High level sustained pressure needed

I HAVE been following the news reports on the Malaysian family in Sweden caught up in a dispute with child protection authorities there.

I understand that the parents have been sent to jail on allegations of their having slapped their son and that now all four of their children have been placed in foster care.

I am writing to express my sympathies and also to bring to your attention that there have been similar cases regarding Indian families in Norway (Bhattacharya family) and the United States of America (Saha family) in which the Indian government intervened and succeeded in having the children repatriated to India.

In another case in Norway (Chandrasekhar Vallabhaneni family) where parents were alleged to have physically punished their child, though the Indian government was not successful in preventing incarceration of the parents, they were however able to appeal to the Norwegian authorities to grant the parents a reprieve of the last one-third of the jail term – apparently this is the norm in Norway unless there are exceptional circumstances.

There appears to be a humanitarian crisis in these countries where families are being attacked and punished under draconian laws that allow children to be permanently removed from their families and barred from returning to their countries on very flimsy grounds.

Indeed many watching these cases do not believe that such absolute confiscation of children from home, country and family is ever justified.

We have also observed that foreigners, low-income families, families that are overtly different in their ways of living or religious beliefs from the country of residence and families where either a parent or the child suffers from disabilities (including minor ones such as dyslexia) are particularly targeted by these so-called child protection authorities.

I hope that your government is successful in getting the children returned to the family and country.

In the Indian cases active and sustained media interest and a proper understanding of these Western child protection systems were vital in securing the return of the children.

In the cases in which I campaigned for the Indian government to intervene, I noted that as the cases progressed there was an extreme reluctance on the part of the foreign authorities to return the children – even to family members, other than those against whom allegation of neglect or abuse were made.

It took sustained pressure at the highest level. In the Bhattacharya case, our Prime Minister had to intervene and in the other two cases, it was necessary to involve the foreign minister directly.

Another thing to be careful about is the health of the children in foster care. There is a high incidence of children falling ill, getting injured and dying in foster care.

Please insist that officials from your embassy are permitted to visit the children frequently to ensure that they are not being neglected or abused in foster care.

The child protection authorities are very adept at exploiting differences between the father and mother of the children to make that an excuse for not returning the children to their families.

This occurred in the Bhattacharya case which also involved a custody dispute between mother and father and allegations were made against the mother to say she was unfit to keep her children.

It has now been over a year that the children have been back with their mother. They are both doing well and the mother was examined by experts over several months in India and found to be completely sane and fit.

One thing we have noticed is that these foreign authorities are not above telling blatant lies when it comes to keeping the foreign children.

The main reason for this, apart from cultural prejudice against families in “poor” or “backward” countries, is that every child in foster care represents a significant amount of money for the local child protection authorities as well as the foster carers and social workers involved in the case.

SURANYA AIYAR

New Delhi, India