Redd Våre Barn
8 December 2014


Drug addicts and child protection

By Aage Simonsen



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Dr.scient Aage Simonsen is a Norwegian biologist who works in nature conservation. He has served on a municipal committee in Bergen monitoring cases prepared by the Child Welfare Service (CWS) (a more direct translation of its Norwegian name would be Child Protection Service - CPS), and has written a number of articles on the issue of child protection.

The Norwegian original of this article, "Barnevern og narkomane", was published by the newspaper Bergensavisen (BA) on the 15 January 1996. At that time, Mr Simonsen represented the political party Fremskrittspartiet in 'Klientutvalget', the municipal committee mentioned above. It was re-published on Forum Redd Våre Barn on 10 January 2007.

The English version is published here with the kind consent of the author.
Translation: Marianne Haslev Skånland.
• • •


The representatives of the Child Protection Service (CPS) with the Bergen police have been active in the media, asking for a change in the legislation concerning child protection so that the CPS can take children away from their parents without trying options like support and help first.

Their argument is that their experience shows that children of drug abusers will themselves become antisocial problem children and that it is not possible to help them as long as they remain with their parents.

It is bad business that CPS workers are willing to utilise a small subgroup of people in a difficult situation as a tool to weaken the position of all parents in the country through abolishing the security of legislation fitting under a rule of law. In addition, it is rather questionable that they use as an argument their own incompetence and ineptitude as regards helping the people concerned, and furthermore that their whole argumentation is built on their personal opinions (= their own experience) instead of on scientifically valid data and information.

It is no great wonder that their experience shows problems to be present through several generations. The majority of children and youths whom CPS workers come into contact with may have parents who are drug addicts, criminal or have other serious problems. That does not mean that all children of drug addicts or criminals will themselves have serious problems. In fact, several scientific studies show that to be the case for only a small percentage. The great majority of children from such backgrounds become law-abiding and normally functioning citizens. For example: A large American study of 2,600 children exposed to care failure showed that 11 per cent of these individuals were convicted of violent crime as adults, as compared to 8 per cent for the rest of the population. (C.S. Widon: 'The Cycle of Ciolence', Science 244, 1989.) 73 per cent did not commit crimes at all, as against 83 per cent of the total population.

This minor difference, then, is what CPS workers hold to justify that the CPS should not be obliged to try any assistance to the parents before forcibly taking the children away. If the CPS were to win through with such a change of law, it will without any doubt be applied not only against families with drug abusing parents but against all parents who at some point in their lives are affected by psycho-social problems, be they of greater or lesser seriousness. This will further reduce the trust which the population still may have in the CPS, trust which is already fairly minuscule.

  

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