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17 June 2015
Norway's parliament passes law making it obligatory to receive 'help' from the child protection services
By Marianne Haslev Skånland
Many victims of the child protection services (CPS) – barnevernet – ask for aid and assistance instead of forcible removal of their children.
One thing is certain, however: The kind of help they want is something they will never get from the CPS and allied professions. What the CPS means by 'help' is something quite different.
It is about time our population started to realise this, because the full reality of it has been clear all along.
This week our parliament has processed and passed the expected and long announced proposition imposing an obligation for parents to receive various kinds of 'help'. It means a more or less full abolishment of any kind of private life and private independence and self-determination – in short: the end of freedom – for children as well as for parents.
These 'aid measures' are no alternative to child removal. They are steps on the road, full separation and subjugation just come later, after an even more prolonged period in hell, during which the CPS has full accesss to the family at all times and can claim that they have 'observed' anything they like to 'prove' that removing the children is unavoidable.
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The Norwegian text of the parliamentary debate is too long for me to attempt a translation. It may perhaps be possible to find a translation provided by parliament itself later. The parliamentary debate, in preliminary, not proof-read form, is found here:
Sak nr. 13 [18:42:57]
Innstilling fra familie- og kulturkomiteen om endringer i barnevernloven
(utvidet adgang til å pålegge hjelpetiltak)
(Innst. 332 L (2014-2015), jf. Prop. 72 L (2014-2015))
(Recommendation from the Committee of family and culture re changes in the child protection law)
(extended authority to impose aid measures)
The CPS will no longer have to say that the only alternative is forced removal of the children in order to impose 'aid measures'. They will have full powers at any time – just claiming it as 'preventive measures' – to 'advise' the parents in the home and about the home and every aspect of life in the home, in fact to decide everything in the home, to decide how parents should talk to the children and treat the children, how the parents should arrange their own lives. They can impose obligatory kindergarten and after-school organisation, of course, obligatory visiting-home for the children to be brought to every so often, obligatory acceptance of support-contact people to be with the children, obligatory 'therapy' for the children (read: brain-washing of the children). They can send the parents to guidance courses.
There is a whole list of such 'aid measures' which will now be obligatory, and the list is not closed, meaning that the CPS can at any time impose some other measure which they claim will help the children.
One particularly serious matter is this (I translate one out of several complimentary references to it from the debate):
"In the category between compensatory measures and transfer of care there are care-changing measures such as advice to parents and a period of residence at centres for parents and children. These can be good and necessary measures for many families. A stay at a parents/children centre can prevent the infliction of damage on the child, either by unnecessary separation from the parents or through observation and guidance preventing the parents from inflicting injury on the child. In some cases a transfer of care can be avoided, while in other cases transfer of care will be recommended. In both cases the stay at such a centre will have a very important function. – Today Parliament makes it possible to impose an obligatory stay at a centre for parents and children when this is necessary to ensure that the child receives satisfactory care, ..."
At such centres families are kept imprisoned. The reason why they usually do not flee is that if they do, the children are automatically taken. From now on, the alleged reasons for placing families at such centres will not even need to be claimed by the CPS to be serious, just a vague worry that failure to care or unfortunate development may surface in the future (cf Aage Simonsen: Norwegian child protection hits immigrants hard).
There is a very good Norwegian book about the way one family was forced to go to such a centre, Viktoria-senteret, to stay. The mother suffered from epilepsy, her mother was forbidden by the CPS to give any help in the home of her daughter and son-in-law when they had a baby, and parents and child were then forced to go to the centre, where, however, nothing happened (how could it? It is simply a prison, with social workers totally unqualified to help anybody and totally unwilling to give any practical help with daily chores and needs). The child's mother became very ill under this pressure, was hospitalised and actually was close to dying. Nothing has been done later to sanction against the Viktoria centre, the local CPS & co, the local or other politicians who forced all this through. A great deal of information about the whole case, unfortunately only available in Norwegian: see Averøy-saken.
With all that is known about such centres and the treatment of children and parents there, a particular association inevitably springs to mind. Only the cattle-wagons are missing from the picture brought to life by our enthusiastic Norwegian parliament.
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