Leen’s story
The criticisms of the Norwegian Child Protection Service date back some years. Two years ago I reported on the case of Ruth and Marius Bodnariu, evangelical Christians who were accused in 2015 of breaking the law by smacking their children. Their five children – including a small baby – were put into emergency care, prompting demonstrations by sympathisers around the world.
The children were eventually returned to their parents – but the family then decided to leave Norway. They now live in Marius’s home country, Romania.
In the same year, 2015, more than 140 professionals in the childcare field – lawyers, psychologists and social workers, wrote a National Notice of Concern to the government. They said that “a long list of children – the actual number is not known by anyone – are exposed to serious failures of understanding and infringements of their rights.”
They added that “when expert witnesses submit their reports and give evidence in court, we often see that the observational basis upon which they report is very weak.”
That open letter has now been signed by a further 120 specialists. Meanwhile, a family involved in a custody battle with the state has won a rare legal victory, gaining the right to have its case heard later this year at the highest level of the European Court of Human Rights.
And, increasing the international pressure still more on Norway, several families from the country have sought refuge in Poland to avoid the threat of care orders by the child protection service.
They believe Poland places more emphasis on keeping families together.
Among those now in Poland is Leen, the 14-year-old daughter of Palestinian parents who were given asylum in Norway.
Her father, Talab, a journalist, had served five years in jail in Syria, much of it in solitary confinement, for criticising the regime there.
Talab and his older daughter, Hiba, are still in Norway, while his wife and Leen are in Poland where they are now seeking asylum for a second time.
Hiba, who works as a nurse, explains what happened to her younger sister: “One day she went to school and she didn’t come back. And my family, my parents and brother were looking for hours as her phone was turned off, going everywhere, looking like crazy on the street and we couldn’t find her.
“Then, hours later, we had two child protection officers at the door and they said Leen is with them. They asked for her belongings, because she was taken under an emergency care order. She had told the school nurse that she had been physically abused at home.”
Leen was taken first to a foster home, then to another care institution, then to a hospital. Eventually – a year after she was first put into care – she ran away. She met up with her mother, who took her to Poland, where they have lived for the past year.
Speaking from Poland, she says the original allegation of abuse was made by another child at her school, where she was being bullied. Then at her foster home, she became depressed and started self-harming. She was treated with anti-psychotic drugs – and then other medication for the side-effects, which she says made her increasingly physically ill.
But medical certificates issued following tests in Poland do not confirm all the diagnoses made in Norway. Doctors there say she is physically fit and suffering only from stress caused by her experiences over the past two years.
“When we came to Norway, we thought that this was where we would live in peace and we would forget all the traumatic and sad events,” Hiba says, referring to the family’s escape from Syria. “But we have all lived this trauma again.”
“I didn’t see the growing-up of my older children when I was imprisoned in Syria,” Talab says. “So when Leen was born here in Norway, it was a God-given present for us. How could we have mistreated her? It is a very silly joke to hear this from the Child Protection Service.
“They behave above regulations, and you can’t win any case against them in the courts, even if you bring witnesses with you. It is as in Syria – the verdict is written beforehand.
It is unbelievable in Norway, something very strange in a welfare state – a Scandinavian state.”
The family says Leen was never physically punished – and they believe the allegation of violence was taken particularly seriously because they were immigrants to Norway.
“If you’re from the Middle East you’re automatically deemed to be abusive and backward,” Hiba says.
The Child Protection office dealing with the case said it could not comment in detail. But it said it did not agree with the family’s version of events, and it denied treating children from immigrant families more strictly than others.
One journalist has calculated, however, that children with a foreign mother are four times more likely than other children in Norway to be forcibly taken from their families.
Reidar Hjermann, the former Children’s Ombudsman, says no-one should be judged to be violent without evidence. But he also says: “When a family comes to Norway with a mother and father who have themselves been brought up with violence, then I think we should assume that we need to go to help this family to understand that where they come from, physical punishment is rather common, but in Norway it is absolutely forbidden.”
He believes “the Norwegian system should do something about its reputation” by improving professional competence in a system that he thinks is currently too decentralised.
And he adds: “One of the absolutely overarching strategies is to help children in families. To remove a child from a family is something you try not to do at all.”
Katrin Koch, the head of the Child Expert Commission which the disgraced psychiatrist was a member of, says one reason for the disproportionately high number of immigrant families affected by care orders might be that Norway is “quite a conformist country in many ways.”
She says: “It might be that the child protection services are not aware enough that there are many ways of raising children.
“Another point would be that Norway is a rich country – and the richer you are, the less consideration you have to give to survival issues, and the more consideration you can give to an optimalisation of how children are to be raised.”
Child welfare guidelines in Norway, as in some other countries, specify that parenting does not have to be “good” – only “good enough.”
But Katrin Koch says: “Maybe the level for ‘good enough’ in Norway is different from other countries.”
The Ministry of Children says it’s bringing in legal changes that will strengthen children’s and family rights. It’s reviewing some care orders – though there’s no suggestion that’s linked to the conviction of the expert psychiatrist.
Like other agencies in the child protection system, the Ministry won’t comment at all on his case at all.
But Inez – who’s now become a campaigner for family rights – regards the silence over the convicted psychiatrist as a cover-up.
She and other parents who’ve lost children are also surprised by a family court decision that the disgraced expert can keep custody of his own young children.
“I’m at a loss for words, for the outrage,” she says, “knowing other parents who have had lesser allegations and have lost children.”
Thore Langfeldt, a psychologist who works with sex offenders, and who gave testimony as an independent expert in the case of the convicted psychiatrist, regards that reaction as “moral outrage”.
He says there is no evidence to suggest that people who download child pornography are more likely than anyone else to commit other offences against children.
“Sometimes moral panic takes over and empirical psychological data vanish on us,” he says.
But Inez, who has been active in her community as a local politician and lay judge, says the case has changed the way she views her own country.
“Before 2013 I considered Norway as the best country in the world. And in many aspects it still is a good country. But if the system is closed and there is no transparency, then it is so much easier to sweep things under the carpet when things go wrong,” she says.
“There has to be a willingness to fix things, because it ensures that people can trust the system.”
Source: BBC
https://www.bbc.com/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_scandal
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