Upping the anti

A new Fathers 4 Justice-style campaign group has launched a series of bitter attacks on social workers, calling them 'child snatchers' and family wreckers. David Batty investigates

Read one social worker's reply
Social Worker's comment

The Guardian, Wednesday 5 October 2005
Upping the Anti

The Daily Mail launched an impassioned broadside on adoption policy recently - and turned to a tiny, virtually unknown campaign group to help give credence to its claims that children were being unfairly taken into care because their parents were too "slow" or too poor. Below the paper's campaign slogan "Stolen by the State", the group's claims that councils were being bribed by ministers to arrange more adoptions, and that this led to children being "snatched" from their birth parents for spurious reasons, were extensively quoted.

The group is the Families Anti Social Services Inquiry Team (Fassit). Members share information on the web, and mainly consist of parents under investigation by social services or in dispute with their ex-partner over access to their children. But its prominent role in the Mail's campaign has put wind in its sails. Committed and angry, it aspires - in the style of Fathers 4 Justice - to a higher, louder profile.

This is not good news for adoption professionals, who are uneasy about Fassit's highly-charged, at times almost paranoid, take on children and families policy, and the crudity of the invective it directs at social workers. Its website portrays them as untouchable enforcers of social engineering, eager to break up happy homes while failing to protect children in real danger of abuse. Social services departments, it says, have been "systematically kidnapping young children from heartbroken families for no legal or proper reasons". Social workers, it says, "procure" children for adoption.

Consider the following extract from the Fassit website: "If you yourself have an unhappy or non-existent family life you are an ideal candidate to become a social worker. When you get used to breaking up other people's families and taking their children you will forget your own troubles and it will make you feel great. Remember, however, that if you come across a really brutal family where a child is being cruelly abused (like Victoria Climbié), just clear out in a hurry and leave them alone. Don't worry, no one will expect you to risk your own safety."

I decided to meet Fassit to see what lay behind its anger and what it hopes to achieve. Its coordinators, Drew, a 35-year-old mother from Greater Manchester, and Thomas, 45, a father from south Wales, arranged to meet me in a hotel in Birmingham. Also present were former teacher Jane and her husband Alan- fresh from a battle with a West Country social services department which they say placed all five of their children on the child protection register for several months as a result of allegations - later disproved - of neglect.

Dishing the dirt

The group was as passionate and uncompromising in person as online. "If they'd taken the children off us, do you know what I'd have done? I'd have abducted them," Jane tells the photographer before I've even sat down. Her experience when social workers came to her home was, evidently, not happy. "I would have physically taken them by the scruff of the neck and shoved them out of the door." She refers to a social worker involved in the case as "a nasty, lying bit of dirt". The experience, she says, has left her "paranoid", and terrified that "something is going to happen in the middle of the night".

Fassit emerged from another online support group, Parents 4 Protest (P4P), inspired by Fathers 4 Justice, the lobby group best known for its infamous superhero protest stunts at Buckingham Palace and elsewhere. Thomas set up P4P two years ago while fighting in the family courts for contact with his two sons. He says he has now come to a private arrangement with his ex-partner.

Drew, who insists she cannot discuss her own case for legal reasons, emailed Thomas two months ago and suggested setting up a sister organisation to P4P, focused on parents in dispute with social services. Now it has 210 members, who correspond via a Yahoo internet group.

Despite its name, Drew insists the group is not "anti social workers". Thomas says they chose the name because they thought it would attract parents seeking help. "The tone of the website is negative because it is negative what [social services] are doing," he says. "But also we have to be anti social services to grab people who are so frightened . . . They're not going to go on a site that says social services help, so we have to say anti social services."

Essex county council believes the group has incited harassment of its staff. Clair Pyper, children and young people service director, says the "disgraceful" descriptions of social workers on Fassit's website provoked much of the hate mail it received during the Mail's coverage of a recent controversial adoption case. She says: "People were calling us Nazis, comparing us to the Gestapo and SS guards running concentration camps. Rather than providing practical help for parents, the Fassit website provides an opportunity for people whose children have been removed to vent their anger. It talks about how to stop social workers going into your house, which is dangerous because a lot of families do need support."

The case that attracted Fassit's ire concerned an Essex couple whose children were put up for adoption because they were considered incapable of parenting. The mother is learning disabled. The high court judge who approved the adoption says the children had suffered neglect and their development would be impaired if they stayed with their parents.

Fassit argues that the couple were picked on because of the learning disabilities alone. Drew claims she also knows of cases where children were removed because their parents are poor, or "arguing", lack routine, or because they had another child taken into care years earlier.

She believes social workers should intervene only if there is "clear evidence" a child has been "severely physically abused, sexually abused . . . or has suffered neglect to the point of illness, or if the parents have got a drug addiction". She opposes children being removed because they could be at risk, saying that this amounts to "crystal ball" gazing.

Pyper rejects this as an oversimplification of child protection. "Our work involves more than dealing with obvious injuries. Neglect and lack of emotional attachment can be just as damaging. The mother in the recent case went on about the children being beautifully dressed, but it's not about those superficial things - it's about the emotional bond."

This does not persuade Fassit, which believes families are being targeted because the government is offering councils extra money if they increase adoptions by 40%. Drew claims: "It's just a big money industry where you can cash in on abuse of children - because it is abuse when children are being taken away from their parents. It's just state-sanctioned child kidnapping." She opens a copy of Adoption UK magazine, and points to images of children on interim care orders. She says: "This is a case still ongoing. And it's wrong to advertise a child like a dog."

The Department for Education and Skills rejects Fassit's claims about the adoption target. A spokesman notes that the 40% increase concerned only children already in the care system and was intended to reduce the length of time that children had to wait before being placed in a permanent home.

The battle goes on

But Fassit has no intention of letting the issue drop and is now embroiled in a row with the British Association for Adoption & Fostering (BAAF). Felicity Collier, its chief executive, is angered by some of the allegations about the Essex adoption case on Fassit's website and wrote to every UK MP to rebut them. Fassit responded in turn, apparently baffled by her defence of UK adoption practices. "We don't understand why Felicity Collier is so vehemently defending social services and what's going on, because she's a charity, and we agree with charities," says Drew.

Collier considers Drew a "clearly wounded person", but regards Fassit's activities as "very worrying". She says: "Having this sort of venom against intervention by social workers does not help vulnerable parents struggling with raising their children. It can only fuel anger."

Fassit appears encouraged by the impact it has had. Drew says this is just the beginning of its campaign, and Thomas adds: "If we are successful in helping one person get their child back from social services or deterring social services in the first place then you can call that success."

· Parents' names have been changed.

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