The Daily Mail 21st January 2004


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SHEILA ROBERTS climbed the steps to the Royal Courts of Justice in
the Strand with the heaviest of hearts and in great trepidation. At
her side was Andy, her husband often years.

Together, they attended what is termed, in the cold terminology of
our family courts, a `disposal' hearing to decide the future life of
their daughter, Jane.

The hearing was held in the utmost confidentiality. Medical experts
aired their views on Sheila's personality. Social workers debated her
suitability as a mother in front of a single judge, who held the fate
of the family in his hands. At the conclusion of the hearing, Jane
was taken away from her parents on the orders of the State.

The three-year-old was sent to spend her childhood with relatives 200
miles away from her grieving parents, where every aspect of her
upbringing will be controlled by social workers.

Worse, Sheila was told that unless she confesses to poisoning her own
beloved daughter - a charge which, as we will see, is dubious to say
the least - she will not be able to care for her child again. Ever.

Although she has two other daughters of eight and five who happily
live with her and Home Counties Internet worker Andy - and are deemed
to be in no danger at all - she is allowed to see her youngest child
just once a month for a few hours. She did not even get to visit her
on Christmas Day because of the draconian rules of the family court.
And when Jane begins school soon, Sheila and Andy will have no say in
which one it is.

Jane's family are part of a disturbing phenomenon in which thousands
of ordinary British parents have been wrongly accused of harming a
child by the secretive family courts, only to lose their entire
family forever.

At least 5,000 families may have had their children removed by these
shadowy courts and adopted or put into care. All these cases -
including Sheila's - are now to be reviewed by the Government.

When the Daily Mail recently published the stories of two mothers
accused in the family courts - both lost babies to unexplained cot
deaths that sparked the removal of their next child - we received
hundreds of messages from desperate parents.

Sheila - all the names have been changed for legal reasons - was
first alleged to have poisoned Jane with an overdose of tranquilliser
which led to a series of fits.

She has vehemently denied the claim by a hospital doctor. She insists
Jane's fits were caused by a serious viral infection, similar to
glandular fever.

Although the secrecy of the family courts system means that she faces
prison if she speaks to us directly, other sources insist there is
not a shred of forensic, psychological or medical evidence to support
the accusation against Sheila.

The files on her case are said .to be littered with accusations that
she suffers from the dubious ailment Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy
where a woman is said to harm a child, to draw attention to herself.
It is an illness promoted by the now discredited paediatrician
Professor Roy Meadow.

Jane had no sign of the tranquilllser in her blood or urine. Even
tests on her hair, which can store residues of toxins for far longer,
proved negative. But once this allegation was totally disproved,
another even more chilling accusation was made.

A paediatrician called as an expert witness at an initial family
court hearing suggested, out of the blue, that Sheila might have
deliberately injected her child with, the water from a flower bowl or
a lavatory. It was a claim considered ludicrous by one of the
country's leading forensic toxicologists, who provided evidence for
the police in Harold Shipman's case.

He told the court it was a medical impossibility for Sheila to have
done such a thing. But for the family courts - which do not require
the standard of proof of a criminal court - this was not enough to
save her. Sheila has had her daughter forcibly removed with little
hope of appeal.

`There has been nothing less than State-sponsored child abduction
going on for years,' insists Penny Mellor, a 41-year-old campaigner
for mothers such as Sheila.

Earl Howe, shadow health spokesman in the Lords, added: `Families
have been grievously wronged by these courts operating in complete
secrecy. There should not be secret courts in a democratic country.'

As the family courts prospered - there is one in every big town - the
number of children taken from their parents has grown. In England,
3,400 children were adopted from care in 2002, a quarter more than
just two years earlier. The figure is rising.

Of course, not everyone who appears before a family court is
innocent. But the system lacks proper checks and balances. Set up 13
years ago, they use the framework of The Children Act 1989 and a
plethora of court orders, often ruthlessly enforced in a way more
suited to a Salem witch hunt. Recently, at 8pm, one family heard a
knock on the door from social workers. They were armed with a family
court order to take into care the two children of four and five.

The social workers had already tried to take the children from their
private school earlier in the day. The school play was going on and
the head-mistress told them, in no uncertain terms, to go away, that
these little girls were safe and well.

ONE has to ask: whatever their single mother may have done - and she
says nothing - was it necessary for the State apparatchiks to go
about their work in this way?

When a neighbour of this family protested about the social workers'
behaviour to Earl Howe, an injunction was served on the mother by a
family court judge gagging her from telling anyone what had happened -
including her own family.

`The result is that more parents are - accused of murder or attempted
murder each year than the gun-toting - Yardie gangs of the inner
cities,' says Dr James Le Fanu, a London GP outraged at the
mistreatment of families.

Yet the grounds for family court appeals are narrow. Accused parents
have to prove -that the judge made a serious mistake.

Barrister Barbara Hewson successfully challenged one family court
decision at the European Court of Human Rights. A family court judge,
ruled the Strasbourg hearing, had wrongly forced a British couple to
give up their newborn daughter for adoption.

Hewson explains: `There is a culture in the family courts of
believing medical experts as a matter of course. The parents always
have to prove a negative - that they will never be a potential risk
to their child.

`This is like proving that you will never be mentally ill - there is
always a theoretical possibility that you might be. But if these
parents cannot prove it, that is enough for the court to take the
child away.'

Jean Robinson, a research director of the Association for Improvement
of the Maternity Services, has complained that hundreds of babies
have been removed from mothers at birth by family courts.

`The same small group of experts go round the family courts. The
social workers know the experts, the judges know them all. The court
insists the secrecy is to safeguard the child's identity.'

Every accused mother has a different tale to tell, while revealing
similar alarming stories about the family courts. One mother has told
us how her brother accidentally dropped her two-month-old son.

The police took no action against him or the parents and the child
recovered completely. But social workers thought they knew better and
hauled the three adults before the family court. The mother says: `To
our dismay, the judge - after hearing all the evidence, including my
brother's admission on oath that he was responsible - came to the
decision that my partner or I caused the injury and that my brother
was taking the blame for us. Consequently our baby was adopted.'

Another e-mail from a London mother was typical: `I am in desperate
nee of help. I lost one of my babies due to cot death. My other baby
has a medical condition, brittle bones and as a result of this he has
sustained fractures.

My husband and I were initially accused of inflicting these injuries
on him and the family court said we were guilty. However, this secret
ruling was based on probabilities rather than the proven facts.

`Soon the courts will decide with whom our baby should live. Given
the verdict, it is almost certain that he will be taken away from us
and we may never see him again. We cannot appeal against this
decision unless we can produce new evidence.

`We have already lost one of our children and desparately do not want
to lose the other. Please help us and our baby.'

The misery provoked by one of the biggest miscarriages in British
legal history cannot be overestimated. It will not end with the
governments promised review of the cases or any further compensation
payments.

These devastated families do not want money or even apologies. They
want their children back. And that is what Margaret Hodge and the
childrens department say they cannot give them.

Tragically, when children are adopted on the orders of the family
courts and, later, ask what happened to their natural parents, they
are told lies.

One mother – who had her daughter seized by social workers and the
police at birth after her first child, a son, died in an unexplained
hospital cot death – told me : `We do not think our daughter will
ever come knocking on our door when she grows up. Why should she?
She will have been wrongly informed her natural mother is a
murderer.'