THE CHILDRENS' COURTS
STAR CHAMBER

By Clare Ambrose

My profession is childcare; I strongly believe that all children should grow up in the knowledge that they are loved, have all their basic needs such as food, warmth, shelter and know they are safe and secure. There is a new process now which has changed the words "Child Protection" into what we now name "Safeguarding children". This has opened up a new powerful approach to how children are looked after and protected by the legislation that covers those professionals responsible for child welfare - but has it really gone deep enough behind the scenes to ensure it stretches to all children?

In order to fully understand where we are at in today's society with regard to safeguarding our children you need to be up to date on the past events of the scandal made by social workers in 1990.

On Wednesday 11th January 2006 a BBC TV documentary 'When Satan Came To Town', revealed the horrors and agonies of the 20 children in 1990 who were snatched from their homes in dawn raids in Langley and taken into care by Rochdale Council, following allegations of 'satanic abuse'.

http://www.saff.ukhq.co.uk/rochdale.htm

In a statement, Rochdale council said: "[We have] both acknowledged and apologised for the errors made in the investigation of the allegations in the 1991 case." Due to misinformation they caused the children in total to spend 34 years and four months in care. The children involved and their families went through absolute hell and irreparable torture due to social services playing God with their lives.

"IN THE weeks following the dawn raids, and with the growing realisation that some terrible mistake had been made, the question that local people and the Middleton councillors wanted answering was what prompted the "witch hunt"?

The root cause seems to have been a series of social workers' conferences given by a group of, what were later labelled by media investigators, as "fundamentalist Christian evangelists" from the United States. Delegates returned from the conferences to scan their files for any indications of satanic or ritual abuse among their "clients".

Two Middleton social workers did not have long to wait before their fears were aroused. In March 1990 a four-year-old boy's behaviour concerned teachers at a Langley primary school. He and his two elder brothers and sister were questioned by the social workers. Allegedly flawed interview techniques, taught at the conferences, led to the youngest boy describing being present at ritual sacrifices of babies and seeing satanic cult members robbing graves in a Middleton cemetery. The boy's father, Andrew, who still lives on Langley, said people would be shocked when they heard transcripts of the interviews in the BBC documentary.

The "confession" prompted Rochdale Council to take the three boys and girls into protective care. But it didn't stop there for social workers feared that their school friends might also have been involved and at risk. This resulted in a co-ordinated series of dawn raids by teams of police and social workers on homes in Langley. Distressed parents looked on helpless as a total of 21 children were "snatched" and taken into care to be farmed out to foster homes. It was to be six years or more before the bulk of them were reunited with their families.

The Middleton social workers were not the only ones influenced by the American "missionaries". Similar cases were misdiagnosed in Cleveland, the Orkney Islands, Newcastle, Nottingham and Pembroke.

All this apparent hysteria prompted the Government to commission a study by Professor J. S. La Fontaine ( THE EXTENT AND NATURE OF ORGANISED AND RITUAL ABUSE (Prof. J LaFontaine) 1994: ISBN 0113217978 H.M.S.O. ) . She found that no evidence of satanic ritual had been found. Rumours and accusations of such abuse had been progressed on the basis of dubious information. She said some evangelical Christians, psychologists, child-care workers and health-care professionals were responsible for spreading the myth. Her report influenced the then Health Minister, Virginia Bottomley to order that every social worker in the UK be retrained with the proper techniques for interviewing children and that the "outrageous and traumatic" practice of taking children from their homes in dawn raids should be ended."

Source - Middleton Guardian 12/1/06

The SAFF (Sub-cultures Freedom Foundation) was instrumental in trying to help the families involved. They wrote to police, social workers, the Home Office, MPs, in a massive campaign to show there was no proof of ritual abuse and that it was all scaremongering. It was the SAFF which first highlighted the fact that the NSPCC had been accepting discredited information on the satanic child abuse scare from various groups.

Now in 2008 the Safeguarding Children courses being sent out by authorities to a lot of childcare providers and professionals are written by and mostly run by the NSPCC. .

Their coursework describes Emotional Abuse and this includes:

"imposing expectations that are inappropriate to the age or development of the child-e.g. over-protecting the child, limiting their exploration and learning, preventing them from taking part in normal social interaction."

"Seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of someone else."

among other itemised reasons.

All the statements above could include most things you as parents may do, from restricting your children to play at a friend's house for earlier bad behaviour, to the child watching someone being ill treated in Coronation Street on TV. Basically normal good parenting and over protection from danger can result in abuse. The world has gone insane and this is still the new information on child safety being taught to professionals who deal with our children.

