The stories are most often told by parents or grandparents. The children who are in the hands of the child protection system are usually prevented from writing or saying openly anything that goes against the official version of the story, or they are afraid to speak because if they do, they know they will be isolated even more radically or their parents will be sanctioned against. For example, the rare, allowed meetings children-parents will be cut down on or taken away altogether.
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But in some cases we hear more about the children’s perspective. Here are two stories. I know them to be true.
The first is about a day of celebration which is something like Christmas for Norwegian children: The two children of a family were taken into foster care. In spring came the ‘seventeenth of May’. It is Norwegian Constitution Day and is often called ‘children’s day’, the celebration being concentrated around happy events for children.
The CPS have a principle of preventing reunions on occasions which can make children feel emotional about their family. However, in this case the 9-year-old girl was allowed by the CPS to visit her parents. Her younger brother was not. So the day was a misery for the girl. She did not want to take part in any happy celebration or watch parades, did not want to eat anything (children’s favourite food and ice creams are usually high points for them on ‘syttende mai’). She cried helplessly all day because her brother was not allowed to be with them and because they were not allowed to show that they loved their parents.
The other case has been taken up by Wings before:
Landmark Report Exposes the Realities of Norwegian Child Protection. It concerns the municipality of Samnanger in Norway, which had got a new mayor and a head administrator and several politicians who wanted radical change, standing up against what the CPS had been doing. There was quite a fight in the community, but they managed to commission a realistic and revealing report of three local CPS cases. The report and some newspaper articles let the children have a voice too. One of the cases concerned a family of father and four children, now of age.
One of the boys said: “I didn’t have so many friends at school. Then the CPS also took my family from me.”
The oldest was a girl who had been 17 at the time and had not been taken. But although she had been allowed to remain with her father, she too was hit hard by the destruction of their family life: The CPS took everything I had – and smashed it.
The youngest, a girl, had been only 7 years old when she was separated from her father and all her siblings. Her reaction had been to be desperately frightened, unhappy and upset. The diagnosis of the CPS was, as expected, not to face the fact that this was the result of their actions, but to put her into institutional care and through her childhood and youth have her treated with various drugs, supposedly to calm her down and lessen her ‘abnormality’.
The two lawyers making the report found her, on the contrary, to be normal and to communicate very realistically about the CPS ‘care’. She told them that she had been very afraid all the years in foster home and institutions. – It should take no great imagination on our part to see that she had experienced simply a variant of what prisoners from concentration camps and other places of torture tell us.