Social Services: You're too stupid to look after your child!It wouldn't be so bad if they (the courts and social services) at least meant well but some aspects of the case make that hard to believe:
Mother: No I'm not, and I'll take this up in court.
Court: You're too stupid to appoint your own lawyer.
After the psychiatrist’s assessment of Rachel, the court has now acknowledged that she does have the mental capacity to keep up with the legal aspects of her situation.
In other words they now accept that their initial assessment of her intellectual* capability was wrong, but they are still going to remove her child on the basis of that assessment.
Incidentally isn't the pretence that these stories can't be reported fully because of the interests of the child especially weak in cases like this? The child is too young to know what the news is and will be given a new identity in a matter of months if the social services get their way.
* Whilst the measured intelligence of the mother is well below average it isn't freakishly so. An IQ of 71 (equal to 71 social workers) would put her in the lowest 2% to 3% of the population. If anyone proposed that there was a case for automatically removing 2% to 3% of children from their parents then they would rightly be considered insane.
6 comments:
There is a horrible irony for me in reading this case; I am currently struggling to take charge of the affairs of a relative with severe Alzheimer's and mental deterioration.
Social services insist on consulting him at length over every aspect of his care, despite his 45-second memory and complete inability to grasp what is going on (he thinks he's in a North African military hospital awaiting demob.).
Meeting after meeting breaks up without resolution because we have to stop every two minutes to introduce ourselves to him all over again - but the target box for 'giving him a say' has been ticked, so that's apparently OK.
Presumably there aren't any comparable target boxes for young mothers.
"If anyone proposed that there was a case for automatically removing 2% to 3% of children from their parents then they would rightly be considered insane."
Yet within living memory Eugenicists were sterilising people in Scandinavia and US states on precisely those groups and they were considered progressive.
As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell:
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Not so much Catch 22 as illogicality.
This left me with a case of nasty chuckles, Ross.
The woman is probably incapable of raising any child properly through no fault of her own, the government is obviously less able to do so through willfully blind incompetence.
I'd vote for the mother doing a better job. At least she'd love the child.
"I'd vote for the mother doing a better job. At least she'd love the child.".
Yeah, I doubt she will particularly bad as a parent compated to thousands of others who haven't had their children removed.
Erm, the comparison would NOT be "removing 2%-3% of children from their parents".
It would be "removing all the children of 2%-3% of the parents".
Equally unpalatable, but not at all the same thing.
They are removing children from their families, of course, because they have a TARGET to meet in doing so. What else would expect from a Blairite initiative?
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