The Ottawa Citizen Online Columnists Page

Tuesday 12 December 2000

We are tearing families apart

Dave Brown
The Ottawa Citizen

Today the Citizen's Dave Brown begins a five-part series taking a critical look at Canada's family court system.

Family courts, he writes, have moved far beyond protecting children from abuse. They deal now in terms such as "a child in need," and "best interests."

That means the court can decide a child needs better parents, even if the child has not been abused or neglected.

By creating courts that undermine parents' rights to a fair trial, he argues, families are being torn apart.

Every day in North America, thousands of people are judged in courts that don't offer the protections of burden of proof, reasonable doubt, hard evidence or presumption of innocence. These courts operate in virtual secrecy.

They're called family courts, and they dispense judgments far more heartbreaking than criminal courts. Because they operate under different standards, they can have the effect of removing the right to a fair trial. In the climate of our times, that's seen as the price of protecting children.

These courts are very busy and rapidly increasing in number and power.

They will likely get even busier after a recent Supreme Court decision written by Justice Claire L'Heureux-Dube, giving child protection workers the right to apprehend a child without a warrant.

She wrote: "A wrongful apprehension does not give rise to the same risk of serious, and potentially even fatal, harm to a child, as would an inability on the part of the state to intervene promptly ... "

Hers was the majority view from a five-member panel that voted 3-2. Justice Louise Arbour filed the minority opinion, arguing: "Harm may come to the child from precipitous and misguided state interference."

That's already happening.

There are sections of the Criminal Code of Canada that call for harsh penalties for persons who abuse or neglect children. In the past two years in Ontario, 2,168 children were made Crown wards.

If they were being abused or neglected, there should have been an equal number of parents punished.

In fact, virtually no parents were punished. In the past year alone, 133 of those children were processed by family courts in Ottawa, again without parents being jailed or fined.

Once Crown wardship is in place, child protectors turn children over to foster parents. If adopted, they become new persons with new names. Who they were becomes a package of sealed records.

The absence of corresponding punishment of abusive and negligent parents begs a question: Why not?

The answer is that family courts have moved far beyond protecting children from abuse. They deal now in terms such as "a child in need," and "best interests." That means the court can decide a child needs better parents, even if the child has not been abused or neglected.

Are children safer in foster homes? In its Nov. 13 issue, Time Magazine observed that many foster parents act selflessly to help at-risk kids, but "a quagmire of child-swallowing bureaucracies plague the system ... The incidence of neglect, physical and sexual abuse of children in foster care systems is feared to be significantly higher than the incidence in the general population ... Nobody bothers to keep an accurate count."

Is the situation any better in Canada? Who knows? Children's Aid Societies are arms-length agencies. Their books aren't open and their accountability seems to be questioned only when news leaks out that a child in care has been hurt or killed.

Criminal courts must deal with matters in a timely fashion. To make a criminal wait too long for closure is considered cruel and unusual punishment, and can result in the case against him being dropped. The same time limits aren't enforced on family courts.

In October, family court Judge Jennifer Blishen handed down a decision making three sisters, now aged seven to 10, Crown wards. They had been in the system, in custody in foster homes, for three years and four months. Except for short visits, they were kept apart from their parents and from each other for most of that time. Neglect or abuse (by the parents) were not issues. Parenting skills were on trial.

About the same time in another courtroom a few doors away, family court Judge Jennifer Mackinnon permanently removed a two-year-old from her mother. The mother was in family court because of an allegation of child abuse made against her when she was a foster mother, before her own child was conceived. Back when she had no children of her own, the child protectors pressed criminal charges. The case didn't go to court. The Crown Attorney said there wasn't enough evidence.

When she became a mother, though, she became vulnerable. Lack of evidence is not a problem to a family court. It uses created evidence, such as psychological profiles and projections that almost always support the side that pays for them.

I monitored these trials and in both cases needed a lawyer to argue me into the courtrooms. The law says the courts are open to the public, but CAS lawyers frequently argue that public attention would not be in the child's best interests. I was the only uninvolved witness to proceedings, and by law must protect the identity of the families. In both cases the parents would love to be identified, and scream that they are victims of an unfair system. The child protectors would consider that an embarrassment to the children, and therefore child abuse.

Details of these cases will come later in this series.

It's important to understand the lengths we, as a society, are prepared to go in an attempt to do the impossible -- shield all children from all danger. By creating courts that undermine parents' rights to a fair trial, we are tearing families apart. Most of us, remembering our childhoods, can understand that being separated from one's parents would be terrifying. To be kept in limbo while a court process ground endlessly on would be torture.

