Ouch! Talkpermalink
20 years of indifference
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Around about the mid 1980s I heard a news item about a couple with learning difficulties who were going to have their new baby removed from them. I tracked down the couple and worked with them for a year in an attempt to provide a realistc alternative to dividing the family. I stand by the proposals made and believe both the local authority and the legal system failed this family.
Now almost 25 years later an item on BBC West Midlands Insideout programme demonstrates that neither attitudes nor practices have changed. I urge people to use the iPlayer and watch this item - it will be upsetting, however, I feel disabled people need to know about these things.
I am often critical of the BBC's coverage of disability issues, but I'll give this reporter my utmost respect for this piece of journalism.
www.bbc.co.uk/iplaye... -
Rob raised this issue the other day Bob, but sadly it dropped off the front page without much comment.
www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/m...
This is what I said on that thread which I make no apology for repeating now in the hope others will now join in and discuss this much neglected topic.
Thanks for highlighting this Rob.
I will write more later but just adding a quick post now so I can keep track of the debate which is very close to my heart as those who remember our earlier threads on this topic over the last few years will recall.
For those interested in the wider discussion can I recomend you vist the Nora Fry Institute Website here:
www.bristol.ac.uk/no...
If you follow the links to the research section and then look through the completed research projects there are many relevant pieces of work they have done in this area that are well worth a read the key one being the excellant report "Finding the Right Support" from May 2006.
I should perhaps explain that I spent most of last night in the delivery suit of our local hospital once again providing support to a young lady I know who lost her first child to adoption 3 years ago and is now awaiting delivery of her second baby already being the subject of an at risk decision regarding her new baby even before it arrives and the likely prospect of the local authority taking the baby for adoption if not right away possibly within days of the birth.
The lack of progress since the 80's is bad enough but the lack of any action being taken when the research has proved things could be improved not only sadens but literally sickens and disgusts me to the core.This is a reply to this message.
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Thanks Peter - I didn't see Rob's earlier post or I would've simply added to that.
The lack of progress since the 80's is bad enough but the lack of any action being taken when the research has proved things could be improved not only sadens but literally sickens and disgusts me to the core.
Absolutely. I also think it is important to avoid seeing all social workers as 'the enemy'; some do play the game, others are genuine in their desire for a better service.This is a reply to this message.
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I would hazard a guess that many of the social workers that have left the profession over recent years have done so because they simply could not live with the decisions the system was forcing them to make against their better judgement as human beings.
One tactic I would highlight is that it is now all too common for a person to be assessed as having an IQ of 72 or just over as this will generally disbar them from any direct help from adult social services in their own right.
This same person then has their restricted inteligence held against them as they are deemed unable to be parents even though still not severly enough to turn of the appropriate help and assistance with that role as a disabled parent.
This double injustice is a particular point of concern for me as I believe it goes to the very heart of the issue of just how badly this particular group of people have been and are still being treated by a system that does not see them as being worthy of any support at all let alone to at least give them a fighting chance in what is after all said and done perhaps one of the most fundamental rights all humans have which is to found a family of their own.This is a reply to this message.
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Sometimes the emphasis on the parents' right to breed overlooks the child's right to the best possible quality of life.
There is a recent case of a woman who burnt her council house in order to be rehoused next to her mum. It worked, and she was not penalised, because she was said to be of low intellect, and has, so far, produced three babies
.Many baby P type cases include the excuse that the mother has low intellect
My friend, from infancy, had to care for both parents and for her brother, who were all what she called "simple". She firmly concluded that they should never have had childrenThis is a reply to this message.
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Let's try putting this another way then.
Would anybody at all here actually ever endorse a blanket policy whereby physically disabled people were routinely denied the support they need in order to be able to be good parents to their children, often not even being heard let alone being given a fair chance to prove they could do so more than adequately with appropriate support being provided?
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There have been times over the years I have felt ashamed to be a man given the attitudes and actions of some other men, but I must confess this is the first time I actually feel ashamed to be disabled given the lack even of interest let alone debate about this particular issue.
I and others are not talking about any parent having an absolute right to have children, as that gift and responsibility always is and must be a privalige one earns rather than demands. The rights of the child must always be paramount but part of that must be a recognition that each and every child has the right to have loving parents even more so than the other way round.
