Crystal Walton, Me and the Media

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NEWS STORY INDEX:

15/09/10
500 parents in legal action to win back 'stolen' children taken into care
(By Martyn Halle)

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Hundreds of heartbroken parents who claim social services "stole" their children have launched a legal bid to win them back.
The 500 mums and dads say it is impossible to get justice in the UK and have turned to an international court.
Families argue they are the victims of social workers who are over-zealous after cases such as Victoria Climbié and Baby Peter and a process in family courts which is excessively secretive.
They also say that the courts rely too heavily on the opinions of experts or social workers and that it is wrong that there is no right of appeal. The UK now has 64,000 children in care...a 6pc rise since 2006.
If the Court of Human Rights in The Hague backs the new case, it could let parents bring proceedings against councils - and get their children back.
One dad told the Sunday Mirror last year he had lost his daughter to adoption days after her birth.
"Crystal" was taken because of an unproven allegation that Alan (Ian Walton is his real name) had harmed his son from a previous marriage.

Alan, 44, who is campaigning for a change in the law, found that over five years his local authority, Enfield in North London, had succeeded in all 43 cases where it wanted to take a child into care. He said: "It's hard to believe they right every time.
In my case there was no evidence our girl would be harmed by me or my wife. Yet she was 'snatched' without warning."
And another dad in Nottingham whose three boys were taken after a tip-off said he and his wife were never told the allegation against them. Sam Hallimond, of pressure group Freedom Advocacy and Law, organising the court action, said: "Families are fighting injustices, with children being taken on vague allegations."
Mr Hallimond, who had his daughter taken for adoption in Suffolk, added: "If the court agree our rights have been breached, we could bring prosecutions against councils and possibly get our children back."
Lib Dem MP John Hemming, backing the legal action, said: "We are challenging a system where simply believing a child is at risk can see them taken into care - or being adopted and lost for ever."

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15/09/10
Parents of forcibly adopted baby condemn 100 per cent success record of Enfield’s social workers
(By Nick Tarver)

Video Television News Item! 

17/02/09 Social workers who snatched four-day-old baby (ITV London Tonight)

Back To News Index! Enfield Social workers who snatched four-day-old baby; Social workers who snatched four-day-old Crystal Walton and put her up for adoption over unproven abuse claim, Mum’s heartbreaking fight to get her daughter back. This is a small part of my Mummy and Daddy's fight to get me back!

