Post by Andy Peacher Tel 07827731060 on Mar 20, 2012 17:42:19 GMT
Statistics
Statistics (click here for official figures!)
ALSO:-
Adhttp://john.hemming.name/national/familylaw/2007adoptionfigures.htmloption Statistics (1992-2006)(The "under 5" stats)
In 1996/1997 only 1000 children in care who were under 5 were adopted,but this figure rose steadily until 2005/2006 to a figure of 2500 ! This increase of 150% in only 9 years was surely due to the frantic pursuit of "adoption targets" by over eager social workers seizing babies at or shortly after birth to be put into care and later adopted.Judges very rarely refuse social services adoption requests and routinely "dispense with the birth parent's consent."
Children looked after in England (including adoption and care leavers): 2005-2006 www.dfes.gov.uk
Private fostering arrangements reported to Local Authorities in England: Year Ending 31 March 2006 - www.dfes.gov.uk
● 2,490 under-fives in care were adopted in 2006, up from 1,010 in 1995.
● 4,160 under-fives were first taken into care in 2006, up from 2,870 in 1995.
● 1,300 babies aged younger than a month when they were taken into care were adopted in 2006, up from 540 in 1995.
● The average age at adoption in 2006 was four years and one month.
● 3,700 children were adopted from care in 2006, up from 2,700 in 2000.
Source: DCSF
Here at last is PROOF that all concerned in "child protection" are receiving vast sums of money for work that can at best be described as "destructive" and at worst "criminal"......
1: Fosterers typically £400/ week per child!
2: Special children's homes typically £7,000/ week per child!
3: Lawyers and court costs typically £500,000 per case!
4: Experts typically £28,000 for a simple report!
5: Adoption and fostering agencies make £millions (£27,000/placement)
6: Local authority agencies get £13,000 per placement
Following the recent Panorama programme on adoptions ......
See below the link to an adoption and fostering agency for sale valued at a tidy £135 million !
LA agencies get around £13,000 per placement,but private adoption and fostering agencies get around £27,000 each time they place some unfortunate with fosterers or with an adoptive family ! I wonder why none of these figures were mentioned in the programme.http://www.baaf.org.uk/webfm_send/2411 The foster families on average get £400 per week per child, and it is not unheard of for certain social workers to get “generous kickbacks” from both agencies and fosterers ….
10 LAWYERS in various family court sessions spread over a year or more,(both solicitor and barrister for each of ,mother,father, children,local authority,and guardian !)Most contested cases cost £500,000 or more…..With 100,000 children in the UK, each one costs the taxpayer £150/day = over £5billion/year!
With so many snouts in the trough can anyone be surprised that a blanket of secrecy is necessary to protect this money orientated child protection and family court system?
When “Panorama makes a “commercial” for the fostering and adoption industry suddenly “privacy” is no longer an issue .CHILDREN IN CARE ARE NAMED AND INTERVIEWED for millions to watch,but if parents got together to make a film exposing the cruelty and corruption of the system they would all end up in jail for breaching their own children’s privacy !Double standards
National Fostering Agency up for sale
www.business-sale.com › NewsCached
14 Nov 2011 – Sovereign Capital has put the National Fostering Agency (NFA) on the market, causing a flurry of interest from private equity buyers.
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/privateequity/8886088/Private-equity-buyers-line-up-for-National-Fostering-Agency.html
1: BALLOONS AND FAMILY FUN TO PROMOTE FOSTERING
Hundreds of balloons will be released from Slough town centre to mark a special event to launch Slough’s new fostering Allowance Scheme.
Saturday, July 2 will encourage more people to consider becoming foster parents to local children and see the launch of a new fostering allowance of £400 per week.
Between noon and 4pm, the Town Square will be bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling. Football fans should be sure to bring a camera as a David Beckham look-a-like will be ready to pose for photos.
Janet Tomlinson, head of education and children’s services at Slough Borough Council, will make a short speech at 1pm before the balloon release.
Team members from Slough’s Family Placement Services will be giving out fostering information including the fostering freephone number, car stickers, bookmarks, keyrings, wristbands and balloons.
Janet Tomlinson said: "Fostering offers great challenges and great rewards. Even if you’ve never thought about it before, why not come down on July 2 to find out more?"
The freephone fostering number is 0800 073 0291.
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2. DISPATCHES: PROFITING FROM KIDS IN CARE
Channel 4, Thursday 25 November, 9pm
In 2004, caring for Britain's most vulnerable children is a multi-million pound industry. Children in care cost the taxpayer over £830 million pounds a year. That's an average of £2,500 per child, per week - more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton. Yet many homes are failing to provide children with even a basic standard of care.
In this programme, Dispatches goes undercover to investigate the consequences of the increased privatisation of residential children's homes. The investigation reveals how homes are run by private businessmen charging social services departments enormous and unethical mark-ups on services - many of which aren't even provided. Fees of £7,000 a week are not unusual yet Dispatches finds private children's homes which are failing the children in many respects. Homes often use untrained, and sometimes unvetted, agency staff to look after some of the UK's most at risk youngsters - many of whom have been the victims of abuse, prostitution and drugs.
The current system is failing thousands of children a year. According to a recent report, three in five kids leave care with no qualifications at all. One in five will be homeless after two years and one in three of the current prison population has previously been in care. Tragically, some don't make it at all, with approximately 60 youngsters dying in children's homes every year.
Information, advice and support for people who are in care, or have been in the past, can be found by checking out the following organisations and websites.
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3: COUNCIL MUST PAY £500,000 FOR WRONGLY TAKING GIRL INTO CARE
Clare Dyer, legal editor
The Guardian, Friday March 17 2006
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 23 2006
(The headline for the article below was misleading. As the story made clear, the £500,000 was the total cost to public funds. The council was ordered to pay the parents £200,000 legal aid costs and will have to meet its own costs. The child would also have been represented and payment of those costs will be met from public funds).
A couple had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason and kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge said yesterday.
Mr Justice McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings" and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the emergency order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds, were £500,000, including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000, which the judge ordered the local council to pay. The judge took the unusual step of making his judgment public after a hearing behind closed doors, although the family, the local authority and the magistrates court are all unnamed.
He laid down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which are certain to lead social services departments and magistrates courts to re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely no pleasure to have to record the multiple failings of the local authority in this case".
But to do so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion on the issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be learned for the future".
He said the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".
Mother and daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for psychotherapy and the girl had been put on the local child protection register.
The notes of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues. Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental to move."
But social workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy - now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of child abuse in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes illness to get attention. At the end of a case conference on the girl in November 2004, social services received a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.
They were told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong. Within hours and without any information from the doctor, social workers were at the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection order allowing the girl to be taken from her parents immediately.
They acted without telling the parents and without seeking any medical opinion to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical treatment before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.
The council's actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous" and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction of this family's ordinary life".
Those descriptions "do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took place on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader, who had no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to the magistrates, of which every one was "misleading or incomplete or wrong".
He ruled that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".
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4: THE EXPERT AS JUDGE AND JURY
After a host of miscarriages of justice based on discredited expert witnesses, calls are growing for radical reform of their use in court, writes Lois Rogers
The Sunday Times, Nov 18 2007
Yet another woman was sent to prison last week, following expert evidence that she had shaken to death a baby in her care. Keran Henderson, a 42-year-old childminder, was said to have killed 11-month-old Maeve Sheppard, by shaking her so violently she was left blind and brain-damaged. The infant died in hospital a few days later.
The case has grim echoes of those of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel, all of whom were accused of killing their children only to be found innocent later. Clark, a solicitor, who was released from prison after serving three years, died last March as a result of psychological trauma and alcoholism caused by her ordeal.
At the Court of Appeal, two days after the judgment on Henderson, a retrial was ordered in the case of Barry George, the loner convicted of killing the television personality Jill Dando in 1999 with a single shot to the head. Expert testimony as to the significance of a particle of gunshot matter in his pocket is being challenged.
There has also been the recent conviction of the true killer of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed, 32 years after the event – and after Stefan Kiszko had served 16 years for the sexually motivated killing, even though medical evidence could have pointed out his infertility proved his innocence. Once again the review of the evidence threw a spotlight on the role of expert witnesses, whose testimony is often crucial in criminal cases but can be unreliable.
Our blind faith in scientific opinion makes us reluctant to question pronouncements by “experts”, but while the law requires everyone from plumbers to nurses to be trained, registered and checked, there is no such requirement for witnesses who may be pronouncing on matters of life and death in court.
A study by senior barrister Penny Cooper of City University in London, has shown that the majority of lawyers and judges do not bother to check the qualifications of experts they approach to bolster an aspect of their case. She also found a substantial number of the expert witnesses had undergone no training to understand their legal duty.
The disquiet this arouses has led to a clamour for legislation to require expert witnesses to be regulated. But how to do that without calling into question thousands of court decisions will not be an easy task.
There is already acute unease over the proliferation of parents convicted of causing cot deaths, shaking babies to death, or harming them by creating symptoms of fictitious illness.
Henderson, for instance, a mother of two herself, a long-term childminder and stalwart volunteer of her local Beaver Scout group, was sentenced to three years in prison for shaking baby Maeve so violently that she was left with fatal brain damage, despite the fact there was no evidence of any “grip marks” on the child, which would normally be expected to accompany such an action.
Her husband, a former police officer, has said she will appeal and hopes to create a campaign similar to that run by Sally Clark’s family, to try to prove his wife’s innocence.
Many character witnesses spoke up for Henderson in court and the family has dozens of supporters in their home village of Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire.
Some even believe her prosecution was only pursued because of the successful appeal by Roy Meadow, the expert paediatrician whose evidence led to the conviction of Sally Clark.
Following the Clark case, in which Meadow quoted a completely erroneous statistic suggesting the chances of Clark’s babies having died naturally were one in 73m, he was struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for misconduct. The Court of Appeal agreed he had acted in good faith.
In the meantime, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted post-mortems on Clark’s two infant sons, was less lucky. His appeal against a GMC finding of serious professional misconduct was rejected. Williams was accused of tailoring his diagnoses of the nature of the babies’ deaths to fit the police case against Clark.
The GMC is currently hearing a claim of gross professional misconduct against paediatrician Dr David Southall. The council has received evidence alleging that Southall falsified his curriculum vitae.