Beyond a doubt there are children in need of protection, and court processes to protect them are needed. Our ancestors knew that when they built child protection into the Criminal Code. Somehow it became accepted that protection under the code was handicapped by the requirements of a fair trial, so family courts were formed. They have now evolved to the point where we can lose our children if we fail to pass parenting tests. The rules are unclear, but the testers will be social workers, psychologists, or psychiatrists.

Courts accept those specialists as experts. They don't deal in ballistics or poisons, but in theories. The view seems to be that they practise a science. Psychology is not a science. Its practitioners are fallible, but free from accountability.

If these views sound harsh, they aren't just those of this writer. They are shared by family court Judge Robert Fournier, quoted in a case I reported in April, 1999. After ruling an Ottawa couple were good people and good parents and could keep their baby twins, he had to explain why in previous family court hearings they were vilified as violent drug-addicted perverts, and lost four children to Crown wardship and adoption.

Three were taken into custody on allegations of child sexual abuse, made while they were out of the country and the children were with a babysitter. By the time they got back, the babysitter was the paid foster mother of their children. The fourth child was a newborn removed by protection workers from the nursery of the Ottawa Hospital, Civic Campus.

Judge Fournier explained that evidence allowed in family court is anything from an observation to an opinion to an impression. He said the mother's appearance contributed to the loss of her children. She's a bodybuilder with a penchant for tight clothing, high heels and big hair. To child protectors, she gave an impression of a wrong mom, said the judge.

As a result, some of the analysis/opinion/evidence became less than objective, and she lost her children. Judge Fournier also made it clear there's no reverse in the child protection system. "I know it leaves a hole in your heart," he told her, "but c'est la vie."

While Judge Fournier was making that statement, the CAS was continuing with the adoptions of the first four children. Heidi Polowin at the time was chief in-house counsel for the society. She said: "The cases aren't connected. Once a court makes a child a Crown ward, other processes start. There's a normal flow." Mrs. Polowin has since been made a judge.

It wasn't my first close-up look at family courts in action. In 1991 I reported on the case of baby Joshua, handled by Lanark Child and Family Services. There was no allegation of abuse or neglect. The mother came under the agency's scrutiny when she asked for its help.

Over the next few months, authorities slowly pulled her baby from her through a series of access-reducing court orders. She came to my office frequently, and I watched her turn into an emotional wreck. Eventually a judge granted Crown wardship, but with a condition. The baby was only to be adopted if no member of his extended family would take him.

The adoption happened quickly. The extended family was in New Brunswick and had a room waiting. I know because I phoned. The child protecters didn't make those calls.

Tomorrow: Three sisters.

There's clarity in brevity, and lawyer Lynn Keller was brief when she told her clients' wishes to an Ottawa family court in early summer this year. Her clients were three sisters aged seven to 10, and they wanted desperately to go home to their parents.

She pointed out they had been in custody for three years. During that time, they were separated not only from their parents, but from each other. Two of them had been in and out of six different foster homes each. They had been in and out of several different schools and had been treated for mental and emotional problems at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, all while in the care of the child protection system.

Ms Keller said the children loved their parents and their parents loved them. There was no evidence of neglect or abuse.

"Let my clients go home," she pleaded, not the first time this plea has been made on behalf of the children during the three-year ordeal.

Children in these trials are represented by a lawyer from the office of the province's Official Guardian.

When family court Judge Jennifer Blishen wrapped up the two-week trial, she said there would be a further delay. She would be on vacation for the month of July. It was almost four months later when her decision was delivered, not in open court, but by messenger to the lawyers involved.

The answer to the plea to go home was no. The children would stay in state care as Crown wards.

There are many kinds of abuse, and that was what Judge Blishen had to deal with. The father abuses alcohol and his attempts to beat his addiction during the last three years have not been impressive. That's the heart of the issue, but over the years it has become surrounded by a body of complications packaged in caseworker reports and psychological assessments.

Mother is a product of a state upbringing. She was a Crown ward. She saw child-protection workers as family. Early in her relationship with the father, she turned to that family of child-protection workers when she wanted to vent, complain, or seek help. She didn't realize social workers were keeping records that would eventually be presented in court.

The pivotal point was in May 1997, when a social worker assigned to the family made the decision to apprehend the children. Mother was in hospital and father was the caregiver. He was drinking. He wasn't falling down drunk, but was obviously under the influence. Tiny details would find their way into the court record. It was noted he wasn't keeping up with the laundry.

It was clean, but piled on a bed unsorted, and the children were being dressed from the pile.

