ExiledMothers.co.uk
Not without my daughter UK
Created with tears, written in pain, published with faith in justice.
ExiledMothers.co.uk is a website spotlighting the secrecy within the UK family legal system and British government and the cost it has on the children and mothers of Great Britain.
Exiled Mothers' purpose is to form a coalition of small groups within the UK as well as international alliance to pressure the British government to update its legal system and erode the discrimination that takes place behind closed doors.
In England, cruelty towards children is systematically perform daily. The reason hundreds children end up in the "care" system is not because of any physical ill treatment, or neglect as claimed by Camden Council. Most have been taken because well paid "experts" say the children are "at risk" of emotional abuse or "at risk" of exposure to domestic violence !
Parents are in effect found guilty not of crimes they have committed but of crimes these soothsayers styled as "experts" think they might commit in the future!
No jury would take children for adoption under such flimsy pretexts so the sooner the establishment family judges are sacked and replaced by juries when questions of adoption or long term fostering arise, the sooner most of these flagrant injustices will be eliminated. A burglar facing a possible 6 months or more in prison can demand a jury and so should parents facing in effect a life sentence when losing children in secret courts to forced adoption!
I have lost my daughter, but there are many children to save!
Camden New Journal - EXCLUSIVE by ROISIN GADELRAB Published: 2 August 2007
Salma ElSharkaway
MILLIONS TO BE MADE FROM FOSTER CARE
Probe reveals firms charge £3,000 a week per child
AN investigation into the tragic death of 12-year-old Salma ElSharkawy while in the care of Camden’s social services has revealed how the fostering of children has been turned into a multi-million pound business. Haverstock School pupil Salma, who was killed in a car crash last month, had been placed at a private children’s home in the Peak District, Derbyshire, where care costs £150,000 a year, the New Journal can reveal. Salma’s four-month stay at the Adventure Care centre cost Camden taxpayers £46,000 – £2,900 a week. Accounts for Adventure Care, which has two company directors – social worker Helen Slater and outdoor ‘educator’ Garry Codman – are not publicly audited under an exemption scheme for small businesses. Inquiries show that Camden Council has 319 children in care, at a cost of £8 million a year. In the last financial year, Camden spent £3.4 million on 53 children in residential homes – £64,000 a child annually. Private foster care for 82 children cost £2.6 million – £31,700 a child annually. Another £2 million was spent on providing council foster care for 158 children – £12,600 per child a year. During her two years in care, Salma was n from page 1placed with three foster carers. John Hemming, Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, who is chairman of family law reform group Justice for Families, said: “There’s a lot of centres out there that are that expensive. “A lot of money is made out of children in care. Salma’s case shows how the system did nothing at all positive at any stage and how a lot of people made a lot of money out of her. “I don’t think this girl should have been in care. She kept running away to be at home.” Salma was not the only Camden child to have been placed at Adventure Care, where the children are schooled and have the chance to go horse-riding. Camden has placed one other child at the centre, although it is unclear for how long. Further investigations reveal 76 per cent of Camden’s children in care were placed outside the borough, higher than the national average of 55 per cent. This adds to the expense to the council, which, on top of the cost of fostering or residential care, has to pay for social workers to supervise contact visits and parents’ expenses. Salma’s story has provoked letters, emails and visits from parents whose children have been taken away by Camden’s social services. Her parents, Walid ElSharkawy and Mary O’Sullivan, have spent the last week protesting outside Parliament. Mr ElSharkawy now plans to take his campaign to the Town Hall steps. He has placed Salma’s story on the video-sharing website YouTube, where a voiceover talks of his despair at not getting the help he wanted from Labour MP Frank Dobson, over a display of photos of his protest and Salma’s grandmother sitting by her grave. Mr Dobson, MP for Holborn and St Pancras, said: “If someone gets in touch with me about a child in care I always take it up with the council. Mr ElSharkawy says I told him it was before the courts. I can’t interfere with court judgments. “I’m very sorry for what happened to their daughter. I can understand their anguish.” Mr ElSharkawy has spoken of his distress at the way he learned of his daughter’s death. He received a phone call at 6pm from someone who wanted her dental records but would not say why – he does not know who called. Five hours later the police visited to tell him his daughter had been killed. He said: “When the police came and said “we’ve got the worst news ever”, I knew she was dead.” Leaked documents also reveal how the police’s Missing Persons Unit was uncomfortable about taking Salma from her parents each time she ran away. A meeting to discuss her care described her parents as “loving” and told how Salma threatened to kill herself on several occasions, once being grabbed by police as she threatened to throw herself from a balcony at a friend’s house. Just before she was taken to Adventure Care, she ran away, managing to live on the streets for three weeks. Mr ElSharkawy has complained about the fact that Salma, who had a mixed Irish Egyptian background, was never placed with a foster carer who took into consideration her Muslim roots, despite Department of Health guidelines stating “racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic needs” should be considered. He said: “I asked more than three times a week. I gave them the address of a Muslim family, and a Muslim adoption agency. She asked them to take her to the mosque just to eat the food. She loved it. Mohammad AlFayed gives it for Ramadan. But they wouldn’t take her.” Her mother Mary added: “I’d have liked her to be in a mixed family. It might have helped her to keep going to the mosque. She was with an ordinary English family.” A Town Hall spokeswoman said: “We were all extremely saddened by Salma’s death and we continue to support her family during this very difficult time. “Camden Council has some of the best social workers in the country and a strong record of effectively protecting and supporting