It’s Dr SUESS plus SUSPICIOUS MINDS (it’s like a Mash-up, if you’re simultaneously down with the kids and about 8 years late to the slang)
It is family law, mostly child protection; and a blog that is mainly centred around showing you the key bits of stuff that you didn’t have time to read in full, and adding cynical asides. In my own description, it is “cut and paste plus sarcasm”
Suesspicious minds is overly fascinated by law, and particularly child protection law – I’ll write mainly with a slight Local Authority slant, though I’ve walked in various shoes during my time in family law, so I’m no rabid pro-eugenicist. I appreciate that not everyone else is quite as law-geeky as me, so I will be trying to break up the very technical law posts with opinion and newsy stuff. Outside of law, I love sport, fashion, music, beer and cheesecake. None of the stuff on this blog will ever be a substitute for legal advice, and I won’t ever be talking about individual cases, nor reading (or printing) any comments that talk about individual cases. [unless they're law report cases]
Oh, and obviously, the name is derived from a combination of healthy cynicism, a talent for doing impressions of the vocal style of Roland Gift, and a love of Dr Suess.
A quick addition on comments – I do have to come in and approve them if you’re a first time poster, so don’t automatically assume that you’re being censored, when it may just be that I haven’t gone in to approve them yet. And after twenty eight days, any individual post is locked down for comments.
I have censored some posts, but with reluctance, as well as the incredible amount of fascinating spam that I get, but I’ve posted a truckload of comments which have had a starkly different view to mine, many of which have been fair, eloquent and reasonable, and some which have not been, including some which come pretty close to calling me crooked and corrupt.
Boo, hiss, censorship, what about Voltaire and free speech etc. You’re free to have whatever rules or policies you want on your own blog, but this one is mine, and after twenty eight days on a topic, I’ve run the course of wanting to log in each day to read posts about how I’m a nazi in the pocket of the system, sorry.
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I read quite a lot of your blog etc. You say that your a family lawyer and you dont believe that social workers lie. I can not only prove that wrong but show you just how corrupt some of them can be. Also my sons can likewise (especially now they are over 21yrs old and allowed to speak for themselves) It is dangerous to think there is no smoke without fire, especially when it involves breaking up the family that can destroy, yes, destroy a child’s life. Care, whether fostering or children’s homes is (and proven) highly damaging to a child, emotionally and educationally. Forced adoption for many is no better.
Dear Sheila
Do I believe that social workers don’t lie? I don’t know that I would go that far. I believe that, as with every profession, there are good and bad people within it, and that even those good and bad people have good and bad days. I think more often than not, where mistakes are made, they are where a social worker has a professional opinion and it is wrong [sometimes they can be very wrong in their opinions, even unfair, without lying], rather than them actively lying; but very very sadly, I do know that social workers, being human beings, do sometimes tell lies.
It has happened to me very rarely in Court, maybe twice in nearly twenty years but I can think of a telling example where my social worker had filed a statement and was about to give evidence about very detailed conversations they had had at a meeting on X date, and I was taken aside by a group of troubled advocates to tell me that such a meeting had never taken place. On further enquiries, yes, it turned out that the social worker had filed a statement lying about a meeting that had never occurred, and he was sacked that same day. So yes, it happens.
Do I think it happens routinely? I hope not. Does it happen to some families and do awful things happen as a result? I’m afraid so. Does every single instance of that come to light by careful cross-examination of the social worker and the truth revealed before the Judge makes decisions? It should always do, and the system is based on that being the protection a parent has against professionals telling lies. But in reality, does it always? I’m afraid probably not. Mostly it does, but even a tiny fraction of cases where the truth doesn’t come out, such as yours are tragedies.
Please can anyone help.
My daughter and her partner have no idea what happened to our 3 year old back in September 12.(she had been smoking weed for some years – so not completely a Mary Poppins) But a consultant said it was “child abuse” -nb he specializes in this subject. A further £3000 report basically said “I don’t KNOW either, so I’ll agree with him”. Suddenly they are in the “pool of perpetrators”. Self infliction or a medical condition are just ruled out – bang.
So a Lancashire in January. No more contact from Social Services or the Guardian; done deal as far as they are concerned.
Relationship broken, new house, drug free, city and guilds in Childcare course. Counted for NOTHING.
