been removed from their birth families and adopted. Seventy
per cent of all adoptions are now in this age group.

These cases often involve mothers and fathers who may have been in
previous contact with social services over alleged incidents such as
being accused - though not convicted - of maltreating their children.

More chillingly, others have been told by social workers they must
lose their children because, at some time in the future, they might
abuse them.

One mother's son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance
she might shout at him when he was older. It was, said social workers,
emotional abuse.

New figures revealed to the Mail this week show that 1,300 babies were
taken from their families in England last year and sent to new homes -
a 300 per cent rise in less than a decade.

More than 900 were newborn or less than a week old. The rest were aged
under a month.

The Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has become so concerned about the
increase and the way that the adoption system is being run that he has
asked the United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner to investigate
the 'systematic abuses'.

He wants to know why so many tiny children are being 'snatched'
needlessly from their families in what he calls a 'national scandal'.

In his formal submission to the commissioner, he said: "Children are
being removed from families merely to satisfy government targets for
the right numbers of children adopted."

He later explained to the Mail: "I have evidence that 1,000 children
are wrongly being seized from their birth parents each year - even
though they have not been harmed in any way.

"The targets are dangerous and lead to social workers being over-eager
and making mistakes."

The MP's concerns have been supported by the Association for
Improvements in the Maternity Services, an independent body which
advises new mothers about how to care for their babies.

Its spokeswoman, Beverley Beech, said: "Babies are being removed from
their mothers by social workers using any excuse whatsoever.

"We strongly suspect this is because newborns and toddlers are more
easily found homes than older children. The younger ones are, in other
words, a marketable commodity.

"I know of social workers making up stories about blameless mothers
simply to ensure that their babies are forcibly taken and put up for
adoption.

"One baby was removed in the maternity ward by social workers before
the mother had even finished the birth process and produced the
placenta.

"Suitable babies are even being earmarked for adoption when they are
still in the womb."

Of course, everyone knows there are some parents who do terrible
things to their sons and daughters - and social workers are often
vilified for not intervening soon enough to protect vulnerable
children.

But can so many more mothers and fathers - in such a small space of
time - really be abusing their own babies?

One thing is certain: it is impossible to overstate the emotional
damage done to families whose babies have been forcibly removed from
them on what can be the flimsiest of grounds.

In Europe, only a handful of children every year are forcibly taken
from their mothers to be adopted.

In Scotland, where there are no official targets, adoptions are a
fraction of the number south of the border - even allowing for the
smaller population.

Yet in England, the annual total for adoptions for children under 17
went up by nearly 40 per cent in four years - from 2,700 in 2000 to
3,700 in 2004.

You only have to listen to the story of Crystal Walton and her
parents, Ian and Sarah, to realise that something may be going
terribly wrong.

At a few days old, she was taken away by social workers. Her bereft
parents were left protesting their innocence.

They have never been charged with, or found guilty of, any offence
against Crystal or any other child and are now taking their case to
the European Court of Human Rights because they have run out of legal
avenues in Britain.

Whatever the judgment in Strasbourg, it will almost certainly be too
late for them to get their daughter back. "One day, she will know that
we tried our very best to bring her home," says 28-year-old Sarah.

The Waltons' story is deeply disturbing. Ian, a 42-year-old
construction worker, and Sarah, an office administrator, married in
2003.

Almost a year after their wedding, Sarah gave birth to Crystal in
hospital and soon afterwards carried her joyously back to their house
in Enfield, North London.

But just two days later, social workers visited - without any warning
- and took their new daughter away.

They claimed Ian might hurt his baby daughter. He had been married
before and has an eight-year-old son, whom the Mail has chosen not to
identify but whom we will call Terry.

Five years earlier, when just eight weeks old, Terry was rushed to
hospital with a suspected brain injury. He had bleeding behind his
eyes.

A medical expert said that Terry had been shaken viciously. A year
later, Ian and Terry's mother were taken to the family court in London
where a judge concluded - on the basis of the expert's opinion - that
the child's injuries had been caused by one of his parents.

The possibility that the baby had an inherited condition, provoking
exactly the same symptoms, was never explored.

The theory - put forward by the family's lawyers - that he had banged
his head in his baby bouncer while playing with another child in the
house was ignored.

The ensuing legal battle was lengthy but Enfield social workers
finally allowed Terry to remain with his birth parents - Ian and his
first wife - who were granted, and still have, joint custody of the
boy.

Ian sees him regularly and often spends time with him alone. The
police were never involved in the case and the couple simply got on
with their lives.

