Lawyer jailed after using disabled client's £1.25m payout to fund 'obscene' spending spree By JAMES TOZER - More by this author » Last updated at 21:54pm on 22nd February 2008 Comments (1) A crooked solicitor stole £1.25million in compensation he had won for a client paralysed in a crash. Thomas McGoldrick, 59, was facing jail last night for blowing most of the payout on "obscene extravagance". The money was supposed to fund a lifetime of care for 45-year-old Keith Anderson who had lost the use of his arms and legs. But McGoldrick, who was massively in debt, used it to continue enjoying the high life with his millionaire neighbours. The cash went on holidays to Portugal and Barbados and prep school fees for his two children.

Committee chair Barry Sheerman

In a report last year, the then Education and Skills Select Committee said local authorities should be required to outline the support they provide to SEN children and the reasons for that pattern of services. But the government has responded by saying the SEN Code of Practice already fulfils this remit by setting out services councils are legally obliged to provide.
The rejection prompted an angry response from Labour MP Barry Sheerman, chair of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee that replaced the education committee.
"It appears the government is still unwilling to concede that a national framework for special needs education, and provision maps for each area, should be introduced to make the system more transparent and allow parents to make informed decisions," said Sheerman. "For it to say the code of practice provides this is to misunderstand what we recommended. We were seeking a framework for provision, not for procedure."
The government also rejected calls for SEN assessments to be contracted out instead of being handled by the local authorities funding the services. It said it did not believe this would be in the child's best interests. However, ministers plan to set up a group, led by Special Educational Consortium chair Brian Lamb, to look at ways of increasing confidence in the assessment system.
Meanwhile, a report by autism charity Treehouse has criticised a lack of government information about SEN children. The charity examined parliamentary questions on autism over 10 years and found nearly 60 per cent went unanswered.
The findings support a bill proposed by Labour MP Sharon Hodgson that would make the government publish annual information on SEN children (CYP Now, 30 January-5 February). The bill passed its second reading in Parliament last week.
- www.cypnow.co.uk/doc


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p&gtEarlier this week, two jurors said medical evidence at the trial was too complicated to interpret safely and they feared there had been a miscarriage of justice. Yesterday Mrs Henderson, 43, who was jailed for three years in November for shaking Maeve to death, said: "I want to be home for Christmas. "All I want is for my family to be reunited. "I miss my two boys, it's very tough for them." The comments will boost Iain Henderson's campaign to have his wife released. Dr Squier, who gave evidence at Reading Crown Court, was the first person to examine Maeve's brain. She said: "My concern is that this baby had brain damage from a previous injury. "I told the court I believe this baby had both old and recent traumatic brain injury. "She had suffered an impact injury to her head before the day she died and then something happened on the day she died. "What I cannot say is whether those injuries were accidental or inflicted. But it's incredibly unlikely it was shaken-baby syndrome. There is absolutely nothing to indicate she was shaken. "The features are far more in keeping with the baby having an older injury. A bruise on her head supported this. This might have been caused by a fall, but it could have been inflicted. I do not know. "I am very concerned if the jury made their decision on this basis." She believes it was too much to expect a jury of laymen to grasp complex medical evidence. Dr Squier, from the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said: "I spend all my life reading papers and studying my field of expertise. "If I have to put that much work in to keep informed then how can 12 people off the street have a hope in hell of understanding?" Maeve's mother Ruth Sheppard last night declined to talk about the case. Childminder Keran was jailed for shaking a baby to death in a fit of rage - but this week jurors admitted grave doubts about her conviction. As this special investigation shows, they're right to be worried Sitting in the visiting room of a women's prison, former childminder Keran Henderson is unsure whether to laugh or cry as her husband shows her photographs of their village where yellow ribbons are tied to trees and even to the gate of their local church. The bunting had been put up by friends and supporters who believe that 43-year-old Keran is innocent of one of the worst crimes imaginable: killing an 11-month-old baby who she was caring for one lunchtime (along with three other children) at her Buckinghamshire home. A month ago, Keran was found guilty of manslaughter after a court heard that she had lost her temper and shook the little girl so viciously that she died two days later in hospital with irreparable brain damage. Keran was given a three-year jail sentence. Afterward, Ruth Sheppard, the mother of her tiny victim, Maeve, said: "Keran Henderson not only took my daughter's life away, but our right as her parents to grieve for her, to mourn her, to think and remember her in any other way than with pain and anguish. "We never said goodbye." The judge's pronouncement was no less damning. He told Keran: "You will never be trusted as a childminder again.You are going to have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge that Maeve died in your care.

