Stolen Girls Find Mother

August 25, 2010 permalink

Christopher Booker reports the story of two stolen English girls who found their mother through Facebook. The websites mentioned in the article are Anti-social Services (on Facebook) and Ian Josephs.

In two more enclosed articles Mr Booker reports on a mother falsely accused of promiscuous sex and prostitution, and another case showing that in England animal protectors are also the fraternal twins of child protectors.

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She defied the law to find her mother

Winona Varney was reunited with her mother through Facebook, writes Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:25PM BST 21 Aug 2010

Winona Varney was reunited with her family through Facebook

For once, after all the shocking stories I have reported on the secretive system that allows social workers to seize children from loving parents for no good reason, to send them for adoption, I can at last report a story where a family torn apart for nine years has been reunited.

When Winona Varney, now a pretty 16-year-old, recently fell into the arms of her mother Tracey at Truro railway station, they had not seen each other since she was seven. During that time, she and her 12-year-old sister Daniella have been living unhappily with an adoptive family, who repeatedly told them that their mother was a bad woman who did not love or want them. But when, in June, Winona managed to track her mother down, via Facebook, a short time later the two girls and their mother were again living under the same roof.

This harrowing story began back in 1997, when social workers from Cornwall county council received a wholly erroneous tip-off that there might be drugs in the house where Tracey lived with her partner. The day after the birth of their first child, a boy, they were made to sign an agreement that they would “work with social services”. Tracey then had two daughters, Winona and Daniella; but their father, who had been in care himself, had a strong aversion to social workers and eventually threatened one with violence.

On the social workers’ insistence, in order to keep her children, Tracey left her partner. She and they were sent to a mother and child unit in Staffordshire, where she often had to protect them from abuse by other inmates. Eventually, though there was no evidence that Tracey had harmed them in any way, the girls were sent for adoption, on the grounds that they were “at risk of emotional abuse”. They were taken in by a couple in a nearby Cornish village, and Winona was given a new name. (Their brother, however, was returned to his mother, after a year in foster care.)

Year after year, unaware of her daughters’ whereabouts, Tracey sent loving birthday and Christmas cards to them. But this could only be done through social services – who never passed them on. According to Winona, she and her sister were constantly told both by social workers and their adoptive parents that their mother was “a horrible person” who didn’t love them.

Tracey eventually found a new partner with whom she had two more daughters. In June this year, Winona managed to track down her mother through Facebook, and they arranged to meet at Truro station. They couldn’t believe their happiness at being reunited and more secret meetings followed.

When Daniella was told what was going on, she was initially wary, because of the lies she had been told about her mother. But twice the girls escaped at night through windows for further meetings, until eventually Winona rang the adoptive parents to say they were both going back to live with their mother.

Winona is so angry about what has been done to them that she has opened a page on Facebook entitled “Anti-Social Services Forced Adoption – We Can Help!”, to join up with other children in the same plight. She pays tribute to the advice she was given by Ian Josephs, the businessman living in the South of France who, through his Forced Adoption website, has helped hundreds of families who have fallen into the clutches of this corrupt and secretive system.

Not dissimilar was the case of Tammy Coulter, taken away from her mother by Derbyshire social workers when she was only seven months old, after an accident left her with a bruised cheek. After time in foster care, she was put out for adoption by a judge who said that, thanks to delays by the social workers, she and her mother would by now be strangers. Only after 17 years did she find her mother again through the website Genes Reunited, and was able to return happily to her birth family.

In 2006, Tammy told a London audience, which included judges, lawyers and Harriet Harman MP: “Finding out you’ve been adopted is one of the worst feelings in the world, because you feel that all of your identity, everything you’ve known about yourself, is a lie.” She said she was speaking out “on behalf of children and parents who have also been through the secrecy of family courts and the injustices that have taken place, and the devastation of one decision that determines the future of a child”.

After nine years of misery, Winona Varney would agree. She says that after going to college, she wants to get involved in child care – “but certainly not as a social worker, because I have seen what they can do”.

Source: Daily Telegraph

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Forced adoption: social workers' surreal investigation recalls 'satanic abuse' scandals

In one ongoing case, social workers are pursuing the most surreal inquiries, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:38PM BST 14 Aug 2010

There could have been few more bizarre meetings anywhere in Britain last week than that between a married mother and the social workers who had taken her six young children to place them unhappily in foster care. The officials, of a council I cannot name, are fixated with the idea that this respectable Christian is a "sex worker", whose children all have different fathers and who is engaged in "child trafficking".

They appear to have no evidence for these charges other than the hearsay surmising of a single "witness". I gather that the social workers had reluctantly agreed to commission DNA testing of parents and children, to establish whether they were all from the same father. But even now, I am told, the social workers are refusing to disclose the test results.

The mother, accompanied to this surreal interrogation by a nun who had known her for years, insisted that she had only slept with one man in her life, her husband, the father of her children. She went on to ask one of the social workers how many men she had slept with. The reply was that this was a private matter.

Perhaps we are not very far here from those extraordinary cases some 20 years ago when children were torn away from their families wholesale because social workers had concocted a fantasy that they were being abused in weird satanic rituals (a story I told in my book Scared To Death).

It is vitally important that when this case again comes before the courts, the judge should put the council's supposed evidence to very careful test.

I look forward to being able to report in due course that this horrible farce has been brought to an end and that the distraught parents have been reunited with their children.

Source: Daily Telegraph

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Did the RSPCA drive a man to suicide?

Alan Brough commited suicide after the RSPCA took his herd of Shetland ponies, writes Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:00PM BST 31 Jul 2010

Several times in recent years I have reported on the change which has come over one of Britain’s richest charities, the RSPCA. Its officials too often seem bent on harrying genuine animal lovers, luridly misrepresenting alleged cases of cruelty in order to win the publicity which will keep funds rolling in, to the tune of some £115 million a year.

Last week I was alerted to a particularly chilling case by the SHG (Self Help Group, online at the-shg.org), set up to advise animal owners on RSPCA persecution. It involved Alan Brough, a 68-year-old retired builder from Newbiggin near the Cumbrian fells. He bought Shetland ponies 30 years ago for his daughters, who in time outgrew them.

Mr Brough released them onto the nearby moorland of Caldbeck Fell where, thanks to his continued care – which included rising at five o’clock each morning to bring them hay – they flourished and became a herd. Eventually the picturesque sight of 90 wild ponies became something of a tourist attraction and a distinctive feature of that northern corner of the Lake District.

Eleven days ago, at the instigation of the RSPCA, Mr Brough was arrested at 8.30am and held in custody at Carlisle police station while officials of the charity put the ponies onto lorries bound for RSPCA-approved sanctuaries. When Mr Brough was released at 3pm and discovered what had happened, he was, according to his family, “trance-like”. He drove to a nearby church, then to a riverbank, where some time later his 18-year-old grand-daughter found him. He had hanged himself.

The RSPCA issued a statement: “We are saddened by what has happened, and our thoughts are with Mr Brough’s family.” They offered to return the ponies to his widow, but then insisted on keeping them, on the grounds that – although there was no evidence of ill-treatment – the animals might suffer sometime in the future. Mr Brough was cremated on Friday, The RSPCA were wise to stay away from his funeral.

Source: Daily Telegraph