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30 January 2012
Marianne Haslev Skånland:
The iron hand that rocks the cradle
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The article was first published in the The Hindu, an Indian newspaper based in Chennai, on 30 January 2012: The iron hand that rocks the cradle, where it has been slightly abridged and some changes have since been made. Some quite interesting comments made below the article seem later to have been removed.
The version here is the original one.
There is a misprint in the article, and it is due to a mistake on my part in my original manuscript sent to The Hindu, and not the fault of the Chennai newspaper. I have let it stand here:
It says, about the middle of the article, that the sum of NOK 430,000 (the yearly pay for taking a foster child which was announced in an advertisement to tempt more people to become foster parents), equals €30,000. It should have been €50,000 (a Euro being the equivalent of a little over NOK 8 at the time).
Of course I regretted not having read proof properly, as I should have. However, maybe it was just as well that I did not discover this mistake? €30,000 is certainly bad enough, even given the high cost of living in Norway. If it had said €50,000, every sane person in India might have thought it could not possibly be true and suspected me of being entirely off my rocker and of lying throughout.
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I must compliment Indian newspapers and not least The Hindu for bringing thorough coverage of the case of the Indian couple deprived of their children by the Norwegian 'child protection services' (CPS).
Very many of the comments to the articles, too, are exactly to the point. But you all need to know that this is the way the Scandinavian CPS carries on in general. Sweden is actually the worst of the Scandinavian countries.
One commentator asks: "It would be interesting to see how many other white Norwegian children are taken away from their parents just because they don't have 'proper toys'."
The answer is: thousands, on exactly such a pretext, or any other. Parents who are frightened or who protest, are stamped with a quack psychiatric diagnosis. There is not much need of real social work in Norway and what there is (helping out with practical tasks such as washing and cooking in homes where the parents are ill), the social workers do not want to do. The CPS, in order to have work, wants children and they attack anybody who is vulnerable. That means mostly poor people, Norwegians as well as foreigners, because they are helpless to defend themselves. The general population chooses to disbelieve and despise the families, to believe CPS lies, and to believe that they themselves could never be hit because they are such good parents. The truth is: Almost all families attacked by the CPS have both good and loving parents. Some need help, e.g financial, most of them need nothing other than to be left in peace by this vicious agency and its helpers. The CPS smashes the family and destroys the individuals. In their ideology family ties are unimportant; they speak not of parents but of "care givers".
CPS lives by depriving children of their parents. It is an industry, which pays incredible amounts especially to psychologists for "reports" and to foster "parents" (they advertise for people to be foster parents and announce a yearly pay of e.g NOK 430.000 (≈ EUR 30.000) + paid holidays and regular "time off" from the foster children + allowances for building on to their house or buying an extra car + pension entitlement. The business also, of course, provides extra income and extra jobs for social workers. Frequently the social workers themselves will take as their own foster children some of the children they remove from parents. Tens of thousands of teachers, kindergarten personnel, health workers etc etc report their "worry" over this and that child to the CPS. The court procedures are those of kangaroo courts. No matter how well those of us who fight against this are able to document the disastrous effects on the lives of both the parents and especially on the children, all the changes in legislation and procedures keep going in the wrong direction: The children are the property of the state and every parent who questions anything is accused of being an ill-doer and a danger to his/her children.
"What is this confidentiality about?" another commenter asks. Answer: The Norwegian state is trying to blackmail everyone to shut up about Norwegian child "protection" atrocities as a condition of letting the Indian children out of their clutches. That way Norway can: a) have the case die down by letting the children return to India, b) prevent outspoken comments abroad and avoid several of these countries perhaps joining forces, c) still continue to protect its social "services" - an industry feeding tens of thousands of people doing unproductive "work", and d) avoid having to face heaps of other cases quite similar to the Stavanger/Kolkata one, some involving Norwegian families, some foreign families.
Another case involving India, because the child's mother is Indian (the father is Swedish), is that of Domenic Johansson, taken by Swedish police on behalf of the Swedish CPS off an aeroplane to stop him and his parents from going to India, and then abducted by Swedish CPS. The charge against the parents was that they wanted home schooling for Domenic:
"The Domenic Johansson Case. Home schooled boy snatched from plane in Sweden".
The cases with similar or identical details to this Stavanger/Kolkata case are endlessly many. There are people trying to fight against this criminal abuse perpetuated by our state, of course, but they themselves are often threatened. Anyone trying to help children who flee the CPS is prosecuted and jailed. It is encouraging for Norwegians trying to get publicity out about CPS abuses (the press is very state-subservient and uninterested) to see, in the bottom right hand corner of the large poster carried in the demonstration in Kolkata (the picture from the newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad is shown on the front page of Forum Redd Våre Barn (Forum Rescue Our Children), a little way down from the top), the tip of a picture of an ogre with the text "Barnevern" (child protection). That picture has been taken precisely from this website. So, some intelligent Indians seem to have discovered "us". It warms our hearts.
Although CPS persecution in Norway happens mostly to Norwegian families, foreign families are disproportionately represented. One case, with the same head of social services, Gunnar Toresen, as in the Indian case, concerns two Turkish children, a case from which I have numerous details. I wrote about it in 2006: The Manavgat case in Turkey - Norway is the kidnapper on the website "Forum Redd Våre Barn".
The case has recently come to life again because at long last a Stavanger newspaper has gone after some details of the city of Stavanger having paid out half a million crowns to be spent as graft to take the children illegally out of Turkey. The man who engineered this is a private investigator who previously worked for the Norwegian crime force and now did this job for the CPS. But in my view, there are far more important facts: The children had been placed with a Norwegian foster "father" who had already been accused by two previous foster girls to have abused them sexually. (No attention was paid to this, of course, since the CPS do not tolerate criticism of their foster"parents".) The boys were kidnapped and taken back to Norway, to the very same foster "father" and his partner. This foster "father", Carsten Flo, has only now been on trial for child pornography and child sexual abuse, and been found guilty (full publication of the trial). Back in 2006, the social services and their Norwegian lawyer derided the boys' parents in a Turkish court for making such claims of abuse, behaving ironically towards the parents, holding that the mother wanted her boys back out of prestige and not out of love, since she made no attempt at that time to get back her daughter. (The mother had been only 14 when her daughter was born, and the CPS had immediately taken the daughter because of the mother's "immaturity" and had never let her know even where her daughter was. The sons were born much later and had lived with their parents for several years before they were taken, and besides, it was possible for the parents to find them, whereas the Norwegian authorities had made it impossible to find the daughter.)
I am full of admiration about the actions taken by the families of this Indian couple Bhattacharya and Indian people and newspapers in general. You need to continue being on the alert: You cannot trust a single thing said by the Norwegian CPS the Norwegian Foreign minister or any other politician or official. It was foreseeable that Norway would try blackmail in the form of making it a condition for returning the Indian children to their family that everybody must promise to shut up about the case. In that way Norway can continue what they do, the kangaroo courts can go on as before, the foster "parents" and psychologists can go on earning money, the myriad social workers trained each year can get jobs. Needless to say, I hope Norway does not succeed with this blackmail.
So let me applaud another comment to one of your articles:
"The world should condemn Norway for its barbarity."
Yes indeed. it should. Please help more victims by doing so.
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