Won't somebody please STOP thinking of the children?

CentreRight:

The basic legal principle in all public and private proceedings concerning children is that the welfare of the child is paramount. This principle is set out in in 1(1) of the Children Act 1989

When a court determines any question with respect to—
(a) the upbringing of a child; or
(b) the administration of a child’s property or the application of any income arising from it,
the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.

This is the key thing to understand when considering cases such as that Iain Dale highlighted this morning: in which a couple were accused of child abuse, their children were taken from them, the allegations were (after a couple years) found likely to be false (in 2007), but in the interim their children had been adopted (in 2005). The case is now in the news because a court has ruled that the adoption cannot be overturned even though the court accepted that the parents may have suffered from a miscarriage of justice.

Iain appears surprised by this judgement. But it follows naturally from the central principle that the welfare of the children is paramount. It was very likely to be in the best interests of the children that they stay with their new adoptive parents. Yet this principle is obviously wicked - consciously so, for it sets aside even the aspiration of being just. The notion that these parents should be denied the raising of their children just because they would be better off being raised by someone else is horrific.

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Australia used to take children from Aborigines so they could be raised in environments in which the children would do better. One could imagine taking away the children of British unemployed teenage single mothers to give them to wealthy childless couples. I don't doubt that by any objective measure of life outcomes - qualifications, lifetime earnings, likelihood of falling to crime or drugs, likelihood of divorce, whatever you like - I have no doubt that on any objective measure of the welfare of children the children taken from Aborigines would have done better, and the children taken from teenage single mothers to give to wealthy childless couples would do better. But we rightly think that this practice in Australia was wicked, and we would rightly think that taking the children of teenage mothers in this way would be wicked - provided only that the parents were competent to raise their children. Setting aside justice in order to take paramount concern for the welfare of children is unjust.

Injustice flows from this principle all the time. Only about half of access orders granted to fathers used to result in those fathers being allowed to see their children, yet until reforms were introduced in 2004, mothers were almost never punished for denying fathers this access. Why? Well, because it was not judged in the best interests of children that their mothers should be imprisoned or fined for denying fathers access, and courts only had these weapons. Again, you have a much better chance of gaining custody of your children if you desert your wife for another woman than if she deserts you for another man. Why? Because if you can show a stable two-person environment whilst she is emotionally scarred by your abandoning her then it is much more likely to be in the best interests of the children that you have custody than if she has a stable two-person environment to offer and you are the one upset by her abandoning you (and of course once you have custody then even if she recovers subsequently it is unlikely to be in the interests of the children that they return to her, disrupting their lives). One more. A man is in prison. His partner decides she no longer wishes to care for his daughter (whom he adores and has become the focus of his life). The daughter is placed into care and is to be adopted. So far, fair enough, perhaps, but then he is not permitted a final meeting with the daughter to say goodbye, since it is decided that that is not in her best interests.

We aren't talking about a tweaking of the adoption laws here, Iain. You are striking at the entire basis of the system - a basis that is consciously and deliberately unjust.