Friday 17th May – adoption.
Friday 24th May – final goodbye booked.
This is madness, sheer madness – she has lost her baby for something that NO-ONE saw or knew about. Police have said from day 1, there is no case to answer as there is NO evidence at all that they “injured” him.
We hardly have time to breath, let alone launch and appeal –
DESPERATE GRANDMA
I totally agree with Sheila. My 12 year old daughter and I are currently waiting for final assessments , so we can go to court and have the Care Order lifted.
She has been in care for nearly 5 years.
‘Risk of Emotional Abuse’ category ( seeing her dad had anger management issues NEVER directed at her, but only towards others, sometimes in her presence).
The most tragically absurd thing is: she suffers FAR GREATER EMOTIONALLY in her foster placement, her health suffered SIGNIFICANTLY due to poor nutrition and constant worry and stress in her life. She is also subjected to RACIAL discrimination – being of a mixed race ( almost porcelain-fair skin complexion), SW decided to place her with Jamaican foster carer, her daughter and another Jamaican fostered child.
So my daughter is always told she is not ‘full-black’. not ‘one of them’, et cetera.
Its all too much for anyone to comprehend these atrocities happen in this day and age in the modern society, the country that signed the European Convention of Human Rights.
My little girl developed more ‘emotional issues’ during this 5 years in ‘so-called care’,
she is now scarred for life. We will be bearing these scars for the rest of our lives.
Dont tell us about good and bad people and social workers.
The amount of harm to come from an average bad person before they end up is jail is nothing compared to the amount of harm from a social worker throughout their questionable career-and ,surprisingly,its very rare they get prosecuted/convicted and locked up.
Any action taken against them is investigated by their own… you get my drift.
I totally agree with Sheila. My 12 year old daughter and I are currently waiting for final assessments , so we can go to court and have the Care Order lifted.
She has been in care for nearly 5 years.
‘Risk of Emotional Abuse’ category ( seeing her dad had anger management issues NEVER directed at her, but only towards others, sometimes in her presence).
The most tragically absurd thing is: she suffers FAR GREATER EMOTIONALLY in her foster placement, her health suffered SIGNIFICANTLY due to poor nutrition and constant worry and stress in her life. She is also subjected to RACIAL discrimination – being of a mixed race ( almost porcelain-fair skin complexion), SW decided to place her with Jamaican foster carer, her daughter and another Jamaican fostered child.
So my daughter is always told she is not ‘full-black’. not ‘one of them’, et cetera.
Its all too much for anyone to comprehend these atrocities happen in this day and age in the modern society, the country that signed the European Convention of Human Rights.
My little girl developed more ‘emotional issues’ during this 5 years in ‘so-called care’,
she is now scarred for life. We will be bearing these scars for the rest of our lives.
Dont tell us about good and bad people and social workers.
The amount of harm to come from an average bad person before they end up is jail is nothing compared to the amount of harm from a social worker throughout their questionable career-and ,surprisingly,its very rare they get prosecuted/convicted and locked up.
Any action taken against them is investigated by their own… you get my drift.
I so understand your situation. Children who know they are loved and feel secure can cope with situations where there is disagreement and even arguments between parents and even anger for other people. They actually grow up knowing that life is not perfect and that life is full of ups and downs but they can learn from it and not only survive it but do better. They also learn that in spite of life’s ups and downs and differences there is something solid that cannot be broken, the fact that no matter the parents imperfections they are loved. To a child, this is something solid that the child can build on.
To remove a child in these circumstances not only puts the child at greater risk of ‘abuse’ of all sorts but ingrains in the child that anything less than ‘perfect’ is unacceptable.
The truth is that no-one is perfect but a child will have a view of him/her self that he/she is also not acceptable in the path of life.
For you, so very sadly your daughter has also suffered racial issues and it is a fact of life (unknown or ignored by some social workers) that there is many forms of racial abuse, not just between black or white but beween different ‘shades’ of black of white. Just as there is between working class to the rich. Not many want it but it exists. But like you know, life and our existence on this planet cannot be rushed and until the time is right no person or govenment can enforce a global world of harmony until its ready.
In the meantime I send my love and respect and feel so sad that your daughter is subject to such hostility. But I think there was a short straw drawn here as so many Jamaican people are such loving people. I so hope that it is resolved soon.