Lawyer Andrew Fobert represented the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa-Carleton. His job was similar to that of a prosecutor -- to win the state's case. He amassed an impressive pile of material to do that. There was little in the lives of the family that wasn't exposed to opinions from social workers and psychologists, and worked into court records. Between the mother's instability and the father's preference for maintaining a constant low-grade buzz, their lives were messy.

An assessment of the family was ordered, and that task was turned over to psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Motayne. He completed one in April 1998. The major problem was the father's drinking, and he concluded the man was "unlikely to maintain abstinence" if the children were returned.

Dr Motayne said he couldn't get a solid read on the mother, because she was trying so hard to impress him that she was skewing the results. That part of his report weakened the CAS argument for permanent Crown wardship.

In June 1999, another assessment was ordered, again from Dr Motayne. By now, the CAS had drawn up a plan of care for the children. When Dr Motayne's second assessment came in, in February, it seemed to not only support the CAS plan, but follow it almost point by point.

The couple's parenting skills were flawed in several ways, he reported, and each flaw had been "observed." Lawyer Wendy Rogers, representing the parents, zeroed in on that word. Dr Motayne said the observations were not his, but reported to him by caseworkers. This appeared to be using a psychiatrist as a typist, and when asked to justify that style of expertise, Dr. Motayne answered, "Accuracy is not as important as consistency."

The children's paternal grandparents sat through the trial and Judge Blishen told them they could ask questions of witnesses. This was the only time they accepted the invitation to question. The grandfather said: "I'm an old surveyor, and I know if you don't have accuracy, you get a lot of inconsistency." He didn't end his statement with a question mark, so there were nods and the trial moved on.

The circumstances of the grandparents show an odd bias in the child-protection system. There are children's aid societies, but there are no parents' aid societies.

The grandparents tried to care for the girls while the protection system made a decision, but being in their 70s, they found keeping up with three active children too difficult. They tried so hard, the grandmother was hospitalized. They asked for, but could get no, financial assistance, in-home help or respite care.

The public purse opens wide to strangers (foster parents) in times like this, but families are expected to provide for their own.

The parents of the children separated in early 1999. Mother said she was advised her only hope of getting her children back was to get the father out of the picture. Although they lived apart, they were "sneaking" back together. Finally they gave up, and in February this year, got married.

Mother had an attitude: "I think it's probably the most important thing, that children have parents who love each other."

But if you run that kind of attitude through psychology, you come up with words like "co-dependent." That's how her view of love appeared in reports to the court.

"There is no question that both parents dearly love their daughters," the judge observed in the judgment. She noted that access visits with the children showed "spontaneous mutual affection." The children, she noted, "continue to have a fantasy wish to return to their parents' home."

In the three years since the apprehensions, the parents' relationship seems to have stabilized and the judge made note of that too. Her concern, expressed in her judgment, is would children be safe in a home with an alcoholic father who also admitted to past drug use?

On the witness stand, mother was asked by her lawyer if there was a threat to her children, would she protect them? She gave the impression she definitely would. She wanted her children home and if there were concerns, she was willing to agree to frequent visits from CAS.

Judge Blishen said no. She recommended the children be allowed to see their parents at the discretion of the CAS, perhaps four times a year, and held out a faint hope they could some day be reunited.

Protection workers recently drew up a plan for the children's Christmas. They will be allowed to spend the day with the grandparents, but the parents can't be there. Mom and Dad will see the children on Dec 21. Grandfather says he doesn't understand why he can't see his son at the same time as his grandchildren, and have the extended family together. CAS doesn't have to explain. It is now the official parent.

There is a wide door opening here. If we, as a society, take all children out of homes where alcohol is abused, where are we going to store them? Odds are good at least one of the girls will be in a foster home where alcohol is a problem.

The judge's decision is the safe one. If the children were returned to their parents and harmed, the whole child-protection system would be in disrepute. If harm were to occur in a foster home, that's a new case.

Removal of children from families should be treated like a death sentence. A family court judge should face parents, like a criminal court judge faces a condemned prisoner, and deliver the bad news.

They should see the pain.

Tomorrow: Voyage of the damned

A two-year-old child, never abused or neglected, has been taken from her mother. Expert evidence purchased from psychologists by the child-protection system won out over expert evidence purchased from psychologists by the defence.

Mother was launched on her personal voyage of the damned in January 1997, when she was accused by child protectors of abusing two children who were not her biological children but who were in her care.

They were brothers aged three and five who were wards of the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa-Carleton. The CAS pressed criminal charges but allegations didn't get past the Crown attorney's office. There wasn't sufficient evidence for an appearance in a criminal court.