Southall’s evidence has figured highly in at least 50 criminal cases and possibly hundreds of family court cases held in secret, which have led to children being removed from their parents.
Questions of how frequently babies really are shaken to death, and indeed if it is possible to do so, have divided medical opinion for some years. There have, however, been up to 200 convictions annually for related forms of violence against babies and young children.
After Clark, Cannings and Patel, another bizarre case was overturned. Ian and Angela Gay, who had been convicted of poisoning their three-year-old adopted son with salt, were cleared when it was revealed the boy was suffering from a rare, and fatal, congenital abnormality.
Recently, the attorney-general ordered a review of almost 300 criminal convictions and 30,000 family court proceedings where children were taken into care. Only four were referred to the Court of Appeal. This, according to critics, was a function of the way the review was done, with authorities being asked to review their own decisions.
Social workers say the crusade to root out dangerous adults is to some extent a reaction to a previous era of regular criticism of their profession when children were left to die at the hands of their parents. Although some acknowledge the pendulum may now have swung too far, others are furious: “Do people think we spend all our time trying to break up families for no good reason?” said John Coughlan, a joint-president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. “In comparison with the volume of cases, the number of errors is tiny. We never rely on expert witnesses alone.”
Others argue that the opinion of expert witnesses is often the decisive factor. And as we have seen most recently with Barry George, it is not just child murder cases that have turned on such evidence.
Last year the Home Office took the unprecedented step of holding a disciplinary tribunal against Michael Heath, one of its most senior forensic pathologists: 20 charges against him were upheld. One man was subsequently cleared of murder, and numerous other convictions have been called into question.
A spate of other convictions came from evidence supplied by Paula Lannas, another Home Office forensic specialist who was the subject of a long-delayed disciplinary hearing that collapsed because those investigating her said they had a conflict of interest. Not only has Lannas been deprived of an opportunity to clear her name, but dozens of prisoners who claim they were victims of her errors have been unable to get the evidence reviewed.
Police forensic scientist Peter Ablett, who is now chief executive of the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners, points out there are only three ways to prove a crime: a reliable eyewitness, a confession, or forensics. The advent of DNA technology and other advances in recent years has brought increasing reliance on forensics, yet only about 3,000 of the estimated 8,000 expert witnesses operating are members of the council and signed up to its code of practice.
He said many of those who are not are unaware that their duty is to give impartial evidence to the court, not to bolster the case of their paymaster.
City University’s Cooper, who is also a governor of the Expert Witness Institute, was concerned to discover during her research that not only have one in five experts undergone no training to understand this duty, but one in 10 was so arrogant they said they saw no need for it. “There should be a requirement for them to be trained, and there should be rules requiring judges and lawyers to consider their credentials before accepting them as expert witnesses,” she said.
Such a provision cannot come soon enough.
A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones.
For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work isa lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.
“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.”
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5: FIRMS CASH IN ON SHORTAGE OF FOSTER HOMES
Published: Sunday, 2 October, 2005, Evening Standard.
LONDON: Private agencies are making millions of pounds out of a critical shortage of foster homes for children. Firms are charging councils on average £800 per child per week, an EVENING STANDARD investigation revealed.
This amounts to £41,600 a year to find suitable homes for the most vulnerable children in society.
One head of social services said: “It is cheaper to send the children to Eton.”
London councils are so desperate to hold on to their foster parents that two are offering them free loft conversions - worth up to £30,000 - so they can take in more children. Britain’s largest independent agency Foster Care Associates had a £56mn turnover in 2003, the last year for which accounts are available.
Its eight directors - seven of them social workers who set up the company 10 years ago - paid themselves total fees of more than £2.2mn as well as sharing pre-tax profits of almost £900,000.
The directors awarded themselves on average £285,000 each - about 10 times the annual salary of a social worker.
There is an estimated shortage of 10,000 foster carers across the UK. This has driven up the prices charged by the 150 or so independent agencies.
It costs councils between £300 and £400 a week to place children with their own approved foster carers but they cannot meet the demand and have to turn to outside agencies. More difficult children can cost as much as £1,500 per week to place in foster homes.
The problem is especially acute in London, where out of 11,500 fostered children up to one-third are found homes through independent agencies. Many of them are ‘dumped’ in outlying towns around the capital. A total of 60,000 children are fostered nationally.
A spokesman at the department for education said: “We know there are too many children being placed outside of authorities. We commissioned a report last year looking at how we can reduce that number.”
Out of the 11,500 fostered children in London, half of them are teenagers, about 3,000 aged eight to 12 and 2,500 aged under eight.
Children are typically being sent from London boroughs to Kent, miles from their schools and friends. Some 330 problem children from London are being fostered in the Margate area.
This has prompted the Kent child protection committee to compile a report, sent to ministers, warning the town is now at a ‘tipping point’ and branding the situation ‘explosive’.
Paul Fallon, director of social services at Barnet council and spokesman for all London’s social services directors, said: “Every penny we spend on one child is a penny we can’t spend on another child. If I place a child with Barnet it is £400. But it costs me about double that to place a child in an independent placement.
“It is a sellers’ market and that will impact on prices. We are stuck. It is cheaper to send children to Eton.”
He estimated that in Barnet about 30 to 40 children - about 10% of the number needing foster care - are unaccompanied child refugees. They have helped to swell numbers of children needing placements, putting added pressure on social services.
A spokeswoman for Richmond council, where private places at £900 cost three times as much as council places, said: “In emergencies we will negotiate with another borough for a temporary foster place, but that’s very rare.”
The crisis has prompted Barnet council and Hammersmith and Fulham to offer grants of up to £30,000 to foster parents to build loft conversions to house more children. A spokeswoman for Hammersmith and Fulham said the outlay would pay itself back within one to two years even if it creates just one extra fostering place.
Defenders of private agencies point out councils often do not factor hidden staffing costs - such as administration and on-call social workers - into their weekly fees. Private agencies also point out they are often called upon to find placements for the most difficult children. They point out they also provide round-the-clock social worker support as well as educational support and therapy. Not all agencies are profit-making with fostering services carried out by charities such as Barnardo’s and NCH.
Marcelle Ibbetson, service development manager at NCH, which also typically charges £800 a week, said: “We don’t think local authorities have properly costed the real cost of foster care. Their behind the scenes costs are hidden. What we provide is private placements at the specialist end of the market.”
None of the directors of Foster Care Associates was available for comment. But in an interview last year Sally Melbourne, FCA’s director for the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region, said: “The majority of the fee we charge local authorities goes to the carer and on the welfare of the child. We are a business but we make very little profit, last year we made 5% profit.”
A spokesman for the company added: “The company specialises in children that are difficult to place. That is not necessarily behaviourally difficult children but it could be kids with five siblings that need to be kept together or from the ethnic minorities that needs to be placed in their own community. We offer a complete support structure including therapy and education, which is why the costing may look more expensive.” – LONDON - EVENING STANDARD.
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6: Written Parliamentary answers
Monday, 3 September 2007
Children, Schools and Families
Adoption: StandardsAll Written Answers on 3 Sep 2007
Tim Loughton MP (East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years.
John Healey (Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government)
I have been asked to reply.
30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of 'performance reward grant' (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim
Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.
Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Local authority Amount of 'reward grant' paid (£)
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council 210,173.00
Blackburn with Darwen 307,367.00
Bristol City Council 307,512.00
Buckinghamshire County Council 526,958.00
Bromley (LB) 499,440.00
Camden (LB) 318,916.50
Cheshire County Council 685,134.00
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council 578,333.00
Durham County Council 502,675.00
Enfield (LB) 244,963.00
Essex County Council 2,469,200.00
Gloucestershire County Council 612,209.00
Greenwich (LB) 580,996.00
Halton Borough Council 153,938.00
Hampshire 1,675,619.00
Hounslow (LB) 165,019.00
Kensington and Chelsea (LB) 339,117.00
Kent County Council 2,156,583.00
Lewisham (LB) 602,854.00
Liverpool City Council 347,404.00
Luton Borough Council 400,027.00
Manchester City Council 984,877.00
Merton Borough Council 358,708.00
Northamptonshire County Council 1,119,115.00
Sheffield City Council 1,025,000.00
Southwark (LB) 435,242.00
St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council 83,845.00
Wandsworth (LB) 387,627.00
Warwickshire County Council 231,061.00
York City Council 203,620.00
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GOOD NEWS!
Thanks in some small measure to this site and all the others who have campaigned adoption targets will be abandoned on April 1st 2008.
Marriages: 1974-2003, Adoptions, Numbers of adoption orders by date of entry in the Adopted Children Register, by sex and whether the adopted child born inside/outside marriage www.statistics.gov.uk
ONS update on adoption statistics, March 2005
www.statistics.gov.uk
It is a sad but undisputed fact that every year,thousands of children are forcibly collected from their parents and put into "care" (usually in foster care or in a "special school"),and at the same time hundreds of children are callously snatched from despairing parents by the secret family courts to be first put into care and then hastily adopted by strangers, even though .... NO CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED !!!
It is often claimed that a large proportion of these children are placed in care under "voluntary" arrangements. No mention is made of the fact that in the majority of such cases parents only agree to care because they are told by social workers (and often their own lawyers!) that if they do not agree they will lose their children for good but that if they do agree then the children will be returned in 2 or 3 months once things have been "sorted out". Needless to say these promises are inevitably and callously broken "for the good of the children"......
Hundreds of trafficked children are disappearing from the care system
Government and social services departments are accused of failing to protect victims
Mark Townsend, The Guardian, Saturday 28 May 2011
Hundreds of children who have been trafficked into the UK are disappearing each year from the care system, amid allegations that government and local authorities are failing to protect them.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a government agency, estimates that at least 300 juveniles identified as trafficked have disappeared from local authority care over the past three years.
Collated figures from the NSPCC yesterday showed they had dealt with 549 trafficked children in the past three-and-a-half years, although there was no indication of how many had since disappeared after being delivered into care.
Charities have urged the government to adopt a scheme successfully piloted in Scotland, in which guardians are appointed to act as advocates and points of contact for all children believed to have been trafficked. The government has so far rejected proposals to extend the scheme to England. "Guardianship is an essential cost-effective way to prevent children from going missing from care," said Christine Beddoe, director of charity Ecpat UK.
