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28 December 2018
(Previously 1995 - October 1998 – 4 October 2006)
Child Prisons?
In Sweden?
By Siv
Westerberg
• • •
Siv
Westerberg has for many years been a practising lawyer in
Gothenburg, Sweden. She has several times proceeded against
the Swedish government at The European Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg, in cases concerning the rights of the
family, where she fights for clients attacked by the
Swedish child care authorities. An earlier version of this
article was published in the Swedish periodical
Medborgarrätt
(Civil Rights) no
2, 1995, and also
by the Nordic Committee for Human
Rights in October of 1998. The
present version was published
on Forum Redd Våre Barn
on 4 October
2006.
• • •
Psychiatric clinics for
children in Sweden today are largely a form of child
prisons. Children forcibly taken away from their parents
and into public care by the child care authorities are
locked in since the authorities, by observing the behaviour
of the child and its parents in this abnormal situation,
want to gather "evidence" to the effect that the child
should continue to be in the forcible custody of the
authorities - because of its own and its parents' "abnormal
behaviour".
As regards orphanages, it should be kept in mind that the
number of parentless (orphan) children in Sweden today is
very small due to the high average life span of parents.
The few orphans there are, almost always have close
relatives who are willing to take care of them.
Considerable improvement in the standard of living for
everybody and the possibilities of economic social support
have had as a result that there are hardly any children at
all in Sweden who have to be placed in orphanages because
the parents cannot afford to support their children. Today,
therefore, the orphanages have by and large the same
function as the child-psychiatric clinics.
In the dubious activity which the taking of children into
forcible public care is, the foster-homes constitute the
element most inaccessible of all to scrutiny. In this
field, private persons, with or without shady backgrounds,
carry out an economic activity, combined with direct
neglect and maltreatment of the children, which is unknown
to the majority of the Swedish population. It is, for
example, standard procedure that foster children of school
age are prevented from attending the obligatory school.
But examples from real life are more instructive than long
dissertations. With my clients' permission I therefore
place before you four cases from my law-practice in recent
years. All four concern the children of caring and normal
parents, none of them drug addicts or alcoholics. These
parents have also, through all the years of forced
separation from their children, fought untiringly in the
various courts of law to have their children back.
1)
Daniela Wollmar was nine years
old when the child care authorities took her forcibly into
care. Her mother, Kerstin Wollmar, is a teacher by
profession. Daniela's two grown-up half-siblings have
testified under oath before the courts to the effect that
they have had a good mother and that Daniela, too, has been
given every care and love by her mother.
Kerstin Wollmar fell out with her employer, the
municipality of Tidaholm, about her work as a teacher. The
municipality's "revenge" was the taking into public care of
Daniela, who was suddenly fetched one day from school and
taken to a child-psychiatric clinic. For three months she
was denied schooling. Then she was taken to an orphanage
where there are locks on the doors and where a "sluicing
system" prevents parents and others from entering. Here she
was kept for three years.
Daniela, who had previously attended a normal school, was
now placed in a school for retarded children. On the 2nd of
January 1995, in a transport strongly reminiscent of a
transport of prison convicts, she was taken to a
foster-home. The address was kept secret from her mother.
Again she was denied permission to go to school. The reason
given by the social authorities for this prohibition is
that they cannot keep the address of the foster-home secret
from the mother if Daniela goes to school. Daniela was
denied all contact with her mother or her sister and
brother. When the mother finally found out where the
daughter was, Daniela was sent back to the orphanage by the
foster-parents, who would not be in charge of her if the
mother was to know their address and perhaps get access to
Daniela and be able to look into what they were doing.
2)
Anne-Marie Paulsen-Medalen is
the single mother of two sons: Jan-Åke, born in 1986, and
Peter, born in 1984. In 1989 both boys were forcibly
transferred to the care of the child authorities. Peter is
handicapped and the authorities claimed that his mother was
unable to take care of him. In Jan-Åke's case the major
justification given for taking him into care was that the
authorities considered him to be seriously psychically
disturbed and that the mother was supposed to be the cause.