Social workers who snatched four-day-old baby put her up for adoption over unproven abuse claim Mum’s heartbreaking fight to get her daughter back. A mum and dad have been told they will never see their young daughter again… after she was snatched away at only four days old. Tiny Baby A was taken from her mum by social workers who claimed the tot, who we will call Emily, was at risk in the family home. Not because of the mum’s failure to care for her – but because of a six-year-old unproven claim that her husband had injured his son from a previous marriage. Yet, although interviewed by police, he never faced a criminal court over that allegation. And he has even been allowed unsupervised access to watch his boy grow up. Now the High Court, in a devastating civil court ruling, has decided that a decision to forcibly adopt Emily – now aged four – away from her parents (who we are calling Tania and Stephen) must stand. Revealing her agony for the first time, mum Tania said: “I had my beautiful baby girl snatched from me at just four days old. Only a mother could understand the horror of that. “My only crime is that I love and trust my husband. I don’t believe he could ever harm a child, and the courts have been unable to prove it. I have already missed years of Emily’s childhood.” Stephen, in his 40s, married Tania, in her mid-20s, in 2003. Almost a year after their wedding Tania gave birth to Emily in hospital and they were overjoyed to take her home two days later. But they were to enjoy just two days alone with their little girl before she was taken from them. Social workers claimed there was a danger her dad would hurt her because of the case six years earlier. Stephen had been married before and has a 10-year-old son, Jamie. When he was eight weeks old, Jamie was taken to hospital with a suspected brain injury and was found to have suffered bleeding behind his eyes. The episode left him permanently disabled, and he now has cerebral palsy. A medical expert said that he had been shaken viciously. Stephen, who also has a 12-year-old daughter from the previous marriage, said: “Doctors couldn’t tell for certain what was wrong with Jamie. But one came up with a theory it could be ‘shaken baby syndrome’, even though there was no conclusive evidence. "My wife and I were told that care proceedings were being started. It was heartbreaking to be accused of harming your own child. I vehemently denied doing anything wrong, but no one listened.” A whole year later – during which time Jamie stayed with his parents and came to no further harm – the couple were taken to a family court in London, where a judge concluded on the basis of an expert’s opinion that the child’s injuries had been caused by one of his parents. The possibility that the baby had an inherited condition, provoking the same symptoms, was never explored. And the theory put forward by the family’s lawyers that he banged his head on a baby bouncer while playing with another child was not accepted. However, social workers in Enfield, North London, finally allowed Jamie to remain with his birth parents under daily supervision. And seven months later the local authority was impressed enough with their parenting to drop the visits. And there the story might have ended if Stephen and his wife hadn’t split up at the end of 2000. They were granted, and still enjoy, joint custody of the boy and remain good friends. Stephen, whose first wife also backs his adoption fight, sees Jamie regularly and often spends time with him alone. It was only when – almost four years later – Stephen remarried and his new wife Tania became pregnant that the social workers reappeared. Stephen, who himself has multiple sclerosis and walks with a stick, said: “Tania has no other children and we were both overjoyed to be having a baby.” Then, when she was eight months pregnant, Stephen developed a heart problem and had to be rushed to hospital. He says social workers visited him at his bedside and handed him a letter saying they were starting emergency childcare proceedings for their unborn child. I could barely breathe because of the shock,” he says. “It had been six years since Jamie’s case and I’d had no contact with social workers.” Emily was born in December 2004. When she was just four days old, social workers burst into their home and took her away. Tania said: “Stephen’s parents were visiting. We were missing an ingredient for dinner, and Stephen and his dad popped to the shops. While they were out social workers knocked on the door. They walked straight in, picked up Emily in her moses basket and walked out again. “I was screaming and crying, begging them not to take her, grabbing at their arms.” Social workers warned Tania she would only stand a chance of getting Emily back if she left her husband. “We had no choice,” said Tania. “We decided I would go to live with my parents a few miles away and we would fight in court to be reunited as a family.” Emily was returned to Tania the following day after a court injunction was obtained ordering Stephen to keep away from her. But social workers were unhappy that Tania and her family remained close to Stephen. “I often visited Stephen on my own, which was allowed under the injunction,” she said. “He asked me to text him if Emily ever woke in the night because he wanted to be involved, and I did that. But for some reason, social workers wanted me to hate him and cut him out of our lives.” Four months later, in April 2005, Emily was taken from her mother for a second time. Tania had been branded unfit to look after Emily simply because she trusted her husband. Tania said: “I had taken