"It would ensure that victims of child trafficking now in care have access to the safe housing, education and legal support which would prevent them slipping back into the hands of their exploiters."
A policy document by the Conservatives in 2008 estimated that "over half of trafficked children disappear from social services". The document also criticised the absence of "safe accommodation" providing 24-hour care for trafficked children. But concern is growing that the party has little appetite to tackle the issue now it is in power.
Home Office sources have suggested that a forthcoming strategy paper on human trafficking is unlikely to include a specific section on child trafficking, an omission that will infuriate campaigners. "We have worked tirelessly with government officials over the past five years to develop a national action plan and a robust protection framework for child victims of trafficking," said Beddoe.
"To see this washed away almost overnight is a scandal. It's as if the Home Office have shredded all the facts and figures."
The government has a statutory duty to provide care to children regardless of nationality or immigration status.
New figures released by the children's charity NSPCC show that during the year to April its child trafficking helpline dealt with 146 cases alone, although experts say this is merely a fragment of the true picture.
Scotland Yard will launch a freephone trafficking hotline to encourage victims to come forward in response to concern that the scale of the crime remains largely unknown.
Detective Inspector Gordon Valentine, the former head of Operation Paladin, Scotland Yard's specialist anti child-trafficking team of police and UK Border Agency officials, said yesterday that the issue did not seem to be a priority for policymakers.
Valentine, who retired on Friday, said that although the Yard had made progress in identifying child victims, there was a concern that the team – which has just five officials – needed to be expanded if traffickers were to be dissuaded from targeting the UK. He added: "Paladin has been a real success and should be expanded, but one issue is that it sits between two stools, the UK Border Agency and the police, and there is an issue about who's going to drive it. The Met are fully committed to Paladin: it's just convincing the wider authorities. Logically, [tackling child trafficking] is cost-effective, but because you can't put costings to it, it's difficult to sell [to policymakers]."
Anne Marie Carrie, Barnardo's chief executive said: "It is imperative that we identify these children quickly and accurately. Failure to do so means they are left without the help and support they so urgently need."
Anthony Steen, former Conservative MP and head of the UK's Human Trafficking Foundation, said: "Child trafficking remains unseen and children don't complain or answer back."
The Home Office said it took the issue extremely seriously and that it remained "core" police business.
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Adoption Facts and Figures
This page gives some of the most recent available statistics and figures relating to adoption and the UK care system. Separate figures are provided for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Here are the figures for England below. For other countries click on the following links - N. Ireland, Scotland, Wales
England
Looked after children
There were 64,400 children in local authority care in England on 31 March 2010 (a 6% increase from 2009). Of these:
56 per cent were boys and 44 per cent girls
Most (52 per cent) came to social services’ attention due to abuse or neglect
47,200 (73 per cent) were in a foster placement. A total of 2,300 children were placed for adoption at 31 March 2010 - 200 less than last year.
Age
6 per cent (3,700) of children in care in England on 31 March 2010 were under one year old
17 per cent (10,900) were aged between one and four years old
17 per cent (11,200) were aged between five and nine years old
39 per cent (24,900) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
21 per cent (13,800) were aged 16 and over
Adoptions
During the year ending 31 March 2010, 3,200 looked after children were adopted - 100 less than in 2009.
Of the children adopted:
51 per cent (1,600) were boys; 49 per cent (1,500) were girls
2 per cent (70) were under one year old
70 per cent (2,200) were aged between one and four years old
24 per cent (770) were aged between five and nine years old
3 per cent (100) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
83 per cent were of White British origin, 11 per cent of mixed ethnic origin, 2 per cent Asian or Asian British and 3 per cent black or black British
70 per cent were placed for adoption due to abuse or neglect, 12 per cent due to family dysfunction, 9 per cent because the birth family was in 'acute stress'
SUMMARY
CAFCASS and government statistics reveal the situation in the following 10 ways .
1:-Adoptions during the year ending 31st march 2010 (3200) have dropped by only 100 from the year ending 31 March 2009 (3300) (3%)
2:-Only 2% of children adopted were babies under 1 year old ,probably because distraught parents with children removed for "risk " of emotional abuse and similar trivialities are now fighting back in the courts and causing delays of 2 years or more before declaring themselves beaten by the biased family courts;
3:Children taken into care for the first 5 months of the year ending March 31st 2012 number 4105 , nearly DOUBLE the 2125 taken in the corresponding period for the year ending 31st March 2009 !!
4:- When Tony Blair introduced huge rewards for Local Authorities for reaching yearly adoption targets(Kent got more than £2million when adoptions were double the target in one year !)naturally adoptions increased. When these scandalous rewards were scrapped ,enthusiasm for adoptions diminished a bit ,so the fostering industry prospered.
5:- In fact adoptions of babies dropped from 70 to 60 this year; hardly earth shaking !,Nevertheless, enthusiastic social workers sanctioned by compliant judges are now taking more and more unfortunate children into a form of "care",so lax that 300 or more children have "disappeared"over the last 3 years, never to be seen again (NSPCC figures!).
6:-Barnardos declare a yearly income of £175 million gained via adoptions;no wonder they want more!
7:- We all have only ONE MOTHER in our lives and it is a gross abuse of any baby to deprive it of contact with a mother who loves that baby and wants to be there for it for as long as possible.
8:-Battered women (and men) are punished twice when they report an abusive partner to the police as they immediately inform the "SS" who then take away the children.Hence the battered often prefer to stay battered rather than lose the children to adoption by strangers;
9:-Single girls who give birth outside marriage no longer rush to adoption agencies as they get priority housing,benefits,and no stigma ! Hence the adoption pool of newborn babies has shrunk since the days of shame and illegitimacy in the sixties and seventies.
10:-The basic problem is that "forced adoption" now has a very bad name as it is viewed as "legal kidnapping" by parents and by most of Western Europe where it would be illegal.Parents who suffer this barbarity or even the lesser oppression of "long term fostering" are then threatened with jail if they complain publicly .Surely it is the normal right of all citizens living in a democracy, to protest against what they perceive as oppression by the State?
-------------------------
Lost 400 children may have been trafficked into sex or drugs trade
· Rise in foreign youngsters missing from care in UK
· Government action plan 'failing to protect victims'
Robert Booth
The Guardian, Wednesday 23 April 2008
More than 400 foreign children, many suspected of being trafficked into the sex or drug trade in Britain, have gone missing from local authority care.
Full article
-------------------------
Nearly all the popular press condemn what has been happening in the family courts. I obviously cannot quote ALL the sensational stories they publish, so I ask you just to read for example what that ultra respectable newspaper "the Times" has to say !
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article720522.ece
The Times May 18, 2006
How can this happen here?
Camilla Cavendish
IMAGINE A COUNTRY where parents accused of child abuse are assumed guilty unless proven innocent. Where secret courts need no criminal conviction to remove their children, only the word of a medical expert, and rarely let parents call their own experts in defence. Where even parents who are vindicated on appeal cannot see their children again, because they have been adopted.And where the “welfare of the child” is used to gag them from discussing the case ever after.
I live in that country.!!
So says Camilla Cavendish in the Times!
This Times article is 100% right!
Most of our European partner countries take
children from parents only if there is
clear evidence of physical or sexual abuse.
In the UK a culture has grown up whereby social workers decide that parenting skills are inadequate so therefore a child is "at risk". They back up this opinion with complex assessments of 20 pages or more made by so called "experts" and "professionals"(therapists,psychiatrists, counsellors and the like) which inevitably predict that the children are "at risk "of either physical or more often emotional abuse from their parents at some ill defined time in the future.
When a mother has had one child taken there is rarely "a fresh start" or "second chance" allowed as any new baby born to that mother is usually taken at birth even when the mother has a new partner , circumstances have changed and several years have passed !The "experts" will claim that the"risk" is still there!
Judges rely heavily on these assessments so that resistance by parents to their"crystal ball predictions" and their conclusions is usually futile and often seen as evidence of their lack of understanding of their child's needs.
The result is that children who are often healthy and happy are removed and taken into care simply because they are said to be "at risk" when all the statistics show the risks they run in care are far higher than any risk to them if they were to remain with their parents! One third the prison population in the UK is composed of those unfortunates who were brought up "in care" of the state !Babies are taken at birth and are then adopted forcibly against the will of their parents . These unfortunates often spend their lives wondering why they were "abandoned"
A veritable industry has grown up with adoption agencies,special schools,fosterers, experts,lawyers ,and social service departments all profiting from the misery of deprived parents. A unique industry where the commodity is children....
It must be smashed and civilised standards must return !
200 people were imprisoned
secretly last year by our
family courts with no public
hearing!
Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
Ms Sally Keeble (Northampton, North) (Lab): Further to the Government’s plans for the court system, will my right hon. and learned Friend say what plans she has for the family courts, especially in relation to ending their ability to send people to prison—for example, for contempt of court for breach of a contact order—without having a public hearing?
Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) Link to this | Hansard source
My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts, and with the important intervention of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, to open them up so that they act in the public interest while maintaining personal privacy
Only in the SECRET family courts are punishments(losing their children to long term fostercare or worse still adoption by strangers) imposed on persons(parents) who have neither committed a crime nor even been accused of committing any crime! THERE IS NO OTHER CASE IN UK LAW WHERE THIS CAN HAPPEN!
.
Social workers themselves are sometimes convicted criminals as the Daily Mirror found out and exposed in the following article !!
Hundreds of criminals apply for care jobs
By Tom Pettifor
Daily Mirror May 20 2006
HUNDREDS of would-be social workers have serious criminal convictions.
Official figures list 375 fully qualified social workers being considered for official registration as having records for high or medium-risk offences.
They include murder, robbery, sex crimes, theft, drug dealing, possessing hard drugs, grievous bodily harm, domestic violence, fraud and serious driving offences.
I repeat THAT SOCIAL WORKERS (who may sometimes be criminals themselves) REMOVE CHILDREN for compulsory adoption FROM PARENTS WHO HAVE NOT BEEN ACCUSED OF ANY CRIME !!! What about the judges?Don't they have to agree? Yes they do and almost inevitably (as they have admitted publicly) they take the "safe route" and usually "go along with social services"
They justify this with the help of so called "experts" and "professionals" who make complicated forecasts and who "predict"(gypsy fashion!) that something bad might happen in the future.This so called "risk" is enough to separate parents and children FOR LIFE !! Hard to believe that such things happen in Britain today isn't it ? Yet there are an average of 600 cases every year held in strictly secret family courts where the judge tells a distraught mother(or father) that she is being "unreasonable" in withholding her consent to the adoption of her new born baby or young child by complete and unknown strangers ! The unfortunate children are then "lost" for good.Yes this really does happen and it is a national disgrace !!
