Translation from Brazilian Portuguese and Full Interview of Suranya Aiyar
Family separation policy causes protest
Under the premise of preserving child welfare, Barnevernet removes about 10 thousand children from their parents each year without notice or a judge’s order. Brazilians report to Correio the drama of losing their children to the Norwegian authorities.
Prejudiced and insular
“Immigrants are disproportionately targeted by the authorities, as there is a lot of prejudice against especially those from South Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Poor immigrant parents cannot afford good lawyers, and state-appointed defenders are not committed enough to win in court. Judges tend to side with the authorities, giving the child protection agency the benefit of the doubt. In Norway, there is no court to oversee the Barnevernet. The first point of appeal for parents after a child has been removed is a County Committee. It is astonishing that such a serious matter is decided without an appropriate court or judge. Norway is a small, insular country. People simply do not know about other cultures. They are not accustomed to a different way of speaking or keeping the house.”
A lawyer and an Indian child rights activist and also manage saveyourchildren.in
Trauma to children “I have talked to many children over the years that are under the care of the Barnevernet. Almost without exception, they want to return to their biological families. It is a trauma for many of the children to be separated from their parents, brothers, grandparents, uncle and aunts. Based on my experiences with these children, I can definitely say that it is not in their best interest to be under the care of the Barnevernet. According to statistics, 75% of children in state care are in worse psychological condition than before. The Barnevernet phenomenon produces billions of euros every year. It is a profitable business for lawyers, psychologists, social workers, judges and private equity firms, some even on the stock exchange. Besides these interests, there is no right of defense. The Norwegian judiciary considers that the laws of the country are in harmony with the obligations of its human rights obligations.
Arbitrary and ideological
I consider Barnevernet to be arbitrary and ideological. It has unlimited power and is not held accountable by anyone. Norwegian social workers can do everything they want and there is no penalty. Prisoners get more rights in Norway than children separated from the biological family. Barnevernet even ignored an official request for information from the Czech Interior Ministry about a family whose children were unfairly taken away. All criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to separate children from migrant parents, but in Norway we can find people who love their system and say that it is best for children. They are destroying families and stealing children. It must be made a priority in Norway to reform the system, but it seems that they care more about the welfare and privacy of state officials.
Jorge Vasconcellas: (Question 1) – I saw on your website (excellent) that government intervention in the lives of families, the withdrawal of children from their parents and other authoritarian actions are a trend in several countries. In your opinion, what can be behind it? What is the reason?
Suranya Aiyar: The main reason is that the current model of child protection which has been adopted in countries around the world, especially in First World countries, allows the permanent removal of children from families without adequate checks and balances to keep the system transparent or accountable. Removing a child from its family has to be the most draconian state power ever conceived – as strong as the death penalty. But murders, rapists and terrorists have more recourse to due process and a fair hearing, than a child and family targeted for separation by child protection agencies.
The second factor is that over the years there has been a steady lowering of the threshold for removal. Originally, the State’s power to remove children from families was conceived as a protective measure for children facing incest or physical assault in the home, but today the overwhelming majority of child removals are not connected with sexual or physical assault. For example, according to latest figures from the USA, child removals associated with sexual abuse and physical abuse account for only 4 percent and 12 percent of the total removals. The maximum removals (61%) are associated with the category of “neglect” which is very subjective and leaves too much discretion to the investigating case officers; or non-abuse reasons such as “caretaker inability to cope (11%) and poverty-related issues such as housing (10%). In England, many children are taken away when there is no abuse but something called “risk of future emotional harm”. This so-called risk is based on the case worker’s subjective assessment of the parent’s personality (‘is the father bad tempered?’) and intelligence (‘is the mother “bright enough”?’). In Norway again the majority of cases do not involve sexual abuse or physical assault, or even drugs and alcohol abuse. So with such low threshold, it is not surprising that the number of taken children is increasing.
What becomes the final nail in the coffin is that child protection agencies tend to interfere with families that are weak and so are not able to fight back. Typically, in the native population, impoverished families are targeted. Then immigrants find themselves disproportionately targeted because there is a lot of prejudice, especially in countries like Norway and Denmark, against foreigners from South Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Adding to this toxic mix of over-broad state powers, a low threshold for intervention and cultural prejudice, is that courts in all countries with active child protection agencies have failed to regulate these agencies properly. Poor parents and immigrants are not able to afford good lawyers, and the state appointed lawyers they are given are just not strong or committed enough to win in courts. Judges tend to side with the case workers and give the child protection agency the benefit of the doubt rather than the parents.