Emily to visit my grandparents. But while I was there, two police cars turned up with a social worker. They burst into the house and snatched Emily from me again. I was in shock – I couldn’t believe what was happening. They said I had been ‘conspiring’ with Stephen. They thought we were going to kidnap Emily.” Social workers said Tania was too mild-mannered to be able to protect Emily from Stephen. At that point Emily was put into a foster home, and Stephen and Tania were allowed to visit her once a week for an hour. “It was so emotional,” said Tania. “I tried my hardest to be happy around Emily. But I cried uncontrollably before and after we saw her.” The couple have video footage taken on July 18, 2006, of them with Emily, and say they look happy and at ease together. At one point, they say the little girl puts her arms out to her mother, who picks her up and kisses her. Touchingly, Tania says when she asks Emily where her daddy is, the toddler turns and points at Stephen. But already the clock was ticking towards their daughter’s adoption. Within a few weeks, the couple were told new parents were being sought for their little girl. And they were horrified when they came across an advert in a glossy magazine offering her up for adoption. The beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl was smiling at them from the page. The accompanying blurb described her as a bright, happy girl who likes swimming and games. A phone number was printed alongside for anyone interested in becoming her parents. Tania said: “Our daughter was essentially being put up for sale in a magazine and under her own name. We hadn’t even been warned. It was despicable.” At the time Enfield officials took Emily away, councils were under pressure to raise the number of children they had adopted by 50 per cent. Tony Blair had promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve targets. The aim was to get older children in care homes into new families. But councils found it easier to place babies and cute toddlers such as Emily, and thousands of children under four were removed from their families across the country. In October 2006 the couple saw Emily for the last time. Stephen, his eyes filling with tears, said: “We didn’t know that then. We had arranged to see her, but the meeting was suddenly cancelled five minutes beforehand. Presumably a new family had been found. We didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye. It breaks my heart to think she doesn’t know why we aren’t there for her.” In a desperate bid to beat the system, Stephen and Tania took Enfield Council to the Court of Appeal in March 2007. They asked for a stay of execution on the adoption while their case was heard by the European Court of Human Rights. But it was refused. The couple did not give up there. Last month they were allowed to challenge the initial accusation against Stephen at the High Court. There they were backed by top europathologist Dr Waney Squier, who believes there is no evidence that the boy’s injuries were caused by her father. In the three-day hearing, Dr Squier told the court the injuries were not consistent with Shaken Baby Syndrome. She said that, crucially, he had no other marks or injuries on his body to suggest he had been shaken violently. She told the court that 85 per cent of autopsies in shaking cases have additional bruising or other injury. And she said the force required to produce bleeding behind the eyes would inevitably cause damage to the neck. But the local authority’s expert Dr Neil Stoodley disagreed and said the injuries were consistent with SBS. However the argument was based just on medical notes, because Jamie’s original brain scans had been lost. The couple lost their final chance of halting the adoption when Mr Justice Mark Hedley, who described the decision as “agonising”, sided with the council and upheld the care order. In what he described as a “dreadful conundrum”, he said: “Wrongly to find that there has been an NAHI (non-accidental head injury) is to risk tearing apart an innocent family – a shocking thing to happen. “Likewise, wrongly failing to find NAHI where such in fact occurred is to risk returning a child to a situation of high or even fatal risk, as notorious cases have sadly demonstrated. “The consequences of a judicial error in these cases are calamitous.” The judge praised the parents’ persistence, saying: “The father’s belief in his innocence and the injustice done to his family is genuinely held.” He also said there was not enough evidence for police to bring a trial on the initial child-abuse allegations. But he said there was still no new evidence to undermine the original findings. The couple have vowed to appeal against the decision, but they are running out of time. Once Emily is officially adopted, it is British law that she can never be returned to her parents – even if they are found innocent. Clinging on to each other in their living room, with walls covered in photos of Emily, the couple say they cannot bear to have another child. Stephen said: “My health is getting worse and I do not want to go through the agony of having another baby taken away from us by the state.” The couple are prepared to go to the European Court of Human Rights if their appeal fails. But Stephen said: “The European court cannot reunite us with our daughter – all we would get is monetary compensation, which means nothing to us when all we want is our little girl back.” -For legal reasons, the real names of the people involved have been changed to protect their identities. '''Although my Dad has identified all of us!''' Back To News Index!