Forced adoption is wicked ! Forced adoption is like capital punishment, it is irreversible!
THESE FORCED ADOPTIONS ARE WICKED CRIMES !! All those odious persons involved in these crimes against humanity,the social workers,the SS lawyers,the hired "experts" and even the compliant judges should all serve prison sentences for their crimes just as their predecessors the Nazi judges were condemned at Nuremburg !
Abuse is a crime,and wilful neglect is a crime but "putting a child (or even more absurdly a new born baby) at risk of future emotional abuse" is not a crime yet it is still one of the most frequent reasons given by the family courts for taking children into care and eventually "forced adoptions" (Adoptions that are actively opposed by a parent or parents in person and in court).Parents cannot defend themselves against the dire predictions made "crystal ball fashion" by highly paid "experts". These so called "professional" judgements are made on an entirely subjective basis and no matter what the parents say the "experts" are nearly always believed in preference to mothers or fathers.Any expert who sides with the parents is usually quietly ignored and discarded soon to be replaced by an expert with views that accord with social services The result is that the unfortunate children and even more unfortunate babies are doomed to long term fostering or forced adoption despite the despairing but hopeless opposition of the distraught parents .
I must repeat again that an average of more than 600 forced adoptions (with no step parents involved) take place every year. 600 bitterly contested court cases where weeping parents plead in vain to at least keep contact with their beloved children.There are double that number that take place "uncontested" because the parents are too distraught to do so or because their lawyers advise them to "go along with social services" and on no account to fight or resist them and then "everything will be all right!" These children are then condemned to spend the rest of their lives wondering who their real parents are and why they were so callously abandoned !.
Forced adoption should be abolished NOW !!
In answer to a parliamentary question (March 21st 2005) the Minister for children admitted that 6643 children over a 10 year period had been adopted by force against the will of mothers pleading in court to keep their children.These figures do NOT include any cases where step-parents were involved and exact adoption statistics are available from the following tables .
Contested Adoptions
Tim Loughton: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many contested adoptions have taken place in each of the last 10 years. [222035]
Mr. Lammy: I have been asked to reply.
21 Mar 2005 : Column 563W
The number of contested adoptions that have taken place in each of the last 10 years are contained in the following table.
Step-parents(9)
Other
Total
Contested Uncontested Contested Uncontested Contested Uncontested
1995 491 2,388 733 1,707 1,224 4,095
1996 362 2,384 518 1,700 880 4,084
1997 272 1,780 555 1,542 827 3,322
1998 237 1,556 477 1,377 714 2,933
1999 211 1,332 716 1,617 927 2,949
2000 167 1,193 651 1,992 818 3,185
2001 141 1,055 653 2,329 794 3,384
2002 109 827 725 2,212 834 3,039
2003 129 840 938 2,489 1,067 3,329
2004 104 767 677 2,583 781 3,350
(9) Step-parent adoption occurs where the step-parent applies to formally adopt the child or children of their spouse and assumes parental responsibility to the exclusion of the other birth parent. Contested step-parent adoption cases arise where the non-resident birth parent does not consent to the adoption
EXTRACT FROM" NATIONAL STATISTICS"
Between 1994 to 2004 there were steady decreases in the proportions of children who were aged 5 to 14 who were adopted, and a significant increase in the proportion adopted who were aged 1 to 4. In 2004, 49 per cent of children adopted were in this age group compared with 26 per cent in 1994, while 13 per cent of adopted children in 2004 were aged 10 to 14 compared with 23 per cent ten years earlier.
The sad fact is that social workers rarely "target" the violent type of parent who tortures , burns, and breaks a child's bones. Too often a nervous social worker retreats hastily and sometimes leaves the child to die. . . . Such violent parents practically never come to court to reclaim their surviving children so the family courts hold no terrors for them. Parents in the family court nowadays are those whose poverty is only too often equated with neglect, or those judged on an entirely subjective basis to have emotionally neglected or abused their children. In my opinion children can far better bear emotional abuse (if this really exists as a serious factor ) than the trauma of being separated from the family they know, and being given for long term fostercare or worse still for adoption by complete strangers.
.... 340 children were removed over a 3 year period simply because the parents had "a low income" and no other reason !
bulletin 06 03 final [pdf]
Statistics of Education: Children Looked After in England: 2002? 2003 Bulletin Issue No 06/03 November 20032 © Crown copyright 2003 Published with the permission ... see page 9
www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SBU/b000424/bulletin_06_03_final.pdf
Children in care cost the taxpayer an average of £2,500 per child, per week-more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton Channel4.com. Massive costs that needlessly drain the resources of local authorities, central government and charities. Massive amounts of public money. In the interests of children? These are the best government figures we are aware of; clearly showing the tragic consequences for the majority of thousands of children leaving care each year:
Lose your children for being 'Too Poor'
By James Chapman – Political Correspondent
Daily Mail 22 August 2005
More than 75% of care leavers have no academic qualifications of any kind
More than 50% of young people leaving care after 16 years are unemployed
17% of young women leaving care are pregnant or already mothers
10% of 16-17 year old claimants of DSS severe hardship payments have been in care
23% of adult prisoners and 38% of young prisoners have been in care
30% of young single homeless people have been in care
LOVE
"LOVE" is not a term that is politically correct,so it is very rarely mentioned in the parental assessments and judicial pronouncements that decide the children's fate ."Bonding" is the preferred term employed by social workers for a "parent and child relationship,"and this portrayal can just as easily be applied to members of the Welsh rugby team !" Bonding really is not at all the same thing as "love"(especially the love of a child for its mother) which should surely be the most determining factor of all when deciding the future of a newborn baby or young child.
The LOVE of a child for a parent (or grandparent) and vice versa ought to (but rarely does ) outweigh the so called disadvantages of grandparents too old at 60 , or parents with learning disabilities,an ancient history of petty crime , extreme poverty, a dirty house ,or a long ago cured addiction. LOVE just does not count when weeping and highly emotional mothers plead in court for the return of their children yet IT SHOULD !! It certainly SHOULD !! Instead such parents frequently get accused in court of an "emotional instability" that further demonstrates their unfitness as parents! Unfortunately the "professionals" (who by definition are those people who make money when parents have their children taken by social services) make decisive "parenting assessments" and consider resistance to fostering or adoption "non co-operation",and failure to "confess " to allegedly bad parenting "a retreat into denial",and as for "hostility and distrust" of the social workers who take the children,that is either a "personality disorder" or "paranoia"! This despite articles appearing regularly in the quality press expressing exceptionally strong criticism of social workers, Family Courts, hired experts and the adoption/fostering system as a whole.
www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo040311/text/40311w24.htm
.
www.channel4.com/health/microsites/P/profiting_from_kids_in_care/
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/berkshire/4115600.stm
The former Minister for children admitted that local authorities were set "adoption targets" and it is a fact that many local authorities like Kent were awarded large monetary rewards (£21 million for hitting 10 out of 12 targets, adoption increase being target number one) via public service agreements. One result of all this has been to strongly motivate social workers to procure children suitable for adoption even if this means splitting up the very families they are meant to support and protect !
These unfortunate mothers are in effect turned into baby making machines to meet the "adoption targets" whilst older children often languish in "special childrens homes" where they are frequently subjected to the most horrific abuse by the paedophiles who so eagerly seek and obtain employment in such places. Typical recent examples of widespread abuse in "children's homes" or false accusations of mass parental abuse occurred in Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Wales, Cheshire, Merseyside, Hackney, Islington, Orkney, Cleveland, Rochdale, Bishop's Auckland, and Ayrshire.
www.fathercare.org/cafcass05.htm
www.msbp.com/secretcourts.htm
www.justiceinfamilylaw.co.uk/Hodge.htm
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/nkids18.xml
observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0, 6903, 1130638, 00.html
www.freedomtocare.org/page124.htm
www.dfes.gov.uk/adoption/adoptionreforms/CLAbulletin2003-04final1.pdf (see page12 tableB)
www.parents4protest.co.uk/p4p/stolen_children_ss.htm
URGENT CONCLUSIONS!!
As I said at the beginning:
1:-There really are SECRET COURTS in the UK.
2:;-These courts take children from loving parents who have committed no crime.
3:-These parents lose their children for ever to adoption by strangers.
4:- Parents are GAGGED and regularly sent to prison in secret proceedings if they reveal what went on in court?
5:-Establishment judges make decisions to take thousands of babies for risk of possible future emotional abuse.
6:-No jury would take babies from mothers because some expert made predictions of their future behaviour.
7:-Criminals facing 6+ months in prison can demand a jury;parents losing their children for life cannot.
8:-Pregnant mothers with no criminal records or disabilities are told their babies will be taken at birth!
9:-Local authorities are rewarded by central government for reaching "adoption targets" hence adoption is prioritised.
10:- Fosterers get up to £400/week/ child,special schools up to £7000/week,adoption agencies,experts lawyers all cash in lavishly!
SO :- What to do?
- Stop the secrecy and the gagging of parents.
- Stop adoptions of children for emotional abuse or for "risk".
- Stop judges deciding cases of long term fostering or adoption,and give juries the final decision.
- Stop excessiv
Statistics (click here for official figures!)
ALSO:-
Adhttp://john.hemming.name/national/familylaw/2007adoptionfigures.htmloption Statistics (1992-2006)(The "under 5" stats)
In 1996/1997 only 1000 children in care who were under 5 were adopted,but this figure rose steadily until 2005/2006 to a figure of 2500 ! This increase of 150% in only 9 years was surely due to the frantic pursuit of "adoption targets" by over eager social workers seizing babies at or shortly after birth to be put into care and later adopted.Judges very rarely refuse social services adoption requests and routinely "dispense with the birth parent's consent."
Children looked after in England (including adoption and care leavers): 2005-2006 www.dfes.gov.uk
Private fostering arrangements reported to Local Authorities in England: Year Ending 31 March 2006 - www.dfes.gov.uk
● 2,490 under-fives in care were adopted in 2006, up from 1,010 in 1995.