"We do not know what happened to make you snap in the way the jury found you did." Suddenly, the reputation of this previously devoted mother, Beaver Scouts leader and a organiser of the November 11 Armistice Service at her local church, St Margaret's in Iver Heath, was in ruins. Ten out of the 12 jurors did not believe her version of events that, without warning, Maeve's body had gone floppy, her eyes rolling back into her head as though she was having a fit, and then stopped breathing. However this week, in a sensational development, two of those jurors have voiced the belief that Keran Henderson is innocent and that her conviction was a miscarriage of justice. One, the jury foreman, says he believes the case should never have reached court because it was based on circumstantial evidence and opinion rather than facts. The other, a woman juror named Carole, phoned a BBC radio programme to complain that even the medical experts at the trial were unable to agree between themselves about the cause of Maeve's death. Today, as Keran serves her sentence at Bronzefield Prison in Ashford, Middlesex, her lawyers are preparing to appeal against her conviction, which many believe is a travesty on a par with the notorious cases of Angela Cannings and Sally Clark. Both women were also jailed for infanticide - in their cases killing their own children - and eventually freed on appeal. A broken Sally Clark has since died of alcohol poisoning.

Like the Cannings and Clark trials, the case involving Keran was dominated by the testimony of expert medical witnesses hired by the police and Crown Prosecution Service. One of them, respected consultant neuroradiologist Dr Neil Stoodley, insisted that scans taken at the hospital showed bleeding in the brain of baby Maeve which was a "marker of a shaking injury." Others said that the little girl had haemorrhages behind both eyes and that her brain had swollen which proved an attack. However, Keran's expolicemen husband, Iain, told the Mail yesterday: "I was surprised their evidence was accepted as gospel because it was only their opinion that Maeve was shaken to death. "Keran never lost her temper. She loved looking after children and they loved her." He added: "Maeve had been ill before. "I helped to revive her myself when she collapsed two weeks before her death. She had been to hospital six times and to the GP's surgery more than ten times. Her own grandmother told the trial that she was a sickly baby. "It is now crucial to find out if this baby was suffering from a lifethreatening ailment that no one knew about." He is trying to clear Keran's name with the help of Bill Bache, the solicitor who organised the successful High Court appeal for Angela Cannings. From a borrowed office in Iver Heath, friends are fielding telephone calls and e-mails of support from as far away as Alaska and Australia.

A website has been set up and a campaign fund started, which, on the first day was sent £3,000 by anonymous donors. On the walls are pictures of happier days: the Hendersons on holiday in Florida with their two sons, Cameron, 14, and Jamie, nine; Keran surrounded by laughing sixyearold Beaver Scouts at camp. There is a large picture of 100 local people campaigning to free Keran. Above a shelf is a photo of Sally Clark on the steps of the High Court after her successful appeal. Importantly, too, there is a bundle of paperwork on shaken baby syndrome (SBS), a controversial - and many say flawed - theory of child abuse. The syndrome first came to public attention in Britain in 1997 when British au pair Louise Woodward was convicted in America of shaking a baby to death. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

Her case was made particularly memorable because of the prosecution lawyer's grotesque courtroom mime - his empty hands jerking in front of him - as he attempted to show how a baby might be shaken to death. The theory was already being enthusiastically embraced by the medical establishment in this country. Among the most ardent devotees are two discredited paediatricians, Professor David Southall and Sir Roy Meadow. Scroll down for more... David Southall was recently struck off the medical register for professional misconduct for accusing Sally Clark's husband of infanticide after watching a TV documentary about the case. He is now appealing. Sir Roy was also barred from medicine after giving evidence as an expert witness at Sally Clark's trial - wrongly claiming there was a 73-million-to-one chance of a middleclass mother, like Sally, losing two children to cot death - he has since successfully appealed and retired. As Rioch Edwards-Brown, a campaigner for accused parents, says: "Scores of families have had their lives destroyed by false accusations that they hurt or killed their babies by violently shaking them. "They have been convicted on what is opinion and dogma rather than fact." Another sceptic is experienced GP Dr James Le Fanu. He insists: "There is no such thing as SBS. "For years, the medical experts have been getting it wrong. We are facing one of the greatest catastrophes in British legal system history." For it appears that SBS is based on little more than conjecture. The syndrome was first identified in the Seventies after the confession of a mentally ill American woman who said that she had violently shaken babies under her care.

