The much-trumpeted legal reforms announced today will not end the secrecy and injustice which surrounds the Family Court.
The plan includes new time limits for cases where children are taken into care, which could work against parents struggling to meet demands placed upon them by social services departments.
Ministers said the changes would put the welfare of children at the centre of the system. But that is what they have always said. The suspicion is that the welfare of the system itself is paramount.
Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division, said the changes were the biggest in a lifetime. But they will not end the cosy relationship of social workers, Cafcass officials, paid ‘experts’ and child panel solicitors.
Crucially, they will not end the cloak of secrecy imposed on all dealings in the Family Courts. No-one may speak outside of what occurs inside on pain of imprisonment. This mafia-like omerta allows injustice to flourish. Justice can only happen when it is seen to be done. We are told the secrecy is imposed to protect the child. In reality, it is there to protect the system.
Care cases will be completed in six months in a single Family Court, which replaces the current three-tier court system in family cases. Although it could be good that cases are followed through by a single judge – assuming he or she is not corrupt – this time-scale will increase the sense parents have of their children being rushed into the adoption process against their wishes – the so-called ‘freed for adoption’ mechanism.
There are also supposed to be limits placed on the amount of expert evidence that can be used in cases involving children, only being permitted when it is ‘necessary to resolve the case justly’. Whether that will end the careers some experts have made out of backing up social workers with spurious observations and biased conclusions, or whether coaches and horses will be driven through it, remains to be seen.
Just yesterday, a distraught mother put up this comment on an older story on our website:
‘Please can you help me get my daughter back from social services? My daughter was kidnapped in 2011 when she was age 11.a teacher and s.s said I hit my daughter. I did not and never have. Police came and took her away. The next day she was taken to a children’s hospital where a doctor lied and made a false report saying she had unexplained bruises. She did not have any bruises.’
The Jayden Wray case exposed how dangerous it is these for parents to take a child to hospital. Jayden had brittle bones from rickets but doctors and social workers demanded the parents confess that they had caused Jayden’s injuries.
Clive Coleman, legal correspondent, BBC News, said: ‘Babies, toddlers and teenagers going through care proceedings have been removed from their parents for their own well being’. Sometimes they are. But in too many cases, when parents cannot explain a bruise a child acquired in the garden, or the child suffers from a mystery illness, they are removed, and even when the mistake is found, social workers will not return the child and fabricate evidence.
Short of death, there is no penalty more draconian than for the state to take people’s children from them.
Our readers or their churches are certain to come into contact with parents whose children have been taken from them by social services.
We are constantly told that homosexuals are the sort of people the Lord Jesus would have ‘been alongside’ as they are on the ‘margins of society’? Are they really? No, they are in the media, in diversity departments and government, with their feet under the table at No10, feted to the skies.
Would you like to know who really are on the margins of society? It is parents who feel totally inadequate and overwhelmed in the face of a machine which grinds them to powder in its quest to assume their function and to strip their children from them.
We should be standing with them, praying with them, showing how God hates injustice, fighting with them to have their children returned.
