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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Nov 26, 2017 10:02 am 
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Madhu Kishwar:
Child protection laws further marginalising the underclass
Part 2: Violating child rights on the pretext of ‘rescue’ operations
Sunday Guardian, 25 November 2017


"The Beggar’s Home staff badgered MANUSHI’s team about helping Nandini and her family learn some other skills so that they didn’t have to “beg” for a living. Our team tried to explain that Nandini was a traditional art practitioner, not a vagabond bhikhari. But the Home In-Charge was unconvinced. She said if the government considered it to be begging, they had no choice but to implement the law.
    When we pleaded for mercy on account of Nandini being pregnant, the Superintendent began pouring out the problems faced by the Home. She said they were severely short-staffed. In case of a medical emergency, such as a pregnant woman like Nandini going into labour at night, the Home did not even have a vehicle to take her to hospital. The Superintendent told us she would be only too happy to release Nandini and lessen the burden on the Home, but it could not be done without a court order. She allowed us to meet with Nandini in her presence. As we were leaving Nandini begged us tearfully with folded hands to get her out of the Beggar’s Home at the earliest."


"For the following week Nandini’s relatives went to court every day but were not given the order. Finally, they had to pay a bribe to get it.
    Even then, their problems were not at an end. When the family reached the Beggar’s Home they were told that Nandini could not be released as the order did not mention her daughter Anjali. It took another round of court proceedings for Nandini and Anjali to be released."


*

"Two Nat children, 5-year-old Kabir and 7-year-old Umman, were picked up by the police soon after a performance. The police had been alerted by an NGO named “Light Life Freedom” that purports to “save women and children from sexual slavery”. The children were taken to a “protection home” operated by this NGO."

"The judge was jolted into compassion by Dilkumar’s pleas. He summoned the children for an in-chamber hearing. Kabir and Umman told us later that they were quizzed on whether they liked living in the children’s Home and the food there. Umman said she told the judge that they were miserable there. Owing to strict gender segregation in the Home she was not allowed to see her brother. She broke down telling the judge how it was bad enough to be kept apart from her parents, but being barred from seeing her brother though he was in the same building was agonising. She also told the judge that the food in the Home had no salt or spice and that she would any day prefer food cooked by her poor parents.
    The judge thankfully released the children. But he also ordered that the children must be educated and not used for performances by the family. He warned that a repeat of the offence would make things extremely difficult for them."


**


The organisation Manushi's website:

Working Towards Solutions
Manushi
Forum for Women's Rights and Democratic Reforms


  

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Nov 26, 2017 10:18 am 
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Sunday Guardian's introduction to the article:

In this edition of our ongoing series, Global Child Rights And Wrongs, in collaboration with http://www.saveyourchildren.on, academic and human rights activist Madhu Kishwar continues her harrowing description of the mistreatment of families of the impoverished Nat community under poorly thought-out child- and social-welfare laws. Part 1 of this essay was published last week with the title "Child protection laws further marginalising the underclass".

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 9:16 am 
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Madhu Kishwar's article, Part 2, is now also on SaveYourChildren.in, with a different title:

Madhu Kishwar:
Part 2: Indian NGOs and Child Welfare Committees traumatise Nat children in the name of “child protection”
SaveYourChildren, 27 November 2017

  
SaveYourChildren's introduction:

"Rescue or Persecution?
Well-known academic, writer and human rights activist Madhu Kishwar continues her harrowing description of the mistreatment of children of the impoverished Nat community under poorly thought-out child and social welfare laws. Part 1 of this essay was published last week. The Nats are an impoverished community of wandering acrobatic performers, whose performance traditions go back hundreds of years. Rather than uplifting Nat children, the Indian child rights laws along with NGOs, police and Child Welfare Committees implementing them are compounding the problems arising from their parents’ poverty and lack of work opportunities. It is high time that people in public policy wake up to the fact that welfare interventions, well-intentioned as they may be, can end up being oppressive to the very people they are supposed to help. Madhu Kishwar’s essay on the Nats will be published in several parts over the coming weeks, with a more detailed version with video recordings of interviews with Nat families to be published on the website of her organisation, MANUSHI. This article was originally published by the Sunday Guardian on 25 November 2017 with the title Violating child rights on the pretext of ‘rescue’ operations as part of our weekly series in collaboration with them called ‘Global Child Rights And Wrongs’."


