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20 September
2017
(9 May 2012)
Suranya
Aiyar:
Understanding
and Responding to Child Confiscation by Social Service
Agencies
Part
1: Practices, Part 2: Ideology and Culture
Bias, Part 3:Next Steps
••
The article was first published
in Pravasi
Today,
on 9 May 2012. Pravasi
Today has later unfortunately ceased
publication and their website has been taken down.
Suranya Aiyar's article is re-published here
with the author's kind consent.
••
•••
Suranya Aiyar is a lawyer who participated in the agitation
for the release of the Bhattacharya children from foster
care in Norway. She has two children close in age to the
Bhattacharya children and has been writing on this case and
critiquing the approach of western social service agencies
to the child and the family.
•••
Part
1: Practices
One of the many
disturbing discoveries from the story of the Bhattacharya
children (Aishwarya and Abhigyan) who were taken into
foster care in Norway is that this was no anomaly. Social
services agencies functioning on the same principles as the
Norwegian Child Welfare Service (CWS) exist in many parts
of Europe, notably Sweden, the United Kingdom, Switzerland
and Germany, and also in the United States. So Indians
living abroad may be certain that the Bhattacharya case is
not the last of its kind.
The Scandinavian version of these social services seems
particularly aggressive. They have targeted foreigner
families, such as the Bhattacharyas. They have confiscated
much larger number of children as a proportion to their
populations than other countries in Europe. However, the
basic model of an autonomous agency of social service
bureaucrats with the power to permanently remove children
from their families exists in many other developed
countries in the West.
The power of these agencies to remove children from
families is not limited to extreme situations. Deficient
parental care or potential emotional harm to the child from
the personality of a parent meets the threshold for
exercise of this power. It is reported in the United
Kingdom that while statistics show the number of
applications from care workers for children to be removed
from their families has sharply risen in the last few
years, the number of times sexual or physical abuse has
been cited as a reason has declined and the number of times
other reasons such as “emotional abuse” or the “risk of
emotional harm” have been cited has increased.
The factors forming the basis for care workers’ negative
assessments of parental care or the well-being of the child
are not readily available. In surprising contrast to the
rules for accountability in the developed West for other
types of public bodies, the decisions of care workers are
screened from public scrutiny by strict confidentiality
laws.
Much of the available information on the basis on which
care workers adjudge deficient or abusive parenting or harm
to children is from affected families, journalists,
activists and lawyers whose accounts have not been
independently verified by this writer. But if these
accounts are true, then there is cause for grave concern.
It appears that it is common for negative assessments to be
made for reasons such as too few or too many toys in the
home; toys not being appropriate to a child’s age; the
ill-health of a parent; the home being too messy or too
tidy; and borderline personality disorder in a parent.
Activists inform us that a child sleeping in the same bed
as a parent is often used as a basis for a finding of
sexual abuse. One activist claims knowledge of cases where
the speed at which a child eats food in front of the care
worker is taken to indicate that it is a victim of incest.
Currently, “attachment disorders”, either too little or too
much emotional attachment of the child to the parent
(usually the mother), are a popular basis for care workers
to assess abuse or neglect. Care workers diagnose
attachment disorder even in very small babies, such as the
four-month old Aishwarya Bhattacharya. She was stated to
have emotional detachment from the mother based on the
claim that she would look away, rather than at, her mother.
Activists have informed us that care workers in other cases
have found excessive attachment to the mother based on the
claim that the baby was looking more at the mother than
elsewhere.
Attachment disorder is also diagnosed by care workers in
children whose behaviour could equally be explained by the
presence of disorders that are not necessarily caused by
parental mistreatment. The diagnosis by the Norwegian CWS
of attachment disorder in the elder Bhattacharya boy
(Abhigyan) is based on alleged symptoms that could be
caused by autism, such as head banging and poor language
skills. Lawyers familiar with CWS cases report that a large
number of children showing developmental disorders are
taken away from their parents as the CWS takes the
existence of such disorders as evidence of parental abuse
or neglect.