● 4,160 under-fives were first taken into care in 2006, up from 2,870 in 1995.
● 1,300 babies aged younger than a month when they were taken into care were adopted in 2006, up from 540 in 1995.
● The average age at adoption in 2006 was four years and one month.
● 3,700 children were adopted from care in 2006, up from 2,700 in 2000.
Source: DCSF
Here at last is PROOF that all concerned in "child protection" are receiving vast sums of money for work that can at best be described as "destructive" and at worst "criminal"......
1: Fosterers typically £400/ week per child!
2: Special children's homes typically £7,000/ week per child!
3: Lawyers and court costs typically £500,000 per case!
4: Experts typically £28,000 for a simple report!
5: Adoption and fostering agencies make £millions (£27,000/placement)
6: Local authority agencies get £13,000 per placement
Following the recent Panorama programme on adoptions ......
See below the link to an adoption and fostering agency for sale valued at a tidy £135 million !
LA agencies get around £13,000 per placement,but private adoption and fostering agencies get around £27,000 each time they place some unfortunate with fosterers or with an adoptive family ! I wonder why none of these figures were mentioned in the programme.http://www.baaf.org.uk/webfm_send/2411 The foster families on average get £400 per week per child, and it is not unheard of for certain social workers to get “generous kickbacks” from both agencies and fosterers ….
10 LAWYERS in various family court sessions spread over a year or more,(both solicitor and barrister for each of ,mother,father, children,local authority,and guardian !)Most contested cases cost £500,000 or more…..With 100,000 children in the UK, each one costs the taxpayer £150/day = over £5billion/year!
With so many snouts in the trough can anyone be surprised that a blanket of secrecy is necessary to protect this money orientated child protection and family court system?
When “Panorama makes a “commercial” for the fostering and adoption industry suddenly “privacy” is no longer an issue .CHILDREN IN CARE ARE NAMED AND INTERVIEWED for millions to watch,but if parents got together to make a film exposing the cruelty and corruption of the system they would all end up in jail for breaching their own children’s privacy !Double standards
National Fostering Agency up for sale
www.business-sale.com › NewsCached
14 Nov 2011 – Sovereign Capital has put the National Fostering Agency (NFA) on the market, causing a flurry of interest from private equity buyers.
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/privateequity/8886088/Private-equity-buyers-line-up-for-National-Fostering-Agency.html
1: BALLOONS AND FAMILY FUN TO PROMOTE FOSTERING
Hundreds of balloons will be released from Slough town centre to mark a special event to launch Slough’s new fostering Allowance Scheme.
Saturday, July 2 will encourage more people to consider becoming foster parents to local children and see the launch of a new fostering allowance of £400 per week.
Between noon and 4pm, the Town Square will be bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling. Football fans should be sure to bring a camera as a David Beckham look-a-like will be ready to pose for photos.
Janet Tomlinson, head of education and children’s services at Slough Borough Council, will make a short speech at 1pm before the balloon release.
Team members from Slough’s Family Placement Services will be giving out fostering information including the fostering freephone number, car stickers, bookmarks, keyrings, wristbands and balloons.
Janet Tomlinson said: "Fostering offers great challenges and great rewards. Even if you’ve never thought about it before, why not come down on July 2 to find out more?"
The freephone fostering number is 0800 073 0291.
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2. DISPATCHES: PROFITING FROM KIDS IN CARE
Channel 4, Thursday 25 November, 9pm
In 2004, caring for Britain's most vulnerable children is a multi-million pound industry. Children in care cost the taxpayer over £830 million pounds a year. That's an average of £2,500 per child, per week - more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton. Yet many homes are failing to provide children with even a basic standard of care.
In this programme, Dispatches goes undercover to investigate the consequences of the increased privatisation of residential children's homes. The investigation reveals how homes are run by private businessmen charging social services departments enormous and unethical mark-ups on services - many of which aren't even provided. Fees of £7,000 a week are not unusual yet Dispatches finds private children's homes which are failing the children in many respects. Homes often use untrained, and sometimes unvetted, agency staff to look after some of the UK's most at risk youngsters - many of whom have been the victims of abuse, prostitution and drugs.
The current system is failing thousands of children a year. According to a recent report, three in five kids leave care with no qualifications at all. One in five will be homeless after two years and one in three of the current prison population has previously been in care. Tragically, some don't make it at all, with approximately 60 youngsters dying in children's homes every year.
Information, advice and support for people who are in care, or have been in the past, can be found by checking out the following organisations and websites.
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3: COUNCIL MUST PAY £500,000 FOR WRONGLY TAKING GIRL INTO CARE
Clare Dyer, legal editor
The Guardian, Friday March 17 2006
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 23 2006
(The headline for the article below was misleading. As the story made clear, the £500,000 was the total cost to public funds. The council was ordered to pay the parents £200,000 legal aid costs and will have to meet its own costs. The child would also have been represented and payment of those costs will be met from public funds).
A couple had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason and kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge said yesterday.
Mr Justice McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings" and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the emergency order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds, were £500,000, including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000, which the judge ordered the local council to pay. The judge took the unusual step of making his judgment public after a hearing behind closed doors, although the family, the local authority and the magistrates court are all unnamed.
He laid down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which are certain to lead social services departments and magistrates courts to re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely no pleasure to have to record the multiple failings of the local authority in this case".
But to do so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion on the issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be learned for the future".
He said the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".
Mother and daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for psychotherapy and the girl had been put on the local child protection register.
The notes of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues. Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental to move."
But social workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy - now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of child abuse in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes illness to get attention. At the end of a case conference on the girl in November 2004, social services received a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.
They were told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong. Within hours and without any information from the doctor, social workers were at the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection order allowing the girl to be taken from her parents immediately.
They acted without telling the parents and without seeking any medical opinion to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical treatment before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.
The council's actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous" and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction of this family's ordinary life".
Those descriptions "do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took place on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader, who had no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to the magistrates, of which every one was "misleading or incomplete or wrong".
He ruled that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".
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4: THE EXPERT AS JUDGE AND JURY
After a host of miscarriages of justice based on discredited expert witnesses, calls are growing for radical reform of their use in court, writes Lois Rogers
The Sunday Times, Nov 18 2007
Yet another woman was sent to prison last week, following expert evidence that she had shaken to death a baby in her care. Keran Henderson, a 42-year-old childminder, was said to have killed 11-month-old Maeve Sheppard, by shaking her so violently she was left blind and brain-damaged. The infant died in hospital a few days later.
The case has grim echoes of those of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel, all of whom were accused of killing their children only to be found innocent later. Clark, a solicitor, who was released from prison after serving three years, died last March as a result of psychological trauma and alcoholism caused by her ordeal.
At the Court of Appeal, two days after the judgment on Henderson, a retrial was ordered in the case of Barry George, the loner convicted of killing the television personality Jill Dando in 1999 with a single shot to the head. Expert testimony as to the significance of a particle of gunshot matter in his pocket is being challenged.
There has also been the recent conviction of the true killer of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed, 32 years after the event – and after Stefan Kiszko had served 16 years for the sexually motivated killing, even though medical evidence could have pointed out his infertility proved his innocence. Once again the review of the evidence threw a spotlight on the role of expert witnesses, whose testimony is often crucial in criminal cases but can be unreliable.
Our blind faith in scientific opinion makes us reluctant to question pronouncements by “experts”, but while the law requires everyone from plumbers to nurses to be trained, registered and checked, there is no such requirement for witnesses who may be pronouncing on matters of life and death in court.
A study by senior barrister Penny Cooper of City University in London, has shown that the majority of lawyers and judges do not bother to check the qualifications of experts they approach to bolster an aspect of their case. She also found a substantial number of the expert witnesses had undergone no training to understand their legal duty.
The disquiet this arouses has led to a clamour for legislation to require expert witnesses to be regulated. But how to do that without calling into question thousands of court decisions will not be an easy task.
There is already acute unease over the proliferation of parents convicted of causing cot deaths, shaking babies to death, or harming them by creating symptoms of fictitious illness.
Henderson, for instance, a mother of two herself, a long-term childminder and stalwart volunteer of her local Beaver Scout group, was sentenced to three years in prison for shaking baby Maeve so violently that she was left with fatal brain damage, despite the fact there was no evidence of any “grip marks” on the child, which would normally be expected to accompany such an action.
Her husband, a former police officer, has said she will appeal and hopes to create a campaign similar to that run by Sally Clark’s family, to try to prove his wife’s innocence.
Many character witnesses spoke up for Henderson in court and the family has dozens of supporters in their home village of Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire.
Some even believe her prosecution was only pursued because of the successful appeal by Roy Meadow, the expert paediatrician whose evidence led to the conviction of Sally Clark.
Following the Clark case, in which Meadow quoted a completely erroneous statistic suggesting the chances of Clark’s babies having died naturally were one in 73m, he was struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for misconduct. The Court of Appeal agreed he had acted in good faith.
In the meantime, Alan Williams, the Home Office pathologist who conducted post-mortems on Clark’s two infant sons, was less lucky. His appeal against a GMC finding of serious professional misconduct was rejected. Williams was accused of tailoring his diagnoses of the nature of the babies’ deaths to fit the police case against Clark.
The GMC is currently hearing a claim of gross professional misconduct against paediatrician Dr David Southall. The council has received evidence alleging that Southall falsified his curriculum vitae.
Southall’s evidence has figured highly in at least 50 criminal cases and possibly hundreds of family court cases held in secret, which have led to children being removed from their parents.
Questions of how frequently babies really are shaken to death, and indeed if it is possible to do so, have divided medical opinion for some years. There have, however, been up to 200 convictions annually for related forms of violence against babies and young children.
After Clark, Cannings and Patel, another bizarre case was overturned. Ian and Angela Gay, who had been convicted of poisoning their three-year-old adopted son with salt, were cleared when it was revealed the boy was suffering from a rare, and fatal, congenital abnormality.
Recently, the attorney-general ordered a review of almost 300 criminal convictions and 30,000 family court proceedings where children were taken into care. Only four were referred to the Court of Appeal. This, according to critics, was a function of the way the review was done, with authorities being asked to review their own decisions.