children, young people and families. To suggest otherwise is a huge disservice to children and young people in Camden because people need to come to us when they are worried about children. “Children in care, or who are subject to care proceedings, have a right to privacy and we have both a responsibility and legal requirement to protect it. We take this very seriously and are concerned that details of children’s, often difficult, lives are being played out on the pages of a newspaper. “Sensationalising one side of complicated cases puts children at risk. Among the reasons children are taken into care are neglect, domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, and drug and alcohol abuse. “It’s fundamentally important that children and parents are not deterred from seeking help and that our looked-after children have confidence in the care they are receiving. Keeping families together when it’s in the best interest of the child is always our priority and our legal duty. “The facts speak for themselves – last year there were more referrals to Camden’s children social services and fewer children in our care. This means our work to keep families together is succeeding. “We would all be failing children if worries kept just one person quiet when the welfare of a child is at stake link title
An urgent need to abolish secrecy in the family courts
It is impossible to defend a system from accusations of bias and discrimination if it operates in secret. Family courts must be open, argues Trevor Jones
THE tragic death of Salma ElSharkawy while in the care of Camden Council has placed the spotlight very much on the workings of social services and in particular the decisions made in secret in the family courts. As a seasoned campaigner wanting to open up the secret family court system to scrutiny you might expect me to say that “it is quite indefensible that there should be no access by the media and no access by the public to what is going on in courts where judges are day-by-day taking people’s children away”. However, these are not my words but the words of the Hon Mr Justice Munby, an experienced family court judge, giving evidence to Parliament last year. His informed opinion was echoed at the time by Harriet Harman, the then family justice minister, who said that the status quo – in terms of the closed nature of the family courts – is not an option when in July 2006 she launched a full consultation, Confidence and Confidentiality: Openness in the family courts, admitting that “it is impossible to defend a system from accusations of bias and discrimination if it operates behind doors”. A year later the government felt no need to open up the family court system and actually laid out plans to make the family courts less transparent by extending the secrecy to family proceedings in magistrates’ courts which are currently open to the press in most cases. This blatant U-turn was justified by the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, who had listened to the views of 200 children and young people and had concluded that they had “overwhelmingly rejected the idea” of opening up the courts. However, the Consultation Response Paper, published in March of this year, revealed that most of the children agreed that it should be up to the people involved in the case – there certainly was not a clear agreement on banning the press from all or part of the proceedings. What is abundantly clear, though, is that the pressure to keep the family courts closed came not from the children but from organisations who say they represent the children. An important part of the consultation was to identify relevant interested parties and those whom the policy will be likely to affect. These groups, termed stakeholder groups, were contacted and engaged in discussion in the policy development process. The 41 stakeholders included social services, judges, magistrates, lawyers, healthcare professionals and many organisations representing children. Not one stakeholder was a parent group representing the thousands of parents who are in danger each year of having their children removed permanently from their care. Twenty years ago there was only Parents Against Injustice actively supporting falsely accused parents who were in the process of having their children wrongly removed by the family courts and over that time it has dealt with 13,000 cases. Today, there are more than two dozen such organisations helping families each year cope with the prospect of losing their children forever via a secret court system. To suggest that there is nothing wrong with this system completely ignores the common themes that have become apparent in cases over recent years and their sheer volume points to a potential injustice on a colossal scale. Many parents complain of the bullying tactics and intimidation that social services use to stop them speaking out through fear of it being used against them in court. In a recent survey of 1,200 records of families who have contacted Families anti-Social Services Inquiry Team (FASSIT) an organisation offering support and advice to parents, nearly all parents claimed that social workers and other court officials were committing perjury in the family court to secure the taking of their children into care or to be adopted. The system allows for social workers to be able to work on an almost totally subjective rather than objective basis and to manipulate evidence to suit their needs. Meetings with social workers are invariably prevented from being recorded and it is common practice once the local authority has set its objective that it only submits information to the court that is negative and deliberately withholds the redeeming features about the parent from the proceedings. Independent assessments ordered by the court into a parent’s ability to look after a child can be undertaken by family centres directly funded by the local authorities who are therefore under pressure to perform to ensure their contracts are renewed. However, the most worrying trend is the use of the catch-all phrase that the child might be in danger of harm in the future even in cases where there is no evidence of any abuse in the past. Innocent parents cannot possibly defend themselves against someone’s opinion that some time in the future they might harm their children. There are just too many contested cases to suggest that the system is operating fairly and while the government justifies the secret nature of the family courts by saying it is to protect children, it also protects other bodies, such as social services, and that is very worrying. • Trevor Jones runs the London branch of Parents Against Injustice, Archway. www.parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk