Milton Keynes Magistrates Court
Two adolescent girls taken into care by a local authority’s social services had to sleep in their school uniforms, a court was told yesterday.
District Judge Patrick Perusko, sitting in Milton Keynes Family Court, heard that the sisters, one aged 14 and the other 12, were not provided by Buckinghamshire County Council with night clothes.
They also complained there was no lock on the bedroom door in their foster placement. Eventually, said one of the girls, the foster mother gave her one of her husband’s old tee-shirts to sleep in.
The sisters also complained that they were given no tooth brushes and that when they asked for a hair brush, a used shared one was produced tangled with other people’s hair. The foster parents made no attempt to keep their dog out of the girls’ room, which terrified them.
To pile on the indignity, the girls were also given no clean underwear by the County Council.
Girls want to go home
The girls are from a stable Christian family and not surprisingly, the District Judge said that both girls had told him they wanted to go home.
The case started when eldest girl’s school learnt that her mother had raised her hand to her. Any contact, says the mother, was accidental, but the school told social services and both sisters were taken into care just over a week ago.
The parents refused to sign a notice under Section 20 of the Children Act, which would effectively ask Bucks CC to provide accommodation. The Council then sought an care order in the County Court. An interim order was granted on Friday 12th February, for eight days. Yesterday’s hearing was to decide whether it should be extended.
Both parents complained to Christian Voice that social worker Rosalinde Woodroffe either misunderstood or misrepresented what they had told them in the report she made. In other cases, parents have said that social workers have resorted to invention to embellish the case the Council was building against them. One social worker whistle-blower even said his bosses objected when his write-up was too favourable to parents.
Bucks Council causing emotional harm
The court even heard that Bucks CC had only served papers on the parents the day before the hearing, giving them no time to prepare a statement in response.
The Judge said significant emotional harm had been done and was continuing to be done by the local authority to the girls. He was surprised that in a whole week the Local Authority had not troubled to arrange a medical examination for the girls to substantiate its contention that they had been subjected to unreasonable physical chastisement – or any at all.
But it seemed that because of what he had read in the report the judge was prepared to order that the girls, as he said, ‘Should stay where they are – just about – on balance.’
A case where parents deny that have done anything wrong is difficult for social workers to understand, but this ministry is surprised that District Judge Perusko did not hear oral evidence from the parents before making his ruling.
The case was set down for another hearing on Friday 26th February, at which, said the District Judge, he hoped to return the children to their parents. ‘They are going home’, he said, ‘subject to the parents being open and honest and co-operating with social services’.
See Bucks County Council fails to bar the press
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