  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Dec 03, 2017 9:21 am 
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Christopher Booker:
Corrupt practices disguised as child-welfare campaigns
Sunday Guardian, 2 December 2017

  
"In each case the social workers produced in court the most extraordinary trumped up charges to justify what they had done. At least in one, a judge eventually returned three children to their parents, after finding that there was not a shred of evidence to support the social workers’ claims.
    But in the other, after a series of bizarrely one-sided court hearings, a senior judge ordered the little girl to be sent for adoption. Only recently has it emerged that, now she is 16, she has been able to escape to be re-united with her parents, and that while in adoption she was seriously abused and emotionally damaged."


"In each case the police had forcibly assisted the social workers to remove the children into the “care” of the state. In one case this was in a school car park and, simply for protesting, the father was locked away in a nearby mental hospital."

"Following my accounts of these horror stories, I was contacted by several experienced experts, including a Member of Parliament, who told me that the two cases I had described were merely the tip of a vast iceberg."

*

"The parents find themselves in court ranged up against batteries of lawyers, supposed “psychological experts” and judges who are all on the other side against them. Even the lawyers given by the state to represent the parents themselves normally seem only too eager to side with the social workers in wanting the children to be removed.
    The most popular reason now given for removing children from their parents is not that they have been physically abused or neglected, but that they face “the risk of emotional abuse”."


"In other words, the system has become horribly corrupted from the initial high-minded ideals for which it was set up in 1989. And what makes this even more shocking is all the evidence we have come across in recent years of how other countries, including Norway, Holland and the USA, are developing “child protection” systems in many ways disturbingly similar to the one we are so familiar with in Britain ."

"And lurking behind them is an immense financial racket whereby most of the arrangements for fostering and adoption are now made by a handful of agencies, almost all run by ex-social workers, paying themselves up to £450,000 a year. These have become hugely successful commercial businesses (one a year or two back was sold to a Canadian pension fund for £130 million)."

Comments by me to Christopher Booker's article are superfluous. The article is as clear as can be.
    I tried to post a comment, though, but the comments program at SG is not working properly. I got one version up which included my comment, then later versions and updatings had either one comment, from one Kathleen, or no comments at all. Here is what I posted:

The world-wide spread of child "protection"
Submitted by Marianne Skanla... (not verified) on Sun, 2017-12-03 14:21
    Christopher Booker is absolutely right about Norway. The situation is very bad here and has been for at least 30 years, but has long roots before that. Way ahead of the other Nordic nations, though, is Sweden, where these atrocities carried out against children have been in action and perfected even earlier and even more thoroughly. It is wildly ironic that in the last few years, the odd family under attack of the CPS in Norway has been able to escape to Sweden and have Swedish social workers agree with them that Norway is off the track. It probably spells "childish" jealousy; Sweden has not mended its ways anyway.
     It seems somewhat accidental in which countries some publicity about this popular way of running "social work" succeeds in reaching the surface and at what times. I had contact with small organisations as well as single individuals trying to fight the child-removal racket in Britain and the USA in the 1990s.



    

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Dec 03, 2017 10:11 am 
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Sunday Guardian's introduction to Christopher Booker's article:

The draconian child-protection laws that many European nations are now adopting are disturbingly similar to what has been going on in Britain for years. A veteran English journalist weighs in.