Social workers say the crusade to root out dangerous adults is to some extent a reaction to a previous era of regular criticism of their profession when children were left to die at the hands of their parents. Although some acknowledge the pendulum may now have swung too far, others are furious: “Do people think we spend all our time trying to break up families for no good reason?” said John Coughlan, a joint-president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. “In comparison with the volume of cases, the number of errors is tiny. We never rely on expert witnesses alone.”
Others argue that the opinion of expert witnesses is often the decisive factor. And as we have seen most recently with Barry George, it is not just child murder cases that have turned on such evidence.
Last year the Home Office took the unprecedented step of holding a disciplinary tribunal against Michael Heath, one of its most senior forensic pathologists: 20 charges against him were upheld. One man was subsequently cleared of murder, and numerous other convictions have been called into question.
A spate of other convictions came from evidence supplied by Paula Lannas, another Home Office forensic specialist who was the subject of a long-delayed disciplinary hearing that collapsed because those investigating her said they had a conflict of interest. Not only has Lannas been deprived of an opportunity to clear her name, but dozens of prisoners who claim they were victims of her errors have been unable to get the evidence reviewed.
Police forensic scientist Peter Ablett, who is now chief executive of the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners, points out there are only three ways to prove a crime: a reliable eyewitness, a confession, or forensics. The advent of DNA technology and other advances in recent years has brought increasing reliance on forensics, yet only about 3,000 of the estimated 8,000 expert witnesses operating are members of the council and signed up to its code of practice.
He said many of those who are not are unaware that their duty is to give impartial evidence to the court, not to bolster the case of their paymaster.
City University’s Cooper, who is also a governor of the Expert Witness Institute, was concerned to discover during her research that not only have one in five experts undergone no training to understand this duty, but one in 10 was so arrogant they said they saw no need for it. “There should be a requirement for them to be trained, and there should be rules requiring judges and lawyers to consider their credentials before accepting them as expert witnesses,” she said.
Such a provision cannot come soon enough.
A review is still going on of 700 cases in which bogus forensic scientist Gene Morrison gave evidence. Morrison, 48, from Manchester who was sentenced to five years for fraud in February, admitted he pretended to be an expert witness and bought his qualifications on the internet because it “seemed easier” than getting real ones.
For many of the genuinely qualified experts, legal work isa lucrative sideline, and if they are perceived to be able to “tailor” their evidence convincingly, the commissions keep flowing in. John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning about the misuse of medical evidence, says fees for a basic written opinion, based on reading through existing files, start at £4,000. If the expert concludes there is a case to answer, they attract court attendance fees as well.
“I have known experts get as much as £28,000 for one report,” said Hemming, who is lobbying for experts to be required to produce the scientific publications on which their opinion is based: “Unless we start using evidence-based evidence in court, we will get nowhere.”
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5: FIRMS CASH IN ON SHORTAGE OF FOSTER HOMES
Published: Sunday, 2 October, 2005, Evening Standard.
LONDON: Private agencies are making millions of pounds out of a critical shortage of foster homes for children. Firms are charging councils on average £800 per child per week, an EVENING STANDARD investigation revealed.
This amounts to £41,600 a year to find suitable homes for the most vulnerable children in society.
One head of social services said: “It is cheaper to send the children to Eton.”
London councils are so desperate to hold on to their foster parents that two are offering them free loft conversions - worth up to £30,000 - so they can take in more children. Britain’s largest independent agency Foster Care Associates had a £56mn turnover in 2003, the last year for which accounts are available.
Its eight directors - seven of them social workers who set up the company 10 years ago - paid themselves total fees of more than £2.2mn as well as sharing pre-tax profits of almost £900,000.
The directors awarded themselves on average £285,000 each - about 10 times the annual salary of a social worker.
There is an estimated shortage of 10,000 foster carers across the UK. This has driven up the prices charged by the 150 or so independent agencies.
It costs councils between £300 and £400 a week to place children with their own approved foster carers but they cannot meet the demand and have to turn to outside agencies. More difficult children can cost as much as £1,500 per week to place in foster homes.
The problem is especially acute in London, where out of 11,500 fostered children up to one-third are found homes through independent agencies. Many of them are ‘dumped’ in outlying towns around the capital. A total of 60,000 children are fostered nationally.
A spokesman at the department for education said: “We know there are too many children being placed outside of authorities. We commissioned a report last year looking at how we can reduce that number.”
Out of the 11,500 fostered children in London, half of them are teenagers, about 3,000 aged eight to 12 and 2,500 aged under eight.
Children are typically being sent from London boroughs to Kent, miles from their schools and friends. Some 330 problem children from London are being fostered in the Margate area.
This has prompted the Kent child protection committee to compile a report, sent to ministers, warning the town is now at a ‘tipping point’ and branding the situation ‘explosive’.
Paul Fallon, director of social services at Barnet council and spokesman for all London’s social services directors, said: “Every penny we spend on one child is a penny we can’t spend on another child. If I place a child with Barnet it is £400. But it costs me about double that to place a child in an independent placement.
“It is a sellers’ market and that will impact on prices. We are stuck. It is cheaper to send children to Eton.”
He estimated that in Barnet about 30 to 40 children - about 10% of the number needing foster care - are unaccompanied child refugees. They have helped to swell numbers of children needing placements, putting added pressure on social services.
A spokeswoman for Richmond council, where private places at £900 cost three times as much as council places, said: “In emergencies we will negotiate with another borough for a temporary foster place, but that’s very rare.”
The crisis has prompted Barnet council and Hammersmith and Fulham to offer grants of up to £30,000 to foster parents to build loft conversions to house more children. A spokeswoman for Hammersmith and Fulham said the outlay would pay itself back within one to two years even if it creates just one extra fostering place.
Defenders of private agencies point out councils often do not factor hidden staffing costs - such as administration and on-call social workers - into their weekly fees. Private agencies also point out they are often called upon to find placements for the most difficult children. They point out they also provide round-the-clock social worker support as well as educational support and therapy. Not all agencies are profit-making with fostering services carried out by charities such as Barnardo’s and NCH.
Marcelle Ibbetson, service development manager at NCH, which also typically charges £800 a week, said: “We don’t think local authorities have properly costed the real cost of foster care. Their behind the scenes costs are hidden. What we provide is private placements at the specialist end of the market.”
None of the directors of Foster Care Associates was available for comment. But in an interview last year Sally Melbourne, FCA’s director for the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region, said: “The majority of the fee we charge local authorities goes to the carer and on the welfare of the child. We are a business but we make very little profit, last year we made 5% profit.”
A spokesman for the company added: “The company specialises in children that are difficult to place. That is not necessarily behaviourally difficult children but it could be kids with five siblings that need to be kept together or from the ethnic minorities that needs to be placed in their own community. We offer a complete support structure including therapy and education, which is why the costing may look more expensive.” – LONDON - EVENING STANDARD.
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6: Written Parliamentary answers
Monday, 3 September 2007
Children, Schools and Families
Adoption: StandardsAll Written Answers on 3 Sep 2007
Tim Loughton MP (East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families which local authorities have received payments from central Government for achieving adoption target levels; and how much each received in each of the last three years.
John Healey (Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government)
I have been asked to reply.
30 local authorities have been rewarded for successfully achieving adoption targets in their local public service agreements (LPSA). The better outcomes and amount of 'performance reward grant' (PRG) each has received over the three years 2004/05 to 2006/07 in relation to their performance in these targets is set out in the following table. In addition, 13 local authorities did not achieve the adoption targets in their local PSA and hence received no PRG for this target. One local authority is still to make a claim
Local PSAs—which are negotiated between local authorities and central Government policy departments, facilitated by the DCLG—have helped to incentivise local authorities and partners to provide better public services to their citizens around priorities for improvement locally. Evaluation shows they have been successful in doing this, with real benefits in improved outcomes for local people and communities.
Local PSA adoption and placement targets: payments made to date under local PSAs
Local authority Amount of 'reward grant' paid (£)
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council 210,173.00
Blackburn with Darwen 307,367.00
Bristol City Council 307,512.00
Buckinghamshire County Council 526,958.00
Bromley (LB) 499,440.00
Camden (LB) 318,916.50
Cheshire County Council 685,134.00
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council 578,333.00
Durham County Council 502,675.00
Enfield (LB) 244,963.00
Essex County Council 2,469,200.00
Gloucestershire County Council 612,209.00
Greenwich (LB) 580,996.00
Halton Borough Council 153,938.00
Hampshire 1,675,619.00
Hounslow (LB) 165,019.00
Kensington and Chelsea (LB) 339,117.00
Kent County Council 2,156,583.00
Lewisham (LB) 602,854.00
Liverpool City Council 347,404.00
Luton Borough Council 400,027.00
Manchester City Council 984,877.00
Merton Borough Council 358,708.00
Northamptonshire County Council 1,119,115.00
Sheffield City Council 1,025,000.00
Southwark (LB) 435,242.00
St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council 83,845.00
Wandsworth (LB) 387,627.00
Warwickshire County Council 231,061.00
York City Council 203,620.00
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GOOD NEWS!
Thanks in some small measure to this site and all the others who have campaigned adoption targets will be abandoned on April 1st 2008.
Marriages: 1974-2003, Adoptions, Numbers of adoption orders by date of entry in the Adopted Children Register, by sex and whether the adopted child born inside/outside marriage www.statistics.gov.uk
ONS update on adoption statistics, March 2005
www.statistics.gov.uk
It is a sad but undisputed fact that every year,thousands of children are forcibly collected from their parents and put into "care" (usually in foster care or in a "special school"),and at the same time hundreds of children are callously snatched from despairing parents by the secret family courts to be first put into care and then hastily adopted by strangers, even though .... NO CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED !!!
It is often claimed that a large proportion of these children are placed in care under "voluntary" arrangements. No mention is made of the fact that in the majority of such cases parents only agree to care because they are told by social workers (and often their own lawyers!) that if they do not agree they will lose their children for good but that if they do agree then the children will be returned in 2 or 3 months once things have been "sorted out". Needless to say these promises are inevitably and callously broken "for the good of the children"......
Hundreds of trafficked children are disappearing from the care system
Government and social services departments are accused of failing to protect victims
Mark Townsend, The Guardian, Saturday 28 May 2011
Hundreds of children who have been trafficked into the UK are disappearing each year from the care system, amid allegations that government and local authorities are failing to protect them.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a government agency, estimates that at least 300 juveniles identified as trafficked have disappeared from local authority care over the past three years.