It is as though the obsessive social workers who were pre-convinced about the existence of a (fictional) world-wide conspiracy of Satanists have transferred their hysterical scaremongering into claims about ordinary child-care. Suspicions and mofits which were current during the SRAM have been re-packaged to encompass any ordinary family whom social workers dislike or distrust.

Now don't get me wrong of course as parents and professionals the safety of the children in our care is paramount and there is abuse going on out there that we need to be aware of and immediately act upon,but this next piece will make you very aware that misinformation is still ripping families apart.

The Mail online has a report by Sue Reid last updated at 23:10 31 January 2008. In her article Sue tells a horrific story of

"the number of babies under one month old being taken into care for adoption is now running at almost four a day (a 300 per cent increase over a decade).

In total, 75 children of all ages are being removed from their parents every week before being handed over to new families.

Some of these may have been willingly given up for adoption, but critics of the Government's policy are convinced that the vast majority are taken by force.

Time and again, the mothers say they are innocent of any wrongdoing.

Of course, there are people who are not fit to be parents and it is the duty of any responsible State to protect their children."

Sue goes on to write,

"But over the five years since I began investigating the scandal of forced adoptions, I have found a deeply secretive system which is too often biased against basically decent families. I have been told of routine dishonesty by social workers and questionable evidence given by doctors which has wrongly condemned mothers.

Meanwhile, millions of pounds of taxpayers' money have been given to councils to encourage them to meet high Government targets on child adoptions.
Under New Labour policy, Tony Blair changed targets in 2000 to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 a year.

The annual tally has now reached almost 4,000 in England and Wales - four times higher than in France, which has a similar-sized population.

Blair promised millions of pounds to councils that achieved the targets and some have already received more than two million pounds GBP (2,000.000.00) each in rewards for successful adoptions.

Figures recently released by the Department for Local Government and Community Cohesion show that two councils - Essex and Kent - were offered bonuses of more than 2 million pounds GBP (2,000.000.00) over three years to encourage additional adoptions.

Four others - Norfolk, Gloucestershire, Cheshire and Hampshire - were promised an extra one million pounds GBP (1,000.000.00).

This sweeping shake-up was designed for all the right reasons: to get difficult-to-place older children in care homes allocated to new parents.

But the reforms didn't work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash, social workers began to earmark babies and cute toddlers who were most easy to place in adoptive homes, leaving the more difficult to-place older children in care. As a result, the number of over-sevens adopted has plummeted by half.

Critics - including family solicitors, MPs and midwives as well as the wronged families - report cases where young children are selected, even before birth, by social workers in order to win the bonuses. More chillingly, parents have been told by social workers they must lose their children because, at some time in the future, they might abuse them.

One mother's son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance she might shout at him when he was older.

What's more, the obsessive secrecy of the system means that the public only occasionally gets an inkling of the human tragedy now unfolding across the country.

For at the heart of this adoption system is the family courts, whose hearings are conducted behind closed doors in order to protect the identity of the children involved. Yet this secrecy threatens the centuries-old tradition of Britain's legal system - the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

From the moment a mother is first accused of being incapable as a parent - a decision nearly always made by a social worker or doctor - the system is pitted against her. There are no juries in family courts, only a lone judge or trio of magistrates who make decisions based on the balance of probability.

Crucially, the courts' culture of secrecy means that if a social worker lies or fabricates notes or a medical expert giving evidence makes a mistake, no one finds out and there is no retribution.

Only the workings of the homeland security service, MI5, are guarded more closely than those of the family courts.

From the time a child is named on a social services care order until the day they are adopted, the parents are breaking the law - a crime punishable by imprisonment - if they tell anyone what is happening to their family.

Anything from a chat with a neighbour to a letter sent to a friend can land them in jail. And many have found themselves sent to prison for breaching court orders by talking about their case.

As High Court judge Mr Justice Munby told MPs last year: "It seems quite indefensible that there should be no access by the media, and no access by the public, to what is going on in courts where judges are, day by day, taking people's children away."

However, it is not only secretive and publicly unscrutinised family courts that are creating an injustice in our adoption system.

There is a more worrying factor involved. Look at the official figures. Why are they so high? Is it really true that more mothers are becoming potential killers or abusers?

Or are the financial bonuses offered to councils fuelling the astonishing rise in forced adoptions?

John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning to change the adoption system, said yesterday: "I have evidence that 1,000 children are wrongly being seized from their birth parents each year even though they have not been harmed in any way.

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

The system's secrecy hides any wrongdoing. One has to ask if a mother is expected to have problems looking after her baby, why doesn't the State help her instead of taking her child away?