Had the allegedly abused children been her own, she would have appeared in a family court, where the burden of proof is not much of a burden. As it was, the two were in her home on an adoption-probation basis. She found them too difficult to handle and wanted to return them.

In the minds of the protectors, those stopped charges against her were still hanging. In their minds, just because a criminal court wouldn't hear them didn't mean she wasn't guilty of something.

After quitting the adoption program, she and her husband split up. She became pregnant with a new partner, who was never part of these proceedings.

When she gave birth to a daughter, she immediately had something to lose, and so qualified for family court. Seven months after the birth, child protectors appeared at her door and took her baby into custody, weaning her in the process.

The mandate of every state-funded child-protection agency is to enforce child protection laws. In Ontario, it's called the Child and Family Services Act. By definition, that makes them something like police departments. Like police in the criminal system, caseworkers are not held accountable if they push into the courts persons who shouldn't be there. They may not have the power to arrest parents, but neither are they subject to the same kind of review and second-guessing that police are.

In the criminal system, there are safeguards, such as presumption of innocence, to protect the accused. Hard evidence is needed. In family courts, judges make decisions based mainly on opinions. They could be called trials by psychology.

An obvious case of child abuse with broken bones or bruises, goes to criminal court. "Maybe" cases, or "it-might-happen" cases, go to family court.

In this case, Judge Jennifer Mackinnon, in her judgment released Nov. 6, made mother's baby daughter a Crown ward to protect her from a mother who may have abused children in the past, and therefore, presumably, could do it again. Psychologists paid by the state to support the CAS case said those were real possibilities. Psychologists hired by the defence said otherwise.

There was hard evidence of injury in the case of the two children who had been temporarily in the mother's care as possible adoptees. The three-year-old required eye surgery for an injury experts said was caused by shaken baby syndrome. That injury is usually associated with babies not developed enough to support their heads. But experts said it could happen to a three-year-old if the shaker was strong enough. Mother said the boy fell down stairs.

There were burns from an iron on the older child. Children don't testify in court, so he said through interviews, reported to the court by experts, that the marks were punishments inflicted by mother. She said he was a strange and damaged child and had burned himself.

The boy made other accusations that became part of the record: She held his head in the toilet. She flushed his brother's head in the toilet. She made him iron. She put him in the washing machine while it was running. He was forced to sit on the toilet while the family ate, and he wasn't fed. She made him eat feces and drink urine. She wrapped a chain around them in the garage and was going to pull them. She kicked. Hit. Pushed.

Those accusations were presented along with an expert opinion that the child did not suffer from "attachment disorder." There were no signs "whatsoever" of self-mutilation. In the final phase of the two-year ordeal, that same expert under cross-examination by lawyer Frank Armitage saw "some partial aspects of attachment disorder."

The words "post-traumatic stress disorder" were added to the psychological soup. A child can get that from being separated from his birth mother. There was agreement that the disorder can result in "a vivid sense that terrible things exist which don't exist."

CAS lawyer David Elhadad presented the court with an impressive profile of mother as a dangerous person. It was painted mainly by opinions from a variety of experts, most of them using psychology.

Journalists in court can't ask questions. Here I can. Why wasn't the woman assessed before two children were left in her care for more than a year? If they were abused, did the protection system not fail them? Where's the accountability?

As a skeptic, I see psychology as a spooky craft too open to error. Its application can be too easily turned and tuned to the needs of lawyers.

For the third time, I saw a twisted test turn up in evidence. It's called the Child Abuse Potential Inventory. You may not have abused a child yet, but maybe you will. In none of the three cases did the mothers pass the test, and always for the same reason.

The way it was worded this time: "(Mother) gave socially desirable responses, perhaps in an attempt to hide negative personal characteristics. Moreover, she wished to present herself in a favourable light to create a positive image. Consequently, the results of the test were invalidated."

In other words, you fail by trying. In the other two cases, they lost their children too.

It smacks of Salem in 1693, and a test for detecting witches. Suspects were bound and thrown into a pool. If they knew how to relax and stay afloat, they were condemned because it must be the Devil holding them up. If they sank and drowned, they weren't witches after all.

In this year's case, there were other tests deemed unreliable because the mother has multiple sclerosis.

What Judge Mackinnon was faced with here was not hard evidence, but opinions on which she had to build a balance of probabilities: Had the mother abused those CAS wards? If so, was she likely to abuse her own child?

There's no room for reasonable doubt. If there is a chance a child may be abused, it's a chance family courts won't take.

Every child is at some risk of abuse, more so as the definition of what constitutes abuse expands. This latest child taken into state care is still at risk -- but any hurt the baby daughter gets won't be from her birth mother.

