Council must pay £500,000 for wrongly taking girl into care
In the public good isn't it better to name and shame
than fine
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1732849,00.html
Council must pay £500,000 for wrongly taking girl into care
Clare Dyer, legal editor
Friday March 17, 2006
The Guardian
A couple had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took
their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason and
kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge said yesterday.
Mr Justice McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings"
and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the emergency
order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds, were £500,000,
including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000, which the judge ordered
the local council to pay. The judge took the unusual step of making his
judgment public after a hearing behind closed doors, although the family,
the local authority and the magistrates court are all unnamed.
He laid down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which are
certain to lead social services departments and magistrates courts to
re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely no pleasure to
have to record the multiple failings of the local authority in this case".
But to do so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion on the
issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be learned for the
future".
He said the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child
health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was
displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".
Mother and daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for
psychotherapy and the girl had been put on the local child protection
register.
The notes of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues.
Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental to
move."
But social workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy -
now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of child abuse
in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes illness to get
attention. At the end of a case conference on the girl in November 2004,
social services received a phone call from a nurse at the local hospital.
They were told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains
and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong. Within
hours and without any information from the doctor, social workers were at
the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection order allowing the
girl to be taken from her parents immediately.
They acted without telling the parents and without seeking any medical
opinion to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical
treatment before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.
The council's actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous"
and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction of this family's
ordinary life".
Those descriptions "do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took
place on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader, who had
no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to the magistrates, of
which every one was "misleading or incomplete or wrong".
He ruled that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made
her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".
End Quote
Naming and shaming dangerous / corrupt
Wiltshire Social Workers
Stella Maria Constant
John Barton Stoddart
Raymond Leonard Jones
with their activities exposed on
http://www.oldbury.chat.ru/nutteing3.htm
or nutteing3 in a search engine.
Valid email nutteing@fastmail.....fm (remove 4 of the 5 dots)
Ignore any other apparent em address used to post this message -
it is defunct due to spam.
date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 09:03:37 -0000
author: Paul Nutteing
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