Foster-children
as lucrative business
By Siv Westerberg, lawyer and medical practioner
Heinz Stombrowski was born in Simken in East Prussia. The Soviet occupation of
the Baltic countries during the second world war caused the family to be driven
out and they came to Germany as refugees. In 1951, at the age of 16, Heinz was
offered a job as a lumber jack in Sweden together with his father. The two were
dependable and hard-working and were soon able to bring the rest of the family
over to join them in Sweden. As an adult Heinz founded his own family together
with a Swedish girl and they acquired a small-holding in the district of
Värmland. Their house was small, with no modern amenities except cold running
water. Nevertheless, for the four children it was a wonderful place, an idyll
out of a children's book by Astrid Lindgren.
It was
not to last, Like other small-holders, Heinz Stombrowski held another job in
addition to working on his farm in order to make ends meet. When his employer
went bankrupt, Heinz was out of work and had to apply for economic assistance
from welfare. This led the social services office to pounce on him. The social
workers found fault with the family. They considered that the children, who ran
around happily in the stables and outside in the fields and forests, were
dirty; the bed-linen was not changed often enough, and the children were late
in developing language skills. (This latter phenomenon can be observed in the
families of many bilingual marriages, be they academics or farmers. Children
regularly catch up later, without any form of special teaching or help. The
advantage later in life of having learnt two languages early in childhood is of
course great, Furthermore, monolingual children, too, vary a great deal in the
way they acquire their mother tongue and the speed with which this takes
place.)
The
social services made use of these deficiencies of the Stombrowski home to take
the children away from their parents and share them out among different foster
families. The eldest daughter, 16 years of age at the time, was alone in not
being forcibly taken into care. She is the only one of the Stombrowskis'
children to lead a normal life today. The younger three were 10, 6 and 3 years
old when they were taken. Ten years later they are still with foster parents. They
have attended nothing but schools for retarded children. The foster parents
have scant motivation for making any change: the more "retarded" a
child can be claimed to be, the greater the financial compensation received by
the foster parents from the social services.
One of
the Stombrowski daughters was at 13 forced to have sexual intercourse with her
foster-father - a crime which this man has never been put on trial for or even
charged with. The son, now 13 years old, has several times stated his intention
of committing suicide. For two years he was placed in the hands of
foster-parents with a great aptitude for financial gain. During the same period
they had in their care seven boys with serious mental disturbances, although
the foster-parents had absolutely no education or training relevant to such a
task. From the social services they received 1500 Swedish Crowns (approx. £150)
per day per child for the job. This brought in a total of more than £ 30.000
per month for this couple.
We ask ourselves:
Is it possible for this to have taken place and still be going on in the
welfare state of Sweden? As the Stombrowski family's lawyer for the last two
years I have to confirm that yes, it really is. Worse still: The Stombrowski
case is no isolated instance. Before, qualifying in law I practised as a
medical doctor for twenty years. As a result, a number of cases of a
sociomedical character now find their way to my legal practice in Gothenburg,
among them several in which the social services, on no valid grounds
whatsoever, take children out of the care o£ their parents and place them with
totally unacceptable foster-parents.
At
present there are in Sweden some 5000 children who have been forcibly removed
from their parents' care. In no more than 10% of these cases there are readily
understandable and acceptable reasons for this, such as alcohol or drug
addiction on the part of the parents. In all the others, the social services
have sought, and quickly found, pretexts when parents have come into some kind
of conflict with the social worker concerned.
All
through the ages there have been children who have been placed in the care of
foster-parents. As late as in the 1930s and 40s this still happened quite
frequently in Sweden when the biological parents were simply too poor to be
able to feed them. Many children born out of wedlock, too, were given to
foster-parents due to the considerable prejudices of society towards unmarried
mothers. Most foster-parents used to be people who genuinely wanted to help a
child in need. The remuneration which they received for their care was very
modest.
