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Marianne
Haslev Skånland:
Dr
Mengele & Co in action in Norwegian
homes?
August
2011 (Norwegian edition 1995)
*****
This article was
originally published in Norwegian and Swedish in 1995, at
the time of celebration of the liberation of Norway after
the second world war. It appeared in the Norwegian
newspapers
Dagen and
Kvinnheringen. It was also
printed in
Fremskritt, the periodical
of the political party Fremskrittspartiet, two of whose
parliamentary representatives had at that time proposed
legislation to try to improve the standard of the Norwegian
public child protection services. The Swedish version
appeared in the periodical
Medborgarrätt of the Swedish
civil rights movement Medborgarrëttsrörelsen.
Internet versions in Norwegian and
Swedish have been published on the sites
barnasrett.no,
nkmr.org,
mhskanland.net, and can
also be found on other websites concerned with the
negative effects of social service activities.
The treatment of children and parents by the social
services and by the court system has not improved since
1995, rather the contrary. Seminars and committee
activities, statistics and research design, are very much
the same as the examples described from the early
nineteen-nineties. The essentials being the same, no
revision of the article seemed called for in the
translation and only a few details have been changed.
Marianne Haslev Skånland has worked as a professor of
linguistics at the University of Bergen, Norway, and is now
retired. She is engaged in social questions concerning
human rights and health, and is especially interested in
the question of the scientific basis for the views of
psychology and social life favoured by the social
authorities and the judicial system.
*****
It is no longer possible to avoid
seeing the similarity between the public child care system
of our Norwegian social authorities (CPS, the child
protection services) and the Nazi SS, the KGB of the Soviet
Union, and the Inquisition a few centuries ago.
In the spring of 1995, Norway
celebrated the 50th anniversary of our liberation from the
Nazi yoke. We all said, with emotional fervour: Never must
we let this happen again. We particularly react against the
concentration camps and everything regarding the treatment
of, among others, the Jews, which for instance took place
in the following manner: First, the Jews were deprived of
all their money and property. Then, those able to work were
made use of as slave labourers in German industry. Finally,
when they were killed, their remains were utilised to make
products such as soap and lamp-shades. But before they were
killed they could also serve as guinea pigs in medical
experiments which could not be perfomed on free
individuals. The experiments were usually very painful and
harmful, or they could be aimed at investigating how the
subjects of the experiments reacted, physically and
mentally, to torture, to being told that they were to be
executed, and so on. These experiments were carried out by
"scientists", with Dr Josef Mengele in the forefront.
A parallel to such "resource
utilisation" was openly called for by the county
administration of Hordaland on the west coast of Norway
("Hordaland fylkeskommune") in the summer of 1995. The
county hosted "The 9th International Foster Home
Conference". The title of the conference was "Building
Bridges" and the programme posed seemingly touching
questions such as: "How can parents be a resource in foster
home care – both to the children, to the foster parents and
to the professional helpers?" and "[the question of] the
use – or lack of use – of the media by care workers in
order to bring the voice of the children out into society".
In plain text: The child victims
are not to be allowed to go home to their parents, the
adult victims are to serve their own and their children's
tormentors. The real reason for the abduction of children
by the child protection services does not lie in
circumstances concerning parents or children, it is found
in the need of CPS social workers and clinical
psychologists for jobs and power. The taking-into-care
business is an incomparable financial drain, a waste of
several billion crowns on totally useless – even positively
destructive – activities. The actions of the CPS are paid
by society, by all of us. But in addition, the victims are
often brought to ruin trying to get efficient help from
lawyers and independent expert witness assessments in their
quite lonely fight against the terrorising CPS. Because the
CPS keeps the children hostage in institutions and foster
homes, the parents cannot effectively protect themselves
and their children against the "resource utilisation".
In practice, parents are deprived
of their statutory freedom of speech, their right to
criticise the authorites, because the CPS – and the courts!
– threaten them and punish them and their children if they
publish in the media or in other ways make public the abuse
of their families carried out by the social services. While
parents are muzzled, the county administration of
Hordaland, on the other hand, at the above-mentioned
conference made considerable and open propaganda for the
use of the media by the CPS to promote their own interest
and that of foster homes, even on the pretext of
representing "the voice of the children"! And sure enough:
newspaper coverage of the conference presented foster homes
and child protection in the way these goups wanted – a pure
beautification of idyllic harmony. I am reminded of the Red
Cross paying a planned visit to the concentration camp
Theresienstadt, on which visit the SS presented a pretty
facade for the occasion. The Red Cross predictably saw
nothing much wrong with the conditions for the Jews there.
