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22 April 2016
Dag Sverre Aamodt:
The Norwegian Child Protection Service – A betrayal of trust
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Speech at the demonstration outside the Norwegian parliament on 16 April 2016.
Dag Sverre Aamodt is a lawyer who has worked in the judicial system for the last 30 years, and has seen the Barnevern system from several different angles.
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You cannot buy love.
The child protection policy of the Norwegian government is fundamentally flawed.
One of these flaws is the assumption that you can buy love.
Every child needs love and care. You can buy some care, but you can not buy love. And love is essential. This love can not be bought from institutions, foster homes or social workers.
We all make mistakes as parents. But the effects of these mistakes are tempered by the love we have for our children.
Everyone makes mistakes. So also foster parents, employees in institutions and social workers. The effects of these mistakes are not tempered by love.
This flaw becomes evident with the steadily recurring surges of reparations offered by the state every 20 years or so for abuse suffered by children in the care of the state.
The second flaw is the assumption that you can distil the universal experience of bringing up children into one single sociological theory and impose this on a population without seriously damaging the very fabric of society.
No such theory is possible. Any attempt made may only scratch the surface and is singularly inept when it comes to dealing with everyday life.
The absence of such a theory renders its practitionaries helpless in the face of reality, leaving them only with opinions.
Everyone who has ever read a child protection report without bias, will generally recognise the facts and conclusions stated in the report for what they are, the opinions of the author.
Opinions about how people should lead their lives, opnions about the needs and wants of children, opinions of morality – all set in the setting of the politically correct context with one single motivation – to avoid personal liability.
The evidence of these flaws can be found in the fact that nearly every report regarding young children brings up the question of the mother's attachment to the child. And every such report I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a number, criticizes the mother. She is either criticized for attaching the child to closely to herself, or she is critized for being incapable of a sufficient degree of empathy.
This demonstrates that there is no defined area of normality. This in a theory aspiring to encompass the totality of humanity?
The third flaw is the absence of accountability
Through my years of dealing with the child protection service I have found that the service routinely distorts the truth, presents statements from parents, children and witnesses out of context, presents opinions as facts and makes allegations without a shred of evidence.
I find it disconcerting that public officials can do this over time, without ever being held accountable for what often amounts to nothing more than blatant lies. The only remedy I have found is to openly tape every conversation held with representatives of the service.
This permeates through the entire system and is present even in the courts where there is a seemingly inexplicable tendency to believe anything a public official may express, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It is a well known fact that belligerent neighbours, disgruntled employees and ex spouses abuse the child protection service by making false reports of child abuse and often compounding this with untrue accounts amounting to nothing but perjury.
The service willingly lets itself be abused in this way and actually encourages this by allowing anonymous reporting, the perjurers never being held accountable for what constitutes a serious criminal offence.
It is my opinion that this absence of accountability perpetuates the unacceptable state of affairs in the child protection service.
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The Norwegian government pretends that its child protection policy is a sound, responsible policy well founded in facts and scientific research. This is untrue. It is, in reality, a radical social experiment, instigated and perpetuated by a socio-industrial complex that has evolved over the last 15 to 20 years.
Like the military-industrial complex of the American sixties and seventies, this socio-industrial complex is no formal alliance but an expedient, and often tacitly implied, co-operation between entities of differing goals, but of common interest.
These three entities are:
The politicians, eager to utilize the current public opinion by tapping into an already established, politically correct set of values without actually making the effort of evaluating for themselves, thus achieving the much vaunted public exposure through a seemingly uncontroversial topic furthering their own political careers.
The profession of child care workers, represented by the professionals themselves, by their educational institutions competing for students and by their union, attempting to monopolize the role as the only experts in the field, all of whom are seeking to enhance the social and economic status of this emerging profession.
And finally, the private venture companies already handling the majority of institutions and foster homes that are actually responsible for the care of children taken from their parents by the child protection service, a care obviously leaving much to be desired, as these companies, as all private ventures, are profit driven.
The individual motives of these three entities work together to encourage legislation that focuses on delving ever deeper into the private lives of the population and places ever stricter boundries for acceptable behavior and ever lower conditions necessary to remove children from their parents. This of course being the most profitable course of action for the involved entities, as the alleged seriousness enhances the status of the involved politicians and professionals as well as the renumeration necessary.
This radical social experiment is out of control.
It has gone so far that parental control is threatened to the effect that any form for physical intervention is regarded as criminal abuse, a legislation way beyond what was accepted as normality no more than twenty years ago even in the Norwegian society, and arguably way beyond public opinion even today.
Even this is not enough. The phrase psychological violence (mark the use of the word violence, not abuse), has sprung up, an attempt to instill the same feelings generated by physical violence as a public reaction also to psychological abuse, this without even contemplating where to draw the line. There are indications that even raising your voice is to be sufficient to constitute violence.
Like a runaway train, this hurtles along, gaining speed and severity every day, hurting innocents and creating fear in everyone that comes in its path.
The power wielded by the Norwegian Child Protection Service is rampant, without justification, without temperance and with few restrictions. It strikes the weakest in our society and inflicts serious damage against the very individuals they allegedly are out to protect, as it bereaves children of their most basic need, the love of their parents.
Perhaps the most insidious and disgraceful side of this is that this is done without even considering whether or not the state can provide better care than the parents, this in full harmony with the official policy of questioning the so-called biological principle.
In a democratic society power is wielded on behalf of the people. It is the responsibility of every citizen to see to it that this power is not abused. I am one of the people. This power is not wielded on my behalf.
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