It was only when Ian remarried and Crystal was born that the social
workers reappeared.

Ian explains: "Everything was normal. Sarah and I were delighted to be
having a baby. When Sarah was eight months pregnant, Enfield social
workers called us in for what they called a 'pre-birth planning
meeting'. We still never suspected anything."

What happened next is hard to believe in a civilised society. But Ian
insists it is true. His family have confirmed the account.

He says: "After bringing Crystal home from the hospital, we were
cooking a meal for my parents. While my father and I were out shopping
for something we'd forgotten, the social workers visited.

"They just came straight in, walked past Sarah and my mother, and
picked up Crystal from her cot and walked out again."

In other words, Sarah had her first and only child wrenched from her
because the social workers had suspicions - of course unproven - about
the behaviour of her husband nearly ten years before.

Nevertheless, Ian and Sarah were allowed to visit Crystal at a foster
home. Indeed, on a website Ian has created as a tribute to his lost
child, there is a video showing footage of the couple with Crystal,
happy and at ease together.

At one point, the little girl puts out her arms to her mother, who
picks her up and kisses her.

And, touchingly, when she asks Crystal where her daddy is, the toddler
turns and points at Ian. It was filmed on July 18 last year. But
already the clock was ticking towards their daughter's adoption.

Within a few weeks of that video being filmed, the couple were told by
social services that new parents were being sought for their daughter.

Not surprisingly, Ian and Sarah were anxious to tell people what was
happening. They wanted to fight in public.

But they were warned by social workers that if they defied the
authorities and told anyone of what was happening, they would be in
contempt of court and might even end up in prison.

In particular, they were not to complain to the Press or let anyone
know the name of Crystal in order to protect her identity as a minor.

So you can imagine their horror when, last August, they first saw the
advert in which she had been put up for adoption.

Ian says: "Suddenly, we saw a picture of Crystal. Sarah burst out
crying. Our daughter had effectively been put up for sale - and under
her own name."

In October, Ian and Sarah were told they could see Crystal for the
last time. At a tense and emotional meeting, they said goodbye and
then went home alone. But they had not given up the battle.

In a desperate bid to outmanoeuvre the system, Ian and Sarah went to
the Court of Appeal in London in March.

They asked for a stay of execution on the adoption while their case
was heard by the European Court of Human Rights. This was refused. Now
they have few places left to turn.

In a separate development, Ian's son, Terry, is about to undergo a
test for a rare and often inherited neurological disease.

If he is proved to be a sufferer, it will mean the disease (glutaric
aciduria) is the likely cause of bleeding behind his eyes and that he
never suffered the injuries as a result of being shaken.

Parents of other child sufferers of the disease have also been wrongly
accused of shaking them as babies.

Indeed, there are many who now question if shaken baby syndrome (SBS)
even exists.

Significantly, in 2005, Dr Jennian Geddes, a neuropathologist at the
Royal London Hospital, became troubled by the number of such cases in
which there was no sign of any other physical damage to the children's
fragile bodies.

She demanded to know how could a parent shake a small baby so
violently - those who believe in SBS say this can be done with the
same force as that of a 70mph car crash - and yet there be no bruising
to the upper arms or body?

There was another mystery. DrGeddes knew that when a baby is in a
fatal car crash, it suffers traumatic damage to nerves in the brain,
provoked by the effects of whiplash.

So she did something no one had done before - comparing the brains of
53 babies and children whose deaths had been attributed to violent
shaking with those of youngsters who had been killed in car crashes.

Her findings were revealing: 50 out of the 53 brains of the so-called
shaken babies showed no damage to the brain nerves.

There was no whiplash effect, an indication that the babies could not
have been shaken to death.

Dr Geddes, who up to this point believed that SBS did exist, concluded
that even a trivial household accident, such as a child rolling off a
sofa, or banging itself in a baby bouncer - perhaps, like Ian's son,
Terry - can prompt retinal bleeding and other symptoms blamed on the
'killer parents'.

Another turning point came in 2005. In a ground-breaking case, the
Appeal Court quashed the convictions of two people who were separately
accused of killing their babies by shaking them to death.

The court ruled that the medical experts' evidence that had convicted
them was unreliable.

The judge accepted that retinal bleeding in babies, could be caused by
minor falls, difficult births or genetic conditions.

All this evidence could now be used by parents fighting social workers
in the battle to win back their children. Yet in the tragic case of
Ian and Sarah Walton, the only winner is Enfield Council.