And yes, I also agree with you that to spend time in jail is nothing compared with losing your child or having social services spending every day involved in your life in a negative way.
They are not the child protection they say they are. The problems to the child can be far more severe than anything suffered within their family. x
I understand fully what you are saying, as do my sons. To put a child in care as most solicitors already know is not in the child’s best interests. Yet these care orders are still put through in their hundreds every day of the week leaving children scarred for life with terrible emotional, physical and sometimes sexual abuse received during care. The govenments answer to this is rush through adoptions. For a seriously abused child this may be the answer, the chance of a life within a family that hopefully will love and protect them. But the sad truth is many forced adoptions do not work, care has been proven not to work and there needs to be a time when the system will finally accept that for many children the answer is to work with the family. At least this should happen with most families unless there is proven sexual abuse, serious violent behaviour or serious drug problem. Would this protect the children? I think it would have a better chance than the child protection system at present. And for obvious reasons, on research there is more abuse within care than outside of it, children failure rates (education and emotional) are far higher with children who entered care, documented abuse is vast within care, a high number of children leaving care have no-one to support them, often due to the social workers and courts removing all family, including extended family from their lives, children are far too often removed from caring and loving families and the child, then adult, leaves care with an intense hatred of authority, (as do children who have suffered some emotional/physical abuse from parents) for the reason they understand that no-one helped their parent/parents in a crisis/ill health/housing etc. They then see a cruel and uncaring world where if they had a problem the system would only condemn them just at it did their parent/parents. Yes these people who remove children, from social workers to county halls to all involved need a reality check.
SS lie, Cafcass lie, solicitors lie, they all collude together in this billion pound industry. They are all in bed together. They are cold hearted, emotionless people who purport to have the best interest of children and families, THEY DO NOT. The way they conduct themselves is a national disgrace, SS get millions in government funding for meeting adoption targets.
The most disturbing part is is the trauma that parents and children suffer from being parted. You need traumatised people because they are then dependent on a health care and social care system that simply does not provide care. Traumatised people are also compliant and conform to what they are told. They never aspire to much because they have no fight left. They struggle with the trauma on a daily basis and to live a good life.
I tried to comment on one of your posts (what to do when social services steal your children) i would like to share my experience both as a parent and an ex- professional. I will cut the long story short. My child disclosed that another adult exposed his penis and let my daughter touch it. i reported this. She also disclosed to police, social services and nursery. I alerted social services previously that this man had an alleged past and the mother was a risk but they failed to act, My daughter was returned a year later, and my social was accused by both myself and another social services of failing in the duty of care. On return my daughter disclosed what had happened. Social services became vexatious, altered meetings ensuring i went to the wrong location, falsified medical records, falsified reasons for child protection, falsified police investigations blah blah. They snatched my daughter last year and mislead the courts. In court we proved they had lied. I have to be supervised because i am a risk because i think pedophilia is wrong and perjury is wrong. Social Services thing is is normal what my child has said. Social Services constantly canceled contact sessions and we had evidence of police hearing them cancel contact but social services lied saying i canceled contact. The judge ignored police evidence supporting me. It came out that this man was reported my his ex wife 25 years ago for his other daughter saying similar thing. Another person came forward that he had done things to him as a child. Social Services had no concerns of sexual abuse.
Social Services said it was emotional abuse reporting suspected abuse and also i was wrong to follow their advice – yes that is correct i followed their advice and they said i should not of done what a previous social worker to me to do.
I was also considered a high risk because i made complaints, contacted my MP and was a fan of the X Files. These were the reasons given that social services hijacked my court case against them for failing to protect and make it public law.
I am ordered to see a psych and until i say that child abuse is acceptable and there could be a logical explanation that 3 children from 3 different generations have all said he exposed and let him touch his penis i am a risk to my daughter.
Its a seriously bad situation when you try and protect your child and you have the whole weight of social services against you. Any parent who reports any abuse especially sexual will become a target for the social services and consider that parent as a greater risk than a offender.
When you consider a child is at high risk of abuse within ‘care’ it becomes very ‘dubious’ as to what ‘care’ is really meant for. And all the knowledge and research I have done proves to me that there are some very sinsiter motives, besides financial gain, for all parties removing children.