Her case was written up by a respected neurosurgeon, John Caffey. He subsequently admitted that the evidence was "meagre" and "circumstantial". But by then his theory had taken hold with child protection agencies across the English-speaking world. The dangerous credo of SBS was that if a dead baby exhibited three "tell-tale" signs - swelling of the brain, bleeding between the brain and the skull, and haemorrhaging behind the eyes - then it must have been violently shaken. The theory was endorsed by the Department of Health. However, some in the medical world began to fear something was dangerously amiss. Dr Jennian Geddes, a neuropathologist at the Royal London Hospital and now retired, became troubled by the number of shaken baby cases where there was no sign of any other physical damage to the children's fragile bodies. Dr Geddes had given evidence against parents brought before courts accused of harming their children but was having second thoughts. How could a parent shake a small baby so violently - with the same force as that of a 70mph car crash - and there be no bruising to the upper arms or body? How could the child escape a broken neck in such a vicious attack? Dr Geddes concluded there must be another innocent reason for the supposed "tell-tale" signs of SBS. She believes that even a trivial household accident, such as a child falling out of bed or rolling backwards on the floor, can prompt the same brain injuries.

The key factor is not how far the child falls but how it lands. For example, a simple bump on the base of the spine can send an enormous shock up to the brain and stop the child breathing. The subsequent loss of oxygen, she suggests, can cause the "tell-tale2 signs that led to the prosecutions of carers and parents. Campaigners also believe that a viral infection or a child choking on food can trigger the same effect. Importantly, a skull swelling can be provoked by a fall perhaps days, or even weeks, earlier. The Court of Appeal recently ruled that due to the growing confusion surrounding shaken baby syndrome a conviction should never be made when there are conflicting medical opinions given in a trial. There has to be real evidence of an assault. This crucial judgment led to a teenage English mother called Victoria Scott being cleared of shaking her baby son to death. Yet at Keran Henderson's trial, although medical experts brought by the defence disagreed with the prosecution, a guilty verdict was still reached. For instance, neuropathologist Philip Anslow said that Maeve's poor medical history - and evidence from Keran herself - all pointed to the child dying after having a fit. Keran's team also said there were no signs of bruising on her arms or her body which surely would have occurred if the baby had been shaken for ten minutes as the police alleged. Most importantly, the police never interviewed the three other children who were in the room with Maeve and witnessed her collapse. A four-year-old girl there at the time has told her mother that Keran kept breathing into the baby's mouth. She has never spoken of noise, crying or shaking. So what really happened to tragic Maeve Sheppard? Keran's husband recalls the events that led to her death. He says: "Maeve needed a childminder because her mother worked. Keran said she would help out. "Maeve's mother came to the house for a formal chat. Both got on well." After a time, Maeve was brought to the Hendersons' house each day. But during the next five weeks, Keran cared for her for only 14 days. Maeve was often ill and was kept at home. Disturbingly, there were two occasions when she became poorly at the Hendersons' house before her final collapse. Iain Henderson says: "Keran was worried about Maeve right from the start. "She told me that every time she fed her she was sick. She was reluctant to take liquids and I watched my wife patiently feeding her when I was working at home.

"In the middle of February, she was sick all over her clothes. When Keran went out of the room to get a plastic bag to put the dirty top in, she returned to find that Maeve, who had been propped up on the floor, had fallen over and her body had gone floppy. "She got all the kids she was looking after dressed and took Maeve round to the GP." The doctor advised her to take the sick child to hospital. "They treated it as a viral condition. They didn't do an X-ray of her head to see if she had banged it, nor did she have a blood test. "Her mother then came to the hospital and Maeve was given antibiotics. I feel now this was a chance lost to pick up anything that might have been wrong with her." But that was only the start. After a few days at home, Maeve went back into Keran's care. Nine days later, Iain was working at home - he is a fraud investigator - when his wife shouted to him: "She's done it again." Iain, who is trained in first aid, did a series of checks on the baby's eyes and mouth to ensure her airways were clear. He recalls: "She was breathing but would not take any liquids. "We tried to feed her with a bottle and a spoon. Finally, we drip-fed water into her using our fingers. I laid her over my arm and she rolled her eyes. She was like that for ten minutes. Suddenly she came back to us." Keran then phoned Maeve's parents and her father collected her.

