DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Soul of Adoption
  HTML https://soulofadoption.createaforum.com
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       *****************************************************
   DIR Return to: Adoption in the Media
       *****************************************************
       #Post#: 34--------------------------------------------------
       Judge attacks social workers who took 'abused' girl, ten, away f
       rom parents for 
       By: Montraviatommygun Date: March 7, 2011, 3:28 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Judge attacks social workers who took 'abused' girl, ten, away
       from parents for no reason
       By STEVE DOUGHTY
       
       Last updated at 01:37am on 6th May 2008
       A girl aged ten was taken from her parents by social workers for
       no reason, a High Court judge has ruled.
       Mr Justice Holman said there was not "the slightest worry or
       concern" about the girl's welfare to justify the separation from
       her family.
       The girl and her 11-year-old brother were sent to live with
       their grandparents for nearly a year on suspicion of sexual
       abuse raised by doctors.
       Despite the girl's adamant denials of abuse, social workers took
       no notice.
       Mr Justice Holman said that the case was a warning that the
       lessons of the Cleveland child abuse controversy of the 1980s
       have gone unheeded by doctors, social workers and the courts.
       He ruled that the parents were "completely exonerated" and that
       the child had never been abused.
       But, the judge said, the children had been damaged by the
       intervention of the doctors, the social workers and the state.
       The Cleveland scandal was one of a series of incidents in the
       late 1980s in which children were removed from their homes by
       zealous social workers for reasons that proved to be baseless.
       A total of 121 children were taken into state care in North-East
       England over five months after abuse was diagnosed on the basis
       of physical examinations.
       The family of the ten-year-old girl came from Leeds. This was
       the city in which Dr Marietta Higgs, the paediatrician at the
       centre of the Cleveland scandal, learned at a conference her
       method of diagnosing abuse from physical examination.
       In the ten-year-old's case doctors made a diagnosis of abuse
       when the girl was taken by her parents to hospital after they
       discovered a bloodstain on her underpants.
       Doctors found small amounts of blood in several examinations and
       subjected the girl to eight examinations.
       They decided that the girl's condition meant she had been
       abused.
       Mr Justice Holman said: "There was nothing at all about this
       family to attract the slightest attention, worry or concern.
       "All the indications were, and are, that the parents and
       children were a well-functioning, happy and closeknit family, in
       which the children thrived."
       After adding that the girl was "subjected to no less than eight
       invasive, intimate examinations of her private parts', he said:
       'Both children must inevitably have been emotionally damaged by
       the experiences."
       The judge said social workers should have listened to the
       children and he also condemned the use of flimsy medical
       evidence to break up a family.
       Signs of sexual abuse were "considerably subjective", he said.
       "Even 20 years after the Cleveland inquiry, I wonder whether its
       lessons have been fully learned," the judge added.
  HTML http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=564174&in_page_id=1770
       *****************************************************