In this week's installment of Global Child Rights and Wrongs, run in collaboration with http://www.saveyourchildren.in, we take a look at the child protection system in Britain, which has been, since the 1980s, at the cutting edge of experiments with child-protection laws. Britain was one of the first countries to introduce public-private partnerships in child protection, and today its child protection system is heavily commercialised. Britain has also been a leading proponent of "forced adoption" which is the adoption of children to non-related third parties even when they have parents or other family willing, indeed begging, to raise them. Britain is also the first country to propose a law against unloving parents – a Bill, popularly called "Cinderella's Law", was introduced in the British Parliament about two years ago that would make parents criminally liable for such things as ignoring a child, making it feel unloved and comparison with siblings. Many questionable theories of medical diagnosis of abuse, such as Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, where children fall ill repeatedly for no apparent reason, are diagnosed as "abused" by their parents, or "Non-Accidental injury", where parents are blamed for unexplained injuries or deaths of their infants, have either originated in Britain or found wider acceptance there than in any other developed country. In this essay, the well-known Englih journalist Christopher Booker surveys the dark consequences of these experiments with child protection. India, as a country that is in the process of implementing a Western-inspired child protection programme, has much to learn.

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 5:05 pm 
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Christopher Booker's article is now also on SaveYourChildren, under a different title:

Governments Removing Children from Families on Inadequate and Fraudulent Grounds
SaveYourChildren, 4 December 2017


The contents are identical. SaveYourChildren adds some information and links to other material about child protection in Britain below the article.

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Tue Dec 05, 2017 10:51 pm 
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Article in Norwegian which summarises Christopher Booker's:

Britisk gravejournalist har avdekket grunnløs inngripen fra barnevernet, advarer Norge mot å følge britisk modell
(British investigative journalist has uncovered CPS action without cause, warns Norway against applying British model)
Resett.no, 4 December 2017

Lots of comments under the article. Note: It is normally quite all right to comment in English in online Norwegian publications, if any readers here should feel so inclined.

*

SaveYourChildren.in in New Delhi has found Resett's online article and commented on child protection in Norway and Britain in the light of the Sunday Guardian article series:

Western Critics of Child Protection Services Are Having To Turn To India To Be Heard  –  Special Report
SaveYourChildren, 5 December 2017

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2017 7:38 pm 
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Joe Burns:
Don’t look at the West for lessons on child protection
Sunday Guardian, 9 December 2017


"Thousands of years of human evolution in any culture has developed the family as the ultimate “Child Protection System”. As adults we have an instinct to see children as more vulnerable than adults. Even children have an instinct to look after babies and more vulnerable children. We have even seen this in the animal kingdom where wild animals will protect other young animals or even children where they would normally prey on them. It’s important to realise that this is “instinct” and not “culture” or “religious ideology”. The vast majority of children are very well protected by family and communities. This is as nature intended and we do not need to be taught this."

"I would especially warn people to be cautious of the agendas and lobbying of children’s non-governmental organisations (NGOs) posing as “charities”. I believe some politicians will be led to support the NGOs and will try to push the agenda of emulating the worst excesses of the Western system of Child “protection”, and eventually start an “industry” around it.
    Believe me when I say, the West has nothing to teach India on the topic of family or child protection. As many Indian citizens have learned in the Western world, you can lose your child forever on the whim of a government official. Ireland, the UK, Norway, the USA and Canada have nothing to teach India about the protection of children, as they are the worst possible examples of abusing children in the name of child protection."


"... The Child Protection System of India is about to evolve, just as it is in other countries. India has an opportunity to develop a world-class system of child protection. I would urge people not to follow the example of the West.
    I would especially urge people not to allow a separate system of justice in establishing family courts. To have a situation, as we do in the West, where you are innocent in the criminal justice system, and yet you are punished with the removal of your children in the family courts, is incompatible with human rights."


It is very valuable to get this voice from Ireland. It confirms, once again, that child protection is off the rails in the Western world generally, and that a showdown is needed, confronting the underlying ideology underpinning it. Burns writes:

"To understand the problems with Western child protection, you need to understand the ideology of social work and sociology. At its core, these disciplines hold the opinion that: Family is an outdated concept with its vestiges in our tribal roots.
    This understanding of the family, which has its roots in eugenics, is very much at odds with nature. Eugenics has been around for centuries, but became popular in the early 1900’s. Eugenics was rejected after the Nazis in Germany used it for their Lebensborn Program [a state-sponsored program in Nazi Germany for promoting the birth of “Aryan” children so identified on the basis of Nazi theories of racial purity]. It was believed that human conditions could be “bred” out of society in the same way that animals are bred to a specific purpose. Of course, nothing was known at the time about DNA or genetics. It was thought that preventing poor people from having babies would eliminate poverty."