The last time I talked to the mother, after the decision was delivered, she proved one part of her psychological assessments correct. She's a strong woman with impressive self-control. (Some experts thought those traits were good.) Others said it showed she may be capable of masking her true cruel self.) She was making arrangements for a private polygraph test. She said she will appeal.

Brigitte Bouvier, The Ottawa Citizen / Maria Bieber turned to the CAS for help after her husband left her penniless.

Dora Bieber disappeared into the child protection system and was adopted 12 years ago. She's now 19, and has been living with her birth mother for two years. She wants answers.

"There's nothing wrong with my mother," she said of the woman sitting beside her. "Why did this happen to her? Why did somebody decide she couldn't be my mother?"

She's looking to me for answers because my name appears as the writer of many stories that for many of those years tracked her mother's one-woman war against the powerful child protectors.

First Dora wants assurances that nothing will be done to harm or embarrass her adoptive parents, for whom she has respect and admiration. To protect them, she doesn't want her photo taken, nor does she want her adoptive, and now legal, name used. She says they, like herself and her birth mother, are victims.

It's 8 pm Nov 29. We order supper at a west-end steakhouse, and settle in for a long talk.

First, some truths for Dora. Her mother was indeed arrested 10 times because she refused to accept family court decisions that took away her child, made that child a Crown ward, and made her disappear into adoption. Yes, mother really did at one point spend 10 months in jail, refusing an offer of early release by refusing to agree to conditions.

Yes, I saw her brought into courtrooms wearing jailhouse jumpsuits, chained hand and foot, raising her handcuffs over her head and shouting defiance: "I love my daughter!"

I have long wondered how she managed to locate her daughter so many times, and how she came within a whisker of pulling off an abduction.

After a slow meal and a long talk, we had some answers. But there's still a gap between mother and daughter. There's something unusual about their interaction. In the parking lot, Dora was waiting in the passenger seat of her mother's car, looking straight ahead at nothing. Like her mother, she's a small woman, and seemed to be trying to make herself disappear between her own hunched shoulders. The body language was clear. She needed a hug.

"I know," said her mother, still standing outside. "I just can't. It would be fake and she'd know that. It would make things worse. I don't fake. It's part of the damage. I can't forget the look on her face that day (of the near abduction). She recognized me, and she ran. She was afraid of me. That hurt so much. How could she have believed I would ever hurt her? How could she have believed them?"

Maria slid in behind the wheel, backed the car out, and paused for a moment to adjust the wipers to clear the cold drizzle. Mother and daughter were pushed against their own sides of the car. Both needed a hug, but mother was still too angry, and daughter too frightened.

- - -

Citizen, Dec. 3, 1987, Brown's Beat: "Woman says justice system failed her after husband walked out."

It was the first time Maria Bieber appeared in one of my columns, and it was intended to show a needed repair to marital law. Three years earlier on an October night, Ms. Bieber, after a lengthy visit to her home in Hungary, arrived back in Ottawa with her three-year-old daughter and ailing mother. Her husband, a bankrupt casket salesman, didn't meet them at the airport as promised. He was gone, along with all their belongings. She was a self-employed hairdresser and he had disposed of her equipment. Everything was gone, including her home and her means of supporting herself and her family. He hadn't kept up the mortgage payments.

For three years, Ms Bieber knocked on justice's doors demanding he be tracked down, charged with theft, and brought back from Alberta, hogtied if necessary. She was in a fury, and once managed to get into the office of Perth Crown attorney John Waugh. When he said he couldn't help, she left her child, saying she couldn't afford to raise her, so Mr. Waugh would have to. She returned later to get her daughter, but it was an incident that didn't look good years later in front of a family court judge hearing a Children's Aid Society application for custody.

In that first story, her lawyer, Ted Masters, was quoted as saying the kind of theft she experienced was a gap in law that should be closed. It still isn't. Although marital property is supposed to be joint property, if one partner steals it, police will tell the other party to take it to a lawyer. It's a civil case.

To Maria Bieber, theft was theft and she couldn't put it behind her. Her anger was further fuelled by the realization he was planning his moves before she left for Europe. That he was still sharing her bed while planning his betrayal was the greatest theft of all. "He stole my love."

The social safety net was keeping the small family barely afloat when she arrived at my office in 1987. She had her small daughter with her and the child seemed placid when mother gave a temper-filled account of her circumstances. The girl found things to play with while mother downloaded. She seemed accustomed to mother's emotional high-tension wiring.

- - -

Brown's Beat, Oct. 26, 1988: "Group aims to judge lawyers, fight bad law."