It has already received £1 million from the Government to help it
reach targets on adoptions and other services. Another adopted child,
another wodge of money.

In the past two years, the council has succeeded in getting 29
children adopted. This year, who knows? Any day now, Crystal could be
placed in a new home and learning to call another couple 'Mummy and
Daddy'.

Needless to say, that would break the hearts of Ian and Sarah, who,
like so many hundreds of other parents in the same position, suspect
that without Tony Blair's adoption targets they would still be with
their beloved child.

Clinging to each other this week, they said they had no idea what the
future held. Ian said: "We are scared of having another child in case
the social workers come calling again. We could not face going through
the nightmare of having a second baby taken by the state."

Reply to this Message

kippaherring@hotmail.com - 09 Jun 2007 23:01 GMT

An earlier article about this case.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article759
348.ece

>From The Times

December 21, 2006
Family courts are the B-side of the law
Camilla Cavendish
What a strange, fumbling kind of justice system it is that condemns a
woman as an unfit mother for the heinous crime of trusting her
husband. Yet this is what seems to have happened in a recent case that
I feel compelled to write about, even though legal restrictions force
me to leave out much of the detail.
The nub of the case is this. A woman, let us call her Janie, gave
birth to her first and only child a year ago. That baby was taken away
from her and subsequently put up for adoption. Not because of her own
failure to care for the baby - her own love and care never seem to
have been in question. No. She has lost her baby because of a
suspicion that her husband John may have injured another child in his
previous marriage almost ten years ago.

The suspicion was no more than that. John was never charged with
anything, let alone convicted. Social workers were never sufficiently
worried to take that first child into care. Since his divorce John has
shared custody of that child perfectly amicably with his ex-wife. Yet
the same local authority which left the first child with him has
forbidden him to see this new baby. And his new wife, despite having
nothing to do with the first case, may never see her baby again.

Unless this case is overruled in the European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) in Strasbourg, where it is now heading, it will set a peculiar
precedent. For it implies that any British mother could be penalised
for choosing a partner to whom the State has taken a dislike:
penalised with the loss of the thing that is most precious to her in
the world.

It cannot be this simple, you are thinking. Well, not quite. The child
of the first marriage is disabled, and did seem to have suffered an
injury - I am not permitted to say more. But no one knows how. Both
John and his first wife have always protested their innocence. They
had a second child who came to no harm. No court will ever truly know
whether John was innocent. But the fact is that he was never found
guilty. For the local authority to leave him alone with a child that
it thought he had harmed, and to take away another that had not been
harmed, is utterly hypocritical. No court should be able to punish you
for a crime you may commit, when there is no evidence.

It should, surely, be a crime to remove a newborn baby from a mother
who has never harmed it.

For that in itself is a form of abuse. Yet the secret State often
chooses to abuse the children itself, rather than let them run the
risk of staying put. They are at least alive, it calculates, even if
it is a diminished kind of alive, deprived of the mother bond. And too
often, it strikes the wrong balance. In 2002, the ECHR ruled against
the British Government for removing a new baby from its mother in
hospital and refusing even to let her cuddle it under supervision,
when there was no evidence that the baby faced a serious risk at that
time. The judgment came too late, though. The baby had already been
adopted.

This is what Janie fears. The ECHR has agreed to hear her appeal and
to consider whether the English court ruling breached Janie and John's
right to family life, to freedom of opinion and to freedom of
expression. That is quite a ticket. But even if the ECHR finds in
Janie's favour, it may be too late. The local authority is already
seeking families to adopt her baby. Her only hope is that prospective
adopters will be put off by knowing of her appeal.

Any lawyer will tell you that family courts are the B-side of the
legal system. The majority of judgments will never be read outside the
courtroom. Perhaps judges fear the consequences if they do not support
social services and social services are later proved right. They seem
to start from the assumption that children are de facto wards of court
who need protection from their parents.

Even then, Janie's case seems extraordinary. Certainly the parents are
not the brightest people in the world. They are not perfect. But the
more I learn about it, the more I believe that Janie and John's
biggest mistakes were emotional. Janie seems to have been very co-
operative. However, John has been irritable, even aggressive, which
would support the view that he has a violent nature. But can you
really convict on that basis? Which of us could control our temper if
faced with losing a child to a bunch of hypocrites? In a Hollywood
movie, anger is a natural reaction to injustice. In an English suburb,
defiance makes you guilty. The legal system wants "remorse". But how
can you show remorse for something you haven't done?

