Social services removing children from parents with ASD

Hello,

That's a terrible story and I'm glad it all worked out. I'm not a parent so haven't specifically had the experience of witnessing something specifically related to autism, but I have witnessed social services in action using their power to steamroll ahead with their own agenda without full evidence of the situation so I'm well aware of the inadequacies of the system.

My sister's first child, my oldest nephew, was almost adopted out of the family. As a baby at the time, he was rushed to hospital one day from the home of the child minder. I don't want to go into too much detail as it's not my story to tell, but I'll state the basics. In Hospital he was found to have suffered some brain injuries that could only have happened from intentional physical abuse so the Hospital was right to contact social services. The problem was that before social services had done any investigating their immediate response was "We're taking him away from the family and putting him up for adoption because statistics say it's most likely the parents. Therefore, in this individual circumstance it must be the parents."

In the first instance, my sister believed that the system would be fair, so her initial response was to state her innocence believing social services would investigate and find her innocent. Therefore, she took no action to get legal professionals to act for her. In that short space of time social services had the power to do anything they wanted. My initial response was to get legal professionals on board as quickly as possible because I didn't trust them. We had some lucky factors in our circumstances, but when social services and the police are failing to do their jobs properly while operating from a very biased perspective that my sister and her husband were the abusers you can understand how easily things could have gone so wrong for our family. So, the system wasn't fair on my sister and her husband, the lives of all our family got so disrupted, but in the end the judge, who acted very fairly and listened with an open mind found my sister and her husband innocent while finding the child minder guilty.

At the end of it all, social services and the police never apologised for their failings or their bias from the beginning. If some of our circumstances may have been different we may not have been so lucky. I have no doubts that there are people who have been let down and failed by the system so I feel a great deal of sadness for any family that gets broken up simply because the system decrees it without proper evidence or investigation.

Hello,

That's a terrible story and I'm glad it all worked out. I'm not a parent so haven't specifically had the experience of witnessing something specifically related to autism, but I have witnessed social services in action using their power to steamroll ahead with their own agenda without full evidence of the situation so I'm well aware of the inadequacies of the system.

My sister's first child, my oldest nephew, was almost adopted out of the family. As a baby at the time, he was rushed to hospital one day from the home of the child minder. I don't want to go into too much detail as it's not my story to tell, but I'll state the basics. In Hospital he was found to have suffered some brain injuries that could only have happened from intentional physical abuse so the Hospital was right to contact social services. The problem was that before social services had done any investigating their immediate response was "We're taking him away from the family and putting him up for adoption because statistics say it's most likely the parents. Therefore, in this individual circumstance it must be the parents."

In the first instance, my sister believed that the system would be fair, so her initial response was to state her innocence believing social services would investigate and find her innocent. Therefore, she took no action to get legal professionals to act for her. In that short space of time social services had the power to do anything they wanted. My initial response was to get legal professionals on board as quickly as possible because I didn't trust them. We had some lucky factors in our circumstances, but when social services and the police are failing to do their jobs properly while operating from a very biased perspective that my sister and her husband were the abusers you can understand how easily things could have gone so wrong for our family. So, the system wasn't fair on my sister and her husband, the lives of all our family got so disrupted, but in the end the judge, who acted very fairly and listened with an open mind found my sister and her husband innocent while finding the child minder guilty.

At the end of it all, social services and the police never apologised for their failings or their bias from the beginning. If some of our circumstances may have been different we may not have been so lucky. I have no doubts that there are people who have been let down and failed by the system so I feel a great deal of sadness for any family that gets broken up simply because the system decrees it without proper evidence or investigation.