Social workers snatch baby on previous shaken baby case

Social workers who snatched four-day-old baby put her up for adoption over unproven abuse claim

Mum’s heartbreaking fight to get her daughter back. A mum and dad have been told they will never see their young daughter again… after she was snatched away at only four days old. Tiny Baby A was taken from her mum by social workers who claimed the tot, who we will call Emily, was at risk in the family home. Not because of the mum’s failure to care for her – but because of a six-year-old unproven claim that her husband had injured his son from a previous marriage. Yet, although interviewed by police, he never faced a criminal court over that allegation. And he has even been allowed unsupervised access to watch his boy grow up.

Now the High Court, in a devastating civil court ruling, has decided that a decision to forcibly adopt Emily – now aged four – away from her parents (who we are calling Tania and Stephen) must stand. Revealing her agony for the first time, mum Tania said: “I had my beautiful baby girl snatched from me at just four days old. Only a mother could understand the horror of that. “My only crime is that I love and trust my husband. I don’t believe he could ever harm a child, and the courts have been unable to prove it. I have already missed years of Emily’s childhood.”
Stephen, in his 40s, married Tania, in her mid-20s, in 2003. Almost a year after their wedding Tania gave birth to Emily in hospital and they were overjoyed to take her home two days later. But they were to enjoy just two days alone with their little girl before she was taken from them. Social workers claimed there was a danger her dad would hurt her because of the case six years earlier. Stephen had been married before and has a 10-year-old son, Jamie. When he was eight weeks old, Jamie was taken to hospital with a suspected brain injury and was found to have suffered bleeding behind his eyes. The episode left him permanently disabled, and he now has cerebral palsy. A medical expert said that he had been shaken viciously.
Stephen, who also has a 12-year-old daughter from the previous marriage, said: “Doctors couldn’t tell for certain what was wrong with Jamie. But one came up with a theory it could be ‘shaken baby syndrome’, even though there was no conclusive evidence. “My wife and I were told that care proceedings were being started. It was heartbreaking to be accused of harming your own child. I vehemently denied doing anything wrong, but no one listened.”
A whole year later – during which time Jamie stayed with his parents and came to no further harm – the couple were taken to a family court in London, where a judge concluded on the basis of an expert’s opinion that the child’s injuries had been caused by one of his parents.
The possibility that the baby had an inherited condition, provoking the same symptoms, was never explored. And the theory put forward by the family’s lawyers that he banged his head on a baby bouncer while playing with another child was not accepted.
However, social workers in Enfield, North London, finally allowed Jamie to remain with his birth parents under daily supervision. And seven months later the local authority was impressed enough with their parenting to drop the visits. And there the story might have ended if Stephen and his wife hadn’t split up at the end of 2000. They were granted, and still enjoy, joint custody of the boy and remain good friends. Stephen, whose first wife also backs his adoption fight, sees Jamie regularly and often spends time with him alone.
It was only when – almost four years later – Stephen remarried and his new wife Tania became pregnant that the social workers reappeared. Stephen, who himself has multiple sclerosis and walks with a stick, said: “Tania has no other children and we were both overjoyed to be having a baby.”
Then, when she was eight months pregnant, Stephen developed a heart problem and had to be rushed to hospital. He says social workers visited him at his bedside and handed him a letter saying they were starting emergency childcare proceedings for their unborn child. I could barely breathe because of the shock,” he says. “It had been six years since Jamie’s case and I’d had no contact with social workers.” Emily was born in December 2004. When she was just four days old, social workers burst into their home and took her away. Tania said: “Stephen’s parents were visiting. We were missing an ingredient for dinner, and Stephen and his dad popped to the shops. While they were out social workers knocked on the door. They walked straight in, picked up Emily in her moses basket and walked out again. “I was screaming and crying, begging them not to take her, grabbing at their arms.” Social workers warned Tania she would only stand a chance of getting Emily back if she left her husband. “We had no choice,” said Tania. “We decided I would go to live with my parents a few miles away and we would fight in court to be reunited as a family.
Emily was returned to Tania the following day after a court injunction was obtained ordering Stephen to keep away from her. But social workers were unhappy that Tania and her family remained close to Stephen. “I often visited Stephen on my own, which was allowed under the injunction,” she said. “He asked me to text him if Emily ever woke in the night because he wanted to be involved, and I did that. But for some reason, social workers wanted me to hate him and cut him out of our lives.”
