When the state takes your child
Alasdair Palmer talks to a mother whose daughter has been forcibly adopted — and who, in common with thousands of other women, now faces the agonies of separation ‘T here is no worse experience for a mother than to lose her child,’ says Rachel Drew softly. ‘I think about her all the time. I keep photographs of her with me.... ’ She pulls four pictures of a smiling six-year-old child from her wallet. ‘These pictures are all I have left.’ The last time Rachel Drew saw her daughter Charlotte was on 19 May last year. It is a date etched on her heart. She speaks of it as the time when ‘I lost my baby’. Yet her daughter, who will celebrate her eighth birthday in the autumn of this year, is not dead. Rachel Drew knows she is alive and well: her child has been forcibly adopted into another family. In the summer of 2003, Ms Drew’s local council applied for a forcible adoption order, and the judge assigned to the case granted it. Charlotte is now with the new parents chosen for her by the council. The final formalities will be completed later this year.
Forced adoption is irrevocable once the formalities have been completed. After that happens, a mother is usually not allowed to see her child until the child reaches the age of 18. Rachel Drew expresses its effect simply: she says that ‘it feels like my child is dead’. She now has a couple of months in which to find a lawyer who will take up her case and possibly win back her child although legal experts say that the chances of such an outcome are extremely slim.
When I met Rachel Drew, she seemed just like thousands, indeed millions, of other mothers. She tried hard not to reveal in public how devastated she has been by the loss of her daughter, and to restrict herself to a recitation of the facts.
Rachel Drew cannot understand why her daughter was forcibly taken from her. Aged 40, she says she is unlikely to have another child. Her reaction — a combination of anger and agony — is understandable. There is no suggestion from the local council that she has ever harmed her daughter physically, and no suggestion that she has neglected her or been cruel to her. She has had a diagnosis of mild schizophrenia which was how, when she was pregnant, she first came to the attention of social services — but the symptoms of the illness are, and have been, thoroughly controlled by medication. Rachel now works as a foot-health practitioner. There are no signs at all of any mental illness when you meet her: she seems to be a perfectly normal woman.
Might, nevertheless, Rachel’s mild schizophrenia have harmed her ability to care for her daughter? A consultant psychiatrist, whom I shall label Dr X — like all experts involved in child protection proceedings he may not be named — examined her with her daughter at the request of the local social services in 2001 when Charlotte was three. He stated that ‘all current observations suggest that Charlotte is a bright child who is happy and exuberant. She has a strong and affectionate relationship with her mother.’ He concluded that ‘there is no risk of serious harm in the foreseeable future’.
The council’s social services, however, became convinced that Charlotte was suffering ‘emotional abuse’ from her mother. The council decided to replace the first psychiatrist with another, whom I shall label Dr Y. Dr Y’s diagnosis was diametrically opposite to that of the first psychiatrist. She found that Charlotte was at ‘serious risk’ of emotional abuse from her mother.
Over the course of a year, and on the basis of two meetings — lasting a total of about three and a half hours — in which she observed Rachel and her daughter together, Dr Y produced two reports. In them, she concluded that there were ‘aspects of Rachel’s functioning which would not enable her to fulfil Charlotte’s needs consistently at all times’. Dr Y also required Dr A, a colleague of hers, to examine Rachel. Dr A came to the same conclusion as Dr Y. She claimed that ‘Rachel would find it hard to remain alert to, and in tune with, Charlotte’s concerns for hours at a time.... In addition, she has definite and concrete ideas about what it is beneficial for Charlotte to, for example, eat, wear and do, that she often wishes to impose.’ A lot of parents will think that the appropriate response to those ‘observations’ is: so what? What parent who loves and cares for their child does not have ‘definite and concrete ideas’ about what it is beneficial for their child to ‘eat, wear and do’?
The judge in this case, however, decided that Dr Y’s and Dr A’s reports provided powerful evidence that Rachel was likely to inflict such severe ‘emotional harm’ on her daughter that Charlotte should be forcibly and permanently separated from her mother by being adopted into another family. He recognised that that step was not what the then four-year-old Charlotte herself wanted. He noted that, when she had been asked ‘who was the best person whom she would choose to live with?’, Charlotte said, ‘My mother’. The judge also noted that when asked, ‘If the judge does not choose your mother, has he got it right?’, Charlotte replied, ‘No! Tell him he’s got it wrong if I can’t go home to my mother!’ He recognised that being separated from her mother would be experienced by Charlotte as ‘a loss’, but he thought that loss would not be ‘as pathological as it sounds’. He decided to ‘accept the expert evidence ... that the risk of emotional harm outweighs Charlotte’s wishes and feelings’. So he ordered her to be forcibly adopted.