Collated figures from the NSPCC yesterday showed they had dealt with 549 trafficked children in the past three-and-a-half years, although there was no indication of how many had since disappeared after being delivered into care.
Charities have urged the government to adopt a scheme successfully piloted in Scotland, in which guardians are appointed to act as advocates and points of contact for all children believed to have been trafficked. The government has so far rejected proposals to extend the scheme to England. "Guardianship is an essential cost-effective way to prevent children from going missing from care," said Christine Beddoe, director of charity Ecpat UK.
"It would ensure that victims of child trafficking now in care have access to the safe housing, education and legal support which would prevent them slipping back into the hands of their exploiters."
A policy document by the Conservatives in 2008 estimated that "over half of trafficked children disappear from social services". The document also criticised the absence of "safe accommodation" providing 24-hour care for trafficked children. But concern is growing that the party has little appetite to tackle the issue now it is in power.
Home Office sources have suggested that a forthcoming strategy paper on human trafficking is unlikely to include a specific section on child trafficking, an omission that will infuriate campaigners. "We have worked tirelessly with government officials over the past five years to develop a national action plan and a robust protection framework for child victims of trafficking," said Beddoe.
"To see this washed away almost overnight is a scandal. It's as if the Home Office have shredded all the facts and figures."
The government has a statutory duty to provide care to children regardless of nationality or immigration status.
New figures released by the children's charity NSPCC show that during the year to April its child trafficking helpline dealt with 146 cases alone, although experts say this is merely a fragment of the true picture.
Scotland Yard will launch a freephone trafficking hotline to encourage victims to come forward in response to concern that the scale of the crime remains largely unknown.
Detective Inspector Gordon Valentine, the former head of Operation Paladin, Scotland Yard's specialist anti child-trafficking team of police and UK Border Agency officials, said yesterday that the issue did not seem to be a priority for policymakers.
Valentine, who retired on Friday, said that although the Yard had made progress in identifying child victims, there was a concern that the team – which has just five officials – needed to be expanded if traffickers were to be dissuaded from targeting the UK. He added: "Paladin has been a real success and should be expanded, but one issue is that it sits between two stools, the UK Border Agency and the police, and there is an issue about who's going to drive it. The Met are fully committed to Paladin: it's just convincing the wider authorities. Logically, [tackling child trafficking] is cost-effective, but because you can't put costings to it, it's difficult to sell [to policymakers]."
Anne Marie Carrie, Barnardo's chief executive said: "It is imperative that we identify these children quickly and accurately. Failure to do so means they are left without the help and support they so urgently need."
Anthony Steen, former Conservative MP and head of the UK's Human Trafficking Foundation, said: "Child trafficking remains unseen and children don't complain or answer back."
The Home Office said it took the issue extremely seriously and that it remained "core" police business.
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Adoption Facts and Figures
This page gives some of the most recent available statistics and figures relating to adoption and the UK care system. Separate figures are provided for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Here are the figures for England below. For other countries click on the following links - N. Ireland, Scotland, Wales
England
Looked after children
There were 64,400 children in local authority care in England on 31 March 2010 (a 6% increase from 2009). Of these:
56 per cent were boys and 44 per cent girls
Most (52 per cent) came to social services’ attention due to abuse or neglect
47,200 (73 per cent) were in a foster placement. A total of 2,300 children were placed for adoption at 31 March 2010 - 200 less than last year.
Age
6 per cent (3,700) of children in care in England on 31 March 2010 were under one year old
17 per cent (10,900) were aged between one and four years old
17 per cent (11,200) were aged between five and nine years old
39 per cent (24,900) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
21 per cent (13,800) were aged 16 and over
Adoptions
During the year ending 31 March 2010, 3,200 looked after children were adopted - 100 less than in 2009.
Of the children adopted:
51 per cent (1,600) were boys; 49 per cent (1,500) were girls
2 per cent (70) were under one year old
70 per cent (2,200) were aged between one and four years old
24 per cent (770) were aged between five and nine years old
3 per cent (100) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
83 per cent were of White British origin, 11 per cent of mixed ethnic origin, 2 per cent Asian or Asian British and 3 per cent black or black British
70 per cent were placed for adoption due to abuse or neglect, 12 per cent due to family dysfunction, 9 per cent because the birth family was in 'acute stress'
SUMMARY
CAFCASS and government statistics reveal the situation in the following 10 ways .
1:-Adoptions during the year ending 31st march 2010 (3200) have dropped by only 100 from the year ending 31 March 2009 (3300) (3%)
2:-Only 2% of children adopted were babies under 1 year old ,probably because distraught parents with children removed for "risk " of emotional abuse and similar trivialities are now fighting back in the courts and causing delays of 2 years or more before declaring themselves beaten by the biased family courts;
3:Children taken into care for the first 5 months of the year ending March 31st 2012 number 4105 , nearly DOUBLE the 2125 taken in the corresponding period for the year ending 31st March 2009 !!
4:- When Tony Blair introduced huge rewards for Local Authorities for reaching yearly adoption targets(Kent got more than £2million when adoptions were double the target in one year !)naturally adoptions increased. When these scandalous rewards were scrapped ,enthusiasm for adoptions diminished a bit ,so the fostering industry prospered.
5:- In fact adoptions of babies dropped from 70 to 60 this year; hardly earth shaking !,Nevertheless, enthusiastic social workers sanctioned by compliant judges are now taking more and more unfortunate children into a form of "care",so lax that 300 or more children have "disappeared"over the last 3 years, never to be seen again (NSPCC figures!).
6:-Barnardos declare a yearly income of £175 million gained via adoptions;no wonder they want more!
7:- We all have only ONE MOTHER in our lives and it is a gross abuse of any baby to deprive it of contact with a mother who loves that baby and wants to be there for it for as long as possible.
8:-Battered women (and men) are punished twice when they report an abusive partner to the police as they immediately inform the "SS" who then take away the children.Hence the battered often prefer to stay battered rather than lose the children to adoption by strangers;
9:-Single girls who give birth outside marriage no longer rush to adoption agencies as they get priority housing,benefits,and no stigma ! Hence the adoption pool of newborn babies has shrunk since the days of shame and illegitimacy in the sixties and seventies.
10:-The basic problem is that "forced adoption" now has a very bad name as it is viewed as "legal kidnapping" by parents and by most of Western Europe where it would be illegal.Parents who suffer this barbarity or even the lesser oppression of "long term fostering" are then threatened with jail if they complain publicly .Surely it is the normal right of all citizens living in a democracy, to protest against what they perceive as oppression by the State?
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Lost 400 children may have been trafficked into sex or drugs trade
· Rise in foreign youngsters missing from care in UK
· Government action plan 'failing to protect victims'
Robert Booth
The Guardian, Wednesday 23 April 2008
More than 400 foreign children, many suspected of being trafficked into the sex or drug trade in Britain, have gone missing from local authority care.
Full article
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Nearly all the popular press condemn what has been happening in the family courts. I obviously cannot quote ALL the sensational stories they publish, so I ask you just to read for example what that ultra respectable newspaper "the Times" has to say !
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article720522.ece
The Times May 18, 2006
How can this happen here?
Camilla Cavendish
IMAGINE A COUNTRY where parents accused of child abuse are assumed guilty unless proven innocent. Where secret courts need no criminal conviction to remove their children, only the word of a medical expert, and rarely let parents call their own experts in defence. Where even parents who are vindicated on appeal cannot see their children again, because they have been adopted.And where the “welfare of the child” is used to gag them from discussing the case ever after.
I live in that country.!!
So says Camilla Cavendish in the Times!
This Times article is 100% right!
Most of our European partner countries take
children from parents only if there is
clear evidence of physical or sexual abuse.
In the UK a culture has grown up whereby social workers decide that parenting skills are inadequate so therefore a child is "at risk". They back up this opinion with complex assessments of 20 pages or more made by so called "experts" and "professionals"(therapists,psychiatrists, counsellors and the like) which inevitably predict that the children are "at risk "of either physical or more often emotional abuse from their parents at some ill defined time in the future.
When a mother has had one child taken there is rarely "a fresh start" or "second chance" allowed as any new baby born to that mother is usually taken at birth even when the mother has a new partner , circumstances have changed and several years have passed !The "experts" will claim that the"risk" is still there!
Judges rely heavily on these assessments so that resistance by parents to their"crystal ball predictions" and their conclusions is usually futile and often seen as evidence of their lack of understanding of their child's needs.
The result is that children who are often healthy and happy are removed and taken into care simply because they are said to be "at risk" when all the statistics show the risks they run in care are far higher than any risk to them if they were to remain with their parents! One third the prison population in the UK is composed of those unfortunates who were brought up "in care" of the state !Babies are taken at birth and are then adopted forcibly against the will of their parents . These unfortunates often spend their lives wondering why they were "abandoned"
A veritable industry has grown up with adoption agencies,special schools,fosterers, experts,lawyers ,and social service departments all profiting from the misery of deprived parents. A unique industry where the commodity is children....
It must be smashed and civilised standards must return !
200 people were imprisoned
secretly last year by our
family courts with no public
hearing!
Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour) Link to this | Hansard source
Ms Sally Keeble (Northampton, North) (Lab): Further to the Government’s plans for the court system, will my right hon. and learned Friend say what plans she has for the family courts, especially in relation to ending their ability to send people to prison—for example, for contempt of court for breach of a contact order—without having a public hearing?
Harriet Harman (Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs) Link to this | Hansard source
My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point, which she has put to me in a written question, so I know what the answer is. Last year something like 200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy. The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts, and with the important intervention of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, to open them up so that they act in the public interest while maintaining personal privacy
Only in the SECRET family courts are punishments(losing their children to long term fostercare or worse still adoption by strangers) imposed on persons(parents) who have neither committed a crime nor even been accused of committing any crime! THERE IS NO OTHER CASE IN UK LAW WHERE THIS CAN HAPPEN!
.
Social workers themselves are sometimes convicted criminals as the Daily Mirror found out and exposed in the following article !!
Hundreds of criminals apply for care jobs
By Tom Pettifor
Daily Mirror May 20 2006
HUNDREDS of would-be social workers have serious criminal convictions.