Four months later, in April 2005, Emily was taken from her mother for a second time. Tania had been branded unfit to look after Emily simply because she trusted her husband. Tania said: “I had taken Emily to visit my grandparents. But while I was there, two police cars turned up with a social worker. They burst into the house and snatched Emily from me again. I was in shock – I couldn’t believe what was happening. They said I had been ‘conspiring’ with Stephen. They thought we were going to kidnap Emily.”
Social workers said Tania was too mild-mannered to be able to protect Emily from Stephen. At that point Emily was put into a foster home, and Stephen and Tania were allowed to visit her once a week for an hour. “It was so emotional,” said Tania. “I tried my hardest to be happy around Emily. But I cried uncontrollably before and after we saw her.”
The couple have video footage taken on July 18, 2006, of them with Emily, and say they look happy and at ease together. At one point, they say the little girl puts her arms out to her mother, who picks her up and kisses her.
Touchingly, Tania says when she asks Emily where her daddy is, the toddler turns and points at Stephen. But already the clock was ticking towards their daughter’s adoption. Within a few weeks, the couple were told new parents were being sought for their little girl. And they were horrified when they came across an advert in a glossy magazine offering her up for adoption. The beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl was smiling at them from the page. The accompanying blurb described her as a bright, happy girl who likes swimming and games. A phone number was printed alongside for anyone interested in becoming her parents. Tania said: “Our daughter was essentially being put up for sale in a magazine and under her own name. We hadn’t even been warned. It was despicable.”
At the time Enfield officials took Emily away, councils were under pressure to raise the number of children they had adopted by 50 per cent. Tony Blair had promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve targets. The aim was to get older children in care homes into new families. But councils found it easier to place babies and cute toddlers such as Emily, and thousands of children under four were removed from their families across the country.
In October 2006 the couple saw Emily for the last time.
Stephen, his eyes filling with tears, said: “We didn’t know that then. We had arranged to see her, but the meeting was suddenly cancelled five minutes beforehand. Presumably a new family had been found. We didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye. It breaks my heart to think she doesn’t know why we aren’t there for her.”
In a desperate bid to beat the system, Stephen and Tania took Enfield Council to the Court of Appeal in March 2007. They asked for a stay of execution on the adoption while their case was heard by the European Court of Human Rights. But it was refused. The couple did not give up there. Last month they were allowed to challenge the initial accusation against Stephen at the High Court. There they were backed by top europathologist Dr Waney Squier, who believes there is no evidence that the boy’s injuries were caused by her father.
In the three-day hearing, Dr Squier told the court the injuries were not consistent with Shaken Baby Syndrome. She said that, crucially, he had no other marks or injuries on his body to suggest he had been shaken violently.
She told the court that 85 per cent of autopsies in shaking cases have additional bruising or other injury. And she said the force required to produce bleeding behind the eyes would inevitably cause damage to the neck.
But the local authority’s expert Dr Neil Stoodley disagreed and said the injuries were consistent with SBS. However the argument was based just on medical notes, because Jamie’s original brain scans had been lost.
The couple lost their final chance of halting the adoption when Mr Justice Mark Hedley, who described the decision as “agonising”, sided with the council and upheld the care order. In what he described as a “dreadful conundrum”, he said: “Wrongly to find that there has been an NAHI (non-accidental head injury) is to risk tearing apart an innocent family – a shocking thing to happen. “Likewise, wrongly failing to find NAHI where such in fact occurred is to risk returning a child to a situation of high or even fatal risk, as notorious cases have sadly demonstrated. “The consequences of a judicial error in these cases are calamitous.” The judge praised the parents’ persistence, saying: “The father’s belief in his innocence and the injustice done to his family is genuinely held.”
He also said there was not enough evidence for police to bring a trial on the initial child-abuse allegations. But he said there was still no new evidence to undermine the original findings. The couple have vowed to appeal against the decision, but they are running out of time. Once Emily is officially adopted, it is British law that she can never be returned to her parents – even if they are found innocent. Clinging on to each other in their living room, with walls covered in photos of Emily, the couple say they cannot bear to have another child. Stephen said: “My health is getting worse and I do not want to go through the agony of having another baby taken away from us by the state.”
The couple are prepared to go to the European Court of Human Rights if their appeal fails. But Stephen said: “The European court cannot reunite us with our daughter – all we would get is monetary compensation, which means nothing to us when all we want is our little girl back.”
-For legal reasons, the real names of the people involved have been changed to protect their identities.

