Two girls have been reunited with their parents following a High Court Judge’s decision that earlier findings of child abuse were wrong.
Ben Butler and Jennie Gray faced what must be every parent’s worst nightmare – an unfounded allegation that they were a danger to their Children.
In 2007, the couples’ daughter, Ellie was injured. Social Services, as they are obliged to do in such situations, investigated how Ellie came to be hurt. Ben was implicated, the suggestion being that he had shaken her with enough force to cause intra-cranial and retinal bleeding.
In January 2008, a Family Court Judge concluded that Ben had indeed been responsible for Ellie’s injuries. Jennie was found to have failed to protect her daughter. Ellie went to live with her maternal grandparents. Ben and Jennie had a second daughter, Isabella. She was thought to be at risk in her parents’ care, and Social Services intervened to remove her, too, from their home. Social Services sought to have Isabella placed for Adoption.
Ben was convicted in criminal proceedings of causing grievous bodily harm to Ellie. However, it was when that conviction was later quashed by the Court of Appeal as unsafe that the original Child Abuse findings came to be re-evaluated. By that time, contact between the children and their parents was infrequent and supervised.
Mrs Justice Hogg conducted a seven week rehearing, in order to determine how it was Ellie had been harmed in the first place. Her Judgment was delivered in early July 2012. It is a mammoth document, as befits the need to do justice to Ben’s and Jennie’s plight, running to 88 pages (and over 750 paragraphs).
Reviewing evidence from the parents and a number of experts (some of whom had not been available to help the original trial Judge), Mrs Justice Hogg exonerated Ben. Her Ladyship found that Social Services were unable to prove that Ben had shaken Ellie in the way they suggested. It was more likely than not that her injuries had happened innocently. Having vindicated Ben, the charge against Jennie that she had failed to protect her daughter fell away.
Last week, Mrs Justice Hogg gave a second Judgment approving Ellie’s and Isabella’s return to their parents’ care and ending Social Services’ involvement. She had this to say of their long fight for justice:
“The parents have weathered the storm. They have each been resilient and determined, and shown tenacity and courage. I hope now that the record is put straight, that with their tenacity they will be able to put behind them those difficulties and look forward to a more positive future.”
And so, unusually for a case where the State intervenes in family life, these proceedings have ended happily for Ellie and Isabella and their parents. The girls are now back at home where they belong.
But the outcome could have been so very different… With the wholesale decimation of Family Justice and Social Service budgets, decisions about children like Ellie and Isabella are routinely informed by resourcing issues. Long-term foster care is expensive. It is a far cheaper option for local authorities to place children who cannot live with their birth families for adoption. However much it might like to dance around the reality, it is this budgetary consideration that is at the heart of the government’s apparent enthusiasm for adoption. Targets or quotas about the number of adoptions and how quickly they ought to happen are all about the money - how can children in need be processed through the system as cost-effectively as possible.
Had Social Services had their way, Isabella would have already been adopted. I highlighted in recent opinion piece for Family Law Online the almost impossible uphill struggle parents face seeking to have children returned to them after an adoption order has been made. If Ellie and Isabella had joined new families through adoption before the awful wrong done to them and their parents had been identified, they would not have been going home (see Webster -v- Norfolk County Council and the Children (by their Children's Guardian) [2009] 1 FLR 1378).
So perhaps the government would like to think again about its approach to Family Justice. Is it really such a radical approach that the welfare of children, rather than how much they are costing, should inform the life-altering decision made about them?
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