Jorge Vasconcellas: (Question 2) – How do you assess the way the Norwegian Barnevernet operates and the criteria adopted to remove children from their parents?
Suranya Aiyar: The issues I have mentioned with over-broad state powers, inadequate courts and cultural bias are heightened in Norway.
For instance, in Norway you do not even have a court to supervise Barnevernet. The first point of recourse in child removals is a tribunal called the County Committee. So you have the shocking situation of such a serious matter as the removal of children from their own parents being decided without a proper court or judge. What makes it worse is that the County Committee can include child welfare officers. So there is no proper separation of powers between the child welfare system that is trying to separate the family and the County Committee that is evaluating the actions of the child welfare system.
Even the Norwegian court system does not have adequate processes for a proper judicial inquiry. The District Court to which you can appeal from County Committee decisions does not have only judges, but also lay members. I have seen cases in which the the lay member is described as “Early Retiree” or “Office Manager”. Can you imagine such a serious question as the permanent cutting off of a child from its family being decided by these unqualified lay members of the public? In India we have a system of Panchayats in rural areas where five village leaders can get together to settle disputes, but that is hardly an appropriate system for such delicate issues as state-sponsored child removal. So in many ways Norway, despite its reputation for being a star democracy, is very lax and unsophisticated, atleast in child-related court processes.
An added factor that makes the system unfair is that removals are done without any advance warning. Barnevernet officials either take the children from school in a surprise move or turn up with police at the home and grab the children. There are gut wrenching videos on social media of mothers being held with their face to the ground screaming pathetically as their babies are taken away. These surprise removals are without any court orders – the local Barnevernet itself sanctions them – sometimes a day after the removal. And these are ex parte removal orders – there is no hearing given to the family.
Once the child is in the hands of the Barnvevernet, they have all the power. Typically, they will take the child away claiming “emergency” and when the matter comes for final decision several months later they will make an entirely new case, without any mention of the so-called emergency which they initially claimed to remove the children. So, for instance, in an Indian case, famously known in India as the “Bhattacharya case”, the children were removed in an emergency with the Barnevernet claiming that they were “endangered” because the mother left the child unsupervised on the nappy changing table. Until then all the Barnevernet had told the family was that they did not like the mother’s hand-feeding and co-sleeping (sleeping in the same room) with the children; and she had to improve her “routine”. These were hardly things you would expect children to be removed for. So when Barnevernet made the emergency claim it was a shock to everyone. It turned out that the family did not even have a nappy changing table at home and the mother changed the nappies on a low cot about a foot off the ground with railings. The authorities then said that even if the removal over the claim of the nappy changing table was wrong, since the mother became hysterical when she was informed by Barnevernet officials that the children had been taken away never to be returned till they were 18, her emotional state justified keeping the children away! In Norway, expressing your emotions is seen as being harmful to children. Such unjustified removals happen all the time in Norway. In a case involving a Czech woman, the children were removed on allegations of sexual abuse by the father. The charges were dropped, but still the children were not returned – not even to the mother who by that time had separated from the father! The reason, one often cited by Barnevernet is that the children are now settled in their foster home and it would not be in their best interests to unsettle them by returning them to their parents!
Norway also has a spectacularly low threshold for child removal. Children are taken away where this is no abuse but what is called “attachment disorder” based on such things as whether the baby seeks eye contact with persons other than the mother or throws tantrums with her. This is seen as a sign of “attachment disorder” . These were the kinds of ridiculous allegations that Barnevernet made in the Bhattacharya case. When the matter came up for final decision, eight months after the so-called “emergency” removal, there was no enquiry into whether the emergency, spurious as it was, had been resolved – even though all this time the children were kept away from their parents under the interim emergency orders. Instead, the mother was declared unfit because her infant baby was said to turn her head if the case worker walked into the room and the elder boy threw toddler tantrums and had some behavioral disorders. The boy’s issues, not uncommon in toddlers, were blamed on the mother. It was Kafkaesque. And it is the same in countless other cases. Once in court, all Barnevernet is concerned with is justifying having taken the child away, and it acts like any other litigant in an adversarial proceeding. It claims to be acting in the best interests of the child, but it is really just interested in defending itself.