”’Although I have identified our selves”’

Please sign my my Daughter’s guestbook at http://www.crystalwalton.com/Guestbook.php Many Thanks!

If you know where my Daughter is please email me at ian@stopinjusticenow.com

Source:

http://stopinjusticenownews.blogspot.com/2010/09/social-workers-who-snatched-four-day.html

The Ethics Of Keeping A Child From Its Parents

A child is removed after its parents are accused of abuse. The child is adopted and settles with a new family. If the parents are then cleared, should the child be returned, ask ethicists Rebecca Roache and Barbro Bjorkman.

Mark and Nicky Webster have lost a bid to overturn adoption orders on three of their children.

The children were removed in 2005, following concerns over injuries incurred to one of the children.

Subsequent investigations revealed that the injuries may have resulted from a medical condition, and that the Websters may not have harmed the child after all.

However, with the children now settled with their adoptive families, senior appeal court judges have ruled that while the Websters may have suffered a miscarriage of justice, it is not in the children’s interests to overturn the adoption orders.

Assuming that the Websters are indeed innocent of harming their child, has the court made the right decision?

Different case

One reason to answer “no” is that, in most cases where the state removes a child from its parents, consideration of the child’s interests overrides consideration of the parents’ interests. This is what has happened in this case, too.

But this case differs in an important way from other cases of state intervention. When a child is removed from abusive parents, we generally think that by abusing their child, the parents lose their claim to have their own interests considered.

However, without reason to believe that the Websters have harmed their child, they can demand that their interests are considered alongside those of their children.

But this may not be enough to warrant overturning the adoption orders. The demand that the children are returned to their parents may be motivated by the belief that doing so would “undo” the wrong committed when the children were removed.

Not all wrongs can be undone, however, and reuniting the Websters with their children would not put things right in the way that returning a stolen item to its owner would. It could cause great distress both to the children and to their adoptive parents.

In this case, perhaps the best that can be done is to compensate the Websters financially. While this would not solve the problem, it is a symbol of recognition that a serious wrong has been committed.

Even so, paying compensation does not excuse the state from making the right decision about whether to reunite the Websters with their children.

Is the court right that the interests of the children are best served by upholding the adoption orders?

Distress and disruption

Removing them from their adoptive parents would almost certainly distress and disrupt the children – but, except in extreme cases, we do not generally view distress and disruption as reason to keep children from their parents.

Children are distressed and disrupted when their parents divorce, when they are forced to change schools, when their parents prevent them from keeping certain company, and so on.

Most would agree that the benefits to children of living with their biological parents outweigh the distress and disruption that they sometimes suffer at the hands of their parents.

In the case of the Websters’ children, even if the distress and disruption of removing them from their adoptive parents is significant, it is not obvious that it would outweigh the benefits of reuniting them with their biological parents.

Rebecca Roache is James Martin Research Fellow at Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. Barbro Björkman is Marie Curie Postdoc Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7889302.stm

Social Services Response To Innocent Criminal SBS Rulings

Father whose ‘shaken baby’ conviction was quashed faces new access battle

Ben Butler, whose conviction for harming his baby daughter in a “shaken baby syndrome” case has been overturned by the Court of Appeal, now faces a new legal battle in the Family Courts for the right to see his little girl.

By Ben Leach
Published: 8:00AM BST 27 Jun 2010

When Ben Butler noticed that his baby daughter had gone limp and was gasping for air, he called immediately for an ambulance.