More than this, however, to refer to any fellow human being's desire to bring new life into the world as "breeding" demeans us all as, although yes this is technically correct, the cold use of a term usually reserved for livestock demeans each and every one of us for whom it could be argued some would see us as less able and/or deserving parents than others for whatever reason that might be.
I am sure it wasn't meant in this way this time, but simply wanted to flag up how its use this time round had made me feel in the specific context of this very sensitive and emotive area of debate about the status of disabled people as parents in the hope others might at least try to see how such a reference might be percieved.
I know this is a tricky topic for discussion and this alone I think explains (if not excuses) the lack of more contributions, but we can not simply avoid such topics because they make us feel uncomfortable not least as this is all too often the basis for so many of our other problems as a group being glossed over and dismissed in the hope we and the problems our impairments/disabily bring will simply go away.
I have a busy day ahead so may well not be posting much till later on but I will not push this issue or bump the thread again myself now.
I simply ask each and every person here to at least take a few moments on this rememberance day to spare a thought for all those parents who have also lost children albeit that the children in this case actually live on as the loss felt by those involved.
In closing please also remember that in in this case both child and parent will suffer the loss in this particular situation.
I know for I myself was adopted as a child although in my case I did eventually get to meet my genetic father after a wait of some 35 years to finally meet him for the first time and I did at least have the benefit of being brought up by my loving birth mother from the start and later also by my adoptive dad, my life as a child and young adult was always missing something irreplaceable.This is a reply to this message.
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I`ll comment further when my brain has woken up properly.
For now I shall say that I am very lucky I have had my children, brought them up and think I have done a pretty good job.
My heart ached at the scene you described Peter ( and the later comments you made) about the young lady you supported ( id have preferred to use the term kept company with , but some wiseacre might have picked me up on it . Im well into sarcasm mode this am)
We need more people of your nature,ilk , disposition call it what to will to defend those who cannot defend themselves, because the situation they find themselves in has been manipulated , ( for whatever reason , perhaps economic ...sarcastic inference there) for the good of not themselves but the social services employees ( The IQ comment made by yourself is a perfect and very shameful example ).
Sorry if I haven`t come over the way that I intended to . My brain knows what I want to say , but somewhere between the brain and my fingers, it gets all jumbled up.This is a reply to this message.
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Thank you Robomam.
"Lest we forget"This is a reply to this message.
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Indeed Peter .
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My husband and I, although not learning disabled, took the decision not to have children as we're both classed as disabled and we could see Social Services becoming rather too interested in us and how we might have coped.
Having said that, with right help & support people should be able to raise their own children. If you've carried a baby and given birth to it you should surely have a right to keep it no matter what your disability is. Help & support seems to be lacking generally in lives of disabled so I don't imagine it would be forthcoming to enable children to stay with their natural parents.
Perhaps taking babies from disabled is cost cutting exercise. If non disabled adopt them they'll need no support to look after them.
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Cynical as I am about a lot of this I actually don't think the prime motivation is cost as such but there certainly is a conection with the current target driven culture whereby the statistics for numbers of children released from local authority care to new families are dramatically improved by this policy.
In the main what we are talking about here is the taking into care for adoption of new borns and as anyone familiar with adoption statistics the older a child is the less likely to be adopted them become.
This is not automatically a bad thing because, of course, best outcomes for a child in the care of local authorities reflect this trend in the statistics as it is true to say that without any doubt at all placing a child in a new permanent home will nearly always give a far better outcome for the child concerned compared to either long term fostering or in house care in a home provided by the authority themselves.
I do, however, suspect that this "knowledge" about outcomes does unduly affect the initial decisions to take a child into care in the first place which is often one of the factors involved in those cases of older children having been abused by parents and/or carers not having been taken into care despite the child having been not just known to social services as being "at risk" but actually on the protection register itself.
Perversly this leads to bad parents often being far more likely to keep their children than those who are physically or mentally challenged in some way and simply needing help with the practical elements of child care rather than having any lack of love for their child.This is a reply to this message.
