I think enryk feels "saturated":


I plead guilty! I have a number of bad character qualities and one of them is that I write way too long tirades, and mine are of course among the longest here. But it's too late in my life now to change noticeably. So please forgive! After all, one of the advantages of the internet is that what we write does not disappear with yesterday's newspaper – people who need info can search and find it long after. Those of us who try to collect and spread information about CPS madness see it as if we are a tiny wolf-pack laying down a trail, available for others to follow if they want. There are many who are struck down by the CPS all the time and who want allies and information.

Regards from Marianne
  

  

No no, I wasn't offended and I didn't interpret it as harsh at all. Besides, even if I had I wouldn't exactly have shrivelled; criticising the CPS (child protection services) as I have done for many years, I expect – and frequently get – real "comments" about my "irrelevancy".

Actually, the political aspects of the CPS questions are interesting but somewhat unusual, and dyalldough is right:


It is just that the politics of it does not boil down to quite the usual alternatives. Certainly, some CPS ideology is in accord with socialistic thinking, and probably a very large majority of social workers here in Norway vote for socialistic parties. But the conservative and more or less liberal (in the European sense of the word) parties in our parliament are just as strong supporters of the CPS, and the sections of the population voting for them are the same, they just dress up their attitudes differently. All of them are completely superficial and avoid looking into what is actually going on. Conservatives believe that the CPS "fixes" criminal youngsters and parents, the Christian People's Party believe that parents attacked by the CPS are inevitably "bad" parents, the party Venstre ("Left", who call themselves social-liberal) have top politicians whose families are heavily into foster home activities, country communities with sympathy for the Centre Party (previously called Farmers' Party) do considerable business in taking foster children.

The only people in politics who take / have taken a principled stand against this destruction of families have been single individuals, usually in tiny, peripheral parties.

 
Yes, that is quite right, but it is not the basic reason, just a "business opportunity" which these people see once it is there. So it is a money machine but it doesn't matter that some of it is private enterprise. The state-run foster places and other things established in connection with it are just as bad and the ideology is the same.


Absolutely right! You have to add some other countries as well, though. Here are some links to articles (don't worry, they are in English) about Slovaks running into British child 'protection':
Protester i Storbritannia, og Slovakia har suksess (Protests in Britain, and Slovakia is successful)
And this site about the USA, which was posted in this thread recently, is illuminating:
Medical Kidnap

This whole way of "protecting" children is a plague. The Western countries are hard hit, probably because they are "educating" too many social workers and psychologists, but it is spreading, through ideology about what constitutes a good society and a good life.

 

  

  

Yes, I know, I wasn't trying to turn it into some political question when I wrote "Russia / Chechniya", quite the contrary. I think I might perhaps have written in the same way about Kamchatka, for that matter. Rather, I feel that regardless of what we think of all sorts of in themselves important questions in life, regarding child protection the central point is: Children need to be with THEIR OWN parents or other close relatives if AT ALL possible, in all kinds of societies.

Do not misunderstand me, folks: It is NOT possible if the parents ill-treat or abuse the child and cannot be trusted to stop.

In this case I agree that Astahov's hand is important and can only be positive.

*


All the better if so, but not even that is the most decisive thing. – I remember a case about 20 years ago, it was something like this:

Some Cubans, a mother with a small son, got into a boat and headed for Miami, as refugees . The boat capsized and the boy was the only survivor. He was rescued by the American coast-guard and brought to some distant relatives of his in Miami. His father and mother had been divorced. The father had not objected to his son going with the mother, but now he of course wanted his son to return to himself. There was a lot of hullabaloo in Florida, which has a large community of Cubans hostile to communist Cuba, saying the boy must not be "victimised" by Cuba and "forced" to go back; the boy's relatives claimed to love him so very deeply (after having known him for a few weeks or even just a few days) that they could not do without him. Quite materialistic arguments (actually quite like a communistic way of thinking, Nemo?) about life and politics being so much better in the USA were very prominent - so many people shouting at the top of their lungs about how terrible it would be if the boy was going to go back to Cuba, that his father in Cuba was very poor, and his mother having wanted him to go to the USA, and Cuba being the big bad Satan.
    Cuba was not too fond of people escaping to the USA but they allowed the father to go peacefully and try to get his son back (the father was not an oppositional and it was positive advertisement for Cuba). The American social authorities kept him there for some little time, I think with the usual mumbo-jumbo which we know so well: they had to see whether the boy "could get used to him" etc. It ended with father and son going back to Cuba. – Which I think must have been the best thing. Even if the boy had not been living with his father before but with his mother, neither the political conditions nor a modest economic standard (as long as neither was an absolute, life-threatening disaster) should trump the principle of the boy being with his own parent.

