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29 June 2016
familien-er-samlet:
3 years away from Norway
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familien-er-samlet (the-family-is-together) is a father who has succeeded in rescuing his family taking them out of Norway. He has written many illuminating articles and comments on Forum Redd Våre Barn (Forum Rescue Our Children).
The present article was first published in Norwegian as two comments on the forum, both dated today. They are published here with the kind consent of the author.
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I don't know when the care failure to which our children are exposed, is supposed to become manifest. But I do know that to live with two parents unable to care for them, which our children allegedly do, must be a great burden for them.
When we left the country, I sent a mail to the leader of our child protection service Barnevernet, with a picture of over-joyed children in their seats on the plane on our way out of Europe. A great adventure for the smallest, while our eldest daughter was maybe the only one who understood fully that this was flight away from the people she had already hated for a good while. After a few months I rang our case handler back in Norway to say hello. The case handler said that in her opinion we had made a bad decision in leaving the country before the case was processed in the County Committee.
Let me be clear: Our children do not possess perfect parents. But now, after three years, the children are well-functioning both at school and at home. So can it be that Barnevernet was a bigger threat against the children's lives than we the parents were? A dangerous thought, putting the whole Norwegian system in a bizarre light, if there was a morcel of something right about such a thought.
Perhaps that is the core of the criticism against Barnevernet; the fact that if it is correct, then Barnevernet is a bizarre institution which runs down instead of helping. Frightening. So frightening that the politicians do not know where to begin. Or whether they dare begin a project in which an awful lot must fall before the new can arise. Presented with this difficult choice, the Minister for children Solveig Horne has chosen an original solution: instead of not doing anything, she makes it all worse. And can say that at least she is doing something.
By all means: For all I know it may well be that we are the exception and that things go badly with every other child who gets away and escapes out of what Barnevernet wants: a life without parents.
Hardly likely, mind you.
And if things do not go a lot worse for other children than for our own, this is in reality a catastrophic verdict on Barnevernet. Probably it is also the reason why the existence of Norwegian Barnevern refugees abroad is a non-theme for Norwegian child protection authorities and Norwegian state-subsidised-press.
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And then the local Barnevern leader, who has now quit, said in correspondence after we had left, that the care situation of the children was now "unsettled", since we chose not to submit to negotiations in the County Committee.
It seemed almost as if "settling" the care situation for the children was a boon for children and adults alike.
I had to remind the Barnevern leader that he wanted to take the parents from the children, and that this was what was planned settled, not any other "clarification or settling of the care situation".
On paper, families, children and parents apparently have fantastic protection under the law in these cases, and Mari Trommald and other child protection authorities try to hammer it into us on every occasion.
What then is the reason why our own trust in this system of justice is so low that some of us rather head for an uncertain future in a relatively unknown country, in a foreign culture, with a foreign language, rather than face a summary trial at a "court" which is even defined as something "resembling" a court. A "court" where the proximity to BUFETAT and the County Governor is so blatant that it is not unthinkable that they say good morning to one another and have lunch together? A "court" where we cannot stop an expert witness, whom we have already exposed and therefore irritated to breaking point, from witnessing, an expert who is in reality going to decide the fate of the children of parents against whom she probably feels more than average loathing.
A woman from the north of Norway was recently fined for having used an expression with "bu....." to a Barnevern worker, probably because that was how she felt she herself had been treated. It is, however, of zero interest to our authorities that we as families feel run over (a nicer expression), and have no confidence in the processes which are to secure our interests being competent, meticulous, truth-seeking, honourable and objective.
In these cases nobody demands proof that the children's lives will be better, because such a demand would immediately have reduced the number of cases of Barnevernet taking over the care to a fraction of what it is today, while at the same time making large parts of this stubborn and, in actual practice, unconquerable construction superfluous.
We seem to have forgotten where we were going while we were on the way there. Sometimes the transport is so pleasant that we do not care to reach our destination.
Power decides. From abroad we observe these primitive forces ravaging in Norway too, and that we are, on the deepest level, not any better than "these countries" we really despise but love to "help", to force our "human rights" on, and to guide with our purse as bribery and temptation.
While sitting up to our ears in social "security" in Norway, we do not see it.
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