The family courts are a human trafficking mafia, but are very far from the first institutions to do this. It is important to understand history to understand additional risks, including using human beings for exploitation and experimentation.

“Stolen” is a 2023 documentary film by Margo Harkin about the Irish Mother and Baby Homes human rights scandal.

The title says it all: Stolen. The film is about child theft. Child theft by the Church, in collusion with the State.

I want to stress at the outset: this is not about bashing religion, or any particular religion. This story is about the Catholic Church in Ireland, but the Protestant Church in Northern Ireland did not hesitate to go into business with brothers and sisters south of the border. Parents and researchers have identified involvement of the Jewish community in corruption in children’s legal cases. Asian countries are the focus of intense western lobbying efforts to amend child-centred practices, but so far prove resistant.

It is important to differentiate Church and faith, and to consider how the former has betrayed the latter. This is abundantly clear in the story of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes, which portrays a desecration of the Holy Mother and her child, and of the teachings of the Bible that would cast to the depths of the ocean those who lead little ones astray.

It is of the utmost importance that victims of the modern day “family courts” have a clear understanding of the intensity of the harm that has been inflicted on them, and that we use the correct words to describe what has been done to us.

This film helps us set ourselves in the right historical and legal context, to lift our heads from the shame that we have been coerced to accept as our own and to speak of the theft of our children and the violation of their, and our rights.

Basic definition of theft

(1)  A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it…

Theft Act 1968, UK

Close to the end of the film, one of the victims of the Homes, actor, writer and director Noelle Brown, says of those who ran them: “They are criminals as far as I am concerned”.

I was in the audience at a screening of the film attended by the director. I am not sure if really did clap slowly and loudly, or if I just wish I did. Margo Harkin spoke of attempts to suggest she moderate the language. I am grateful she resisted them.

Unethical experiments

The Irish State is blocking Noelle’s access to her medical data so she cannot establish whether, and in what way, she was used in vaccine trials by a forerunner of GlaxoSmithKline while she was in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home as a child. This despite the Irish Government acknowledging the crimes and human rights atrocities committed against children in its institutions.

Conall O Fatharta of the Irish Examiner says:

“We now know that there were at least thirteen vaccine products trialled on children in Mother and Baby Homes… Some 40,000 children we now believe took part in these trials. My suspicion would be that Glaxo, or the Wellcome Foundation as it would be at the time was aware that there were large numbers of children in ‘care settings’ in Ireland… Essentially, the subjects were here.”

This would not be an isolated instance. Just Google “children’s home medical experiment” and you will quickly see that children in care have often been targeted in this way.

State violence

Even without the added injury of non-consensual medical experiments, taking children from their mothers for social engineering or ideological reasons is a cruel experiment that inflicts deep psychological injury and physical harm.

This is not lost on the victims of the modern family courts, who know all too well the harms caused to their children and themselves.

An adult who has their child taken from them for reasons other than those laid down in law, without evidence of serious risk to the child, is a victim of State violence not far from the death penalty in intensity, and often with the same outcome.

Any child who has been taken from the care of their loving parents under such circumstances is a victim of State violence that will scar them psychologically for ever. Many lose their lives at a young age through suicide or ill-health caused by trauma.

These acts by State bodies have at least three dimensions in law: human rights violations, criminal offences and torts.

Legal implications

The human rights violations are clear and have been acknowledged time and again throughout history. I was musing where the roots of the practice of taking children from their mothers lay. I realised: the slave trade.

The most obvious breach is the right to a private and family life. The Ireland story makes clear that very often after this breach the violation of the right to life and to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment follow. The death rate among child and adult victims of unlawful separation by the State is very high, and so are the rates of abuse. In the case of the Mother and Baby Homes the child death rate was 15 %. In Scotland, the death rate of care experienced children is five times higher than their peers who live with their families.

The level of violence and overt hatred of mothers in cases like historic and current child removal gives them the characteristics of a persecuted group. In “Stolen”, it is noted that unmarried mothers and children born out of wedlock were treated like subhuman life forms. Extramarital sex was treated as if it was worse than murder – for women. The men got away with it, leading former Taoiseach Enda Kelly to remark that the women seemed to have “developed the amazing capacity to self-impregnate”.

Today, this persecution is still happening, but doesn’t just happen to women who have children outside a stable relationship. It happens when women leave violent relationships. It can also happen when men leave violent relationships, though studies so far indicate at a lower rate.

