It Couldnt Happen Here - Road to the Middle Class

LET US TALK about something important. No, not the burning question whether the recent Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, but something even more important: The power of the government to take your children away from you.

Maybe there is nothing to worry about on this score. But then again you can’t be too careful where government power is concerned. In Britain, things seem to be getting beyond the “nothing to worry about” stage, according to Cassandra Jardine.

Again and again, I have heard parents say that social workers seem to make an instant judgment about their fitness as parents and then assemble the evidence to support that decision. One woman sobbed down the phone from South Wales that she had been accused of neglecting her children because one of them was underweight; even those of her children without dietary problems have been taken from her. A cluster of women from Sheffield contacted me about the high-handed behaviour of social services: one had had her two children taken because she had left them with a 12-year-old while shopping; another had had her younger children taken because her eldest had mental health problems; a third because she and her partner had been arguing. From the Isle of Wight, I heard from a woman whose three-year-old cowered whenever the doorbell rang because twice she had been taken into care by social services on the basis of inaccurate information.

Maybe that is just the British welfare state. But here is a curious story from the excellent Minette Marrin about the rights of parents over their adult disabled children. How many rights do they have? Not very many.

In both these areas, the removal of children from their homes by the state and the control of adult mentally disabled children, the presumption is clearly in favor of the government, its experts, and its functionaries. If the local social worker starts a file on you and your family, then you could very easily find yourself fighting to prove that you deserve to raise your children. If you have an adult disabled child, well, the government is the one with the money, after all.

We have got into this situation gradually, without ever really getting a chance to decide what is right. We set up government child protective services to help abused children, and then the experts and the social workers went to work. Their interest, of course, is to increase their power and increase their discretion and reduce the power of parents to “make a nuisance.”

But the question is: do government child service operations result in positive outcomes, compared to other approaches? Where should the level of proof be set when the government removes a child from its parents? And what kind of say should parents have in the treatment of their adult disabled children even if the state has custody of them?

Let’s have a dialog. Sooner rather than later.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.