Until this case I had tended to be sceptical about the claims that the
Government's targets for adoption were leading to miscarriages of
justice. I still feel that ministers were right to want to speed up
adoption and to release more children more quickly from the hell of
care. But I have now started to take more seriously the argument that
these targets have created a perverse incentive for local authorities
to take more babies into care. Babies are, after all, more attractive
to prospective adopters than older children and therefore an easy way
to reach those targets. In Janie and John's case, you do have to
wonder why the authorities have rushed to take away a healthy baby,
when they did not take away a disabled one.

Janie's case seems to me to make a strong argument for introducing
juries. Why is a burglar facing six months in jail allowed to ask for
a jury trial, but a mother facing the irretrievable loss of her only
child is not? Mistakes will always be made when the ordinary,
imperfect citizen is judged by the imperfect and powerful. Personally,
I would rather face 12 men good and true.

Reply to this Message

Mike Dobony - 24 Jun 2007 15:30 GMT

Reply to this Message

Marley Greiner - 25 Jun 2007 00:52 GMT

> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=460863&i
n_page_id=1879&ICO=FEMAIL&ICL=TOPART
>
[quoted text clipped - 61 lines]
> to children. Rapists and homosexuals are a protected, elevated class. And
> on it goes.

It is the nature of the state to own everyone, not just children. The
state, no matter what system it opeates under, must coerce, rob, rape, and
kill to survive. Taxes, marriage, family, heterosexuality, laws, the church
are all social constructs created to curtail free thought and individual
liberty and control us. There is no such thing as Republican or Democrat,
just state suckers, and the biggest state suckers are the
Trotskyites...oops, I mean, "Republicans..." in Washington.

Equating queer with rape, though, is really over the top. Where do you live
where rapists are an elevated class? The Whitehouse? And why do you care
who somebody sleeps with. Are you a statist in drag?

Marley

Reply to this Message

Robin Harritt - 25 Jun 2007 12:23 GMT

>> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=46086
>> 3&in_page_id=1879&ICO=FEMAIL&ICL=TOPART
[quoted text clipped - 49 lines]
>>> More chillingly, others have been told by social workers they must lose
>>> their children because, at some time in the future, they might abuse them.

>> Britain is a socialist nation where people are the property of the
>> government, an Animal Farm. The US is quickly becoming an Animal Farm.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>> to children. Rapists and homosexuals are a protected, elevated class. And
>> on it goes.

No it's not, though we do have a load of tossers here in GB called the
British Nationalist Party who come out with load of old Bollocks and
obviously and obviously thick parochial Americans with no than half a dozen
brain cells to rub together tend to latch on to the idea that it is true.
But then every country has it's less intellectually gifted minority doesn't
it.

> It is the nature of the state to own everyone, not just children. The
> state, no matter what system it opeates under, must coerce, rob, rape, and
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
>
> Marley

I'd hoped it wasn't that bad here anymore but I think we are going backwards
ever since we caught a nasty dose of TB. I'm hoping Gordon Brown will
reverse some of the ghastly cock-ups, but I'm not holding my breath waiting.
Unfortunaly Blair and the Blairites have given political w.nkers like the
BNP political breathing space, because of his control freak policies on
social and welfare issues and much more besides.

WTF is Sue Reid BTW? Ah I see the Daily Mail, it does have it's uses even
when the loo paper hasn't run out.

Robin
(British Bastard)

Reply to this Message

Marley Greiner - 25 Jun 2007 22:24 GMT

> in article 1tDfi.117041$Sa4.52868@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net,
> Marley
[quoted text clipped - 123 lines]
> Robin
> (British Bastard)

I posted something to this effect this morning and it never made it online.
I'll try to reconstruct.

I'd hoped to get to England this year for the bunfight in Clutton, but I
don't see it happening unless somebody takes up a fund for me. But to tell
the truth, the current government and ugly archicture make the UK pretty
unattractive at the moment. I hope Brown can pull back some of the worse
BushCo dictats, but I doubt it. I've been particularly bothered by
anti-social behavior laws and the recent proposals to require psychological
tests of all drivers to weed out "risk takers" and to charge the parents of
obese children with child neglect. This is what happens when you let faux
feminists run the government. I don't know who would enjoy this more:
Lysenko or Oswald Moseley.

I met a BNP fellow in London back in 1986 and spent a couple days hanging
out
with him. He was OK until he got off on his tangent.. He was from Teeside
which may explain it. You know how those Hartlepudlians are. We've had
enough of them here.

Marley

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Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / June 2007

The scandal of the baby snatchers