The importance of the parent-child bond is what social services are taught to disrespect and forget, and so that is what we have to work to have reinstated.
    

  
The physical consequences of physical punishment vary, but especially hitting or smacking anywhere around the head may lead to serious injuries, loss of hearing, dislodged neck, death. For one thing, adults often do not have good judgment of the strength they apply.

The emotional consequences also seem to vary a lot, on an individual basis as well as depending on the cultural climate surrounding the child. Certainly nobody other than the child's own parents should be permitted to use physical discipline. There is a lot of horrible evidence from boarding schools etc.

This question of physical discipline in bringing up children was central in a court case in Sweden, against Malaysian parents (physical punishment of children is a criminal offence in Sweden (as also here in Norway)). The couple were found guilty and were given fairly hard prison sentences. Through their detainment, the court case and subsequently there was a lot of writing about it in Malaysia, people arguing for and against physical punishment of children.  

Personally I do not think spanking or hitting children is a good thing at all, the drawbacks are unforseeable and too serious. But one particular internet posting in that debate, from one Roslina Abu Bakar, made me smile; you can view it here! :

http://forum.r-b-v.net/viewtopic.php?p=34346#p34346

  

  

We know more about this story. I can't guarantee to remember correctly every detail, but it is possible to locate it in various articles.

Both parents are originally from Chechniya. The father and mother were divorced, both living in Norway. The father ran a business here. The father was/is married again, this time too to a Chechen woman, I think. They had two younger children.

The CPS took the two older children, two girls, and placed them in a foster home. When the CPS started their actions, the father's new wife and their children very wisely went back to Chechniya. The CPS were very angry about this, they had of course planned to take those children also. The father, with some help, got hold of the two older children and succeeded in bringing them to Russia / Chechniya, and he went there himself. The CPS tried to get the girls' mother to make trouble and demand they be taken back to Norway since she was here. A warrant was out for the father.

The father a little later made a statement that he would come back to Norway with the daughters if the CPS would give him a solemn promise never to do this - meaning take them away - again.

This is as naïve and stubborn as can be - he should have informed himself of realities and known better: The CPS can never make such a promise, by legislation they have no right to promise never to take a child. On the contrary, they are obliged by law to take a child if they 'suspect' or know that the child is in the need of …… (you know all the nice-sounding words - - -). And if the CPS in this case had said, in a sort of half-baked promise, that at the moment there was no occasion to take the girls again, that would not be binding, and at the same time there would be an uproar in CPS circles and the ministry and all sorts of places, because: how could a CPS office say that girls who were in their care and who were 'abducted' by their father (who had already been found to be unsuited/dangerous), were suddenly not in need of CPS care? That would be to admit that there was no need for the CPS at all.

In other words, the father spoke as if he believed that the local CPS office had done something a bit silly, which they would be suitably ashamed of, like naughty children, when he 'corrected' them.

Well, anyway, the CPS said nothing of the sort. The father meanwhile had financial trouble because he was not in Norway taking care of his business together with his business partner. So one day he returned to Norway in order to work, thinking that he could do it undisturbed. The girls were left in Chechniya, together with their younger siblings and their step-mother, I think.