The authorities have refused to let him return to his
mother since they claim that he is still suffering from
these disturbances. His mother has never observed any
psychic abnormality in him; he was, on the contrary,
unusually alert and gifted, and he developed well in every
way. This was confirmed by his teachers, who said to the
mother and her lawyer that they, too, had never seen any
psychological abnormality in Jan-Åke; he was precisely like
other normal children. Anne-Marie Paulsen-Medalen then
called them as witnesses in court. Now the teachers changed
their tune, however. No doubt under pressure from the child
care authorities and perhaps from the school authorities,
who work in close contact with the child care authorities,
the teachers now stated that Jan-Åke had "psychological
problems".
Handicapped Peter was placed as a foster-child in a family
with four children, the foster-father working on the wharf
and the foster-mother working nights as a
nursing-assistant. The family had yet another foster child.
In addition to the usual foster-child payment, the
foster-mother received payment equal to full
nursing-assistant wages, in order that she should take
leave from her work and to concentrate on the handicapped
foster-child Peter. The social services did not know that
although the foster mother took leave from her night-work
at a hospital in Gothenburg, she immediately took another
job of the same kind at a hospital in Alingsås.
Anne-Marie Paulsen-Medalen understood that Peter was
seriously neglected and mistreated in the foster-home. He
had inexplicable blue marks on his body, and he cried and
begged his mother to be allowed to come home. Her criticism
was stifled by the social services with a threat of taking
her to court on a criminal charge if she continued to
investigate the deplorable conditions.
Her suspicions were confirmed when the police had to
intervene in the foster-home on a midsummer night so as to
stop the strongly intoxicated foster-father from killing
the equally intoxicated foster mother. It then emerged that
the social authorities have known all along that the
foster-father had had a serious alcohol problem for many
years.
The foster-parents separated. The social authorities have
continued to keep handicapped Peter under forced care with
the foster-mother, who, besides, is still working full time
at her job. When she separated from her husband, she had
her own four children and two foster-children to take care
of, and shortly after that, she also had to take care of a
baby, which her teen-age daughter was then expecting. She
has continued to work nights and has left the night care of
Peter to her 17-year-old daughter.
At one time during the forcible public custody of
Anne-Marie Paulsen-Medalen's two boys, the authorities had
both of them, then six and eight years old, placed in a
child-psychiatric clinic for observation and diagnosis.
During the three weeks of their stay in a closed ward, they
were allowed out of the house altogether six times.
The authorities claim that Peter is severely retarded. He
has been placed not in a school for retarded children but
in a so-called "training school", where not even an attempt
is made to teach him to read and write. His mother, as well
as several other people who have met him, hold a different
opinion, but no attempt is made by the authorities to
encourage the development of any capabilities that he may
have.
3) and 4)
Alexander Aminoff and Frans
Lovasz are two young men who in their childhood were under
the forcible custody of the child care authorities and were
placed in foster-homes in which they were exposed to
neglect and to physical abuse and were for long periods
denied schooling. Both were, after many years, able to flee
from foster-home life through dramatic escapes.
After reaching adulthood, they have both tried to take the
Swedish state to court claiming damages for the suffering
they went through in their foster-homes during the years of
forcible public care. Their cases have been denied
admissibility to the courts. Behind the diffusely
formulated decision of rejection, the reality seems to be:
Swedish courts consider that he who cannot, as an adult,
give precise information as to the day, time and place for
every beating by hand, rope or stick that he was subjected
to as a foster-child, cannot have his claim for
compensation examined by a Swedish court. One also discerns
a line of reasoning to the effect that the court cannot
understand how it can be grounds for compensation that a
child has been prevented from meeting his parents or has
been denied schooling.
Both Aminoff's and Lovasz's cases have also been denied
consideration by the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Must we conclude that the Court of Human Rights, along with
our Swedish state, considers a vast system of persecution
and harassment of families, carried out by our authorities
with great financial benefit accruing to every link in "the
system", to be in the best interest of children, while the
victim who seeks compensation is considered with contempt
and suspected of being greedy? When will European society
be told the real truth about the forcible care and
foster-home system?
*
The Paulsen-Medalen case was heard in The European Court of
Human Rights in Strasbourg on November 24, 1997. The ECHR
delivered its verdict in March 1998. The only 'crime' that
the Court found Sweden guilty of was that the Supreme
Administrative Court took two and a half (2 1/2) years to
hand down its decision not to review the care case. The
mother was awarded 10 000 SEK in damages ( ≈ € 1000).
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