It was a story about people who had paid much money to lawyers and felt they had been burned. They believed they had been little more than raw material for an industry that didn't care. Over the next few years the group would grow to a membership of 170, and then fade away. Shortly after it was founded, Ms. Bieber showed up at a meeting. She became the cause celebre for the group, which called itself CABL -- Citizens Against Bad Law. She told how she had been watching television at a shelter for the homeless in 1988, and saw a commercial about the services of the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa Carleton. The main theme of the ad was: We're here to help. If you've got problems, call.

She called and talked to a caseworker and signed an agreement placing her daughter in foster care for three months. She extended that twice while she waited for rent-to-income housing. She frequently visited her daughter and thought she was lucky to be in a country that offered such fine services. Her daughter was in a nice home being cared for by good people.

After getting an apartment and decorating a room for her daughter, she contacted her caseworker and said it was time to bring her daughter back. The child had been in care for almost nine months.

She says now: "I knew I was in trouble the minute the new caseworker walked in. Up until then, I had been dealing with a woman who had become a friend. She was 62, and I thought of her like a second mother. The new worker was younger. She said she wasn't running a babysitting service and accused me of taking advantage of the system."

Maria Bieber has a hot temper and a low flashpoint. Treated to a view of the eye of one of mother's storms, the social worker decided to apprehend Dora for the child's protection.

The fight was on.

In family courts in child protection cases, the steps are painfully slow. As Maria's access to Dora was slowly reduced, she became more angry and distrustful. She fired lawyers and eventually the only people she would trust were CABL members. They turned out at hearings to show support, and some of them at some points represented her. One of them kept count of her court appearances, but stopped counting at 147.

- - -

Brown's Beat, Nov. 22, 1994: "Woman seeks trial to get back 'lost' child."

Maria Bieber had been in jail for six months at this point. A judge offered her instant freedom if she promised to stop her attempts to abduct the child the system was now referring to as her "former daughter." She had been caught with passports and within a few feet of the girl.

She said no to the judge's offer, and went back to jail for another four months. She was demanding her case be heard by a criminal court, and she wanted a jury "with mothers on it." It didn't happen.

Watchers, including police, were impressed by mother's investigative skills. That she managed to track her daughter and find her, frequently, through a series of foster homes was impressive. At the steakhouse she explained: "I drove all the time, all over the Ottawa and St. Lawrence valleys. I would watch schools.

"Garbage was best. Once I knew where one (foster) home was, I would pick up the garbage and go through it, mainly for phone bills. I would call the numbers and sometimes connect with the next foster home. If I suspected a house might be a foster home, and found a lot of calls to the CAS, I would know I was on the right track."

During dinner at the steakhouse, she focused more than once on the day in 1994 when she almost abducted her former daughter. "I'll never forget the look on Dora's face. I was so close, but she ran. She was afraid of me. They lied to her, and she believed them. She believed I would hurt her. That's what I can't forget."

Dora asked for help making her mother understand. "When they told me I'd never see my mother again (she was seven), I think I cried for three months. But the surroundings were nice and people were nice and I was just a kid. There were lots of distractions and I started to change. I started to forget.

"When I was 10, I remember we (she and her foster parents) got all dressed up and went to the courthouse and I was adopted. The judge told me I was lucky and I thought so too. We went out and had a nice dinner, and it was a happy day."

Over the years, the caseworker who took Dora into custody maintained contact. "She told me my mother had gone crazy and was looking for me to kill me. She said my mother wanted to burn my house down. I was terrified. I couldn't sleep. I recognized her running towards me that day, and I ran for my life."

At 13, things were changing in Dora's life. "I didn't feel close to my (adoptive) parents any more. They were, they are, wonderful people. But I started to feel alone. Even when I was with my parents or my friends, I had the feeling of not belonging. I started to smoke. They didn't like that. Did I tell you they even spent a lot of money on riding lessons? I'm a good rider.

"They didn't deserve what happened. I started to feel there was something wrong and I started to rebel. I wouldn't co-operate. I started skipping school. My marks fell. I used to tell them all the time that the minute I turned 16, I could legally make my own decisions. I would be legal. I would get away from them. I was going to do it. I'm so sorry. They really tried, and I hurt them."

She left in April 1996, the day after her 16th birthday.

Within a few days of her flight from her parents, an anonymous caller told me the girl I knew as Dora was on her own, and where she could be found. She was at a home in a valley town about an hour away. I drove there and left a brief letter for her in the mailbox. If I never heard from her, I wrote, that was her business. But if she needed help, use the number on the business card.

For the next year she drifted, often waking up not knowing how she would get through the day or where she would go to bed that night. She held onto the card and after a year, made the call. She was brief. She wanted her former mother's telephone number. I didn't hear from them again.