  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2017 7:41 pm 
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Sunday Guardian's introduction to Joe Burns' article:

Emulating the Western ideas of child protection, which grant the nanny state all powers to monitor and even abduct children, is likely to do more harm than good to India’s robust social fabric.

In this week's edition of Global Child Rights and Wrongs in collaboration with http://www.saveyourchildren.in we have prominent international activist and critic of Western Child Protection Services (CPS), Joe Burns from the Republic of Ireland. Over the last decade, Joe Burns har helped numerous innocent families facing persecution by European CPS agencies, providing them with moral support, advice on how to regain their children, helping wrongly accused parents to get media attention and organising protests on their behalf. He has also written an informative book on this issue called Secret Court-Child Protection or Child Abuse? Readers will be interested to know that there are several Indian families among those whom Joe Burns has helped. Like many activists in the worldwide resistance against CPS atrocities, Joe Burns has com to this field not as a professional but out of compassion and concern for the suffering he has witnessed of families torn apart by CPS. In fact, it is the professionals in sociology, psychology and social work and children's NGOs who are, sadly, the greatest defenders of this horrendous system – a system that Joe Burns warns India not to adopt.
  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Tue Dec 12, 2017 9:47 pm 
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Joe Burns' article is now also on SaveYourChildren, under a different title, and including several links:

India Should Not Adopt A Western-Style Child Protection System
SaveYourChildren, 4 December 2017

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 10:14 pm 
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Madhu Kishwar:
Part 3: Persecution of Nat families under a flawed legal system
Sunday Guardian, 16 December 2017


"It was in the 1920s that begging was first declared a crime in British India modelled on the Victorian minded anti-poor laws then prevalent in England. Unfortunately, in free India the anti-beggary law was further institutionalised in the form of the BPBA, and extended to 18 states including Delhi.
    The law is patently unconstitutional.Apart from targeting the destitute, it treats the legitimate modes of earning livelihood of the already marginalised traditional art communities in India as criminal acts and deprives them of all their fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution, in addition to snatching away their children.
    Notice the ridiculous overarching definition of beggary under the BPBA:
    “Soliciting or receiving alms in a public place, whether or not under any pretense of singing, dancing, fortune-telling, performing or offering any article for sale.”
Most traditional art performers are criminalised through this clause."


"Most Child Welfare Homes, including those run by high-profile NGOs, have become money-making enterprises. “Rescuing street children” has become a lucrative business. The size of their grants from donor agencies depends on the numbers they “rescue”, even if it means indulging in criminal abduction of children and forcibly taking them away from their parents."

"Why then target the poorest of the poor whose very survival depends on the street performances?
    heir children are neither neglected nor abused. In Parts I and II of this series I have described the pains these parents take to get their children released. Just witnessing the brutalisation these families are subjected to when arrested and separated from their children has been deeply traumatic for me."


" Their children are forcibly taken away from them and locked up in “protection homes”. There they are underfed, beaten up and made to clean and cook and do menial tasks in the Homes. Many of these protection homes do not allow parents to even visit their children. Even jail inmates guilty of heinous crimes are allowed visitors from among close relatives. But children of the poor forcibly put in orphanages or protection homes are not allowed any contact with the outside world."
  
  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Dec 17, 2017 6:36 am 
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Sunday Guardian's introduction to Madhu Kishwar's article Part 3:

In this week's edition of Global Child Rights and Wrongs, run in collaboration with www.saveyourchildren.in, Madhu Kishwar concludes her three-part paper on the persecution of Nat families under child rights laws. Madhu Kishwar's work on the Nat community illustrates how child rights laws compound the troubles of impoverished children by taking a rigid position on theoretical rights that are of little practical use to them, and by allowing profiteering in their name by corrupt state officials and opportunistic NGOs and lawyers.

