Why the Harehills riot sparked by the violent removal of three children from their home matters to us all

On the evening of 18 July 2024, a riot broke out in the Harehills area of Leeds, UK. Media reported that the cause was the violent removal of three children from their home by police and social services.

I used to live a 10-minute drive away in Hyde Park, so this felt close to home for me.

I used to be part of a group that ran schools workshops on tolerance throughout Leeds, including Harehills. I saw not only the deprivation impacting these communities but the heart and dedication of many people who live and work there.

I am also a mother who has lived through scenes like those that were shared over social media depicting the violent removal of children from their homes. I am writing this, because people have difficulty believing that the family could be innocent and the authorities in the wrong.

As a result of blatant corruption in the Croatian courts, which I stood up to, I also had police and social services at my door in Croatia, threatening to drag my children away. One of my sons was screaming to be left alone to live with his mum and grandparents.

Under this photo is a link to the video on X. Warning: people have told me that my son’s screams stayed with them for a very long time.

In response, his father obtained a court order authorising the police to take the children by force. To avoid that, we fled to Switzerland to seek asylum. However, the utterly corrupt and abusive judges apparently don’t understand what asylum means. So my children were extradited, again using force.

Here is video footage of that happening. Again: content warning.

And here is a photo of the police officer overseeing that operation, Stefan Walser of Zurich Canton, smirking all over his face. He knew it was unlawful. Just another police officer getting off on exerting control over women and children.

In previous posts on this Substack I have documented and evidenced the judicial kidnap and false imprisonment of my children. What happened to my children involved criminal acts on the part of their father and public officials.

This happens routinely, both in child custody and abduction cases, and in “public law” cases which relate to child protection and care proceedings (putting children into homes, or into foster care or adoption). Over the years, I have probably been in touch with hundreds of families this has happened to.

Their stories are horrifying.

In a roundtable hosted by Tortoise media, Pia Sarma, Editorial Legal Director of Times Newspapers called the “family courts” a matter of immense public interest. Invasion of our families by the State strikes at the very core of our humanity and private lives.

Taking children from their mothers without good reason, especially when this reults in them being put into situations where they will be abused, is a form of child abuse by the State.

State-sanctioned child abuse

This blog post by an adult campaigner for adoptee rights, one of many who suffered sexual abuse inside adoption, is about a conference about the “family courts” held on 11 June 2024 by the Shera Research Group, based at the School of Public Health at the University of Manchester.

The conference featured a presentation by Tracey Norton, a campaigner for the rights of disabled mothers at WinVisible and Support Not Separation. The transcript is provided in Adoptee Watch’s blog post. You can also see most of the Conference presentations here.

Tracey raises the problem of discrimination against families with disabilities in family law and social services. This was also the topic of discussion at a conference titled Systems Generated Trauma at the University of Leeds on 9 July 2024.

What is driving the heavy-handed, often abusive treatment of children and families by the State?

One reason is an over-zealous response to tragedies like the case of Baby P, compounded by young and inexperienced social workers over-reacting to benign family situations.

Unfortunately, it’s not the case that investigating families and taking children “just in case” helps children like Baby P. Research cited at the Systems Generated Trauma indicates that despite a dramatic rise in the number of families investigated in recent years, the number of child homicides has not fallen. University of Leeds researchers believe that this is because social workers have become overwhelmed with cases, leading the serious child protection matters to slip under the radar.

There is also the very real issue of how profit has incentivised children being taken into care and put up for adoption. Central Government provides local authorities with adoption targets, and gives cash bonuses to local authorities to meet them.

While this may have originally had a benign intent, to stop children languishing in care homes, the consequence has been that the State has turned into the facilitator of a trade in children.

Campaigners are also unearthing conflicts of interest. Inevitably, where profit incentives are driving children’s social care, decisions will be made that do not benefit the children.

In Wales, two local authorities have already realised this is unsustainable. The Welsh Government has committed to ending the role of the private sector in children’s social care.

Targeting Roma families

In the Harehills case, the family concerned is both of Roma heritage, and from Romania.

I became aware of the vulnerability of Roma families to having their children taken when I was campaigning with other parents in Croatia about the unlawful treatment of children by social services.

Outside Zagreb Municipal Court, a Roma family approached us. They explained that nine of their children had been taken by social services. The father said that he had got out of prison and his children were taken.

It is true that Roma communities in Eastern Europe have a high rate of involvement with the criminal justice system, often live in conditions of deprivation and suffer heavy discrimination. But being in prison does not ordinarily mean that when you get out, your children are taken from your family.

Being poor does not mean you should have your children taken. Many children grow up in conditions of poverty. My mother did. She was born in Bosnia, one of six daughters in a family living in a tiny cottage made up of two rooms. But she was loved, and she and all of her sisters grew up to be wise and gentle.