It is common for care workers to declare troubles in the
parents’ relationship as making the home unfit for children
and to demand that parents separate on pain of permanently
removing the children.
Information disclosed by the CWS in the Bhattacharya case
also provides some examples of the basis for negative
findings about parenting: for instance, the elder child was
stated to have emotional disconnect from the mother based
on the fact that he wriggled out of her arms when she held
him in front of the care workers. Allegations against the
mother’s mental competence were made on the basis that she
appeared confused and flustered around the care workers and
that she shouted when the police confiscated her children.
In some jurisdictions, the care worker does not need a
court order to take the child away. In such cases, the care
worker is not even required to give prior notice to the
families before confiscating their children, even where
there is no emergency. For instance, in the Bhattacharya
case, the Norwegian care workers took the four-month old
from the mother on the pretext of taking the baby out for a
walk, and the elder boy was picked up from kindergarten.
Even when these cases go to court, none of the evidence and
reports based on which care workers claim parental neglect,
abuse and the like are subjected to the level of scrutiny
of a criminal trial. Evidence of the care workers is
effectively treated as expert, even though they act to all
intents and purposes as adversaries of the parents. In some
cases, parents have claimed that they are not even given
copies of the evidence and psychologists' reports submitted
by the social services against them.
How things came to such a pass is anyone’s guess. Part of
the explanation lies in bureaucratic overreach and
overzealousness. Part may lie in the general expectation
that it is the responsibility of social services to prevent
incidents of abuse within the family. In many of the
countries that have this sort of social service agency,
there is a history of cases of child abuse or battery
hitting the news followed by public outrage against the
social services for failing to prevent such cases. Social
service agencies appear to have responded by lowering the
threshold of harm or risk to the child that justifies
taking them into care. Part of the explanation may also lie
in corruption – in some countries foster carers and
psychologists are well-paid for their participation in the
care system and the opportunities for abuse of the system
are clearly present.
Part
2: Ideology and Culture Bias
The questionable
basis on which parental abuse or neglect is found to exist
by social service agencies is not the worst thing about
them. The more dangerous problem is the understanding of
the child and the family on which these agencies operate.
At the core of this institutionalised response to troubled
families in the form of removing the child is the false
dichotomy between the welfare of the child on the one hand
and its growing up with its parents on the other. It is the
equivalent of bombing a city to get rid of a virus.
The approach to child welfare as a question of care
divorced from family (even when preferring the “healthy”
family as the best place for the child) is apparent in the
statements of CWS officials to the Indian press in
justification of the permanent foster care order against
the Bhattacharya children. One official stated to The Hindu
(a well-known Indian English daily) that it must be
understood that Sagarika Bhattacharya may be a loving
mother without being a good carer. The Norwegian ombudsmen
for child-related matters explained on television that the
remit of the child welfare officials was to consider the
interest of the child and that the interest of the adults
would not be allowed to stand in the way of that of the
child. Presumably, the reference to “adults” was to the
parents or other adult family members willing to take over
care of the child.
It is on these first principles that matters have gone so
badly off track. The raising of the child by parents or
extended family is wrongly framed as a matter that pertains
to the interest of the adult family member as opposed to
the interest of the child. It is emphatically in the
interest of the child, no less than that of its parents,
for the child to grow up in its family where the family are
willing, and in the case of scores of families torn apart
by these agencies, begging to be allowed to do so.
While parents may be imperfect, leading to home conditions
that are far from ideal, it is unjust and cruel for the
child in such a situation to be consigned to a joyless
existence in a care institution or spend its childhood
circulating through different foster homes or to be put up
for adoption when its parents are willing to care for the
child. To say that a child suffers when the mother is
depressed or unaffectionate is one thing, but to say that
children should be separated for good from such mothers is
quite another. If being with family is understood, as it
should be, as part of a child’s welfare, then intervention
will never be in the form of separation but in the form of
helping parents and other family care givers to surmount
their own difficulties to become better care givers. It may
well be that dysfunctional parents often do not improve.