This persecution is still motivated by groups driven by religious ideology. In the case of divorcing couples, think tank the Centre for Social Justice has been instrumental in quietly inserting protocols created by US fundamentalist Christian groups into UK Government policy, leading onlookers to wonder how it can be that British courts and institutions are completely ignoring the law. One of the founders of the Centre for Social Justice is Lord Michael Farmer, a key Conservative Party donor and devout Christian.

I have experienced myself the “benevolence” of the fundamentalist Christian fringe in the “family justice” sector. In Croatia, where my children are falsely imprisoned following their kidnap and abuse of power in the court system, almost all powerful figures in the family justice system are known to be members of Opus Dei. Dr Dubravka Kocijan-Hercogonja, a child psychiatrist who fraudulently labelled me as “paranoid” simply for reminding her of the law, admitted in my court hearing that she and her colleague punish mothers who exercise their legal right not to participate in mediation with abusive ex partners by recommending to the courts that their children be removed. She is the first President of the Zagreb branch of the Croatian Catholic Medical Association..

One thing is clear from the serious studies (not the ones with outcomes made to order): children do best with their families. Care arrangements must be temporary. The focus must be on support until parents can safely resume care of their children. Permanent arrangements are for extreme cases where there is no alternative. By law, they are a last resort.

Unfortunately, these facts do not suit the enormous, highly aggressive, utterly unethical lobby which seeks to profit from taking children into care.

Profiteering

Where does the profit come from?

It can come from legal sources: privately run care homes, foster care and adoption agencies. Sometimes the organisations which run these facilities describe themselves as non-profit organisations or charities. It makes little difference. Usually, these organisations have their eye on funding and job creation. Very quickly, you have an ecosystem that relies on children being in the system to justify its existence.

Local authorities are financially incentivised by central Government to fulfil adoption targets.

Profit can also come from illicit sources. Too often, we hear about children and vulnerable people in care settings being exploited and abused. Too often, we hear about children being prostituted from care homes. There is profit in children being used in medical trials. There are also fears that children entering today’s care system may be at risk of being trafficked for organ harvesting or drug running.

Yet many are reluctant to use the word trafficking.

Trafficking

If Ireland’s Government has, for all its faults, admitted that the Church and the State took children from their mothers and trafficked them, it becomes impossible to avoid using the same word to descrive today’s scandal.

If our children are being taken from our homes today, against our will and theirs, on the basis of conjecture and hearsay, not evidence and the law, and if someone, somewhere, is making money out of it, we have human trafficking on our hands.

I am not sure what is difficult to understand about this.

The same applies when children are taken from their mothers in child custody cases and given to fathers who are evidenced abusers.

Who profits from this?

The lawyers profit from court cases that drag on for years. The mental health practitioners, regulated and unregulated, who make thousands of pounds from conducting court-ordered “assessments” which follow no professional standards, and drafting “reports” which they copy-paste from one couple to the next, all based on damaging pseudoscience. They profit.

But there are surely other revenue pathways that are not transparent. There is a lot about family law and money which is very far from transparent. We need an excellent investigative journalist to look into white collar crime here.

Serious problems arise when we see judges binning evidence of serious abuse, including convictions for assault and evidence of child sexual abuse, and giving children to the very person who is a risk to them.

What happens to these children? Recent research in Australia shows a shockingly high incidence of parents making their own children available for sexual exploitation. It shows a shockingly high number of adult males who admit feelings of attraction to minors. We know that the economy of the internet is fuelled by pornography. We know about the grooming rings in our towns and the drug trafficking. US psychiatrist Dr Bandy X Lee, who has extensive experience of work with the most hardened criminals, has no hesitation in describing the US family courts as child sex trafficking rings and organised crime.

We know about the unaccompanied minors arriving in our communities, displaced by war and migration and… disappearing.

Destabilising

While all of this brutal interference in the lives of perfectly good families is going on, social services are ignoring the real child protection cases. The death rate among children is rising, and so is the rate of children in care.

The reason: abused children are not marketable. They are not profitable. They take up too much time and challenging their parents is too much hard work for inexperienced social workers with enormous case loads.

We have a perfect storm, a system which is out of control. It is causing unbearable suffering and threatening to damage the fabric of our society.

