Mother in court over a birthday card
By Christopher Booker, political reporter
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Next Wednesday, Maureen Spalek, a spirited and loving mother, will be in
Runcorn magistrates’ court to face a criminal charge of having sent a birthday
card to her eight-year-old son – having already been arrested and held in a
prison cell for 24 hours for the same offence.
Mrs Spalek is charged with breaking a court
order forbidding her to have any contact with her three children, even though
she has an order from another judge explicitly permitting her to send them
birthday and Christmas cards. Yet a few days after she sent her younger son the
card, on April 15, she was visited by two police officers who threatened to
beat down her door unless she gave them entry. She was then taken to one of
Runcorn’s 30 police cells where she was held in very unpleasant conditions for
24 hours.
Mrs Spalek, the former wife of a naval officer,
lost her children some years ago after one of her sons was taken to hospital
with a broken leg from a bicycle accident. When she complained about the
attitude of a doctor who was treating her son, social workers were called in.
When she then, in turn, complained about the “hostile” attitude they had shown
to her, the affair escalated to the point where her three children were taken
away, on the grounds that she had “problems working with professionals” – even
though it was agreed in court that she was an “excellent mother”, that the
children were well-behaved and well-looked-after and that they had suffered no
physical or emotional abuse. Two were adopted, one lives with their father.
One of the many serious issues not raised in
the recent election campaign, because all three parties have agreed not to
discuss it, is the growing scandal of the abduction by social workers of
children from responsible and loving parents. In too many instances, this gives
the impression of a tightly closed system, in which the social workers, who
have in the recent past been set “adoption targets” by central government, are
aided and abetted by the police, by certain family court judges and even by those
lawyers supposedly acting on behalf of the parents. I shall return to this very
disturbing issue after Mrs Spalek's case this week.