And of course the father was arrested and put in jail pending trial as soon as he arrived.
I haven't gone after the story after that, so I don't know if there actually was a court case and, if so, what the outcome was. One gets quite exhausted at all these people (there have actually been many) who manage to save their children and then they think that they can come back after a while and nothing will happen? As if they have just had an innocent disagreement with the CPS, and the CPS would have simmered down now and realised that they had been overly dramatic and now they would be sensible and listen to the parents and let themselves be guided by the parents.

I admit I lost interest in the Chechen father. Many of these families even bring their children back with them. They think they can start afresh, after some months or a couple of years. Hah! I remember a parent or two who used to ring me up and sort of complain when I wouldn't tell them that of course they could come back now because it had all been just like a quarrel between two children, who made up and became friends again after a little while. These parents would get angry with me when I said "No, you must stay away, and you children must never set foot here until they are of age" (18 years old and their own masters). And preferably not even return then, because the CPS will be after them to take their own children if they have children in Norway, just to prove that they had bad parents so now they have become bad parents themselves. (Very primitive determinism, in other words.)

Most CPS victims who contact me and people like me, do not really want to hear the grim truth. They want me to say something they hope will be true.

But you were right, I think, Naine: it was a happy ending for the two girls, I think. Better to be in difficult Chechniya with relatives than in Norway with people obviously making money out of working as fosterers for the CPS, cut off from their own family altogether.

  

  
I have updated the thread on Forum RVB about the 7-year-old Lithuanian boy, to a great extent on the basis of Naine's posting on 2 Feb at 09:46:32 am and Nemo's translation of 2 Feb at 02:33:52 pm.

http://forum.r-b-v.net/viewtopic.php?p=35143#p35143
http://forum.r-b-v.net/viewtopic.php?p=35149#p35149
http://forum.r-b-v.net/viewtopic.php?p=35159#p35159

I am not at all satisfied with my last two postings there, they should have been shorter and more concise, but I lack the energy to be less longwinded!

That case by now gives a lot of clear information which I, with a deep sigh, hope the needy will trouble to read. I wish foreigners bringing children here to Norway would take it seriously. I could wish for my own countrymen to take it seriously also, but there is less hope of that.

Well, at least to foreigners in Norway:

Never talk with the CPS. Insist that everything has to be in writing.
At the first indication that they want a psychologist to talk with you or they want to visit your home or talk with your children:
Get out of the country!
Make do with whatever income you can make in your own country, or some other non-Western country.
It may be hard, but having the bonds to your children violated is harder.
Do not wait: Pack 3 plastic bags with only the basic necessities for the children. If you are seen about with ordinary luggage, the CPS will stop you and take the children on an emergency decision.
When the children have been placed in a safe country, you may return to pack up properly, or even better: get friends to do that.
Do not tell people that you will be going, there are many who may report you to the CPS.
Do not book airline tickets or boat tickets, nor should you go in your own car to Sweden. Go preferably by anonymous bus. Get yourselves to Oslo, for example, there are several buses running every hour from the bus terminal in Oslo.

Very important:
1) You must go before a case over transfer of care has been opened in the County Committee, and if you are after all caught in one, then certainly before such a case has been completed. After such a case, your child belongs to the Norwegian state.
2) Get a "moving" form (flyttemelding) from the National Census register (Folkeregisteret), which is managed by the taxation office, or better: get it from the internet, fill it in properly, and post it registered mail as soon as possible after you leave, so that it is officially registered that your children (and preferably yourself) have moved out of Norway. In that way the authorities cannot claim that you are just away on a holiday, in which case they could go ahead with a CPS case without you being there.
3) Do not be too optimistic - do not come back. The local CPS will not have forgotten you, and CPS offices all over the country are equally terrible - there might be a few odd exceptions in a few odd places for a while, but they are exceptions, and they will not be able to stand up against a report against you from another source.
  

  

Hoho, seems interesting - now who can summarise / translate this Russian for us? (Guess who I am thinking of. Or are you Russian-proficient yourself, Naine?)


  

  

I am very glad to hear that Naine thinks the issue will not die down in Czechia. The only way to achieve a change is for people to react strongly over every case, and not forget it, not shrug their shoulders, not to accept all the babble which official Norway comes up with.