According to court papers, he took her for treatment at the NHS walk-in centre that evening. Two weeks later, on March 2, 2005, Maeve - apparently fully recovered - was back with Keran. While she was getting her and the other children ready for the playgroup, Keran thought she could smell a dirty nappy. But when she began to change her, Maeve suddenly threw herself back as though she was having a fit. Her eyes went back and she stopped breathing. Keran rang 999 and breathed into the baby's mouth as the other three children in her care watched. Significantly, they can be heard playing happily in the background in a tape of the emergency call. Having been alerted to the crisis by phone, Maeve's mother rushed to the house and they were taken to hospital by ambulance. That was the last time that Keran ever saw her. She learned the next day that Maeve had died when she called the Sheppards to find out how their daughter was. Her husband says: "Keran was terribly upset. She blamed herself because she thought she had not kept up the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation long enough. Within 24 hours, the police had called and wanted to see her." Today she is serving her sentence knowing she will miss Christmas with her family and her boys' next birthdays. But as she helps other prisoners write letters home and makes decorations for her cell, she is cheered by her Iver Heath friends' campaign of yellow ribbons, the brave public stand of the two jurors and the thought that her appeal will soon be under way. Keran Henderson hopes that she may soon join the increasingly long list of women freed from prison after being wrongly convicted of killing children on the basis of flawed or flimsy courtroom evidence.

THOUGHTS: isnt it about time the doctors and their "mistakes" were held to account, wether it be a criminal matter or care proceedings ??
We cannot go on jailing innocent mothers/parents based upon flimsy evidence or heresay....
there needs to be transparency an integrity
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We cannot go on removing children from there parents because a professional may feel it is in the best interests of the child....