Official figures list 375 fully qualified social workers being considered for official registration as having records for high or medium-risk offences.
They include murder, robbery, sex crimes, theft, drug dealing, possessing hard drugs, grievous bodily harm, domestic violence, fraud and serious driving offences.
I repeat THAT SOCIAL WORKERS (who may sometimes be criminals themselves) REMOVE CHILDREN for compulsory adoption FROM PARENTS WHO HAVE NOT BEEN ACCUSED OF ANY CRIME !!! What about the judges?Don't they have to agree? Yes they do and almost inevitably (as they have admitted publicly) they take the "safe route" and usually "go along with social services"
They justify this with the help of so called "experts" and "professionals" who make complicated forecasts and who "predict"(gypsy fashion!) that something bad might happen in the future.This so called "risk" is enough to separate parents and children FOR LIFE !! Hard to believe that such things happen in Britain today isn't it ? Yet there are an average of 600 cases every year held in strictly secret family courts where the judge tells a distraught mother(or father) that she is being "unreasonable" in withholding her consent to the adoption of her new born baby or young child by complete and unknown strangers ! The unfortunate children are then "lost" for good.Yes this really does happen and it is a national disgrace !!
Forced adoption is wicked ! Forced adoption is like capital punishment, it is irreversible!
THESE FORCED ADOPTIONS ARE WICKED CRIMES !! All those odious persons involved in these crimes against humanity,the social workers,the SS lawyers,the hired "experts" and even the compliant judges should all serve prison sentences for their crimes just as their predecessors the Nazi judges were condemned at Nuremburg !
Abuse is a crime,and wilful neglect is a crime but "putting a child (or even more absurdly a new born baby) at risk of future emotional abuse" is not a crime yet it is still one of the most frequent reasons given by the family courts for taking children into care and eventually "forced adoptions" (Adoptions that are actively opposed by a parent or parents in person and in court).Parents cannot defend themselves against the dire predictions made "crystal ball fashion" by highly paid "experts". These so called "professional" judgements are made on an entirely subjective basis and no matter what the parents say the "experts" are nearly always believed in preference to mothers or fathers.Any expert who sides with the parents is usually quietly ignored and discarded soon to be replaced by an expert with views that accord with social services The result is that the unfortunate children and even more unfortunate babies are doomed to long term fostering or forced adoption despite the despairing but hopeless opposition of the distraught parents .
I must repeat again that an average of more than 600 forced adoptions (with no step parents involved) take place every year. 600 bitterly contested court cases where weeping parents plead in vain to at least keep contact with their beloved children.There are double that number that take place "uncontested" because the parents are too distraught to do so or because their lawyers advise them to "go along with social services" and on no account to fight or resist them and then "everything will be all right!" These children are then condemned to spend the rest of their lives wondering who their real parents are and why they were so callously abandoned !.
Forced adoption should be abolished NOW !!
In answer to a parliamentary question (March 21st 2005) the Minister for children admitted that 6643 children over a 10 year period had been adopted by force against the will of mothers pleading in court to keep their children.These figures do NOT include any cases where step-parents were involved and exact adoption statistics are available from the following tables .
Contested Adoptions
Tim Loughton: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many contested adoptions have taken place in each of the last 10 years. [222035]
Mr. Lammy: I have been asked to reply.
21 Mar 2005 : Column 563W
The number of contested adoptions that have taken place in each of the last 10 years are contained in the following table.
Step-parents(9)
Other
Total
Contested Uncontested Contested Uncontested Contested Uncontested
1995 491 2,388 733 1,707 1,224 4,095
1996 362 2,384 518 1,700 880 4,084
1997 272 1,780 555 1,542 827 3,322
1998 237 1,556 477 1,377 714 2,933
1999 211 1,332 716 1,617 927 2,949
2000 167 1,193 651 1,992 818 3,185
2001 141 1,055 653 2,329 794 3,384
2002 109 827 725 2,212 834 3,039
2003 129 840 938 2,489 1,067 3,329
2004 104 767 677 2,583 781 3,350
(9) Step-parent adoption occurs where the step-parent applies to formally adopt the child or children of their spouse and assumes parental responsibility to the exclusion of the other birth parent. Contested step-parent adoption cases arise where the non-resident birth parent does not consent to the adoption
EXTRACT FROM" NATIONAL STATISTICS"
Between 1994 to 2004 there were steady decreases in the proportions of children who were aged 5 to 14 who were adopted, and a significant increase in the proportion adopted who were aged 1 to 4. In 2004, 49 per cent of children adopted were in this age group compared with 26 per cent in 1994, while 13 per cent of adopted children in 2004 were aged 10 to 14 compared with 23 per cent ten years earlier.
The sad fact is that social workers rarely "target" the violent type of parent who tortures , burns, and breaks a child's bones. Too often a nervous social worker retreats hastily and sometimes leaves the child to die. . . . Such violent parents practically never come to court to reclaim their surviving children so the family courts hold no terrors for them. Parents in the family court nowadays are those whose poverty is only too often equated with neglect, or those judged on an entirely subjective basis to have emotionally neglected or abused their children. In my opinion children can far better bear emotional abuse (if this really exists as a serious factor ) than the trauma of being separated from the family they know, and being given for long term fostercare or worse still for adoption by complete strangers.
.... 340 children were removed over a 3 year period simply because the parents had "a low income" and no other reason !
bulletin 06 03 final [pdf]
Statistics of Education: Children Looked After in England: 2002? 2003 Bulletin Issue No 06/03 November 20032 © Crown copyright 2003 Published with the permission ... see page 9
www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SBU/b000424/bulletin_06_03_final.pdf
Children in care cost the taxpayer an average of £2,500 per child, per week-more than four times what it would cost to send a child to Eton Channel4.com. Massive costs that needlessly drain the resources of local authorities, central government and charities. Massive amounts of public money. In the interests of children? These are the best government figures we are aware of; clearly showing the tragic consequences for the majority of thousands of children leaving care each year:
Lose your children for being 'Too Poor'
By James Chapman – Political Correspondent
Daily Mail 22 August 2005
More than 75% of care leavers have no academic qualifications of any kind
More than 50% of young people leaving care after 16 years are unemployed
17% of young women leaving care are pregnant or already mothers
10% of 16-17 year old claimants of DSS severe hardship payments have been in care
23% of adult prisoners and 38% of young prisoners have been in care
30% of young single homeless people have been in care
LOVE
"LOVE" is not a term that is politically correct,so it is very rarely mentioned in the parental assessments and judicial pronouncements that decide the children's fate ."Bonding" is the preferred term employed by social workers for a "parent and child relationship,"and this portrayal can just as easily be applied to members of the Welsh rugby team !" Bonding really is not at all the same thing as "love"(especially the love of a child for its mother) which should surely be the most determining factor of all when deciding the future of a newborn baby or young child.
The LOVE of a child for a parent (or grandparent) and vice versa ought to (but rarely does ) outweigh the so called disadvantages of grandparents too old at 60 , or parents with learning disabilities,an ancient history of petty crime , extreme poverty, a dirty house ,or a long ago cured addiction. LOVE just does not count when weeping and highly emotional mothers plead in court for the return of their children yet IT SHOULD !! It certainly SHOULD !! Instead such parents frequently get accused in court of an "emotional instability" that further demonstrates their unfitness as parents! Unfortunately the "professionals" (who by definition are those people who make money when parents have their children taken by social services) make decisive "parenting assessments" and consider resistance to fostering or adoption "non co-operation",and failure to "confess " to allegedly bad parenting "a retreat into denial",and as for "hostility and distrust" of the social workers who take the children,that is either a "personality disorder" or "paranoia"! This despite articles appearing regularly in the quality press expressing exceptionally strong criticism of social workers, Family Courts, hired experts and the adoption/fostering system as a whole.
www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo040311/text/40311w24.htm
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www.channel4.com/health/microsites/P/profiting_from_kids_in_care/
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/berkshire/4115600.stm
The former Minister for children admitted that local authorities were set "adoption targets" and it is a fact that many local authorities like Kent were awarded large monetary rewards (£21 million for hitting 10 out of 12 targets, adoption increase being target number one) via public service agreements. One result of all this has been to strongly motivate social workers to procure children suitable for adoption even if this means splitting up the very families they are meant to support and protect !
These unfortunate mothers are in effect turned into baby making machines to meet the "adoption targets" whilst older children often languish in "special childrens homes" where they are frequently subjected to the most horrific abuse by the paedophiles who so eagerly seek and obtain employment in such places. Typical recent examples of widespread abuse in "children's homes" or false accusations of mass parental abuse occurred in Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Wales, Cheshire, Merseyside, Hackney, Islington, Orkney, Cleveland, Rochdale, Bishop's Auckland, and Ayrshire.
www.fathercare.org/cafcass05.htm
www.msbp.com/secretcourts.htm
www.justiceinfamilylaw.co.uk/Hodge.htm
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/nkids18.xml
observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0, 6903, 1130638, 00.html
www.freedomtocare.org/page124.htm
www.dfes.gov.uk/adoption/adoptionreforms/CLAbulletin2003-04final1.pdf (see page12 tableB)
www.parents4protest.co.uk/p4p/stolen_children_ss.htm
URGENT CONCLUSIONS!!
As I said at the beginning:
1:-There really are SECRET COURTS in the UK.
2:;-These courts take children from loving parents who have committed no crime.
3:-These parents lose their children for ever to adoption by strangers.
4:- Parents are GAGGED and regularly sent to prison in secret proceedings if they reveal what went on in court?
5:-Establishment judges make decisions to take thousands of babies for risk of possible future emotional abuse.
6:-No jury would take babies from mothers because some expert made predictions of their future behaviour.
7:-Criminals facing 6+ months in prison can demand a jury;parents losing their children for life cannot.
8:-Pregnant mothers with no criminal records or disabilities are told their babies will be taken at birth!
9:-Local authorities are rewarded by central government for reaching "adoption targets" hence adoption is prioritised.
10:- Fosterers get up to £400/week/ child,special schools up to £7000/week,adoption agencies,experts lawyers all cash in lavishly!
SO :- What to do?
- Stop the secrecy and the gagging of parents.
- Stop adoptions of children for emotional abuse or for "risk".
- Stop judges deciding cases of long term fostering or adoption,and give juries the final decision.
- Stop excessiv