*


Very revealing. So this, then, is the Norwegian ambassador in Prague, Mrs Siri Ellen Sletner. First she says that there were reasons why the children had to be taken. Then she says that she has no documents about the case and is not in contact with the CPS. Then how does she know? The answer is the typical one: She "knows" how the system works. That is the way the Norwegian state always answers: The CPS "never takes children unless there are compelling reasons why it has to be done". – This is the blind propaganda we are always up against.
Předpokládám, že museli mít důvod děti vzít, říká norská velvyslankyně

Here are some more Norwegian amabassadors praising our CPS:
Norwegian embassies abroad and Norwegian child protection
(Note how the group of Hindus in America exposed the one there.)

*

This article shows the text on the transparencies they used at the sports-competition - bravo!
Jak na protest v Novém Městě na Moravě

The transparency texts are in Czech and Norwegian, so I can provide an English translation of the Norwegian:

"Norge bryter FN barnekonvensjon" – Norway violates the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child
"Norge bryter menneskerettigheter" – Norway violates human rights
"Norge, gi oss tilbake barna våre" – Norway, give us back our children
"Bryt ikke art. 8 EMK" – Do not violate Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights
"Norge er hjerteløs" – Norway is heartless
"Norge oppfører seg som et diktatur" – Norway behaves like/as a dictatorship
"Norge – siste kommuniststat?" – Norway - the last communist state?*
"Dårlig samvittighet? Det bør Norge ha." – Bad conscience? That is what Norway should have.
"Husker du tatere? Det samme skjer på nytt." Do you remember the "Taters"? The same is happening again.**
"Reputasjonen deres er ødelagt. Hjelp med gjenoppbygging!" Your reputation is ruined. Help rebuilding it!

* But look out for Sweden, it is even worse when it comes to CPS.
** The Taters are a gipsy-like, nomadic/semi-nomadic, ethnic group in the Nordic countries. They have been treated atrociously, shut up, forcibly sterilised, lobotomised, and their children have been taken from them.






  

  

Hoi!   Mother and daughter made it home to Lithuania!

- Mor og datter befinner seg i Litauen (Mother and daughter are in Lithuania)
Adresseavisen, 26 January 2015

"Mannen som varslet politiet er ikke jentas biologiske far. Han har sagt til politiet at moren ikke klarte å leve uten datteren sin. Begge skal ifølge mannen ha det bra." (The man who informed the police is not the girl's biological father. He has said to the police that the mother was not able to live without her daughter. Both are, according to the man, fine.")

!!
  

(I could do with a full time secretary to find articles more quickly.)
  
  

  
Back for a moment to what is going on in Norway just now:

The Lithuanian girl has not been "found" by the authorities by this morning (27 January):
Posting in the Lithuanina / Norway thread

At the same time, a 7 year old Lithuanian boy is "missing" from Molde. He disappeared from a bowling hall yesterday. Several police patrols are searching, and they have drafted in all sorts of other people, but so far they have not succeeded in getting hold of him:
Lithuanian boy? – unclear news reports

My title for that thread is no longer quite apt, since the reports are becoming fairly clear. The Norwegian press's way of presenting it is less so, of course, but it does not take a genius to make a reasonable guess.

  

  
I recently rediscovered an article by Christopher Booker from last year, one which I had myself linked to in a small article but had in my inefficiency completely forgotten. I ought to have done more than link to it, because it is very important, so here it is for consumption by us. (It starts off with an illustration of how Russian-Latvian children in the Netherlands were taken - for not speaking Dutch at home! So that adds "nicely" to what you just reported about Oscar, Nemo.)
Here is Booker:

MEPs must investigate this child-snatching scandal
The Telegraph, 22 March 2014

So the EU Commission is hidebound and "uppety" but MEPs – members of the European Parliament – are getting active. Add to this the fact that the social services particularly in Britain are going crazy these last years, they are having a regular feast "redistributing" children, so that the European Court of Human Rights is getting a lot of complaints especially from British parents. The Czech member of the European Parliament Tomáš Zdechovský should therefore find a number of allies in his efforts to have Britain and Scandinavia condemned for their practices (the latest I heard was that he would especially take up the actions of those countries).