SUE THANK YOU FOR THIS ARTICLE, FACTUALLY ACCURATE AND A BLOW TO THE GULAG OF THE CORRUPT FAMILY COURTS......
GIVE US OUR KIDS BACK
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by SUE REID - More by this author » Last updated at 22:19pm on 25th July 2007
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Comments Comments
Six weeks ago, the Mail told how social workers tore a baby from her loving family to put her up for adoption. Since then, scores of parents have contacted us with horrifying stories of children stolen by the state. How dare the courts continue to gag them?
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The harrowing film of a young mother with an IQ of 63 cuddling her much-loved toddler daughter for the last time before handing her over for adoption was always going to be controversial.
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As the cameras roll, the 18-year-old mother cries pitifully.
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Her bewildered child reaches out to hug her when the moment comes to say goodbye for ever.
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This raw, emotional footage was to be the centrepiece of a new BBC series called Family Wanted, spearheading a national campaign to increase the numbers of children adopted in this country.
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Scroll down for more...
Desperate mother
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Behind closed doors, in every town, children are being taken from birth parents, often forcibly, and given to new mothers and fathers
Read more...
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* The childless couple who adopted eight scared, troubled children
* Councils making millions in incentives after snatching record numbers of babies for adoption
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In a bid to find them new homes, children removed from their real parents have been paraded publicly during the TV series. It is, say critics, akin to a human auction.
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Now, in a further twist, a High Court judge has given the programme makers of Family Wanted a knuckle rapping.
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He ruled that the film of the child being taken from the low-IQ mother - whom social workers deem not mentally capable of caring for her daughter - cannot be aired.
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It would, said Mr Justice Eady, upset viewers and be a massive invasion of the mother's privacy.
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It would also, of course, have revealed with clarity on prime-time television that adoptions can be brutally painful affairs.
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The mother in this case fought to keep her child and denies allegations by social workers that her low intelligence would stop her being a responsible parent.
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She has lost the chance of telling her side of the story in public, which she dearly wished to do. For the truth is that adoption has become one of the most secretive - and seemingly one-sided - issues of our time.
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Behind closed doors, in every town, children are being taken from birth parents, often forcibly, and given to new mothers and fathers.
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During this investigation, I have learned that a staggering 75 children change hands each week, many of them toddlers like the little girl in the BBC film.
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And since the court decisions are held in utmost secrecy - with the aim of protecting children's identities - almost no one is allowed to speak about the rulings, let alone challenge them.
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What is most disturbing is that parents have told me that child care professionals, from social workers to doctors, are routinely fabricating or distorting evidence to make a case to take their children away.
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The number of babies under one week old now being taken for adoption has soared three-fold in a decade to an annual total of 900. In 1995, 1,000 children under five were removed from their parents.
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By last year, it was nudging 2,500.
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But why have these figures shot up? And why would anyone fabricate evidence to boost them?
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To understand this, we have to examine the Government's policy on adoption. In 2000, Tony Blair set new targets to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 every year.
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The tally has now reached almost 4,000 in England and Wales - four times higher than France, with a similar-sized population.
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He promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve the targets. Some have already received more than £2 million each in rewards for successful adoptions.
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This sweeping shake-up in social policy was designed for all the right reasons: to get older were inundated with calls from people wanting to make her their own.
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This sweeping shake-up in social policy was designed for all the right reasons: to get older children in care homes into happy new families with parents.
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But the reforms didn't work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash, councils began to earmark those children who were most easy to place in adoptive homes - babies and cute toddlers - while the older children remained in care. (The number of over-sevens adopted has plummeted by half in less than a decade.)
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Campaigners - including parents who have had their sons or daughters taken - say that social workers are tearing innocent families apart. Everywhere, I came across evidence to suggest that these claims are justified.
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Recently I wrote about a two-year-old English girl whose parents have been at the centre of a David versus Goliath battle to keep her, reaching the highest courts in the land. They say bluntly that she has been stolen by the state.
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The girl was advertised in the media on a website, breezily called London Kidz, for would-be adopters. Placed with her picture was a blurb saying she was a smiling child who liked a cuddle. No wonder social workers
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Yet the snappy advert covered up the devastating truth: that her birth parents, decent people from Enfield, North London, love her dearly and have fought like tigers to halt her removal. They have failed.
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Last autumn, they said goodbye to her at a meeting watched by the local council's social workers, who claim they cannot be trusted to care for her.
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Almost certainly she will never see her them again. Nor is she likely to learn of their desperate attempts to stop her forced adoption.
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For the other day, at the request of Enfield Council social workers, a judge in London's High Courts of Justice issued a draconian order gagging the parents from revealing anything about their daughter until her 18th birthday in 2022. (Enfield incidentally, has been offered a tasty £900,000 incentive to meet its adoption targets.)
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The order means the parents can no longer protest publicly or explain in any meaningful detail their side of the story. They cannot disclose her name, nor show her picture, to anyone-in the media.
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On the grounds of protecting her identity, they are also barred from talking about what happened in the myriad court hearings and case conferences with Enfield social workers that began before she was even born in December 2004.
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What an irony that is, especially as it is the social workers themselves who paraded their daughter - using her distinctive name and photograph - on a website. Yet, if her parents breach the gagging order they will be charged with contempt of court and could be sent to prison.
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But what the Mail can reveal without breaking the law is this.
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Eight years ago, the father of this girl was suspected of shaking his son from a previous marriage and damaging his brain. No proof was produced by social workers who accused him. No medical evidence was found by doctors treating the boy, nor were any charges brought by police investigating the claims.
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Indeed, it is now believed that his son - whom the father sees regularly and looks after, often alone - suffers from a rare disease which causes identical neurological impairments to those caused by a physical assault.
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In other words, the father has not been found guilty of harming anyone.
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And his wife?
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Her only crime is to have fallen in love, married and given birth to the daughter of a man who had once had the finger pointed at him by social workers.
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My story about the couple's child was published in the Daily Mail a few weeks ago. The result was an avalanche of phone calls and e-mails from other parents who said their children had also been, or were about to be, forcibly adopted.
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Over the weekend, after that story was published, I heard from 35 families. Within two days, the tally had reached 56. Now it is nearer 100.
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The letters continue to arrive, some scribbled on scraps torn from notepads, others on expensive paper with heavilyembossed printed addresses at the top. They come from council estates, middle-class suburbs, and even a castle in the heart of England.
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Many of the families left desperate whispered messages on my office phone late at night. An e-mail from one father just said: "Please, please help, NOW. We are about to lose our son. In court tomorrow for final disposals hearing before he is taken for adoption. We have done nothing wrong."
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Most touching are the messages from children themselves. One mother sent a letter that her son had written after being taken away by social workers. It said: "I just want to be back with my Mum now. I just want social serverces (sic) to get off our backs...my Mum is reliable and really useful. She is not just my Mum but my best friend."
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It was one cry among many.
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A father calling himself "James" rang from a public payphone to say his wife's baby was one of eight seized by social workers from hospital maternity units in Tyneside during a two-week period this summer.
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A Welsh grandfather complained that his grandson of three weeks was earmarked by social workers. The mother, a 21-year-old with a mild learning disorder, was told that she might - just might - get post-natal depression and neglect her son.
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To her great distress, her baby was put in the care of Monmouthshire social services within minutes of birth.
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The grandfather said: "Our entire extended family - including two nurses, a qualified nanny and a police officer - have offered to help her care for the baby. I believe my grandson has been deliberately targeted for adoption since he was in the womb."
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And there were more.
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A Worcestershire woman told how her daughter's baby was snatched away by three police officers and two social workers who came to the door of her house. The girl has now been adopted.
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The mother's failure?
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She was said to be too young to cope. Yet she has now had another baby, a boy, whom she has been allowed to keep, in the same home and with the same partner. It is only a year later.
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The grandmother explained: "All the family came forward to offer to help look after my granddaughter, and all of them were told they were not good enough. The social worker said to forget her. He said: 'She is water under the bridge'."
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But the most disturbing story came from a 25-year-old church warden and nurse, who is married to an IT administrator. They live in a lovely home in the North-East of England and looked forward to having a baby together.
During pregnancy, the mother's only concern was that she has serious lung problems. As a teenager, she suffered from encephalitis and spent 12 weeks in intensive care at Newcastle Hospital.