It is creating generations of people who do not trust their own Government, because it has betrayed them. They do not trust a legal system which does not abide by the laws of the land. They do not trust the police forces which tolerate the crimes of perjury, malfeasance in public office and the trafficking of minors.

In this destabilising situation we have the sense that the criminals are the prison guards. But we are living in a geopolitical powder keg. Why would our own Governments let this happen?

Scarred landscapes

The screening of “Stolen” in the London Irish Centre in February 2024 concided with “Mary, Mary”, an exhibition of therapeutic photography by Mary Musgrove, who aged 17 discovered that she had an older sister who was taken by the Irish nuns at birth. She learned of this from a clairvoyant, and asked her mother, who confirmed it was true. The secret caused severe damage that impacted the whole family.

Mary’s work is a sensitive, evocative exploration of landscapes dripping with sadness and decay. Boarded up churches and convents, abandoned icons and neglected statues document how the people of Ireland, after the revelations of what Margo Harkin calls “a litany of abuse”, turned their backs on the Catholic Church. Without that, a referendum vote to legalise abortion would probably have been impossible.

Mary told me that, apart from the deprivation caused by famine, the shame over illegitimate births caused by a society that viewed extramarital sex as worse than murder caused many people to leave Ireland and never come back. They left abandoned homes and empty hearts, scarring the human and natural landscape.

As a mother harmed by the present day family courts, I can testify that I hear impacted children saying that they will never get into relationships or have children. The risk of State intrusion and torture is too great. If the authorities wanted population level birth control, they have certainly got it.

As with the Irish families affected by the scandal, the involvement of the present day “family courts” in children’s lives will be carried through their lives as psychological damage, and through the generations that follow them as markers in their files: “domestic abuse”, “known to social services”… Markers that will trigger predictive analytics systems to categorise them as a risk to their own children and see the following generations taken into care.

Unless we break this ghoulish cycle now.

Mafia

For most of us who have known the fear triggered by the march of dour-faced social workers into our homes, by the arrival of dreaded letters and emails, by interviews laden with unavoidable traps, any excuse to take our children, the thought of letting this state of affairs continue on is impossible to contemplate.

Anyone who has lived through that fear will recognise the very same things in “Stolen”.

Anyone who has lived through that fear will see in the faces of the nuns marching a pregnant young woman to her forced rendition to Ireland, in the ranks of unsmiling clergy, the same mafia we see today in the social workers, “guardians ad litem”, “experts” and judges who ignore our evidence, disdain our country’s laws and are deaf to the screams of our children.

They lied through their teeth then, betraying their faith, and they lie to us now, betraying their professional and ethical obligations and public trust.

It IS a mafia.

It IS criminal.

It IS a human rights tragedy.

It IS trafficking.

It caused death rates comparable to the Stalin era in Ireland, and we do not yet know what is happening now. But we will find out.

Because we don’t accept living in the era of the social Gestapo. That’s not the world we want for our children.

We WILL prove this is happening, either through the courts or an emergency inquiry, which must be conducted with the utmost rapidity, have statutory powers to seize documents and have citizen oversight.

It MUST be accompanied by an emergency package of measures to rescue children who have been wrongfully taken, reunite them with their loved ones and properly compensate families. Without quibbling or delay. We have suffered enough.

The courage of the Mother and Baby Homes victims and campaigners, their dignity and eloquenceelevate us from the wreckage wrought from our lives and lift us on the wings of truth. They restore our dignity and gives us hope and strength to fight on.

Imperative

The time to address the family court scandal is now, because the worst fates imaginable DO befall children who fall victim to these institutions which are fit only to be condemned.

There are people making a great deal of money from this hellish system, leaving families and communities bankrupt. Are the profiteers just going to take the money and run?

We need a public outcry and we need it now, before the coming elections. We must let candidates know that our votes depend on what their position is on the institutional abuse of children and families.

To the people who tell me we must moderate our language to be believed: No. We must speak the truth ever more clearly.

Would you have told the victims of the homes in Ireland that they should have couched what was happening to them in more palatable terms?

It was the tireless work of Catherine Corless, an amateur historian, documenting the deaths and burial records of hundreds of infants in Tuam that prompted an international outcry and inquiry.

A decade later, the victims are still waiting for justice.

How long will it take us if we keep our mouths shut?

Watch “Stolen” on Amazon Prime.

View the exhibition of therapeutic photography “Mary, Mary” online”