  

  

A little movement in the Czech case, and I know for a fact that they are working on it in Prague:

Norwegian MPs may discuss Michalák case
Prague Post, 23 January 2015

Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský has been pushing for Norway to take action
…… He said Per Sandberg, deputy chairman of the Progress Party, wants to ask the Norwegian Foreign Minister about the case at a meeting of the foreign committee of Norwegian Parliament.
 “This will be for the first that something like this will happen in Norway in relation to a case involving the Czech Republic,” Zdechovský said.

  

  
Right - then I'll try reposting the other one, with two small additions.


From 21 January 2015, at about 11:50 pm:


Another case today: A Lithuanian girl of 9 has (probably) been fetched by her mother and they are on the run. Hopefully back to Lithuania. They are being hunted by Norwegian police, all the border personnel are on the look-out for them, the Norwegian Crime Force are "assisting" and Interpol has been alerted. They are now "wanted internationally" and the police want everybody to be on the look-out and tip the police off if they see the fugitives.

I have made the start of a thread here (hope there will be articles in English about the case on the web by and by, so that I don't have to translate and write so much):
Lithuania / Norway: Girl taken out from foster care by mother


If mother and daughter are caught, the child will be taken back to the foster home (no matter what she wants or says) – or to another foster home at a secret address – and the mother faces a criminal court case and imprisonment. Plenty of cases here, in the section "Temaer" (themes / topics) at BarnasRett (The children's Right):
Barn og familier på flukt fra barnevernet (Children and families fleeing from the child protection services)
Barn og foreldre som blir straffet for opprør mot barnevernet (Children and parents who are punished for revolt against the child protection services)

Unfortunately these articles are all articles in Norwegian. Still, the files give an idea of the profusion of articles and I also post the links for the benefit of readers who can read Scandinavian.

*

Jan Simonsen has been interviewed again by Czech television. He says that the Czech member of the European Parliament Tomáš Zdechovský has been very active getting an overview of very many cases relating to several countries whose children have been confiscated by the Scandinavian ones. He will bring the whole issue to the European Parliament, I think. We shall know more about it in not too many days.

I hope all these countries: The Czech Republic, Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Turkey, India - - what have you, will get together in a strong, concerted action against this child 'protection' which is completely off the rails. And they must get Estonia included, because Norwegian child protection is busy there teaching the Estonians how do provide 'welfare and protection' for children!

Nemo, to you think Pavel Astakhov is kept informed about all that is going on? He seemed enough of a maverick not to let any soft soap from Norwegian assurances talk him down. And he speaks Swedish, or so the info says (KGB-educated!).

  
While the Bitcoin Forum has been down, two posts of mine have apparently been removed? There might be some technical reason they got lost, to do with the forum being down, but if not, it was perhaps done by Nemo1024 because they were unwanted? That of course is for him to judge. I am posting the first one again and so if he removes it again, I will understand the message (albeit not the reason for it!).

**

From 21 January 2015  at 11:35:51 pm:



Regarding the current Czech case (Eva Michaláková's):

A new statement from the Norwegian embassy in Prague yesterday – the contents being of the usual kind which we know well from Norwegian authorities:

Child welfare in Norway and the Michalak boys
The Norwegian Embassy in the Czech Republic, 20 January 2015

The embassy, on behalf of Norwegian authorities, claim that all sorts of things said by Eva Michaláková and by Czech media are untrue, and so on. Also, they claim that the boys are "progressing well" in their foster homes. "Progressing" sounds like an insinuation that they were not doing well before they were taken from their parents, and that the CPS and the foster homes are having to work to compensate for that.
 
