Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
I am an autistic adult who is a parent. Since having my daughter I went through a terrible time with social services who set me up to fail and removed my daughter from me because I have a diagnosis of autism. It took me two years to fight for my daughter back and through this time social services and Cafcass used the so called deficits of my autism to justify the removal and to stop the return of my daughter. Thankfully the judge saw through this and returned my daughter concluding in her judgment that I parent my daughter to a high standard.
I want to know how many my adults will autism who are parents have been through a similar situation. How many parents with ASD and other disabilities and or impairments are being targeted by social services and having their children removed? If you have experienced this please tell your story because the current system is outrageously discriminative against parents who have a disability and or impairment and I would like to raise awareness of the current failures within the current child protection system which is targeting parents with disabilities and or impairments so that change can happen.
How do social services even get involved or find out a parent is autistic to start with??
So glad you have your daughter back. So wrong it ever had to be something you had to go through.
Hi ya,
Before I gave birth to my daughter I had a lot of anxiety about becoming a Mom. I had nothing to compare it to because this was my first baby and I was scared and worried about what it was going to be like so I sort help and support from social services thinking that they would support me. It was the worst decision I made in my life and social services certainly did not help or support me. In fact they set me up to fail and by the time my daughter was 7 weeks old they had taken her.
I also had really poor legal representation and they decided that because I had a diagnosis of autism, I didn't have capacity despite medical records making it clear that I had full capacity. Social services cherry picked evidence to make it appear that I could not parent my daughter. They withheld from the court all the positive evidence so the judge was deceived and because I had majorly poor representation my solicitor at the time did not make enquiries to collate the positive evidence which was readily available at the time.
I did change solicitors and went to a solicitor who helped me show the court how underhanded social services had been. The judge also ruled that the evidence should not have been withheld and the judge at the time should have seen all the evidence and had that happened my daughter would not have been removed.
I'm glad you got your daughter back.
"Cherry picking evidence" that's the phrase I was looking for earlier. I'm glad you said it. Because that's what was used to fire me from my last job.