But this has wrongly been taken as a justification to
prefer separation over assistance for troubled families.
The Hindu has reported that the Norwegian CWS takes the
view that it is better to remove children from parents seen
to be dysfunctional as it is cumbersome, expensive and may
in the end be futile, to wait for such parents to improve.
This kind of thinking has to be comprehensively rejected.
No doubt a good family environment is best for children,
but they certainly do not deserve to be orphaned by the
State for the sins of their parents.
To the uninitiated, stories of care workers taking children
away from parents conjure up images of children being saved
from murderous or incestuous parents. But the reality in a
vast number of cases is quite different. Readers may recall
the description of both Bhattacharya parents of how
Abhigyan used to clutch at his father’s shirt when being
taken away by care workers to the foster home after the few
hours’ meetings that the parents were allowed with the
children when they were first taken away. Christopher
Booker, a veteran British journalist who has worked
extensively on these issues (and who has historical and
present family connections to India) describes this tragedy
movingly in a recent publication: “the only contact the
accused parents and their unhappy children are allowed with
each other is in brief, rigorously supervised ‘contact
sessions’ staged in grim council ‘contact centres’. Even
these are likely to be brusquely terminated if any sign of
affection is shown, or if a bewildered child dares to ask
its parents for an explanation of why all this is
happening.”
Norwegian activists who have been campaigning against the
CWS for years say that the natural upset of children at
these contact session has often been used by the CWS to
cancel parental visits altogether. Affected parents have
reported that the child’s confusion at the parents no
longer being with it is manipulated by care workers and
foster carers to alienate the children from their families.
For children unfortunate enough to be subjected to sexual
abuse or battery from their parents, the criminal justice
system must step in to punish or remove the responsible
parent. In such cases, provision needs to be made for the
rehabilitation of other family members, including the
children. But the current system of making child welfare
officers, who are not subject to the checks of the criminal
justice system, responsible for identifying and then
redressing abuse by removing children from their families
is entirely wrong. The present state of affairs that has
care workers ordering parents with problems to separate in
order for the children to stay with one or other of them is
unworkable and absurd. Engineering such forced separations
is immoral and dangerous for all the reasons that forced
marriages are immoral and dangerous.
Cultural bias is prevalent in both the ideology and the
practices of these child welfare regimes. The attenuation
of family ties, the suspicion of moral claims based on
biology or race (such as the right to one’s natural family
or to the culture of one’s birth), popular pop-Freudian
notions of the family as a dark and dangerous place; all
this forms the fertile matter in which the ideology of the
child welfare agencies of isolating child welfare from
family has germinated and grown. Whether we agree or
disagree with the importance of family, what has to be made
clear in the debate is that each position is located in
profoundly cultural place.
Cultural bias also informs many of the assessments made by
care workers when investigating families. In Norway, it is
reported that immigrant communities are disproportionately
targeted by the CWS. In the Bhattacharya case, the fact
that the mother fed the younger baby whenever she cried and
had not put her on a routine (which is common in South
Asian communities) was held against her. The scheduled baby
that eats and sleeps to fixed timings is something of a
sacred cow in the West. The care worker’s complaints about
the father not giving priority to the family and spending
too much time at work could perhaps be made of any Asian
family. The strict view on slapping is heavy with cultural
baggage. So is the sniffiness at “force feeding” and
sleeping in the same bed.
It is not that these practices are not found in non-Asian
households. They are, but it is not the norm and state
sponsored websites on baby care, popular baby care books
and literature accompanying baby equipment are filled with
warnings about suffocation dangers from “co-sleeping”,
injunctions against force feeding and methods for putting
babies on a fixed schedule of eating and sleeping. It is
interesting that while most Westerners would be quite
firmly against the smacking of children by parents, most
would not see as cruel or neglectful practices such as
sleep training, where infants as young as a few weeks old
are left to “cry it out” in their cots to learn to go to
sleep independently.