The new father had no idea that the health scare would mark the start of a three-year ordeal which would see him wrongly convicted of harming his child, and jailed for four months with a sex offender for a cellmate.

When the ambulance was slow to arrive, Mr Butler took the two-month-old baby by car to St Helier Hospital, south London.

Doctors at the hospital diagnosed bleeding on the brain, bleeding in the eye and swelling of brain tissue – the “triad” of injuries seen as indicators of a “shaken baby” who has been deliberately injured.

The father, from Sutton, insisted he had not hurt his daughter. The baby’s mother, his then-partner, supported him.

The baby was later transferred to St Thomas’ Hospital, in central London, where a different team of doctors said the head injury had in fact been caused at birth. She went on to make a full recovery.

Yet the couple were arrested in March 2007 and Mr Butler was charged with GBH and cruelty. At his trial at Croydon Crown Court in March 2009, he was convicted and given an 18-month sentence.

The conviction was finally quashed at the High Court this month following an extended legal battle. Yet Mr Butler, 30, a former removal man, said the ordeal had devastated his life and left him unable to find work.

He also now faces a fresh battle with social services in the Family Courts over his right to see his daughter.

The father, who has no previous convictions, is only given supervised access to see the child twice a year, for two hours at a time, at a social services contact centre.

Social services have also taken custody of the child away from the mother because she continued to defend him over the shaken baby charges.

The mother, who can not be named for legal reasons, said: “Because I didn’t come out and attack Ben and say I thought he’d harm her, they ridiculed me.

“My child means everything to me and now I’m only able to see her six times a year. I was told at one point that if I went against Ben it would be to my advantage and I’d have more chance of getting my daughter back.

“It’s outrageous. Because I took Ben’s side they decided that I was a risk to my child. It’s been horrendous.”

Mr Butler added that he now intends to contest the social services’ decision to deny him and the mother access to their child.

“It could be a long process,” he said. “It could be years before I get to have proper access to my daughter.

“Even now – even though I’ve been proven innocent – I’ve still got to fight. It’s been three-and-a-half years and it’s non-stop – a constant battle. It takes everything from you. I’ve thrown everything at it and I just want to see her.”

Mr Butler was freed on police bail while awaiting trial, but following his conviction he was sent to Littlehey Prison, Cambridgeshire, where he shared a cell with a man who had been convicted of sexual assault.

Mr Butler said: “It was horrendous. It’s still difficult to talk about it. They sent me to a vulnerable prisoners’ prison. I was put with sex offenders.

“I never spoke to the guy I shared a cell with – it’s like being put in a mental hospital when you’re not mental. It was just a horrible, dirty feeling where everyone is on a different wavelength.”

He added: “These three-and-a-half years have been horrendous. I can’t believe that it’s taken so long to clear my name.

“I can’t believe so much money has been wasted on prosecuting an innocent person when there was so much evidence that it wasn’t a shaken baby case.”

After four months behind bars, Mr Butler was released following an order by the Court of Appeal last year, pending its final decision on his case this month.

In quashing the conviction Lord Justice Moses also criticised the trial judge, Timothy Shaw.

He said that the significance of the fact that by the time of the trial the baby had already made a full recovery – something which is rare in shaken baby cases – had not been properly explained to the jury.

Lord Moses found that if the little girl’s injuries had been caused by shaking her full recovery “would not have been expected”.

He said: “The recovery cast doubt on a severe shaking injury; indeed it told against a major shaking incident.”

In his ruling Lord Moses said that “nowhere in his ruling” did the trial judge “fully acknowledge the weight to be attached” to parts of the evidence.

He added: “No proper direction was given to the jury that they must consider the possibility of an unknown cause, and should only convict if they reject it.”

Mr Butler added: “It should never have been a shaken baby case. The police were only interested in evidence that strengthened their case against me.

“The trial came down to medical opinion only and the medical evidence just didn’t add up.”

He also said he intends to take action against the police for wrongful arrest.

Source:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7856016/Father-whose-shaken-baby-conviction-was-quashed-faces-new-access-battle.html