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SS have targets for placing in adoption. Babies are easiest
(Isn;t it interesting that people have to jump through hoops to get a child, with the highest standards of all being demanded for prospective baby adopters, but lowest standards of all for those parents who will take a disabled baby or child?
e.g an elderly white gay man would have no chance of being given a small black boy. Unless, of course, the child has physical and mental disabilities. Not saying the child isn't best off being adopted, just noticing. There was one on radio 4 recently, doing a great job, but she was a single parent who had adopted, if I remember right, more than 20 severe Downs children )This is a reply to this message.
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There was a post here last night about this subject, a woman who had her child taken away and adopted due to her physical disability.
I havnt been back to that thread because I do not know what to say to her, carys is having IVF (3rd cycle) and her GP is ignorant and Im worried that that post will upset her and as a mother who had a brought up a child on crutches/wheels I honestly cant see why with care and thought to detail other physically impaired women cant carry and parent children.
Taking our children from us because we are disabled is wrong and any parents who are struggeling should be able to ask SS for help without fear of having there children taken from them, there are many AB parents who bring up there children worse but they have no fear of SS because no one wants there children, no one wants badly behaved, anti social brats.
ddThis is a reply to this message.
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Ive cocked up my previous post, I think you can see the meaning of the mistakes but I did miss the last sentance.
I dont know enough about LDs or other disabilities to comment apart from the same should be true, ALL struggeling disabled people should be able to ask SS for help without fear.
ddThis is a reply to this message.
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sorry i lurk rather than post
to comment on what dis1dat1 said, i had problems relating to one of my children, mid 80's, asked for help. was already seeing pysch, who was supportive but between SS and childrens/family pysch was almost riped apart to point of no return. thay didnt like someone saying they a problem and wanted help. it took sometime to escape there 'grasp' all i'd wanted was help
13ish years later, when i was realativly well mh wise, ther was a need to be in contact with services again, and they wondered why i was uncooprative as far as visiting 'centres' they messed me up once i couldnt allow this to happen again
i do hope this atitude has changed but i think unlikely
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This is carys thread and the last post is the one that bothers me.
www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/m...
ddThis is a reply to this message.
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What I find particularly offensive about these cases where someone from SOcial Services decides that, based on a diagnostic label, they are justified in removing a child from its parents.
In the case of a person with learning disabilities for example: to the best of my knowledge there is little or nothing in a Social Worker's training which qualifies them to understand and interpret the meaning of IQ test scores.
e.g. someone mentioned an IQ "score" of 72 - assuming that is a reference to the overall full scale IQ score then
(a) 72 is within the "normal" range which is usually considered to be 70 to 130.
And (b) there are any number of reasons why an overall IQ score might be that low - I have seen at least one student with overall IQ that low, he was genius level on verbal tests and very very weak on non-verbal tests because he had a brain bleed as an infant and was hemiplegic, so the two sub-sets of scores average out if you only considered the overall score.
The score alone cannot possibly tell one whether someone will be an adequate parent - not least because IQ tests were not designed for such a purpose and don't measure anything remotely related to parenting skills.
Surely if a SW is seriously considering whether any person (disabled or not) is going to be a fit parent, they should be obliged to make a full and detailed assessment of that individual person's ability to be a parent - including a range of skills which are actually related to parenting abilities. If the SW lacks the skills to make such an assessment, perhaps they should find someone who might have a better skillset for making that assessment (no I don't know what kind of expert that could be, maybe we need to develop a whole new profession).
After such an assessment, consideration could then be given to whether the person could be provided with support / adjustments which might allow them to raise the child successfully (and of course that would need to be kept uinder review over time as the child and parent's needs will change ).
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Totally agree with you devine63. I had to sit in court and listen to "professionals" describing people I didn't recognise in reality!
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The answer here is that yes the detailed assessments are suposed to be carried out and will be, but they are so coloured and distorted by the labels the person is carrying as to often simply confirm any initial doubts of the original SW who will have flagged up the case for further investigation often simply because of the label.
This is what leads to often very sloppy and slipshod assessments full of errors and inconsistancies that are then taken as fact rather than opinion and/or speculation based on the original sterotyping because of the label which was often originally applied mainly as a way to deny access to services.This is a reply to this message.
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