The facts about child snatching can be reported in Norway – but not here
by Christopher Booker, Telegraph
The international row over Indian children seized by Norwegian social workers serves to highlight the problems with our own child protection law.
The anger of the Indian government at the seizing of two young Indian children from their parents by Norwegian social workers has recently attracted the attention of the media around the world. The family were living in Norway, where the father works as a geoscientist, when local social workers removed their children, reportedly on the grounds that the son was allowed to sleep in his father’s bed and that the mother fed the children with her fingers (practices not uncommon in India). The parents were told that the children must be kept in care in Norway until they are 18 – although on Wednesday the authorities caved in and agreed that the children could live with their uncle.
What is striking about this furore is that such things happen here in Britain many times a week, with no publicity at all. In Norway, as in almost every other country, when children are seized for what seem inexplicable reasons, there is no bar to parents and children being named, or to aggrieved parents speaking to the press. But it was precisely this publicity, not least in India, which led to last week’s official Norwegian climbdown.
Yet here, thanks to the wall of secrecy with which our “child protection” system surrounds itself, none of this is possible. Day after day, as the number of children seized from families soars to record levels – nearly 900 a month – I hear accounts of the actions of social workers and courts which would profoundly shock the public if they could be reported. But, thanks to that wall of secrecy, a reassuring official impression is created which could not be further from reality.
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