EXPOSURE, this is the footage that the social services didn't want you to see of a six-hour old baby is being taken away from his mother by social workers. It's a forced adoption and this is the footage they didn't want us to see.
Britain is the only country in Europe that commonly allows adoption against the parents' consent. Adoption is for good, and cannot be reversed. forced adoption has the second-highest record in the world of forced adoption, second only to the United States in permanently removing a child from the natural birth parents.
Some parents are so frightened such that they are fleeing abroad helped by an unofficial network of supporters. Ian Joseph a multi-millionaire who has a fleeing abroad from Oxford helps families to escape these forced adoptions and advises parents to leave the UK and in some cases, even pays for some parents to flee Britain to avoid losing their children.
This is a worrying picture of what seems to be the continuing trend of the permanent removal of children. The heartbreak of losing a child along with the added pain of the secrecy that surrounds this whole process.
With social workers using repeated vague descriptions like emotional abuse and the potential of future emotional abuse, without giving any real example. Reciting phrases like meaningless mantras in the Family Court process. The department for the training of social workers is said to be considering training for best practices.
The Government is using targets and funding to speed up this process of adoptions and giving less money in helping families stay together. The fear is that categories like the future risk of emotional abuse are being increasingly used against birth families, with decisions being made by the family courts, to take children into care before the child is even born. With the child not being in any imminent danger, but social workers saying that the child could be at risk of future harm.
With parents faring imprisonment if they talk about their experiences, parents aren't allowed to tell anyone what’s happening to them.
Less time, fewer people, fewer resources, and money to help families earlier on, along with pressure to move them quickly through into adoption, because that's where the money is.
The system is now too quick to presume guilt when parents have been falsely accused of physically harming a child. Could it possibly have been a non-accidental injury, if the answer is yes which it will be in most cases this coming from a Dr, they are referred to social services. The social services then say the Dr has said that it's a potential non-accidental injury.
If the parent can't account for it, then the parent is presumed guilty via the social services and the children will be removed with such speed, that it allows the parent to do nothing other than to be a passenger in the whole process. They can do nothing but only observe from the outside, and there's no way of stopping it once the wheels are in process. Suspicion and here say with flimsy evidence, it then becomes procedural abuse through not actually investigating and just acting without any real thought of the aftermath.
Social services will be actively looking for adopted parents while assessments are still going on. Parading children round on open days for potential adopters along with putting them on websites.
As loving families are being broken up, more and more children are ending up in care, with often a failure to think through, the implications of adoption as opposed to long term fostering or trying to find a special guardian within the family.
With an experience of looseness of thinking with an assumption that, just because a child may not be able to go home at that time, therefore adoption is the right thing all round.
Where there are care orders, a third of them are in the process of adoption. Moving children through the care procedure system, as fast as possible, only to park them at the end with placement orders, with thousands of them with no placements available.
The ultimate decision to remove children from the home lies with the family courts. And this decision should only happen when they are sure and it is proven that the children are suffering, or likely to suffer significant harm.
There are concerns that the government's new children and families act, no longer gives a clear priority to the broader over foster carers and adopters, making it more likely for a child to be placed with strangers.
With the child's legal status with the family being severed by this grave interference of family life, that child is no longer the natural biological parents’ child. Any other children they have, are no longer legally that child's brother and sister. Forced adoptions are closed, which means the family has no legal rights and cannot see the child until they are eighteen, and only if that child wants to.
There were around 4000 children awaiting adoption during the making of this film, and for those who are adopted, around a third will be returned to care. The government's new children and families act are likely to increase the number of cases of forced adoptions.
Parents that talk or disclose details of child proceedings risk imprisonment as the law says, proceedings involving children must be kept secret to protect the identity of the child. Parents are not allowed to tell anyone what is happening to them, and the media is forbidden to report any details of such cases.
Martha Cover Chair of Association of severed has specialised in children's law for twenty-five years and believes there have been incidences where the law on secrecy, has been taken too far.
Martha Cover says, the purpose of the legislation that protects the confidentiality of children's proceedings and the identity of the children and their families is there to protect them. But by a side-wind, it has also had the effect of protecting poor local authority practice, poor social service work, and inadequate expert work and expert reporting to the courts.
She states that in one case, former president of the family division, Sir James Mumby refused to sign the Injunction of Staffordshire County to silence a father. In doing so, this became a game-changer. He said the veil of secrecy had gone too far.
Martha Cover said that local authorities can no longer assume that their actions are protected from public scrutiny. She goes on to say that we as a society are moving rapidly away from doing everything possible to keep children within their families, opting for adoption. The statistics by the department of education show a 95% increase in the number of court orders which are required to allow local authorities to place a child for adoption.
Once a child has been taken into care and approved for adoption, it is incredibly hard for birth parents to ever get their children back. And while parents are doing everything humanly possible, whether that be taking parenting classes and marriage courses etc. The social services are actively looking for potential adopted parents for the child, all while assessments are still being carried out.
This process has been made even tougher for parents with the new children and family act. As with what use to take a year or so, has now been shortened with the new target to complete the whole process from the moment the child is taken into care, to a time frame of just twenty-six-weeks, of which the care plan now includes adoption. This act came into force in April 2014.
So, if mother at the beginning of proceedings has given up drugs while she was pregnant, of which all experts say a minimum of twelve months of absence is needed. This act now only gives the family courts twenty-six weeks to make a decision. As a result, children are being placed for adoption who shouldn't be.
The act is a passion Project for Michael Gove, the then education minister who is a strong advocate for this policy. He says his life was transformed with the opportunities that he has been given in being adopted into a family when he was just four months old.
Bridget Robb Chief Executive British Association of Social Workers Union, the largest body of social Workers in Britain says, to extend and implement this and say it’s good for everybody because he had a good experience, is itself naïve and a political ideology. Ideology, a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
Lucy Allan Conservative MP for Telford and now family rights campaigner, found herself going through this exact process of the very same system via Wandsworth social services. She later found out, social services had ticked a box saying her child was at risk of significant harm which is a permanent record and stays on an individual’s record forever and has to be disclosed in any CRB check around children. The irony of this is that she went to the Dr’s expressing she was feeling a little low and prior to her experience, she worked on the Wandsworth fostering and adoption panel. Accessing cases of the most vulnerable children of disadvantaged backgrounds for six years. She said she doesn’t recall more than one case where the panel ever disagreeing with the recommendations of the social workers. Fortunately for her, she had the economic means to deal with this and started legal action appointing solicitors and top QC’s of which these sorts of resources are not readily available to most of us.
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