But anyway, that is what they say about foster children generally: that things are going so well with them and they were so miserable and so damaged when they were with their parents. Of course all sorts of 'child experts' back this up. This kind of 'information' is not matched by statistics relating to the number of children who try to escape from foster homes, nor those of the end results of foster care, which are appalling: a very high percentage have a miserable life, comprising crime, illness, early death, no education, unemployment, not to speak of tragedies of personal life (cf the points marked • in the section "Protection of the child / Child protection" here: Political program for child protection in local administration).

  

  
  

I agree one would think it must take a very serious initial trigger to make the CPS take up a case. That is, however, not the case. And yes, an anonymous tip is all they need. Sweden and Denmark are the same. (Finland is probably much the same too, but the information is not so easily accessible to Scandinavians, since Finnish and Scandinavian are not mutually intelligible languages.)

Cases which turn out to be very serious and probably looked fairly serious from the start, are in fact sometimes not taken up by the CPS at all. Thus, we have in Norway over the last few years had one little boy die as the result of serious physical abuse by his stepfather. The CPS had been contacted (several times and over a long time, as far as I remember) but shrugged their shoulders. In another case several children (siblings) have been sexually abused over many years – the parents are now in prison (there has been some dispute among the children, but the convictions are probably just). Again, the CPS in the district had been contacted several times, but the leader of the CPS was a good friend of the mother in the case and refused to do anything. Just recently a boy has starved to death; his mother is now in a mental institution and the case is pending. The CPS had been called in but had "found nothing wrong".

Actually, I see that Grinder and Nemo1024 discussed such cases briefly back on 11 November:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=828129.msg9500611#msg9500611
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=828129.msg9510336#msg9510336
The case Grinder links to, is probably the same as the last one I just mentioned, but the article is open only to readers who are subscribers.

I more than agree that such cases do not outweigh the cases in which the CPS takes children who clearly should never have been deprived of their families, and whose life in foster care turns out a tragedy. They are not to be weighed against each other at all. The current CPS policy has nothing to do with perhaps making unfortunate decisions in complicated cases. Their basic tenet is that taking a child from its family and "planting" it in different soil has no ill effects whatsoever – all the bad results of foster care and institutional care are "explained" as after-effects of the parents' "deficiencies" and "bad influence"! Not even when the foster care is a long tragedy is the child allowed to go home. The CPS never acknowledge what their own actions have led to.

One reason why the CPS frequently develop psychobabble cases but omit to take up serious cases, is their incompetence – their inability to make realistic assessments or to use realistic measures to find out and to improve the situation for the child concerned. The CPS are really in over their heads in serious cases. Another reason is that in really violent families, in which the family members perhaps have ties to active criminals, the CPS are scared for themselves. Parents whose children are taken from them, react very strongly – as well they might – and if these parents belong to criminal circles, the social workers may be in serious danger.

Psychobabble cases, on the other hand, are all fiction, and this the social workers have been trained to develop. Such cases also provide a living for psychologists whom the CPS engage to write seemingly thorough reports, full of mumbo jumbo quackery, which impresses the courts. – Among such arguments one finds allegations of abnormal speech development or delayed language acquisition in the child. Neither the social workers nor the psychologists are competent at all to assess this, but it sounds scientific and of course they – on an equally unscientific basis – claim that the parents have caused this "deficiency" (I am a linguist myself, have been in court in such cases and have investigated several other cases and looked at what psychology textbooks say. It is deplorable.)

Many cases start by parents asking the social services for financial help. Others start because a child has difficulties at school or "makes trouble", or the parents "make trouble" for the school by demanding that the school stop some harassment going on between children. It is standard for head masters to claim that the child's troubles at school "in reality" stem from home.

Among the clearest indicators that the system is haywire, is the fact that the craziest, silliest arguments – even sheer invention – are all the time logged by the CPS and put into their reports which are presented in the courts, and that they are accepted by the courts. If a case was really so serious that the child had to be taken away from all its family, what need would they then have of coming up with the nonsense-arguments at all?

The list I referred to above:
An incomplete list of reasons given by the child protection services (CPS) of the Nordic countries for depriving children of their parents
is not one of only "first causes" of CPS involvement, but it may still go some way towards providing an answer to koshgel's question.

