Speech held by Margaret Hennum at the demonstration against barnevernet in Oslo May 5th, 2016
My name is Margaret Hennum. I am a pediatric nurse and have been working with children and with families in crisis almost my entire adult life. I am a mother of two, but I have never been involved with the Norwegian Child Protection service (CPS), “barnevernet”. So why am I standing here now?
Well, eight years ago I read a book called “Power abuse and miscarriage of justice” by Berit Aarset, a grandmother writing about how the CPS took away the healthy and sound one-year-old from the mother.
I, who hardly ever thought about the CPS before, got a wake up call, and couldn’t NOT stand her. After I read the book, I have heard of an alarming number of parents with similar stories. And I have seen that the Child Protection Service, with the word “protection” in their name, is not a protector, but have become a large threat to our children’s lives and well being!
The CPS has as an official goal to remove more and more children from their homes, and they do. But it is not the neglected children they take. Most of them are healthy, functioning children without any signs of neglect. “This can’t be true,” you say, “there must be something more, right?” Yes, there kind of is, but not in the way you would think. For the CPS thinks they are capable of judging who is able to raise a child and who is not. So even if the children are OK living with their parents right now, they mean to see the parents as a threat to the children in the future. Then they suddenly remove the child without warning, and thereby inflicts the child’s loss of parents, loss of siblings, loss of grandparents, friends and all what they belong to!
It is more than 50 years since health care realized that the parents should come with when children were hospitalized. They understood that the anger, despair and in the end the apathy the children showed, laying alone in the hospital bed, were reactions to loss, natural reactions to the loss of their parents. Now, 50 years later the CPS are taking more and more children from their families, and the child protectors are proud of it!
In the Ida case, the newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad presented recently, we can read about a girl who got aggressive only after the CPS got involved. Many times the CPS describes the children they have removed from their parents as aggressive, despairing and depressed. Lawyer Sverre Kvilhaug says that in all the cases he has been working, he has NEVER seen that the CPS has considered the possibility that they themselves could have created aggressive, despairing and depressed children; these natural reactions to loss of family.
Homeless, yearning and insecure children become damaged children. They are put back in development and prevented from having a normal and healthy development. The CPS, who are making more and more of this homeless children, can not know what it means to belong!
For decades they have gone out to other institutions, like health centres, schools, hospitals and the government agency for children, youth and families, in addition to children and teen organizations, asking them to come to the CPS if they have any worries about a child. Many people have done this, and are shocked when the CPS then immediately empties the home of children.
Last year barnevernet spent 20 billion Norwegian kroner! So, of course, we now have to ask the question: what went so terribly wrong? The barnevernmentor Kari Killén has told her students since 1988 that 45%, nearly half the amount of all Norwegian children, have parents not able to bring up their kids without the help and advice from barnevernet!
If this was not a huge lie, it would imply a total collapse of our welfare society model! But even worse than the billions of kroner spent, are the sufferings of all the devastated families involved. Still the CPS wants more money. But they should not have it; instead their budget will be squeezed. And their only responsibility that will be left for them, are for those severely neglected children, these who are let down by the CPS today. We do not accept that the CPS can be an intruder in the lives of normal, functioning families. The help that normal families need from the government are provided by other government institutions like health centres, schools and hospitals. And then we need to get the “housewife substitute” back!
Until the CPS has lost most of the current functions, we need to stop reporting anything but sure neglect.
The CPS is now not only a threat against those directly involved, but it is undermining the functions of important institutions like health centres and others, providing services that we all need. Because nobody should ever take the chance of showing their vulnerability to helpers instructed to be informers to the CPS.
I cannot think of anyone less trustworthy, and whom I will more strongly warn against, than those removing by force a 3 months old baby from its mothers breast!
These kind of people shall not take care of our children. Anyone who is deprived of their children must get the possibility of
having their case considered by a qualified investigating committee, and all those children who want it, must be allowed to return home to their families.
Finally, social media have lately revealed the inner workings of maternal homes, where hundreds of parents are forced into. Most of the parents leave without their kids. Those places are not a home for mothers, were you get advice and help. Those places are observation institutions, were despaired and frightened parents are kept, forced by the CPS to enter. If not, they will loose their child immediately! Just like the gypsies were forced only a few years ago. The only difference is, that the gypsies were sterilized by force. The parents today are not sterilized, but they are denied having a family! And like the gypsies, parents are painstakingly intelligence tested.
As strong as I can, I am warning you: never agree to go to those family centres or maternal homes! Flee abroad, hide yourself in Norway, fight for your child among people who want the best for you!
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