On Nov 27, just a couple of weeks ago, I was at the Elgin Street courthouse and passed them in a corridor. I didn't recognize them. Ms. Bieber called out. We talked. Did Dora want to tell her story?

"Hell yes," she said. She is angry at the system that took her away from her mother.

Dora made the call to mother in late 1997. The Red Lobster Restaurant on St. Laurent Boulevard was chosen as the meeting place. They didn't recognize each other for several minutes.

Dora (laughing): "Suddenly I had this crazy woman jabbering away at me in a language I couldn't understand. She switched languages and I still couldn't understand. I thought, oh damn. They were right. She's crazy."

Maria: "When they took her away, she spoke English and Hungarian and Italian as well as I do. I was so afraid she would lose her languages. And she did. At least she didn't get fat."

How did they decide to live together? "I didn't have a choice," says Dora. "She told me to get in the car. We were going home. It just felt right." Mother is a fitness fanatic, and now daughter is too. They work out regularly together. No smoking.

Dora is attending an alternate school, maintaining a 90 average, and expects to earn her high school diploma by April.

In an attempt to show the child-protection system as, in her word "stupid," Ms. Bieber borrowed a niece from a sister in Hungary. The girl was the same age as Dora. From 1989 to 1994, she played mother to the child, sending her to school as her daughter, using Dora's name and paperwork. She also continued to collect support from social services as a mother of one.

She wanted to force the child protectors to make a move, and get the issue back into court. "If I was such a bad person they took away my own daughter, how could they possibly allow me to have another child in my care?"

CAS didn't bite, and her niece was left in her care.

After the niece returned to her mother in Hungary, speaking excellent English, Ms. Bieber was charged with fraud. She was accused of defrauding the taxpayers of Ontario to the tune of $55,000. She appeared in front of a criminal court in 1998, unrepresented and offering an explanation. Whether the child in her care was her daughter or somebody else's, she was a child in need of support. The court agreed and lowered the amount of the fraud to $7,000, found her guilty and the sentence was two years probation. She will complete the sentence in July.

- - -

Dora's question: A mother loves her child and the child loves mother, and there's no abuse or neglect. Why would anybody tear them apart?

One answer is that it's because there is a Children's Aid Society, but no parents' aid society. Her mother was suffering from depression and was being treated for it. When she signed over temporary custody of her daughter, she was admitting she was flawed. Most of us are, but we don't put it in writing. The request for help put child protectors in the position of having a child to protect, and they had some difficult choices to make.

Mother was depressed and her anger at the system made her appear irrational. With the interests of only the child in mind, the protectors decided mother's healing time was up, and started separating child from mother. Once that process starts, it doesn't back up.

Maria Bieber has a different answer to the why question. She calls it false advertising. "If I had never called that number, they would never have been in our lives."

Ottawa parents are 19 times more likely to lose their children to state care than are parents on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. The risk that parents will be taken to court by child protectors in the first place is three times higher in Ontario than across the river in Quebec.

Either Quebec authorities are leaving children at risk, or Ontario child protectors are being over-protective. Take your pick, but there has been no noticeable epidemic of child abuse in Quebec.

For Ontario parents, the risk of court challenges by child protectors skyrockets if they're poor. Ottawa lawyer Ross Stewart has been practising at the family bar for 11 years, and is a veteran of protection cases. Among those clients over the years, he can't remember one that wasn't a legal aid case. Only the poor qualify for legal aid.

There are 448 Crown wards on the rolls of the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa-Carleton, which serves a population of 780,000. In Quebec, where Les Centres Jeunesse de l'Outaouais serves a population of 325,000, there are 10 children for which the agency is "tutor," the Quebec equivalent of a Crown ward. Put those figures through a calculator and the number of Crown wards in Ottawa-Carleton is 19 times greater per capita.

In Ontario the decision to remove a child from its family is made by family court judges. In Quebec those decisions are made by judges in juvenile courts. In 1999, according to Attorney General Department figures, Ottawa family courts were asked to decide the fate of 2,151 children. For the same period in the Outaouais, child protectors asked for court decisions for 302 cases. On a per capita basis, that's puts the Ottawa figure three times higher.

Why are the Hull-side figures so low? Luc Cadieux is director of the Outaouais child-protection agency. He says one possible answer is oversight. He has powerful people looking over his shoulder to make sure his child protectors don't abuse their power. His peers in the Ontario system don't. "It makes you cautious," he says.

Parents in Quebec who believe the protection agency has overstepped its authority, or acted improperly, can complain to the Quebec Human Rights Commission. That agency will investigate, even if the case is being pushed to court.