24/05/07

The rank hypocrisy of family court judges
(By Camilla Cavendish)

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I was gratified this week to find that an article I wrote in December has been quoted in full by the Court of Appeal. (I only hope there were no typos.) It is flattering that Mr Justice Munby takes The Times seriously. It is of more import that he decided to publish his judgment on the case that I wrote about six months ago. For it is only when judges make their reasoning public that we can start to debate the grounds on which children should be taken into care.

A few long-suffering readers may remember that this peculiar case concerns a woman whose baby was removed by social workers, not because the child came to any harm but because there was a suspicion that her father might have injured a child from his previous marriage. That suspicion was never proven, no charges were ever brought and the child of the earlier marriage was never removed. But a woman who everyone agrees is blameless has lost her only child – for ever – because she is deemed to be besotted with a man who may pose a danger.

As so often in these situations, there are complex allegations and flawed characters. In my view it is questionable whether the father’s inability to conceal his loathing of social workers makes him unsuitable for parenthood. Mr Justice Munby has decided on several grounds not to grant an appeal. The case may still go to Strasbourg, but it will be too late: the child will have been adopted.

This couple have become a cause célèbre for campaigners who fear that the Government’s drive to get more children adopted is having a perverse effect on some local authorities. For the same local authority to leave a man alone with a child that it thought he had harmed, but to take away another that had not been harmed, does seem bizarre. Until you realise that the child from the first marriage was disabled, and older, and would have been hard to place with an adoptive family. The child from the second marriage was a healthy baby, just the kind of “adoptive commodity” that local authorities find relatively easy to place.

I still believe that ministers were right to want to speed children out of the hell of care. But they have put social services departments in a strange position. We now expect them to combine three contradictory roles: to protect children, to keep families together and to meet adoption targets (which bring financial rewards). Under pressure, in situations that are not clear-cut, those roles are bound to conflict.

What is the evidence? Government figures show a significant jump in the number of babies being taken into care, from 1,600 in 1995 to 2,800 in 2005: a 75 per cent increase in ten years. While there has been an increase across all age groups, it is much, much greater for babies. More 10 to 15-year-olds are removed, but the rate of increase was only 21 per cent.

One possible explanation is that the authorities are now monitoring pregnant women, especially teenagers and substance abusers. But there are also numerous examples of relatives being turned down by local authorities when they offer to take the children of a family member. Some of them may indeed be unsuitable. But the turning-down sometimes seems very peremptory. John Hemming, MP, who follows these issues closely, believes that “the [hard-to-place] children the targets were established to get adopted are not getting adopted; instead a completely new group of children are being taken into care, then adopted”. Ministers should be seriously alarmed if a failure to help difficult candidates find homes were being masked by a zealous pursuit of babies.

This case has also brought something else home to me: our hypocrisy about privacy. It is illegal for me to write about most care cases, or to read court papers, even when the parents involved beg me to. I can generally only write when judges go public. Yet I have discovered that even as I was writing about this case last year, painstakingly omitting much of the detail to ensure that no one could identify the child, her picture, real name and age were being published in a national newspaper. Not by a journalist, who would have been in contempt of court. But by an adoption agency, advertising for adopters.

Agencies have to find good homes for needy children. Many do a great job. But for parents who are routinely told that they will be in contempt if they dare to reveal the legal proceedings to anyone outside the court, or even to talk about the child by name, because his or her privacy is paramount, it is staggering to see their children being advertised like pets.

Contempt of court is a serious matter. Last year Harriet Harman, the Minister for Justice, admitted in Parliament that in 2005 “200 people were sent to prison by the family courts, which happens in complete privacy and secrecy”. Family court judges can send parents to prison for up to six months for contempt. Two hundred people is about four a week. That is far more than the number of suspected terrorists we have locked up without a fair trial. So where are the civil libertarians? One young woman was recently sent to Ashford prison for kidnapping her child back from social workers and trying to flee the country. Others seem to be committed for minor breaches of contact orders. The threat of jail is made time and again, and it is real.

The main justification used for keeping family courts secret is to protect the identities of children. It is the argument used to gag parents and the media. How strange that seems when a little girl, whose family struggled to get the right legal advice to keep her, can be paraded around the country.

Every judge in these adoption cases can decide to make their judgment public. Until they do, the pretence of privacy will be nothing but rank hypocrisy.

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21/12/06

Family courts are the B-side of the law
(By Camilla Cavendish)

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What a strange, fumbling kind of justice system it is that condemns a woman as an unfit mother for the heinous crime of trusting her husband. Yet this is what seems to have happened in a recent case that I feel compelled to write about, even though legal restrictions force me to leave out much of the detail.