Why the judge came to be so impressed by the ‘expert evidence’ of the ‘risk of emotional harm’ to Charlotte if she was allowed to stay with her mother is puzzling. Rachel could certainly be difficult: she complained to the GMC about Dr X, alleging that he had made offensive comments during their meeting, including asking her how much she charged for sex — an allegation she now accepts was totally false. ‘I wasn’t taking my medication at the time,’ she says, ‘and I was hearing things which weren’t happening.’ There has been no repetition of that kind of incident since, and it is difficult to see how it could justify forcibly and permanently separating her from her daughter.
Social services officials commented negatively on the fact that Charlotte was not reliably potty-trained by the age of three, and was still having ‘accidents’ at the age of four. This is a point also used to suggest that Rachel Drew was ‘emotionally harming’ her daughter in Dr Y’s report. A failure to be completely toilet-trained by the age of four, even five, is, of course, something which Charlotte has in common with several million other children. And yet in the letter which the director of social care sent to Rachel Drew stating the ‘reasons for the decision’ to adopt her daughter forcibly, the fact that she was ‘unable to progress Charlotte’s bed-wetting, soiling and toilet training’ appeared as one of the reasons for taking Charlotte away from her mother.
The council first applied for, and got, an interim care order for Charlotte after she and her mother went to hospital (Charlotte broke her collarbone in a fall). Nurses were reported to have observed Charlotte being ‘defiant’, and ‘growling like a dog and mewing like a cat’. This was asserted, without any supporting evidence, to be ‘not in play’. Rachel insists that it was in play: the then three-year-old Charlotte had a game, based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which she played with her mother. It consisted of her taking the part of the wolf, the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood in turn. What the nurses heard as ‘growling like a dog’ was Charlotte’s playing the wolf; her ‘mewing like a cat’ was her speaking in what she thought was the grandmother’s voice. No evidence was presented to show that her account was not truthful.
How seriously should the allegations that Rachel was a danger to her daughter be taken? Ben Sacks is a professor of psychiatry who has acted as an expert witness in many court cases centring on the care of children. After reading the relevant documents, he said, ‘The reports submitted by the council in pursuit of its plan for Charlotte’s forcible adoption simply do not present any evidence to justify the removal of the child from her mother.... Dr Y, for instance, places great emphasis on a technique she terms “story stems” [in which the child under examination is asked to continue a story whose elements are given by the psychiatrist]. I know of no evidence showing that this technique has any validity at all. To me, the grounds put forward for taking this child away are wholly speculative. They consist in predictions of what might happen. They do not involve observations of actual harm.... I do not understand how a child can be separated from its mother when there is no evidence that the relationship is actually causing damage: there is only a prediction that it might be damaging in the future. This is like punishing someone for a crime they have not committed.’ Yet the eminently disputable claim of one psychiatric expert that Charlotte was being ‘emotionally damaged’ by her mother was enough to trigger the irrevocable step of permanently separating a child from her mother. Social services officials and officials of the family court system appear to take the view that since the legislation states that ‘the welfare of the child is paramount’, they are entitled to remove a child from his or her parents whenever they can find an expert willing to say that the child might do better elsewhere. That interpretation of the ‘welfare of the child’ would license the agents of the state to take at least half the population’s children away and place them elsewhere, for it is an inescapable mathematical truth that half the population does an average, or worse, job as parents.
How is it possible for judges to uphold applications for forcible adoption which seem to be based on so grotesque an interpretation of ‘the welfare of the child’? Such a procedure could surely not survive scrutiny if the public knew about it. The public, however, does not know about it. The courts which order forcible adoptions operate in secret. Legislation passed in 1960, and updated and confirmed by the Children’s Act of 1989, makes it an offence not merely to report the evidence presented to a court during an application for the forcible adop tion of a child, but also for any of those involved to pass on documents relating to such cases to any third party. Yet the first requirement for being able to remedy injustice or incompetence is being able to identify when it has happened — which is precisely what the veil of secrecy prevents.
There is no evidence from jurisdictions which have less draconian secrecy laws, such as Canada, Australia or the United States, that children’s interests are harmed as a consequence. The secrecy does protect experts, officials and ‘professionals’ from scrutiny and criticism. This has been justified on the grounds that psychiatric experts will be less willing to testify if their reports are liable to public scrutiny. It is of course true that every professional would rather that his or her opinions were not scrutinised in public for errors. That practice, however, has not led to the collapse of the criminal courts, nor has it resulted in a shortage of medical experts willing to testify in them. There is every reason to believe that, if expert testimony were subject to open scrutiny in the family division, the only effect would be to increase its reliability.
Because of the expert testimony in her case and the weight the judge accorded it, Rachel is unlikely to see Charlotte again until her daughter is 18. ‘I can’t think about that,’ she says. ‘I have to believe that somehow there is a way for me to get my baby back.’ There were more than 3,000 forcible adoptions in the year 2002–03. Most of them were contested. Rachel Drew’s case may or may not be exceptional — the secrecy surrounding the family courts means that nobody knows but it is certainly tragically unjust.
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