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Mon Dec 18, 2017 5:54 am 
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The third part of Madhu Kishwar's account Indian NGOs and Child Welfare Committees traumatise Nat children in the name of “child protection” is now also on SaveYourChildren, under the title

Part 3: Social welfare laws are oppressing the very children they were meant to protect
SaveYourChildren, 18 December 2017



SaveYourChildren's introduction:

In the third and concluding part of her paper on the Nat community academic, writer and human rights activist Madhu Kishwar demonstrates the perhaps unintended, but nonetheless unjust and harsh effect, on this community of the Right to Education Act and other social welfare laws such as the Children’s Act and the Prevention of Begging statutes. The Nats are an impoverished community of wandering acrobatic performers, whose performance traditions go back hundreds of years. Madhu Kishwar’s work on the Nat community illustrates how child rights laws compound the troubles of impoverished children by taking a rigid position on theoretical rights that are of little practical use to them, and by allowing profiteering in their name by corrupt state officials and opportunistic NGOs and lawyers.

Links to Parts I and II of this paper which were earlier published in this series are also included below. A more detailed version of this paper with video recordings of interviews with Nat families will shortly be published on the website of Madhu Kishwar’s organisation, MANUSHI. This article was originally published by the Sunday Guardian on 16 December 2017 with the title Persecution of Nat families under a flawed legal system as part of our weekly series in collaboration with them called ‘Global Child Rights And Wrongs’.


  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 5:50 am 
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Julija Stepanenko:
Lessons from Latvia on how to protect children overseas
(Part 1)

Sunday Guardian, 23 December 2017

The author is Member of Parliament in Latvia since 2014. As a lawyer and mother-of-four, she is particularly interested in family friendly policies and traditional family-oriented child education.

"Every year, nearly 20 Latvian children are removed in Great Britain. The official figures of our minor citizens abroad being forcibly deprived of their Latvian families, which includes both child protection cases and inter-parental custody disputes (under the Hague Convention), are worryingly high and growing nearly each year, as can be seen in the table presented here."

"The attention to Latvian children abroad came into the spotlight in Latvia in 2015 when a Latvian journalist, Laila Brice, was about to lose her final battle in Great Britain for her beloved daughter. All the force of our Cabinet under former President Andris Bērziņš, the Latvian Ministry of Justice, and numerous delegations from the Latvian Parliament were unable to stop the forced adoption of Laila Brice’s child in Great Britain."

"We had to overcome the reluctance of some government officials still keeping themselves in the comfort zone of non-interference in such matters, we had to work against the belief that only bad parents lost their children to the child protection system in foreign countries. It took some time to change the way people in Latvia saw the problem."

"I will only say that our Latvian parents, and all immigrant parents, have to be very careful and aware of the risk of unjustified child removal when moving abroad, even for a temporary job.
    We have to do a lot of work in preventing such cases— explaining to parents the main dangers of the system, encouraging them not only to cooperate with foreign social services, but also to know their rights. Without knowing their rights, in a stressful situation, parents are made to sign documents that legally translate as abandoning the child, when in fact they had no such intention."


"To understand the scale of the problem, consider that in Great Britain 95% of the approximately 5,000 adoptions per year are forced, i.e. take place without the consent of the birth family."

  

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 Post subject: Re:Several articles expected in the Sunday Guardian in India
PostPosted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 5:53 am 
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Sunday Guardian's introduction to Julija Stepanenko's article Part 1:

This week in Global Child Rihts and Wrongs, run in collaboration with http://www.saveyourchildren.on, Julija Stepanenko describes the Latvian government's efforts to retrieve children confiscated by foreign child protection services (CPS). Julija Stepanenko is at the forefront of these efforts in Latvia as a Member of Parliament. Her article will be published in two parts. Readers here will be interested to see that child confiscation by CPS in foreign nations is a problem not just for Indian families. In fact, families from Eastern Europe and the Baltic States are targeted in much greater numbers than Indian ones by English and North European CPS.

  

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