Furthermore, the Norwegian Ministry
of Child and Family Affairs (the name in 1995 of the
government department concerned) now intends to spend 3-4
million on propaganda for foster homes, since they do not
have enough of them (one would hope that the reason for
this shortage was that decent people are beginning to wake
up and understand that they should not enroll as minions of
an organisation which is out of all ethical control, a
regime that has developed into a pure harm-doer). I am
perhaps not alone in remembering the meeting in which the
SS planned the organisation of the "final solution"?
Norwegian child protection services arrange such strategy
meetings endlessly; they are called "seminars",
"conferences" and "supplementary training courses".
Such behaviour on the part of the
social authorities is not new in Norway. During many
decades our "Taters" (a travelling population resembling
gypsies) were interned in work camps and threatened: if
they left, their children would be taken from them.
However, the children could be taken anyway and the victims
both sterilised and lobotomised. Long after the 2nd world
war these atrocities against the Taters have continued. A
man of Tater family made a statement in 1995 which
Norwegians should take more seriously. It appeared on the
news a few days before the celebration of liberation day
the 8th of May. He said something like this: "No, we want
no liberation celebration of the freedom hero Dr
Scharffenberg. He headed the abuse of Norwegian Taters,
which were carried out so that Dr Scharffenberg should be
able to practice his 'theories'. Many of us are still
despairingly searching for our families."
The atrocities against the Taters
have now been extended to the general population. As in the
Soviet Union under Stalin just anybody, randomly, can be
subject to house search, unremitting interrogation and
sustained monitoring over years, forced "treatment for
non-existing mental illness, and of course deportation of
the children. It serves us right, though, to have our
society destroyed in this way, we who let it happen to the
Taters. Norwegians are not at all especially freedom
loving! We let ourselves be impressed by authority and
indoctrination just like other nations, in the way, for
instance, of large numbers of Germans who could not, or
would not, believe in the existence of the concentration
camps.
Among the endless series of
frightening aspects shown by the conduct of our child
protection services, another detail deserves a mention: Her
in Bergen the CPS has lauched a so-called "Orion Project"
(known generally as Marte Meo). It consists in the CPS
again forcing their way into peoples' homes, this time to
capture on film the unhappy parents whose children they
have taken or threaten to take away, in their daily tasks
in the home and e.g in their "interaction" with the
children. The purpose is said to be to study them
psychologically and "show the parents what they do wrong".
If the parents refuse this "help", they are said to be
extra unfit to have anything to do with their children. I
know, for instance, of a young mother staying at Bergen
Mødrehjem ("Bergen Home for Mothers") – en institution
under CPS supposed to help mothers in a difficult
situation. This young mother refused to let herself be
filmed by the Orion Project, was thrown out from the
Mothers' Home with her child, and was therefore in fact put
on the street because she had no other place to go.
When we are to assess such an
action, we would do well to note what kind of proof, about
home and parents, is considered by the CPS to be relevant
and is in fact brought as evidence by them in court cases,
evidence for "negligence", "lack of care" and "harm to the
child's mental health": the mother "is clumby with the tin
opener"; she "uses too much washing powder"; the clothes
"do not lie in military order in the closets; the mother
"cuts the bread into too thick slices"; the father "seems
stressed when the child protection services are present";
the child "eats her food so quickly that she must have been
subject to incest"; the child "eats so slowly and
reluctantly that it must be the victim of incest"; the
mother "does not stimulate the child verbally in the
food-situation"; "when the child fell over on the floor,
the mother only help her up withour comforting her
verbally"; the mother and a twelve year old son "eat when
they are hungry and not at set times every day"; the
parents "do not notice the needs of the child"; the parents
"are concerned with the child all the time and overprotect
it"; the mother "will not let us into her private life and
therefore gives us reason to strongly suspect that she has
something to hide".
I suggest we say that the real reason for
such projects is the ever present zeal for remunerative
activities, plus their insatiable desire to poke their
noses into everything everywhere, with their voyeur's lust
for "research" and control of all and sundry, such always
being the need of power-lovers. It seems to me that the
Orion Project is Josef Mengele in a new version. In Germany
it was at least over after something like twelve years. In
the Soviet Union it took seventy.
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Some relevant
articles:
---------------------------
Marianne Haslev Skånland:
Human Rights in Norway – as Low as they
can Go
Siv Westerberg:
Child Prisons? In
Sweden?
Siv Westerberg:
The Folly of Sweden's State Controlled
Families
Siv Westerberg:
Foster-children as lucrative
business
Johansen v. Norway
The European Court of Human
Rights
Critical comments to Norway's fourth
periodic report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the
Child – 2008
Letter to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
Eric Brodin:
Limiting the Rights of Attorneys and
Denying the Right to Counsel
Arild Holta:
Letter to Amnesty
Marianne Haslev Skånland:
The attitude of social professions
involved in the child protection
sector
Germund Hesslow:
The Dangers of the Therapeutic
Culture
Article Archives,
NCHR
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