A TEETOTALLER BRANDED AS 'ALCOHOLIC' LOSES HER CHILD

What emerges from behind the family courts' veil of secrecy can be a travesty of the truth

Another mother and child have been torn apart in the name of the Children Act Photo: ALAMY

By Christopher Booker 04 Aug 2012

I never cease to be surprised by the contrast between what goes on behind that self-protective wall of secrecy that surrounds our dysfunctional “child protection” system and the way it gets reported to the outside world. Again and again, I have followed the course of desperately unhappy cases involving the wresting of children from their parents, only to see what a startlingly different picture of them is presented to the public.

On July 25, for instance, a local newspaper reported that the Court of Appeal had confirmed a lower court ruling that a baby should be adopted because its mother had tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out of a window when drunk. “The woman,” said the paper, “insisted that she fell from the window in a drunken mishap.” The court was alleged to have heard that “social workers feared that the mother was a heavy drinker and drug user”, and had taken her baby into care “believing that she had tried to commit suicide”.

Just where the local paper got this story from is a mystery, because it bore so little relation either to what was actually said in the Court of Appeal, or to the truth. I am reliably assured that the mother has nothing whatever to do with alcohol or drugs. Her fall from a first-floor window, which left her temporarily paralysed, was no more than a horrible accident, as was accepted by everyone at the time, including a psychiatrist and the hospital to which she was taken. But, still in her hospital bed, she was apparently handed a telephone, to be told by a social worker that her baby was being taken into care.

After making a miraculous recovery, the mother discovered that the social workers were assembling an extraordinary case against her: that she was “an excessive chronic drinker” and “a cocaine addict” (both disproved by several tests), and that her fall from the window was a suicide bid. All this was repeated by the newspaper as fact. For two years she lived through a Kafkaesque nightmare and countless court hearings, where her supporters claim that none of the evidence against her was ever properly tested. During this time, she was grudgingly allowed enough “supervised contact” with her daughter to convince the supervisors that she and her daughter had a “very strong bond”.

But the social workers stuck to their story; her lawyers, as so often in such situations, failed to make her case with any conviction; and a succession of judges accepted the social workers’ version. After the Appeal Court ruling that her baby must be adopted, she will soon be allowed a “one-hour goodbye session”, then will never see her daughter again.

The judges included Lord Justice Thorpe, who once famously said: “There is nothing more serious than a removal hearing, because the parents are so prejudiced in proceedings thereafter. Once you have lost a child, it is very difficult to get a child back.”
Since the appeal, friends in the town where the mother lives, who had no difficulty in identifying her from the newspaper report, have come up to her to express complete disbelief at the picture it painted of her. She may have lost her child, but at least some friendly libel lawyer might wish to discuss with her how her name came to be so recklessly and publicly blackened.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/9451313/A-teetotaller-branded-as-alcoholic-loses-her-child.html