The MP's concerns are echoed by the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS), a body which advises new mothers. Spokeswoman Beverley Beech insists:

Babies are being removed from their mothers by social workers using any excuse.

We strongly suspect this is because newborns and toddlers are more easily found homes than older children. They are a marketable commodity.

I know of social workers making up stories about innocent mothers simply to ensure their babies are put up for adoption.

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

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

Her words may be emotive. But are they true? Six months ago, I wrote an article about a young couple - who must remain anonymous because of family court law - fighting for the return of their three-year-old daughter.

She was taken within weeks of birth and is about to be adopted.

Astonishingly, a judge has issued a Draconian order gagging them from revealing anything, to anyone at all, which could identify their daughter until her 18th birthday in 2022.

Immediately after the article was published, I heard from 35 families whose children were forcibly removed.

The letters and e-mails continue to arrive - coming from a wide range of families across the social classes (including from a castle in the heart of England).

An e-mail from one father said: "Please, please help, NOW. We are about to lose our son . . . in court tomorrow for final disposals hearing before he is taken for adoption ... we have done nothing wrong."

Another father calling himself "James" rang to say his wife's baby was one of eight seized by social workers from hospital maternity units in one small part of North-East England during one fortnight last summer.

A Welsh man complained that his grandson of three weeks was earmarked for forcible adoption by social workers. The mother, a 21-year-old with a mild learning disorder, was told she might, just might, get post-natal depression and neglect her son.

To her great distress, her baby was put in the care of Monmouthshire social services within minutes of birth."

THIS IS HAPPENING TODAY!

This fanaticism of the Child Care Industry is a direct result of the hysteria surrounding the Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth (SRAM), Because of the work of the SAFF in exposing and ridiculing social workers over their imagined fears about SRAM they have moved on from the religious ruse to that of using the Emotional Abuse reasoning in order to remove children from their homes without proof.

The courts which operate utterly in secret are completely unjust and have no accountability whatsoever to normal rules of law, enabling them to ride roughshod over the rights of the parents and children whom they take exception to. That the government has backed these new laws and that all parents are now at risk because if the Rochdale and Orkney scandals occurred again today, then it would be illegal for any person to comment on them publicly - including the parents who have been accused and their offspring. Thus the entire victimisation can occur without any of the normal rules of evidential law, without appeal, and often without representation, going on the testimony of people who may be religiously or ideologically opposed to the parents lifestyle and the victims have absolutely no redress in English law.

Camilla Cavendish from The Times August 2007 states that:

"Emotional abuse" has no strict definition in British law. Yet it now accounts for an astounding 21 per cent of all children registered as needing protection, up from 14 per cent in 1997. Last year 6,700 children were put on the child protection register for emotional abuse, compared with only 2,600 for sexual abuse and 5,100 for physical abuse. Both of the latter two categories have been falling steadily. Meanwhile emotional abuse and "neglect" - which replaced the old notion of "grave concern" in 1989 - have been rising. Both are catch-alls. But emotional abuse is especially vague. It covers children who have not been injured, have not complained, and do not come under "emotional neglect".

Do you as a reader of this piece and a parent and/or childcare professional find this frightening? You should.

We need to act now and get this system out in the open, give rights back to the victimised families and force a recognised and full definition of "abuse" which
does not incorporate ambiguities which enable innocent people to be roped into a witch-hunt by over-zealous social workers and do-gooders.

How would you feel if your children were taken away in a dawn raid? You could not appeal, speak about it, see your children and maybe they would be put up for adoption never to be seen or heard of again. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? At present nothing because you and your children have no rights and the secret courts hold all the counters.

Now where exactly do you think all this leaves families having unorthodox religious backgrounds that are widely misunderstood or even regularly vilified in our establishment? Who are they going to turn to for help? Remember that SRAM can very affect YOU!

If the secret courts are given misinformation about you they are not pulled up, not asked to give proof but BELIEVED IN ORDER THAT YOUR CHILDREN ARE REMOVED FROM YOUR CARE.

Just look at the definitions of Emotional Abuse and think about how many families it could touch that you know. The NSPCC document on the effects of child abuse state behavioural problems, educational problems, mental health problems and relationship difficulties amongst others. Now get an over zealous social worker and they could use those definitions against ANY family including yours and haul them into the secret court system before you even realise what is happening.

Children need to be safeguarded as they are vulnerable to the system that is there in place to protect them-but it needs to be the right system. Secrecy cannot replace the term confidentiality. From secrecy and deceit spread lies and those lies and misinterpretation are today still ruining people's lives. We need to spread the word and make others aware.

Ends:

Clare Ambrose Beaconsfield, December 2008