Reprinted from DG.se – 11 Nov 2011
There is nothing to say that the social services must act in the way they did in Sandviken. That’s what child rights lawyer Lena Celander-Jörgensen says.
– The law does not say that you have to act first and think later. Here, no one has thought about what to do with the children. That’s scary!
As a lawyer, Lena Celander-Jörgensen has worked for ten years with legal issues and processes concerning children, including LVU cases involving compulsory care of children (LVU stands for the Care of Young People Act).
– I have no criticism that the social services have – and do take – responsibility for children who get hurt. That is good.
– What I think is so bad is that they so often do not put the child perspective first, that it is not the most vital aspect to think about how the children are affected by their interventions. It shows an incredible shortcoming.
She has not read the investigation behind the forced care of Thomas Andersson and Jennie Berg’s two children, but she has seen SVT’s Assignment Review.
– The case is not unique, unfortunately. The problem is that there does not seem to be a basic system for how the social services work.
She says she was shocked by the lack of a child perspective in the sudden forced care of the children.
– It is a very big mistake to isolate the children from their parents and all contact with people they know for two and a half months. It’s an incredible operation. Here, the child perspective disappears completely.
She says that such a dramatic intervention must be the last resort when everything else has been tried.
– It does not say anywhere that after a person calls and claims something, you must immediately forcibly take care of a child without reflection or further investigation. On the other hand, it says that you have to investigate and you have up to four months to do so.
Lena Celander-Jörgensen says that the social services could have talked to the environment, school and preschool before the decision was made to forcibly take care of the children.
She thinks that the social services have a tendency to overreact in certain types of cases while at the same time having a tendency not to intervene in others.
– It has become so today that as soon as words such as naked bodies or snot are mentioned by someone who reports, then the alarm system starts flashing and the boat almost tips over.
But it happens in almost all families that a parent is naked in front of their child at some point.
If someone then reports it, then it can suddenly be considered sexual abuse by the social services. This means that a report of sexual abuse can be used to put someone there. At the same time, nothing is done in other cases, despite the fact that there may be several reports of concern.
She believes that it may be due to the prestige of individual officials that the social services, when the district court acquitted the parents of all suspicions of abuse, still did not let the children come home.
– The social services have their own veto, but it is really strange considering that the district court has a higher burden of proof.
The social services usually claim that they look at other things, but when you ask what things are, it is often about completely subjective experiences; they think, experience or feel things and know better than the judiciary. They act perfectly in power. It’s a huge problem. And it affects the children.
This article originally appeared on : https://www.gd.se/artikel/barnrattsjurist-chockad