Yet, curiously, doctors and social workers said she was making this up. They alleged that she suffered from a mental ailment called Munchausen's syndrome and that this disorder - completely unproven in science and widely discredited - made her pretend she had once been ill.

They informed the incredulous mother that the so-called disorder meant she was a danger not only to her baby, but to other children in the maternity ward.

She told me: "I had my little boy by Caesarean. We got to spend six hours with him, then the social worker came to remove him. She sat at the bottom of the bed in the hospital-and said the police were ten minutes away, and that if we didn't sign a voluntary care order, she would phone them and they would snatch our baby anyway."

This woman is now fighting to stop his adoption.
We are, of course, talking about a hugely emotive issue. Distraught and faced with what they believe are false accusations, parents can misinterpret the actions of the social services and health professionals.
It is also impossible to verify all the facts of these stories. But if only a quarter are true, it is a scandal on a terrifying scale.

Each tale I was told had a similar ring. From a first accusation - often based on what seems to be hearsay, and nearly always made by a social worker or doctor - the unforgiving system is pitted against parents.

At its heart are the family courts, where parents must go to hear the State's case for their children being put up for adoption. Here, the solid cornerstone of our legal system - that you are innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt - does not apply.

There is no jury to weigh the evidence, only a lone judge who makes decisions based on the balance of probability.

Crucially, the courts' culture of secrecy means that if a social worker lies or a medical expert giving evidence makes a mistake, no one finds out. There is no retribution.

Only the workings of the homeland security service, M15, are guarded more closely than those of the family courts.

As Justice Munby, one of the most senior High Court judges of the family court system, opined to MPs last year: "It seems quite indefensible that there should be no access by the media, and no access by the public, to what is going on in courts where judges are, day by day, taking people's children away."

He is right. From the moment their child is named on a social services' care order to the day he or she is adopted, a father or mother commits a crime if they tell anyone what is happening to them.

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming says: 'There are many miscarriages of justice in the family courts, but the system prevents parents from protesting about it'

Almost all those who approached the Mail to tell their stories were breaching the law.

Of course, in any society there are people who hurt their children deliberately. It is the State's duty to protect their offspring from further harm. But it is clear there is something desperately wrong with the government's adoption policy.

This has not escaped the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who warned this week: "There are many miscarriages of justice in the family courts, but the system prevents parents from protesting about it.

"The secrecy is protecting misbehaviour by some social workers and doctors, rather than protecting the children forcibly adopted to meet government targets."

The revolt is growing. Two hundred parents are threatening a protest at a pre-designated place and time, using their real names and those of the children they have lost. They believe that not all of them can be thrown into prison cells for contempt.

If the rebellion goes head, perhaps the low IQ mother of the toddler in the banned BBC film will be there. And also a grandmother who protested to the BBC when her grandson, a two-year-old disabled boy called Lamar, was paraded for adoption last week in Family Wanted.

Her daughter and son-in-law have been told by social workers that they are not suitable parents for Lamar.
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Whatever the accuracy of this, the grandmother has offered to bring up the child. She says: "I recorded the programme because it is the only film I will ever have of my precious grandson.
"I feel he has been put up for sale on television. If I advertised him in this way, he would be taken away because it is a form of abuse.

"I wanted my grandson to live with me. I was told by his social worker that I don't parent in the way she likes. Yet she has no kids, and I have raised four of my own."

Like many aspects of the adoption system in this country, it appears to make no sense whatsoever.

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