Foster carers get paid well by the state in Norway for taking in children. There is also a demand for adoption owing to declining fertility rates. So, perhaps unwittingly, there are commercial and other interests that have come to feed off the pool of children that Barnevernet creates. This is also driving the high rates of child removal in Norway.
Immigrants get disproportionately targeted because there is a lot of cultural prejudice in Norway. For all its money, Norway is a small and isolated country. People there simply do not know about other cultures like India or Latin America. They are not used to a different way of keeping the home or talking. For example, being excitable or passionate is seen as being somehow lacking in control and hence a sign of being unfit as a parent. So you can imagine that anyone with a Latin or South Asian temperament, especially when it comes to their own children, comes off very badly with the insular case workers. One case worker told an Indian mother that Indians were barbaric and it was the British who “civilised” India. With this negative attitude and a low threshold for removal, you can imagine how difficult it is for immigrants to prove they are good parents.
Jorge Vasconcellas: (Question 3) – In the name of the “welfare” of the children the Barnevernet takes away the children of the parents. But what are the psychological effects of this withdrawal for children? And the harm to families?
Suranya Aiyar: Well, as you can imagine the effects are terrible. Children are petrified and confused. Some of them end up thinking their parents must have died. That is what the children are reported to have said in the Bodnariu case which was a mixed Romanian-Norweigan family whose children were taken away because of alleged “Christian indoctrination” and slapping. Toddlers are unable to eat or sleep. Indian parents from the US with taken children have told me about how at visitations their children grab at food as if they haven’t eaten for a week and have dark circles under their eyes. One man who was taken as a boy in Denmark talks of how he was locked up in a dark room in a shelter and spent the might looking through the keyhole at the point of light from outside.
In England and Norway at visitations (which are as low as once every six months) the child protection officials ban parents from expressing any sadness or talking about the case, with the threat that contact will be stopped. So the children get really confused. Imagine how isolating for a four-year-old whose mother is not telling him why he is being kept away from home and when he can come back. Since they are taking even newborn infants, babies are deprived of breastfeeding and of the comfort of their mothers. Anyone who has had a baby knows how they crave for their mother’s arms. The case record in the Bhattacharya case notes that the baby (five months at removal) did not take the bottle for two or three days after being taken. She was a breastfed baby. To give you an idea of how inhumane the system is, in this case the mother described to me how her son was held by social workers at the other end of the room because it was technically a few minutes before the contact time. He was straining and squirming but they just held him back until the hands of the clock reached the exact minute for the start of contact!
Jorge Vasconcellas: (Question 4) – In June, the European Council adopted a Resolution with harsh criticism of the actions of the Barnevernet and similar bodies in other countries. The document condemns the removal of the children of their parents and other actions. At the same time, the European Court of Human Rights examines several denunciations against the Barnevernet. Can we say that, finally, the world woke up to the problem?
Suranya Aiyar: Well, it is good that international bodies are examining and critiquing the system. But to be honest, a lot more has to be done. The systemic dysfunction that has led to rising child removals which I have described earlier need to be addressed – and not just in Norway’s Barnevernet, but in Britain’s Social Services, in the USA’s Child Protection Services and, indeed, in all countries that have this system from Australia to Scandinavia to Canada. It is not enough to respond to a particular case of child removal or a particular country’s record on this issue. We have to ask fundamental questions about whether this is the right system for protecting children. The European Union (EU) and United Nations (UN), unfortunately, are among the greatest proponents of this misguided system of child protection. In order to become an EU member state you have to have a system similar to Barnevernet in place. In the UN, it is the UNICEF that is propagating this system as the gold standard for child welfare in all countries – even in India. UNICEF and Save the Children are here preaching to the Indian government how to take children away from poor Indian families in our slums and villages, how to jail parents for slapping their kids, as if these families were not miserable enough already. The EU and UNICEF will say that they are in support of families staying together, but on paper even Barnevernet takes child removal only as a last resort. The fact is that this system has not worked even when it was supposed to have preferred family re-unification over removals. So I do not believe that the solution is going to come from the EU or UN. I think this is an issue that BRICS should take up. India, Russia, China and Brazil are societies that understand family values. South Africa knows well how the state machinery can be used to repress a particular group in society, which is what child protection agencies are doing to immigrants. BRICS should join with the African and Eastern European nations to protest state sponsored child snatching by Western countries and come up with its own model for child welfare that is sensible and compassionate, and looks upon the family as an ally and not a hindrance to protecting children.