The nub of the case is this. A woman, let us call her Janie, gave birth to her first and only child a year ago. That baby was taken away from her and subsequently put up for adoption. Not because of her own failure to care for the baby — her own love and care never seem to have been in question. No. She has lost her baby because of a suspicion that her husband John may have injured another child in his previous marriage almost ten years ago.

The suspicion was no more than that. John was never charged with anything, let alone convicted. Social workers were never sufficiently worried to take that first child into care. Since his divorce John has shared custody of that child perfectly amicably with his ex-wife. Yet the same local authority which left the first child with him has forbidden him to see this new baby. And his new wife, despite having nothing to do with the first case, may never see her baby again.

Unless this case is overruled in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, where it is now heading, it will set a peculiar precedent. For it implies that any British mother could be penalised for choosing a partner to whom the State has taken a dislike: penalised with the loss of the thing that is most precious to her in the world.

It cannot be this simple, you are thinking. Well, not quite. The child of the first marriage is disabled, and did seem to have suffered an injury — I am not permitted to say more. But no one knows how. Both John and his first wife have always protested their innocence. They had a second child who came to no harm. No court will ever truly know whether John was innocent. But the fact is that he was never found guilty. For the local authority to leave him alone with a child that it thought he had harmed, and to take away another that had not been harmed, is utterly hypocritical. No court should be able to punish you for a crime you may commit, when there is no evidence.

It should, surely, be a crime to remove a newborn baby from a mother who has never harmed it.

For that in itself is a form of abuse. Yet the secret State often chooses to abuse the children itself, rather than let them run the risk of staying put. They are at least alive, it calculates, even if it is a diminished kind of alive, deprived of the mother bond. And too often, it strikes the wrong balance. In 2002, the ECHR ruled against the British Government for removing a new baby from its mother in hospital and refusing even to let her cuddle it under supervision, when there was no evidence that the baby faced a serious risk at that time. The judgment came too late, though. The baby had already been adopted.

This is what Janie fears. The ECHR has agreed to hear her appeal and to consider whether the English court ruling breached Janie and John’s right to family life, to freedom of opinion and to freedom of expression. That is quite a ticket. But even if the ECHR finds in Janie’s favour, it may be too late. The local authority is already seeking families to adopt her baby. Her only hope is that prospective adopters will be put off by knowing of her appeal.

Any lawyer will tell you that family courts are the B-side of the legal system. The majority of judgments will never be read outside the courtroom. Perhaps judges fear the consequences if they do not support social services and social services are later proved right. They seem to start from the assumption that children are de facto wards of court who need protection from their parents.

Even then, Janie’s case seems extraordinary. Certainly the parents are not the brightest people in the world. They are not perfect. But the more I learn about it, the more I believe that Janie and John’s biggest mistakes were emotional. Janie seems to have been very co-operative. However, John has been irritable, even aggressive, which would support the view that he has a violent nature. But can you really convict on that basis? Which of us could control our temper if faced with losing a child to a bunch of hypocrites? In a Hollywood movie, anger is a natural reaction to injustice. In an English suburb, defiance makes you guilty. The legal system wants “remorse”. But how can you show remorse for something you haven’t done?

Until this case I had tended to be sceptical about the claims that the Government’s targets for adoption were leading to miscarriages of justice. I still feel that ministers were right to want to speed up adoption and to release more children more quickly from the hell of care. But I have now started to take more seriously the argument that these targets have created a perverse incentive for local authorities to take more babies into care. Babies are, after all, more attractive to prospective adopters than older children and therefore an easy way to reach those targets. In Janie and John’s case, you do have to wonder why the authorities have rushed to take away a healthy baby, when they did not take away a disabled one.

Janie’s case seems to me to make a strong argument for introducing juries. Why is a burglar facing six months in jail allowed to ask for a jury trial, but a mother facing the irretrievable loss of her only child is not? Mistakes will always be made when the ordinary, imperfect citizen is judged by the imperfect and powerful. Personally, I would rather face 12 men good and true.

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09/06/07

The Scandal Of The Baby Snatchers
(By Sue Reid)

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