Yesterday I replied to a blog, again on dishonesty of social workers. And I will say it again here, most social workers are NOT angels working to protect children, nor are most carers including children’s homes, foster carers and adopting parents. If the financial rewards were taken away, not many would be left in the bag, so to speak. If these people really cared about children they would be whistleblowing most days, campaigning with the many groups, campaigning with people who have suffered abuse in care, and giving their time helping parents who have had their children wrongfully removed. They would also not work within a ‘regime’ of social services care without fully complaining about bad decisions and alerting the top of the tree. On top of that they would spend time campaigning, writing to MPs fighting for change in family law and signing petitions to open up family courts.
Adopting couples and singles would also insist on full knowlege of any child they may consider adopting and would certainly expect the parents to have contact with their own birth child, even if this was by supervised contact until no risk is proven.
But the sad fact is, history has proven these people do not work in the best interests of the child and so many of them have proven who and what they really are.
Therefore it is true that social workers, carers, foster carers and adopted parents will lie, work against ethics, tamper and change reports and assessments, add false information, accuse you of the unthinkable, build a negative profile against the birth parent and fail to assist the birth family.
In all of this, the child is of no real concern to them. They are all fighting for their own personel gain.
It is only the birth parents and extended family who are fighting for the rights of the child. They are the only ones where the love of the child already exists.
This means that most cases that go before a court can be broken up as such.
Out of every 100 children there are perhaps 10 who should have been removed and given a chance of a life within another family. And those are the cases of proven serious abuse.
The rest range from no harm to the child and moderate harm where in all the cases I know and have researched should have been resolved by no action or support by a ‘caring’ supportive social system.
Givin that the financial burden to the country would be less, the damage to children would be less, that there would be less people obtaining financial gain, less adopting families having a chance of adopting, less private children’s homes having financial gains (some charge on average £3,500 per week) less high ranking council officials making money out of them, and the list goes on.
I cannot see an end to all this yet, until birth parents can realize their strengths, compile their cases and unite in a large group to prove the corruption. Of course so many parents are so distraught, so damaged and so worried about their children that paperwork is bottom of the list. Parents are also not lawyers and the system is not geared ln a legal way to deal with these corrupt social workers and carers.And nor is the law itself, the family courts are not there for any form of justice.
So ALL birth families should realise that it can happen to anyone (especially the vulnable or those in crisis) If you are not a lawyer you can lose your children. And even being one will not always protect you against the vast headhunters that exist within a corrupt system.
For all of you fighting for your children and anyone who reads this whether in law, social services, care, carer or other please help build a better future for ALL children. A negligent and damaging system such as it stands is destroying lives every day.
And as the letter says above. The system is also keeping sexual abuse as a taboo subject and therefore does NOT help real victims of sexual abuse to speak out nor does it encourage those who are concerned of it in reporting it.
Just as being a victim of domestic violence, many women (and sometimes men) lose their children, every day for this reason.
The system makes a victim a lifetime victim. It is a non-working model.
Much sense spoken on this blog
I speak a fair bit of nonsense too though Jennifer, but thank you very much. If that is, as I suspect, a pseudoynm, then you have chosen well, it was one of my favourite songs growing up. If it is your real name, then wow, top name!
I recently lost my children to a secret court and had no chance of securing their return. They were taken because we didn’t have a dentist (just moved in to the area) and the fact that my eldest son was told off for stealing at school.
We’re an independent film company based in the UK and with out skills and knowledge already collected from families we intend to release a 90 minute Documentary in the style of Roger Cooke and Micheal Moore. We have plenty of interest from media sources.
Below is a brief synopsis of our intentions:
Have you been affected by the Social Services? if so we need your assistance. We’re currently making a 90 minute documentary highlighting the corruption within this department.
We’re looking for families destroyed by trigger happy social workers, having their children taken for the most ridiculous reasons.
If you would like to take part and get your story heard then please contact us. We can promise total privacy if you wish to stay that way or give you the airtime you deserve. I can travel to you for interviews etc, they will be no cost to you, only an hour of your time to share your story. It will also receive global coverage.
With your help we can show the corruption within a service sworn to protect!
If your interested please contact us via email @internationalpix@aol.co.uk or PM me and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Kind regards,
Emma Ibbitson
Producer at Pete Middleton Pictures.