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1 October 2017
Morten Ørsal
Johansen:
Norwegian
child protection Barnevernet (CWS), a state within the
state?
••
Morten Ørsal Johansen
has been a
member of the Norwegian parliament Stortinget for 8
years, representing Oppland County, and was re-elected
on 11 September 2017 for a third term.
This article was first published in Norwegian with the
title
Barnevernet, en stat i staten?, on 6 September
2017,
in the newspaper
GD
(Gudbrandsdølen
Dagningen), a regional
newspaper based in Lillehammer in the county of Oppland.
The article is published here with
the kind permission of the author. It has also been
published
in the Sunday
Guardian, based in
India, under the title
Norway's child-confiscation policies are disastrous,
unjust on 30 September
2017.
••
Barnevernet, the Norwegian
Child Welfare Services (CWS), do not remove children from
their parents for no reason, or do they? I have to admit
that I myself have been among those who thought that
there must
be a very good
reason behind their taking children into care. The first
thing you think of is that probably, the parents have
subjected their children to violence, or to neglect, there
are drug or alcohol problems in the family or they have in
some other way exposed the children to serious neglect. In
the course of my political life I have obtained thorough
insight into Barnevernet and close contact with many of the
families who are affected by the agency. I will go as far
as to say they have been struck by disaster.
Here in Oppland county I have got to know cases, have seen
documents, and have heard recordings, which have made me
wonder what kind of establishment the CWS are, what kind of
people work there, what kind of municipalities let the CWS
charge ahead in the way they want to do.
I was a witness in a case before the County Committee, the
tribunal that oversees CWS cases. That was when it really
became clear to me how erroneous this system is. Thirteen
witnesses were heard, from the CWS, from the service for
Child and Youth Psychiatry, the school, the health nurse, a
mandated expert, and the family. Lillehammer CWS were alone
in going for taking into care, the other twelve witnesses
were against. The decision of the County Committee was that
the child was to be taken into care!
In the municipality of Gran, the children of a family were
taken, without warning, from the school and the
kindergarten, while the parents were fetched from their
jobs by the police. The cause was that an adult had
reported a worry to the CWS,
four months earlier (!), when she had
heard one of the children say that their daddy gets just as
angry as the father in the story and film "Emil i
Lønneberget".
The most suspect and frustrating of all in child protection
cases I hold to be the absence of any requirement of proof,
of stated and reasoned cause, or of concrete answers.
Allegations are made without any form of documentation,
just expressions like "we think" and "our assessment". The
County Committees accept vague, undefined claims and
arguments and do not demand anything in the way of quality
control and concrete justification for the CWS's
conclusions. I have lost count of how many times I have
read, and heard, that the answer of the CWS to questions is
that there has been a "professional assessment based on
child expertise", an undefinable phrase which even the
Ministry of Children and Equality says does not give a
concrete explanation of anything at all. Or the proposed
measures are said to "have been assessed to be in the best
interest of the child". It is never revealed what these
"assessments" consist of, what the background for the
"assessments" is, and which concrete points constitute the
basis of the assessments.
I know an extremely high number of examples of how
representatives of the CWS act. They have in my view become
a state within the state, they do not act according to
existing laws and rules. It seems to me that they have one
goal only: as many children as possible taken into care.
This is not how the CWS should work.
It has also come to my knowledge that a municipal head
administrator, with the mayor present, has said that the
municipality does not have the resources for long term
assistance and that taking children into care is therefore
cheaper, since a lot of the expense is then covered by the
state. It makes me somewhat upset.
In the
autumn of last year, the CWS of Østre Toten municipality
had four employees guarding the entrance to a house for
seven hours, with the help of two police patrols. The
reason was that the people living there knew a mother whose
son had escaped from a foster home. No wonder Barnevernet
in our Norwegian municipalities cost the tax payers
billions every year when we see what resources they have
access to. I also question the uncritical cooperation of
the police in that kind of task, and their use of resources
when they are able to man the driveway of a house for
hours, on the day after a killing had taken place in the
same municipality.
The CWS in Land
municipality have been discussed in the media, with their
89% violations of the law. The County Governor's report
revealed transgressions, serious errors and deficiencies.
In my experience, matters have not improved in Land. I know
of a child protection case which was before the County
Committee for Social Affairs this summer. The proceedings
were broken off by the Committee leader because Land CWS
did not have sufficiently much of a case. But the CWS
refuse to drop the case and were granted a deferment, so
now they are working to strengthen their arguments for
having the children taken into care.
Furthermore, I have listened to a recording from a meeting
at Valdres CWS, in which a social worker says straight out
that they do not try to return children to the parents.
Being asked to stick to the paragraph of the law requiring
them to work for return, the social worker says that "we
know the law, but it is not complied with by us". The same
case worker has also stated that "the child protection law
is only a guide".
The Child Welfare Services need a proper clean up. Since I
have just been shown trust by the voters re-electing me to
Stortinget (Parliament), I will spend a lot of time on this
in the coming period.
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