by Suranya Aiyar

A version of this article was published in the National Herald in March 2023. 

The trailer of Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway was released last week to a resounding public response. The film is based on the true story of the Bhattacharyas, a young Bengali family in Norway, whose children were brutally snatched by Norwegian Child Services, known as Barnevernet, about ten years ago. The family, especially the mother, Sagarika, fought back valiantly, and managed against all the odds to win back her children.

The case was brought to national attention by then Rajya Sabha MP, Mrs Brinda Karat. Along with other concerned mothers, I joined her campaign to bring the children back.

I was shocked, both as a mother and a lawyer, at the summary way in which Sagarika’s children had been removed. There was no allegation of extreme violence or incest. There appeared to be no reason for the severe measures taken of placing the children in permanent foster care, without allowing the parents to even visit them. The videos and photos of the children showed them to be clean, well-fed and well-dressed. The baby girl was thriving as an exclusively breast-fed infant. All this indicated the mother’s, who was the children’s primary care giver, commitment and good care of them.

The Indian Government intervened after massive public protests, and eventually the children were returned to Sagarika.

The most disturbing thing about Sagarika’s case is not the racist attitudes she encountered from Barnevernet, or even the chilling practices of Barnevernet, such as turning on their video cameras to tape her whenever she was emotionally overcome at the agonising separation from her children. The most shocking thing about this case is that Sagarika never did anything bad to her child.

After Sagarika returned from Norway, we obtained all the documents of the case from Barnevernet. The entire case was built on bizarre, culturally-biased interpretations of her normal everyday interactions with the children.

Since Sagarika’s case, I have been contacted by many other Indian families abroad with taken children. They call me from all over the world – the USA, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Australia. In each case the family is completely innocent – just like Sagarika. But they are only able to prove this when given access to the lawyers, activists, interpreters and other experts who can help them mount a defence.

The types of families targeted by these foreign child services agencies are in no position to fight back if left to fend for themselves. Typically, they are newly arrived immigrants from a lower middle- or working class- background. They have no friends or family in the new country. Their English is very weak. They do not know the local language in non-English-speaking countries.

The children are below the age of two, and so they are unable to speak for themselves.

The appearance of the parents is distinctly vernacular. They do not present as Westernised. This weighs heavily against them when everything hangs upon the evaluation of their demeanour and child-rearing practices by hostile and insular social workers.

In almost every case the father is in the IT Industry and all the family members are Indian citizens. The big Indian IT corporations that are profiting from sending these dynamic young men abroad make no provision to help them when trapped by Child Services.

In the USA, most of the cases that come to me have started when the parents took their child to hospital with head injuries or bone fractures. The parents are immediately put under suspicion of abuse or “Shaken Baby Syndrome”.

Shaken Baby Syndrome is a contested medical theory that certain types of injuries in babies can only be caused deliberately, and not by accident. Typically, the babies have been injured when they roll off a bed or slip while bathing or being lifted from their oil massage. Many medical experts believe injuries diagnosed as Shaken Baby Syndrome are in fact caused by short falls and other accidents. However, if the parents are not able to find and pay for such experts, they can lose their babies for ever.

The US system atleast allows parents to present a robust defence with medical and forensics experts. But in Europe and the UK, the child protection laws have been progressively skewed against the parents to the point where it is virtually impossible to win in court. Instead of being treated as a party in an adversarial process, the Child Services are treated by the judges as neutral experts.

Child Services in all Western countries are not bound by the burden of proof that applies in other areas of the law. However, in Europe and the UK they are not even required to allege abuse. In the UK, Social Services can remove a child simply by claiming that it is at “risk” in the home based on the parent’s so-called aggressive personality – an evaluation that can be based purely on the Social Services’ own fraught interactions with parents who are angered by the unwarranted intrusion into their homes.

In one tragic case involving a Tamil Muslim family in Birmingham, Social Services removed the children when the father insisted on welfare benefits after losing his job. The Local Authority had to concede the benefits, as that is what the law provided. But the father was accused of causing stress to his children by the family’s financial straits. The father was an undocumented migrant and Social Services accused him of “using” his children to get nationalised. Based on these wholly unjustified grounds, the children were permanently removed. The parents have not even been allowed to see their children – not even to speak to them over the phone – for the last eight years.

In Northern European countries like Norway, the trigger for child protection cases can be anything from a toddler’s fussiness in playschool (as happened in Sagarika’s case) to a spiteful neighbour’s complaint. Once the case is started, all decisions hinge on psychological assessments of the parents and the children.

These assessments are based on outlandish and discredited psychological theories. For instance, in Norway, based on Sagarika’s 2-year old son’s perceived behavioural issues, care workers opined that the mother must be “cold”. This is a sexist theory from the past that no respectable psychologist would endorse today.

Another favourite peg on which Child Services hang families in Norway and Germany is the so-called “attachment theory” where the relationship between the child and parents is judged on how they interact with each other.

Obviously, such an approach is heavily culturally biased. The nature of interaction between parents and children varies significantly between cultures. Scolding your child in a loud voice is considered terrible by Norwegians, but they give no weight to the fact that the child has a stable home with earning parents. Responding emotionally to care workers who are from a cultural context where people are not very expressive, is taken as a sign of instability. Feeding your child by hand or reciting mantras to them is not seen as an expression of love by European psychologists.

In the case of babies who are not yet verbal, there is really very little for a psychologist to go on. So they have invented indicators of attachment disorder that beggar belief. For instance, the Norwegian care workers assessed that Sagarika’s then 3-month -old baby was not attached to her because the baby would look at the care workers and not at her when they entered the room.

In Germany, in a case still underway, the psychologist has said that the 2-year-old baby has “stranger attachment disorder” because though she has been separated from her parents for over a year, she still cries when it is time to leave them after visitations, but does not have a same reaction to the foster carer.

So these Western child protection systems are a house of cards. The whole edifice is built of nothing much more than dodgy psychology and downright racism. Our Government needs to take a strong line against the cultural bias of Western child services agencies.

Under the Vienna Convention, the receiving country is obliged to inform the Embassy of the sending country when a child is removed from parental custody. However, this rule is never followed in practice.

Our Embassies abroad have no information for families trapped in child services proceedings. They do not even have a list of child protection lawyers.

As they are unaware of the unfairness of child protection inquiries, embassy officials will meet the parents with the same scepticism and scorn that they are already facing from insular and prejudiced child care workers. Embassy officials will blame the parents for not giving them proper information without understanding that the parents are themselves bewildered and uncomprehending of the case against them.

It is high time for the Government to formulate a policy for these families. Our Embassies need to be trained in handling these parents with more sensitivity. They need to understand the parents’ linguistic and cultural limitations when confronting Child Services. Embassy officials also have to be better informed as to the rights available to Indians and their children in this situation. Most urgently, the Government should put in place arrangements with these countries that enable the taken children to be immediately repatriated to extended family in India.

Suranya Aiyar is a lawyer who helps pro bono families caught up in foreign child services proceedings.