The
situation changed in the 50s. The general standard of living got better and
prejudices against unwed mothers were on the wane. Therefore, to leave children
in the hands of foster-parents was no longer an obvious necessity. As a
consequence, the jobs of many social workers were no longer secure. However,
just in this period Swedish authorities concocted a "vision" of a
Swedish state, a state which would mind and manage its citizens from the cradle
to the grave. This suited social workers, of course, as it secured a continued
and increased demand for people of their profession.
Strong
family ties, however, in which family members influence each other's lives and
help each other, were an obstacle to having such "dreams" put into
practice. Therefore a law was passed which empowered - and still continues to
empower - social workers to break into practically any family, even with the
aid of the police, and decide forcibly to take over the care of the family's
children. Furthermore, another law was passed authorising "prohibition
against removal" from the foster-home. This means that even if parents
should, after years of litigation succeed in having the original decision
depriving them of the right to care for their children revoked, the social
authorities can nevertheless prevent the children from going home. In theory,
the reason for this law is a good one: a child who has been with foster-parents
for years is given a couple of months to readjust to life with its biological
parents. In practice, though, the social services use the law to the opposite
end, they regularly issue prohibitions on removal that last many years and thus
sabotage all contact between parents and children.
In actual
fact, no legal control over any of this set of procedures exists in Sweden. Forced
transfer of care to the social services' authority falls under the jurisdiction
of an administrative court. It works in such a cumbersome and bureaucratic
manner that it functions as an extension of the social services.
In this
manner the profession of social worker becomes attractive to people with a lust
for power, people who simply enjoy themselves when they take children away from
parents who deviate, be it ever so trivially, from the state controlled ideas
of development and upbringing, as for instance if the house is not tidy or if
the child has played hookey from school.
To obtain
a sufficient number of foster-parents, the social services pay for care at
fantastic rates. A healthy child will bring the foster-parents between £500 and
£1000 per month, in large part tax-free. One must also bear in mind that
foster-parents frequently take four or five foster-children at the same time. A
handicapped foster-child is paid for at several times the going rate.
Where
such sums of money are advertised, takers will be many. A number of applicants
for being a foster-parent have or have had problems with alcohol or have a
previous record of criminal convictions, but this in no way stops the social
services from engaging them as foster-parents. While every detail of the lives,
opinions and backgrounds of the biological parents is scrutinised with marked
suspicion, foster-parents are, curiously enough, hardly checked out at all.
The
system could not function if the children were in frequent contact with their
parents. Therefore the parents' visiting rights are restricted very severely. Ordinarily,
they are only allowed to see their children once every three months, for a
couple of hours and under the eyes of the foster-parents. The social services
can also prevent the parents from having any contact at all with their
children. In their decisions on prohibition against visits the social services
are regularly backed up by opinions solicited from child psychiatrists who are
only too eager to write such assessments as requested by the social services,
which are practically their only source of work. This unholy alliance between
power-ridden social workers, avaricious foster-parents, and child psychiatrists
dependent on the social services, has brought endless suffering on many
families in Sweden. I have brought the cases of many of them to the Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg, including the Stombrowski family's case. In the Court of
Human Rights, Sweden has several times been found guilty of its violations of
human rights in connection with its forcible transfer of the care of children. The
Swedish authorities have learnt nothing from these proceedings. They have not
even always complied with the decisions of the Court of Human Rights. As it
stands today, Sweden still has no constitutional court to which such
legislation and such conditions as those described above can be appealed and by
which they can be tried.
Nor,
unfortunately, is Sweden any longer alone. Over the last couple of years I have
observed the development of public, child care in Norway and conferred with
concerned people there. The situation seems to have become exactly what it is
in Sweden, that is a catastrophe for children and parents exposed to the
attention of the social "services". The background, the course taken,
and the techniques used by social welfare personnel, are all exactly the same. Norway
seems to have begun to slide into this state of affairs later than Sweden; now,
however, Norway has apparently at great speed arrived at the same destructive
and lawless conditions for children and their families.