The articles below also throw some light on the range of "arguments" used when the CPS practice their profession. In the second article, the last section "Seeing the CWS in practice" gives a few details of the way literally "nothing" is twisted into "something serious". The last article I have already referred to for case c), but the other cases too illustrate that destroying family ties may be started by anything the CPS fancies.  

Joar Tranoy:
Child protection and the law

Aage Simonsen:
Norwegian child protection hits immigrants hard

Marianne Haslev Skånland:
The Child Protection Service (CPS) – unfortunately the cause of grievous harm
Part 2: Content, dimensions, causes and mechanisms of CPS activities

  

  
My fingers itch hyperactively to comment on several things in this thread, among them something back on p 3 from October/November, but let me first take up one posting which I consider to be among the most important recently:


We should take note: 1) this is happening - or has been going on - in many or even most countries (I think) in the Western world, and 2) it is not new. The whole history of how society or groups of do-good-ers have considered it their right to decide over and handle children is relevant.

As regards Switzerland: I am so ashamed that I am such a slow reader of German - I have to look up the dictionary all the time (and have no excuse, it is only laziness that I have never passed the threshold of good vocabulary incorporation) - my deficient German vocabulary makes it hard for me to search the web efficiently for articles and stuff in German. If leopard2 has some more interesting links, please post! In English or in German.

I remember there has been at least one child protection case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against Austria in which Austria was found guilty of a violation. I have also read one verdict from a Strasbourg case against Switzerland, in which Switzerland in fact won against the applicants. (In my opinion the state definitely should not have won.) I did not concern a child, but an old woman. The social workers had her forcibly moved to a "foster home" because she would not keep decent cleanliness at her home and the social workers claimed they could not help her there. So, in Switzerland it seems to be forbidden for adults to choose to be left in peace and go to hell if one wants.

What leopard2 says about mandatory kindergarten is a clear warning. We have sort of almost the same thing in Scandinavia, perhaps even more reprehensible, because it is not what it claims to be: officially it is not obligatory to have your children in kindergarten, but if you don't, all manner of "child expert" units are no end busy finding other faults with the child and you, claiming that if your child was at a kindergarten and did not see so much of you, these deficiencies would not be there. And of course, kindergarten personnel are taught to "diagnose" everything a child does and says as a proof of failed parenting. So then they take the child away. I have referred to one case which was on tv and in the press some years ago, and although there was a sort of mild reaction against the kindergarten and the CPS in the case, there was not - and never is - any change in the general attitude that everybody except the parents know best. It is case c) here:
The Child Protection Service (CPS) – unfortunately the cause of grievous harm
Part 2: Content, dimensions, causes and mechanisms of CPS activities

Some examples of kindergarten activities which may also support our understanding of the present system are found here (the whole list gives examples of claims which various institutions and their employees use to prove that children must not live with their parents): examples 12, 32, 35:
An incomplete list of reasons given by the child protection services (CPS) of the Nordic countries for depriving children of their parents
  
There was a comment under an article of mine in 2012 about Switzerland - I take the chance of showing it in its entirety:
"I saw a subtitled documentary on french channel TV5 about switzerland
and how it had been removing children from their homes for years for
the mildest of pranks like hiding the clothes from the clothes line of
a grouchy neighbour or listening to modern music not conforming to a
dress code They were kept in juvenile homes for years together .There
were actual victims( the children now adults )..speaking out about how
their lives had been ruined by this ..and their parents too similarly
had no recourse to the law to get their children ..the state
organisation had pychologist which branded them with tags like sexual
adicts ( because some underclothes had also been in the clothes hidden
from the clothesline )
The swiss story too echoed the things in this article and I think it
would be great if the hindu continues its coverage.
from:  Vinita Gill
Posted on: Jan 31, 2012 at 09:57 IST"

PS: I see that the Wikipedia article links to info about a film: Der Verdingbub (The Foster Boy). I am going to try to get hold of it.

