Protest RCJ

Parents against forced adoption

For the children's sake, it's time to lift this veil.
By Alasdair Palme, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:00am BST 02/07/2007



When the state takes a child by force from its parents and gives it to another family, it is an offence to publish that fact, or any of the evidence produced for the court hearing. The punishment is an unlimited fine or imprisonment.

If a mother whose child is taken from her so much as communicates the information to someone not on the government-approved list - restricted to her legal team, doctor and MP - she commits an offence.

Some of the judges who work in the family courts, however, have come to realise that blanket secrecy does not serve justice.

advertisementLast year, Mr Justice McFarlane took the almost unprecedented step of publishing his judgment in the case of X, a child who was taken away from her mother, after the mother had asked social workers for advice in dealing with the girl's moods. The woman only managed to get her daughter back 18 months later.

Mr Justice McFarlane found that "every single element" of the grounds used to justify taking the child "was misleading, or incomplete, or wrong". He identified appalling malpractice on the part of social services, the local authority and its lawyers. He published his judgment in an effort to ensure that the same malpractice was not repeated. Usually, secrecy would ensure that no one, not even court officials, ever knew how badly things had gone wrong.

It is easy to see how the practice of keeping the family courts secret benefits incompetent social workers and lawyers: they are never called to account for their mistakes, for their mistakes are never identified.

But how could anyone think that such a practice benefits children?

In justifying its decision not to open the family courts to public scrutiny, the Department of Justice (DoJ) stated that children would suffer harm if their "right to privacy" were infringed by such a move, because then children would be named in the press.

But the blanket secrecy of the family courts could perfectly well be ended without children being identified by name.

In reporting rape trials, it is illegal to identify the victim. The press complies with that law. No one claims that the only way to protect the privacy of rape victims and to improve the quality of justice in rape trials is to impose a blanket ban on reporting anything about such cases, not least because everyone knows that would be a recipe for lowering the standards of justice. Furthermore, even if it is granted that children would "suffer harm" by any form of publicity, that "harm" has to be balanced against the lasting damage that can be done by wrongly taking children from their parents.

The DoJ seems to believe that the family courts never wrongly take children from their parents. But that is demonstrably false.

Because the courts are secret, no one has been able systematically to examine the quality of decision-making, so no one knows what percentage of the children who are forcibly adopted should never have been taken away.

The evidence of malpractice from the few cases that do manage to make it into the public domain is not reassuring.

Covering up incompetence is not the only motive for preserving secrecy in the family courts, but it is usually its only effect. If the Government really believed the "interests of the child" were paramount, it would end that secrecy tomorrow.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Forced
• adoption