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Lucy's son was nearly taken into care when she was wrongly accused of putting his life in danger

Ordeal: Lucy's son was nearly taken into care when she was wrongly accused of putting his life in danger

One would like to think that this was just some joke, a fiction, something that would never happen in a civilised democratic country that had a legal system in place and laws that are supposed to judge one innocent until proven guilty.
As I belong to an organisation who deals with these types of issues quite often and sadly sometimes, just a little too late. Occasionally we hear that a Father decides that he can no longer bear the agony of having lost all he had, including his own children, makes the decision to end his life..

It has happened often enough to sadly force one to just accept it as a normal anticipated response. There are very few services available to Dads, who have been grounded down by an inhuman system who claims they have the "best interest of the child"(in most cases the "child" is the mother) in mind but seems indifferent about how or what Fathers are supposed to do when they are totally and completely stripped of everything they had and held dear. In most of those sad cases, one can understand why that decision was made and one can only imagine to what depth of despair they reached in order to make that option preferable..

Over the last year we have lost three dads. Each and every one having faced that inhuman grinder that considers the father to be just an unlimited ATM and does not require any consideration about where he can live or how he will survive. It truly is horrific and heartbreaking, to witness a human being, ground into a useless and irrelevant member of society..

So I can relate to what this woman went through in this article and it is usually the case, that unless it is a woman complaining, it would never even see the light of day and especially not be exposed in the MSM. Only women matter, as far as they are concerned and no one give a damn about the Fathers..

The 'experts' who break up families: The terrifying story of the prospective MP branded an unfit mother by experts who'd never met her - a nightmare shared by many other families

By Sue Reid
A little over a year ago, Lucy Allan led what most people would regard as an eminently respectable life.
The middle-class mother, a Tory councillor, was happily married to her stockbroker husband, Robin, and doted on their ten-year-old son, who loved going to school and was a passionate cricketer.
Indeed, such was Mrs Allan’s standing in the community that this accountant and former investment banker was on David Cameron’s A-list of potential MPs and a prospective Conservative candidate at the last election.
She devoted her spare time to her council duties. Twice a month, she sat on the local fostering panel, which oversaw the removal of children from their parents and placed them with new families.
It was heart-rending work, as she recalls. ‘At each fostering meeting we were presented with horrifying cases of abusive parents, almost always depicted as “substance abusers”, mentally unstable or “unable to put the needs of their children over their own needs”.
‘Often, this portrayal was supported by an expert report from a psychiatrist, psychologist or medical doctor,’ says Lucy.
‘It never occured to me, or any member of the panel, that the information we were presented with might be a distorted, twisted fiction — or that the reports were anything other than independent.’
Now, her view has changed. She suspects that many of the damning reports were written by experts who had never met the families in question, to suit the wishes of social workers under pressure from the Government to increase the number of children adopted.
As a result of this process, more and more children are being taken into state foster care.

So why has her faith in the system she once facilitated been shattered? Because, thanks to a bewildering chain of events, this eloquent, educated woman found herself under attack from social workers and fighting to stop her own son being taken into care.
Hers is a Kafkaesque story involving family experts who passed judgment on her fitness as a mother without, in some cases, even meeting her.

Lucy’s story is particularly disturbing in the light of a report released this month which found that decisions about the futures of thousands of children are being based on flawed evidence from well-paid ‘experts’, some of whom are unqualified and, time and again, never meet the families concerned.
The damning study by Professor Jane Ireland, a forensic psychologist, examined more than 127 expert witness reports used in family court cases in three areas of England. She found that 90 per cent were produced by clinicians who no longer practise, but instead earn their living entirely as ‘professional expert witnesses’ paid for by council social work departments. Sixty-five per cent of the reports were poorly or very poorly carried out.
This has led to accusations from MPs, lawyers and families that many of the experts are on a gravy train — ‘hired guns’ paid to write precisely what social workers want to read.
This month the Mail reported how just such an accusation has been levelled against one leading psychiatrist, Dr George Hibbert — who faces allegations that he deliberately misdiagnosed parents as having mental disorders, which led to them having their children taken by social services.
John Hemming, a Lib Dem MP who is calling for a national inquiry into the use of expert testimonies in family court hearings, says this dubious system has resulted in families being torn apart and hundreds of children being wrongly taken for adoption from innocent parents.
It is a scenario Lucy Allan feared could happen with her own son. Her nightmare began last March when, aged 46, and having begun to feel depressed for no apparent reason, she decided to go to see a doctor.
‘I am close to my son, so I was worried that he knew I was feeling sad. I went to my local GP surgery expecting to be given a course of anti-depressants and then feel better,’ she recalls.
She was seen by a young female locum, who listened to what Lucy had to say, and then told her she wanted to refer her to social services to ‘see if the family needed support’.