Last year, I reported on Boris Johnson’s suggestion that some children at danger of radicalisation should be taken into care. Here’s an account of a chilling parallel case. A 25 year old man nearly had his baby put up for adoption when it was discovered a) that he had supported the EDL and b) had received a police caution, aged 17, for sleeping with a 13 year old. The fact he sometimes drank too much and had been known to smoke cannabis were noted as aggravating factors in this decision. As Sir James Munby pointed out when he overruled the adoption order, these facts/failings do not constitute sufficient cause to be permanently separated from your child. However the social workers clearly took a different view.
Social workers … decided that the far-Right political group was ‘barbaric’ and the 25-year-old man’s views were ‘immoral’.
He should not be allowed to bring up his child because the boy needed ‘an environment that supports difference, equality and independence’, they said.
The social workers seemed to be demanding that individuals and families all adhere to the kind of standard which we expect from, say, a school. Sir James Munby’s judgement on the council’s behaviour is damning:
Sir James said the allocated social worker had been ‘plainly both inexperienced and too inexperienced for a case of this complexity’.
He said her work had been ‘seriously flawed’. And he said a second social worker seemed neither to have ‘explored nor analysed’ in any detail the underlying factual basis of the council’s case.
Insisting parents conform to certain moral/political perspectives is a pretty odd way of demonstrating your commitment to ‘support[ing] difference’. I began this post by mentioning Boris Johnson’s parallel concerns – and it would be interesting to know what these social workers’ tolerance threshold would be for extreme views (or simply views not fully supportive of difference) relating to radical Islam.
