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22 February 2019
The Norwegian child protection service (CPS) Barnevernet
– what is the truth?
By Marianne Haslev Skånland, professor emeritus
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The article was published in a Polish translation in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, on paper and in the web edition on the same date, 22 February 2019.
The Polish title on the web:
Dyktatura norweskiego Urzędu Ochrony Dzieci
– Jak Urząd Ochrony Dzieci w Norwegii dba o dobro dzieci
means something like "The dictatorship of the Norwegian Child Protection – How the Children’s Protection Office in Norway cares for the well-being of children". The title in the paper edition:
Dyktatura norweskiego Urzędu Ochrony Dzieci
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The matter of Norway expelling Polish Consul Slawomir Kowalski from the country highlights important features of Norwegian child protection in practice.
The Foreign Ministry of Norway says that Consul Kowalski has behaved in a threatening and in part violent way towards public personnel. People in Poland should, however, know that the source of these accusations must be personnel in CPS employ. Nothing, in the video from Hamar or otherwise, supports the allegations against Dr Kowalski.
Furthermore, similar accusations are often levelled at parents by CPS personnel. In some cases the parents have wisely taped what was going on and can therefore prove that they did not even show agitation but that the CPS workers were the ones who threatened them!
Our public child protectors are usually very much against having witnesses to how they treat parents and children. They chase witnesses and helpers away, and use it against the parents if the parents publicise anything about the case. The courts go along with the CPS's arguments that publicity is bad for the child. In reality, though, it is in most cases good for the children to have it demonstrated publicly that the parents love them and are doing all they can for the children to regain freedom and return home, the wrong being done to them coming from the CPS.
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I have been concerned about child protection cases, especially in the Scandinavian countries, since about 1994. I have seen a number of cases close to, and have read literature used as text-books for students of child protection and in the child-related parts of the study of law. I have also functioned as an expert witness in court. I have come to the following conclusion:
The 'child protection' taught in the colleges and universities in Norway is wrong from the bottom up. Central beliefs are that biological parents are of no particular value to children but that materialistically stimulating conditions surrounding the child are very important; that parents are essentially their children's most dangerous enemies; and that being taken into public care is good for children. On such a basis, people cannot afford to let themselves be reassured by what Barnevernet's employees assert: that they only contemplate taking children away from their families in very extreme cases.
Nor is this true. The propaganda spread ardently at the moment is that child protection cases are mostly about parents who have beaten or abused their children, and many foreigners believe this to be so. But statistics from the most reliable sources, such as the national bureau Statistics Norway (abbreviated SSB in Norwegian), show that physical violence accounts for 2-3% and incest and other sex abuse for less than 1% of the accusations in CPS cases. The major kind of accusation is the vague one of "insufficient parental ability", with psychobabble claims of what this consists in, or far-reaching claims that it will show up later.
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The above-mentioned beliefs feed on a faulty ideology, which in turn stems from a speculative clinical psychology spreading fairly rapidly through many countries. So realistic child protection is in jeopardy in other countries than Norway as well. But Norway is contributing fuel to the development by pouring large sums earned from North Sea oil particularly into East European countries to 'help' them build up their child protection system on the same pattern as here, and cooperate extensively with Norwegian CPS workers about policies.
Not only practice but legislation, too, is unsatisfactory, and over the last 30 years it has become increasingly worse. In several law amendments and regulatory changes, the parents' right to protect and make choices for their children has been eroded step by step. Personnel in kindergartens, schools, health institutions are assumed to be highly competent to assess what 'the best interest of the child' is in each individual case, and they have a duty to report 'worry' to the CPS. Their real methods of observation and assessment hardly exist, however.
So the CPS system is clearly an industry, benefitting all the paid participants and rarely the children. The result of this kind of practiced ideology for children is observable in statistics. Individuals who have grown up partly or wholely under CPS care come out significantly worse than others as a group, even when compared with individuals growing up in very difficult social, economic and personal circumstances but with their own parents. The relationship of love between a child and its own parents is uniquely more valuable than substitutes.
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For Polish families in Norway to have had an ethically conscious person like Consul Kowalski helping them in the tragic danger they are in if the CPS intervenes in their lives, is indeed an unusual blessing. Norwegian society, too, loses valuable insights and courage when he is forced to leave.
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