Could It Happen Here? Children Taken Away From Parents At An Alarming Rate In The UK

Children in the United Kingdom are being taken away from their natural birth parents at an alarming rate, and not always with good cause.

According to the UK Sun, the number of children ripped from their parents through “forced care orders” rose from 7, 550 to 10, 130 in 2017: an increase of 34%. When you factor in children taken away with the parents’ say-so, the number rises to 32,810.

Children being taken away from their natural birth parents by social workers who have wrongly accused the parents of abuse is not just an issue in the UK, but worldwide. There are stories of children being taken away from their parents for being overweight, or from having not brushed their teeth.

In one insane case, the social worker removed the child from the home because the mother refused to give her son ice cream saying the mother failed to meet her son’s “emotional needs.”

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In the story of the Courtnages, the parents lost both of their sons after the mother took the youngest boy to the hospital with a bump on his head. Two doctors thought it to be a fissure, while a third believed it was a fracture. Although the parents were not charged or ever convicted of any crime–both boys were taken away from their parents and adopted out to other families.

One of the more well known cases of children being taken from their parents under false claims of child abuse is with that of Jill Goss and her daughter Alyssa, who was taken from her when she was only 10 weeks old.

Jill noticed a swelling in her daughter Alyssa’s arm and took her to the hospital to have the arm looked at. The GP diagnosed a tiny fracture in the 10-week-old’s arm and sent her in for x-rays which discovered three more fractures in her legs and ribs.

Baby Alyssa had been receiving treatment for vitamin D deficiency but this was not brought up by social workers – despite doctors’ reports that claimed the deficiency could very well have led to the tiny fractures.

Jill recounts the nightmare of her baby being taken away:

“Once we took Alyssa to the Royal Berkshire hospital it started to go very wrong. After they found the fractures the police were called in after a day and we had to speak to them in the hospital conference room. Alyssa had been constipated so we’d been told to massage her stomach but social services said this could not be the reason for the fracture. Another doctor said there was no way we had injured her though. We were arrested in the hospital and taken to the station but I thought I’d be able to go back and see Alyssa – the police said I could but I was just terrified and distraught.

Then I signed a document believing it meant Alyssa could stay with her aunt but in fact I’d signed for her to go into care. They considered putting me on sedatives but I was still providing breast milk for Alyssa which they were taking to her. I’d been lied to – it was horrendous and I later told my solicitor but they didn’t push this in court. We were in the court within days and it was clear then Alyssa was in care – I always believed I would get her back because we had done nothing wrong.”

According to The UK Sun, 90 children each day – 32,810 across the year – were taken into care through forced and voluntary agreements only after social services’ intervention.

Children in care due to court orders is now the highest on record at 50,470 – around a 25% rise from 8 years before – with more than 14,000 applications to the courts in each of the last two years.

Just this past June Judge Sir Andrew McFarlane, the President of the Family Division, said the courts were seeing entirely too many cases that were not serious enough for the children to be removed from their homes.

“It may properly be said that we have reached a stage where the threshold for obtaining a public law court order is noticeably low, whereas, no doubt as a result of the current financial climate, the threshold for a family being able to access specialist support services in the community is conversely, very high,” he said.