In Ontario and the rest of North America, rights agencies stand back. They take the view that any involvement in a court-related issue would be interfering with justice.

Family courts are classed as courts of justice, but are they? They do not review hard evidence and scientific fact. If there's any of that, the case appears in a criminal court.

A family court makes decisions it believes to be "in the best interests of the child." Evidence is mainly opinion and theory from social workers and psychologists. There is no requirement that those who put parenting skills on trial -- including judges -- must themselves be parents. Frequently they are not.

The "best interests" principle has been called, by some legal experts, the vaguest principle in all of statutory law.

For Ontario parents who think they are being abused, the complaints desk is in the same agency they want to complain about. Children's Aid Societies are arms-length organizations. There are more than 50 in Ontario. There is no oversight.

Regional councillor Alex Munter hears enough cries for help at his office that he has called for a complaints process. Ontario's new ombudsman, Claire Lewis, former commissioner for public police complaints, believes child protection agencies are enough like police services to require oversight. He has offered to take on the role of CAS complaints reviewer -- if the legislature will give him the power.

In a family court, the most dangerous accuser parents will face is a psychologist. There are reasons to fear them and their spooky craft. In the '50s and '60s, multiple personality disorders (MPDs) were all the rage in the psychology industry. Many got rich writing about patients they said had several different personalities inhabiting the same body. Since then, the existence of MPDs has largely been discredited.

In the '70s, evidence taken from children by psychologists and presented in courts sent dozens of daycare operators to jail for involving children in satanic rites and sexual abuse. Oops again. It didn't happen. Massive lawsuits are still going on.

Now on the block is suppressed memory syndrome. Reports suggest that those memories are often planted by psychologists' repeated, leading questions.

A new breed of psychologist is emerging, dedicated to exposing junk psychology. One of them is Dr. Tana Dineen of Victoria, author and frequent contributor to this newspaper.

The title of her 1996 book leaves no doubt where she stands; Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People. For more information visit her Web site at www.tanadineen.com.

Recently I watched three different family court trials in which mothers failed a test called the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP). In each case, psychologists, paid by the prosecution, reported that the mothers were trying so hard to fool the tester by being nice that they were masking their true feelings and invalidating the test. They didn't pass. They lost their children.

I asked Dr Dineen for her expert opinion of that test.

"Psychologists are the inquisitors of the modern age witch hunts. They control the uncovering of child abuse and thrive from identifying perpetrators. The tests they use, including such questionable instruments as the CAP, are useful to them for two reasons: The tests sound clinical and scientific, and they cast such a wide net that they identify a significant number of innocent people as potential child abusers."

Family courts provide abundant grazing for psychology. Not only are practitioners highly paid for producing the reams of material that will be logged in as evidence, but there's more good grazing on the periphery. Courts routinely order people to take parenting courses, marriage counselling, anger management courses, addictions counselling and the list grows.

Courts buy psychology as science and the media buys it as sexy. Hardly a week goes by that a new psychological discovery doesn't make a splash in the media.

A new affliction discovered recently in California is called affluenza. The discoverer, with a book bearing that title already on the U.S. market, promises to make nice people of the children of the affluent. The diagnosis is rich kids grow up to be arrogant snots, but don't worry, a treatment has been developed.

The perfect life is living rich in California where you can hire experts to give you angst-free love, guilt-free sex, and snot-free kids.

Psychology is a hard sell in a Quebec child protection case, because judges run courts that require more of a burden of proof. Of the 1,237 files opened in 1999 in Hull juvenile court, 876 were under the Young Offenders Act. The remaining 302 were child protection cases under the Loi de la protection de la Jeunesse.

Parents who truly abuse their children and cause injuries or leave marks, appear in criminal courts. There are harsh penalties.

For the kind of abuse psychologists describe in family courts, though, the aim is not to incarcerate the parents, but to take their children into custody. They go into a foster-care system that regularly turns out adults with a high failure rate. In March, the latest month for which figures are available, there were 14,200 children in the care of all Children's Aid Societies in Ontario. It will cost taxpayers $650 million for their welfare, including foster care.

When we created family court with its reduced burden of proof, we established an institution. Institutions grow and, to do that, they need numbers. This institution is served by dedicated professionals in the child-protection system who, through no fault of their own, provide the system with what it needs to keep growing -- a body count.

The problem is the system, not the people in it.

Only public pressure is going to bring about change. Politicians are locked into the idea that more power for the child- protection industry means more protected children. What's needed is protection from the protectors -- accountability -- and that's not going to happen until the public demands it.