It should be mentioned here that there is a following in
the West of baby rearing practices based on the so-called
“attachment” principle. Attachment rearing rejects
routines, sleep-training and schedule-forming practices.
Instead it directs parents to “wear” their babies, to feed
them “on demand”, to rock them to sleep and so on.
Superficially this looks like the opposite of the
independent-baby practices preferred by care workers. But
even here, we have keep our eyes wide open to the full
picture. Attachment rearing texts also tend to have the
same “how-to” approach as the independent baby texts. All
the wearing, rocking and feeding are presented as the
answers to “how to” cure colicky crying, get the baby to
eat well or sleep comfortably. In this aspect they are
identical to independent baby practices which are also “how
to” – how to get the baby to stop crying and start
“behaving”. On the other hand, the common Indian view (and
I dare say other Asians would have the same) is that it is
in the nature of babies to cry, often inexplicably; to eat,
wake and sleep at odd times, for toddlers to be very
naughty indeed and for a whole lot of loving and scolding
to be the basic lesson of parenting. This is not to say
that many Westerners do not have the same approach. But if
we are to engage governments and the Western public on the
ideology and culture bias of social services agencies, then
we have to identify and concentrate the cultural polarities
in different approaches to baby and child care.
Part
3: Next Steps
The first step
for Indians living abroad is to spread awareness of the
practices and thinking of child welfare agencies. It would
be useful to make contact with other immigrant communities
and learn from their experiences with these agencies.
Building of awareness is required not just among
non-resident Indians (NRIs), but also in India, so that in
future there is a deeper understanding of the context in
which such cases of child confiscation occur. NRI
communities should also gather names of lawyers, child
specialists, journalists and activists who can be of
assistance to persons targeted by child welfare agencies.
The next step abroad is to oppose the ideology of these
child welfare agencies and to expose the biases and
inequities in their functioning. NRI communities should
also explore what recourse persons who are wrongfully
targeted by child welfare services in Europe and the United
States may have before international human rights
tribunals.
Back in India, the Indian Government should be petitioned
to institute formal response mechanisms in Indian embassies
and consulates, as well as in the Government at home, to
assist Indian families that are caught up in the child
welfare system. There also has to be further work a
comprehensive legal basis and action plan for intervention
by the Indian Government in future such cases.
Having been brought in quite late in the day in the
Bhattacharya case, several months after the permanent
foster care order was passed, there was perhaps little
option but to accept the Norwegian terms that custody of
the children be given to their uncle for their return to
India.
But this must not be treated as a model response for future
cases. The solution forced on everyone by the Norwegian
authorities in the Bhattacharya case had the effect of
ousting the parental rights of Indian citizens and of
ratifying the CWS’s assessment of both the parents and the
children. In cases where all family members are Indian
citizens, the Indian Government should be persuaded to draw
up a legal basis for intervention that will protect the
family from separation and permit the parents, as Indian
citizens, to have their rights adjudicated in accordance
with Indian law (although women should be warned that the
father’s rights are much stronger than those of the mother
in Indian family law). For this to be practicable and to
limit complications under international law, it is key for
intervention of the Indian Government to be sought and made
as early as possible in such cases.
Intervention by the Indian Government in cases where all
family members are not Indian is somewhat complicated. But
even so, the Indian Government should be persuaded to take
a stand against the ideology and practices of child welfare
services of the Norwegian variety as a humanitarian issue.
It would be useful for NRI communities to sound out other
immigrant communities in this regard. There is likely to be
much interest. Certainly, as against the Norwegian CWS,
there appears to be considerable opposition in Poland and
Russia.
We must take head on the wider issues raised by the
Bhattacharya case about the thinking and practices of child
welfare agencies in the developed West. Behind a veil of
secrecy and dressed up in the finery of a welfare
institution, these agencies are pursuing a course of utmost
cruelty and inhumanity. We must speak out against them the
strongest terms.
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