  

  
After I had written the above, I did a search with some combinations of words like "child" "protective" services" "USA" "parents" etc, and up came of course an unending series. While not all protesters' stories seem verifiable, there are more than enough. I also suddenly remembered one, rare story I had of a US court protecting a girl against the CPS (I suppose it is rare because the courts so often accept whatever the CPS says and does, like it is here in Norway). I had myself written a comment, but thought mistakenly that I remembered that it took place in Florida, no doubt because there has been a great deal of trouble about an over-active CPS in Florida. This, then, is Texas:

Texas teen gets restraining order against Child Protective Services
30 September 2011

   "The family’s lawyer contends that thousands of children are needlessly taken from their families every year and placed into foster homes or group homes where they are abused.
    The girl’s family decided to fight back. They took CPS to court and asked for an order of protection, which the judge granted. The court ordered CPS to stay away from the girl and stop harming the chld in the name of “protecting” her."

  



Tecshare is right (unfortunately). Especially in the years 2000 - around 2005 I was in touch with a number of Americans, who wrote about their CPS cases, or other people's cases, on the internet, and I also mailed back and forth with some of them. America is fully as bad as Western Europe. One reason is almost certainly that most of the quack psychology that is used in so many child protection cases (and which underpins general beliefs about childhood and people) is extra popular in America; some of it has been invented there (though the biggest, baddest wolf Freud was of course European). For instance, the scandalous "kindergarten cases" - McMartin and others, are not an entirely different issue from what we are discussing.

*

There are and have been several US-based websites about CPS cases that are full of information from, among other things, official sources. This one has been running for several years:
Fight CPS

*

Also deserving some attention is the testimony of Nancy Shaefer, a senator in Georgia:
Nancy Shaefer exposes the EVIL CPS
On youtube 2009

Nancy Shaefer lost her senatie seat probably because of her fight for CPS-attacked families. She died under unclear circumstances; there were more than scattered rumours that she might have been killed precisely because she had fought strongly in the Senate of Georgia to have CPS cruelties stopped.

*

One particular article from Massachusetts News (that publication is known to be ultra-something-whatever-you-call-it in American politics, but I have found them credible in several articles I have seen about CPS matters and have found some independent confirmation):
Social Workers Meet Counter Protest at State House

Note: Here, then, we have social workers wanting money and jobs, and justifying their demands by reading out a list of a hundred children who have died, implying that social workers prevent children dying. Then they are faced with the information that 79 had died in CPS care, and the social workers actually confirmed that the 79 were among the hundred!

*

Koshgel is quite right to raise the question of whether things are the same in the USA, because that is what most of us think of immediately when we hear of abuse carried out by the social service: "It may be like that in some other country but I have never noticed it here at home in my own country."

The reason is that unfortunately, it is something like abuse in psychiatric hospitals: it affects relatively few people. We have grown up in/into a culture we then feel we know well, and there are always these "explanations" around: that the people who tell horror-stories about the CPS must be exaggerating, that they are bad parents, that they lie, that they are mentally unstable, that because they are involved, they are not objective. Some are - -, some do - -, but it pales beside what the social services do - serviced of people officially employed to assist children.

The bottom line is: The social services lie, and they have taken a leaf out of Joseph Goebbels' book: Don't tell small lies, because people are used to doing that themselves, so they will recognise them as lies. If you want to lie, tell huge lies, then people will say that this is so enormous that it can't be a lie.

  
The BBC programme Question Time, today 8 January, (that is: now tonight,) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xtl6z, will probably have an interview with the parents and/or about the British case concerning the two Gujarati children which I wrote a little about above, in a posting on the 6 Jan:

Save Indian Children from First World Governments
blogs.Swarajya, 6 January 2015

It says on BBC's webpage that the programme will be available shortly after the broadcast.

  

  
Here is a case in Britain, concerning children of Gujarati origin, which has stirred some sympathy in India:

Save Indian Children from First World Governments
blogs.Swarajya, 6 January 2015

British child "protection" is running amuck at the moment, especially with forced adoptions. I think I wrote something about that above.