Dutch social workers catch the English disease - by Christopher Booker

When it comes to social workers ripping families apart for no good reason, it seems the English disease is spreading. I have lately been following a bizarre case involving the kidnapping by Dutch social workers of two 10-year-old twins from a Russian-speaking Latvian family long resident in Holland.

Pretty well everything about this case echoes what goes on behind closed doors in England: social workers colluding with a dysfunctional father to justify snatching distraught children from their mother, to incarcerate them miserably in care homes; the courts refusing to test evidence and accepting lies. But because this case is in Holland, not Britain, the family can be named and its shocking details publicized. Unusually, for instance, we can see on YouTube the harrowing scenes from March 2012 which show the screaming children being carried by police from their family home to a waiting police van (Google “Kidnap of children from their mother by Dutch social services”).

Nikolai and Anastasia Antonova were removed from their mother, Jelena, for three stated reasons. The first, astonishingly, was that they spoke Russian rather than Dutch at home (this is in clear breach of two articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which enjoins respect for a child’s right to speak his or her family’s language). A second was the baseless claim that the family might return to Latvia to escape from the children’s estranged father, who had joined a weird cult that caused the family intolerable strain.

The third, according to the social workers who were working closely with the father, was that the children had “severely conflicting loyalties to their parents”. The children had made clear that they were frightened of their father and did not want to see him again.

Note EU-Digest: obviously this article which comes from a British conservative paper is slanted against any kind of Government funded  public service agency. It must be said, however, that even though some of these cases are very tragic for the children involved, government  social workers in general do perform some very beneficial assistance to families, children and old people in distress.
 
Read more: Dutch social workers catch the English disease - Telegraph