The Children Act lays a strict legal obligation on social workers, when removing children from their parents, to investigate, as the first option, whether they can be placed with relatives. This is routinely ignored, so that in Britain only 12 per cent of removed children are in ?kinship care?; in New Zealand the figure is 75 per cent.
In another case I have been following closely, the social workers, after initially making a crashing blunder, have changed their reasons for keeping the children in foster care several times. According to the parents, when they recently had to listen in court to a social worker describing a contact session, they wished to produce a recording they had secretly made of the meeting which contradicted everything that had been said. When this was refused, they left the court in disgust. The evidence they had been unable to challenge was thus accepted as fact.
If our Children?s Minister, Tim Loughton, means what he says about empowering a new Ombudsman to investigate the ?minority? of cases which go ?horribly wrong?, he may be amazed how many such cases will be brought forward. I don?t believe Mr Loughton has any idea how large his ?minority? could turn out to be.
Noam Chomsky Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton Tom DeLay Elizabeth Dole
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