Missing boy and cancer treatment

The news that the parents of a child have taken him abroad for cancer treatment and that the Courts here are dealing with the case have echoes of the Ayesha King case which was such big news last year.  I wrote at that time about some of the legal issues about when a parent can decide to reject medical advice about their child

https://suesspiciousminds.com/2014/08/31/parents-deciding-not-to-go-ahead-with-cancer-treatment/

The Press reports about this particular child are in most of the newspapers today – here’s an example from the Guardian   (I picked up today that I always tend to use the Guardian for these, but they don’t sponsor me.Yet)

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/07/boy-needing-urgent-surgery-for-cancer-disappears-from-home-in-england

The judgment from Mostyn J is available, and people may want to read it

Re JM (a child) 2015

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2015/2832.html

The boy is 10 years old. His parents are originally Polish but have lived here for two years. Very tragically, the boy JM has a very rare and aggressive cancer on the right hand side of his jaw. The medical advice is that it should be removed. If it is not removed soon, then JM will suffer an agonising and painful death.

5. The operation would be lengthy, lasting up to 12 hours. There is a 2% risk of mortality or morbidity in the operation. It would involve harvesting skin and bone from his leg in order to rebuild the removed jaw bone. The result would be that J may be affected by lameness in future. He would need false teeth inserted in the lower right quadrant of his mouth. As he grows his face may develop a lop-sided appearance. He may suffer from chewing problems and need to be on a softish diet in the long term. Above all of this is the estimate that he has a 55% – 65% chance of survival for 5 years. Therefore there is a 35% to 45% chance of a fatal cancer re-emerging in that period. This might be at the same site or elsewhere in the body, most likely the lungs. All of these statistics are based on adult patients. It is not known whether they are equally applicable to children as the incidence of this disease in children is so rare that there is insufficient data on which to found empirical conclusions and predictions. There are only a handful of children in this country with this cancer. Dr X has treated five or six in 16 years of practice.
6. I have seen photographs of a child who underwent this surgery. The facial swelling before the operation is very pronounced indeed. It is huge. At present J’s swelling is about a third of that size. The photographs post-operation show extensive skin grafts under the jaw. J may be able to escape skin grafts. The child in the photographs does not appear greatly disfigured, although the result of the operation is clearly noticeable.
7. There is no doubt that the proposed surgery carries serious risks. However in the very clear opinion of Dr X they are risks which should be taken given the awful alternative. In her oral evidence she stated:
   

   “I would be hopeful of a young boy growing into a very able teenager. So far he has not had major organ toxicity and, depending on his engagement and motivation, I would have an expectation that he will be walking, running – Mr. Z has put in his statement not playing football, but I think that he means competitively. I mean, he will be able to kick a ball around. So I would expect, externally, that he will look and feel like most teenagers. He will have a scarred face and there is a worry that there will be asymmetry of his face as he grows older. He will be engaged with my team and the surgical team as he grows up, so he still will be medicalised, because he will be caught up in routine surveillance, which goes on for years; so we check out his lungs and do a clinical assessment every two months for the first year, every three months for the next year, every four months for the next year, every six months after that, and then annually, so he will be engaged in his medical outcome, so that makes him different, perhaps, from some of his peers, but, going back to my general clinics of those who survive, then some people find this whole process, actually, is a constructive outcome rather than a destructive one.

   Now, there are outliers of that. There are people who are very challenged by their cancer experience, who find it difficult to re-engage with their peers and who have ongoing psychological problems, but I would counter that with – so that may happen with other traumas in other walks of life. The only benefit to J, though, is that he will be in a very medicalised system that would hope to be able to support and manage problems that he brings to our attention. I would be very hopeful, if he survives, that his outlook is reasonable.”

