Council
must pay £500,000 for wrongly taking girl into care
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,,1732966,00.html
Guardian
- 17th March 2006
A couple
had their family life torn apart when social workers wrongly took
their nine-year-old daughter into emergency care without good reason
and kept her from her parents for 14 months, a high court judge
said yesterday.
Mr Justice
McFarlane castigated the social workers for "multiple failings"
and criticised the family court magistrates who had granted the
emergency order. The costs of the case, payable from public funds,
were £500,000, including the parents' legal aid costs of £200,000,
which the judge ordered the local council to pay. The judge took
the unusual step of making his judgment public after a hearing behind
closed doors, although the family, the local authority and the magistrates
court are all unnamed.
He laid
down guidelines to prevent future miscarriages of justice which
are certain to lead social services departments and magistrates
courts to re-examine their practices. He said it gave him "absolutely
no pleasure to have to record the multiple failings of the local
authority in this case".
But to do
so was "necessary not only in order to come to a conclusion
on the issues in this case, but also in order that lessons may be
learned for the future".
He said
the girl's mother had sought the help of social services and child
health services because her daughter, the couple's only child, was
displaying some "modest behavioural difficulties".
Mother and
daughter had been referred to the child guidance unit for psychotherapy
and the girl had been put on the local child protection register.
The notes
of a social services planning meeting read: "No neglect issues.
Home and care good. Mother and child have good relationship. Detrimental
to move."
But social
workers suspected it was a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy
- now called fabricated or induced illness (FII) -a rare form of
child abuse in which a mother or carer makes a child ill or fakes
illness to get attention. At the end of a case conference on the
girl in November 2004, social services received a phone call from
a nurse at the local hospital.
They were
told that the mother had taken the girl there with stomach pains
and was asking to see a doctor after the nurse found nothing wrong.
Within hours and without any information from the doctor, social
workers were at the magistrates court seeking an emergency protection
order allowing the girl to be taken from her parents immediately.
They acted
without telling the parents and without seeking any medical opinion
to try to confirm their suspicions. The girl had had medical treatment
before and no doctor had suggested fabricated illness.
The council's
actions were described by the mother's counsel as "outrageous"
and "inexcusable" leading, as it did, to "the destruction
of this family's ordinary life".
Those descriptions
"do not, in my view, overstate the quality of what took place
on that day", the judge said. The social services team leader,
who had no detailed knowledge of the case, made 13 assertions to
the magistrates, of which every one was "misleading or incomplete
or wrong".
He ruled
that the council had no case to take the girl into care and made
her a ward of court "to facilitate the child's return home".
Justice
McFarlane Judgement 16th March 2006
Innocent
but presumed guilty 13th January 2006