The parents did not agree to the surgery, and nor did JM (though of course at aged 10 his views aren’t determinative)

8. J’s parents do not consent to the operation. Neither does J. He has written to me to say “I don’t want the operation and there is not 100% [chance] to survive after the operation”. To Dr X he put it more graphically. He screamed out: “I don’t want to have it, because I don’t want to have a foot in my mouth”.
9. J’s parents prefer to seek to treat him with Chinese medicine. The practitioner has not treated a cancer like this before and his technique is to treat the whole body to seek to promote overall wellness. The evidence before me is that even in China, where the use of Chinese medicine is widespread, surgery is the standard treatment for a cancer of this kind.
10. J’s parents have explained to Dr X why they do not consent to the operation. She told me:
    

    “They are very frightened and fearful of what their son will blame them for when he grows up, that they worry that he will be so disfigured that he will blame them for allowing the operation to go ahead. That is one of their stated words. But they have not heard that the prospect of him growing up is completely remote, completely impossible, if they do not have surgery. …It is not that I have not tried to say that, and I have been very explicit, but there is a difference between hearing the words and processing the words. …That is one of their issues. I think that they have struggled with the consent process.”

The hospital can’t carry out the surgery if the parents don’t consent, unless the Court authorises it. Hence the hospital made an application to Court. The parents would have been able to attend that hearing and make their arguments, but did not attend.  Of course, in the Ayesha King case, the parents favoured a particular form of treatment proton beam therapy, which wasn’t available in the UK but was a form of treatment that was recommended in other countries for cancer treatment. Here, note that not even in China would this form of cancer be treated by “chinese alternative medicine”

The Judge weighed up the issues and the parents known objections and the child’s views very carefully, and came to the conclusion that the only option for JM was for this surgery to occur.  We now know that the child has been removed from the country – possibly to Poland, possibly to China.

You may be asking whether it really should be up to the Polish courts to decide, if the parents are from Poland and that’s where they are physically located there – if they disagreed with English doctors and decided to go back home, what’s it to do with the English Courts? Well, Mostyn J did explicitly deal with this

16. It is possible that J is now in Poland. On 17 September 2015 when these proceedings were commenced J was habitually resident here in England. Therefore under Article 8(1) of Council Regulation (EC) No 2201/2003 of 27 November 2003 concerning jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in matrimonial matters and the matters of parental responsibility this court had jurisdiction over him at that time in relation to the matter of parental responsibility then in controversy namely his medical treatment. Since then it is possible (but unlikely) that with joint parental authority his habitual residence has changed to Poland. If so, it may be that courts here do not have jurisdiction to determine where or with whom he should live. As things stand at present however the evidence is that J remains habitually resident in this jurisdiction.
17. However, there is no doubt that this court is seised of the specific issue of J’s medical treatment. Therefore under Article 19 the Polish court must decline jurisdiction in relation to this matter in favour of this court. I have explained that implementation of my primary decision will require a further hearing before me. If J is now permanently in Poland it may be that it would be appropriate for that aspect to be remitted for decision by the Polish court under Article 15

[It stays with the English Courts for now – if the parents have genuinely moved permanently to Poland, then an application can be made to transfer the case to the Polish Courts]

We will have to see how this story develops. And just as with the Ayesha King story, your heart absolutely goes out to the family who are in the middle of an absolute nightmare and just hope that a resolution can be reached.

[Mostyn J being Mostyn J, he still managed in the midst of all this to explain that if the imposition of treatment is on a 16 or 17 year old, the application ought properly to be made solely under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction and not to a family Court under the Children Act and  hence

Note 1 It is for this reason I think that Ian McEwan’s excellent novel The Children Act (Jonathan Cape 2014), which is about a 17 year old Jehovah’s Witness refusing a blood transfusion, is in fact incorrectly titled.

which leads me to think that at either a book club or some cocktail party, someone has made the mistake of asking Mostyn J what he thinks about Ian McEwan’s novel and has wished twenty minutes later that they hadn’t.  I LOVE Mostyn J, in case you didn’t realise. His judgments always contain something extraordinary and marvellous.  I know that Ian McEwan read a LOT of judgments when he was researching his novel. If he still keeps up with them, he may be pleased to (a)  be in one, and (b) have received a positive book review.  I suspect he’ll be content with the title of “The Children Act” rather than “The Inherent Jurisdiction of the High Court”   ]