Many of us grow up in circumstances that are less than ideal. Financial indicators are indeed predictors of life outcomes. But they are not the only ones. What happens to you if you grow up in a home practically devoid of affection, and are sent to boarding school where you are abused? Ask people like Earl Charles Spencer.

If you are poor, and the State wants to help to improve outcomes across society, the best way it can do that is to provide direct support to you.

At the moment the children’s social care sector is giving the money to intermediaries such as foster care and adoption agencies, and children’s homes. A foster family receives a minimum of £165 per week to care for a child. A placement of a single child in care can cost local authorities up to £281,000 per year.

Most families would give anything for a fraction of that kind of support.

Some care home companies are establishing real estate holding companies that are inflating the price of the buildings they, ripping off local authorities and sending the money abroad, tax-free, through offshore companies. This asset-stripping mechanism is described by Yannis Varoufakis in his book Technofeudalism.

That’s why if we want to accuse anyone of causing the impoverishment of the British public, we should be looking at private equity firms that own care homes and many other public services. Not poor immigrant families living in deprived areas.

Back to our Roma families. Campaigners in Croatia share suspicions with the Roma community that there is another reason why these children are taken.

The family in front of the Zagreb court did not know where their children were or if they were alive or dead.

(I know British families in this position. By law, even following adoption, parents have the right to information about the welfare and whereabouts of their children. Unfortunately, that right is often not upheld.)

Roma families grieving the deaths of two toddlers in Zagreb in the last few years, Šeherzada Bajrić and Nikoll Dedić, suspect that the little girls were victims of organ harvesting.

The refusal of the Croatian Government to reveal information on the whereabouts of more than 120 individuals, some of whom were found by journalists to be unlawfully trafficked into Croatia from DR Congo, does not help quell suspicions that some may no longer be alive.

Organ harvesting is a topic few people have the courage to broach but it is a known phenomenon.

Croatia is a global leader of organ transplantation. This does not sit comfortably alongside Croatia’s persistent position as the most corrupt country in the EU or its reputation for abuse of power in family law cases. There have been cases in Zagreb hospitals where vulnerable adults were found to have been trafficked for their organs.

At a recent conference, I met a group of Congolese women. I spoke with one about the illegal adoption of children, and she knew immediately what I meant. She had seen the same footage that I had of children being found packaged in bags. She told me spontaneously that the Congolese suspect these children are being used for organ harvesting.

Children unlawfully taken into care in past decades have been subjected to medical experimentation. A recent, documented case is that of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes scandal, neither GSK nor the Irish Government are prepared to provide information or compensation to adult victims.

It would be naïve to think that this does not happen today, when parents like me have ample evidence of the flagrant disdain for evidence and the law in “family courts” and children’s services.

Corruption in healthcare is also not uncommon, as documented by Transparency International and other bodies. Medical kidnapping is another issue that impacts children. In the UK and EU creeping privatisation of healthcare will not help matters.

Roma families are typically vulnerable. Due to compound factors of marginalisation they may struggle to advocate for themselves in an environment that parents with Masters degrees and who work as lawyers, doctors and judges cannot navigate.

In the United Kingdom, Roma children are disproportionately taken into care. The table below shows the number of looked-after children by race in England in 2022:

A representation analysis shows that in 2022:

1. White total:
   • Representing 73% of looked-after children, the White ethnic group made up 82 % of the population of the UK, meaning this group was slightly under-represented.

2. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller:
   • Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children made up 0.8% of the population of looked-after children. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ethnic groups comprised 0.3% of the population in the UK, indicating more than double the representation compared to the overall population size.

3. Mixed or Multiple Ethnic Groups:
   • Children from Mixed or Multiple ethnic groups accounted for 10% of the looked-after children, while they made up 3% of the overall population. This suggests that children of mixed heritage were also disproportionately represented in the care system.

4. Black, African, Caribbean or Black British:
   • Combined, these groups represented 7% of the looked-after children. They comprised 4% of the population of the UK, showing this group was over-represented in the care system.

5. Asian:
   • Combined, Asian groups represented 5% of the population of looked-after children, while in 2022 they comprised 9% of the population of the UK. This was a significant under-representation compared to other groups.

Source https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/national-and-regional-populations/population-of-england-and-wales/latest/#by-ethnicity-19-groups

Romania’s adoption tragedy

The Harehills family at the heart of the unrest, as a family of Romanian origin, is probably aware of a national tragedy that unfolded following the fall of the Ceaucescu regime in 1989.

Images of neglected young children in children’s homes in Romania flooded the TV screens of the western world after the collapse of communism.

These scenes were exploited by foreign adoption agencies and lobbyists who swooped in claiming that the only solution to this crisis was to have the children adopted abroad.

Many of these children were not orphans. Some of them were brought to children’s homes during the winter because their mothers were too poor to heat their homes and feed them in the winter.

Laws were changed so that if a child was not visited by his or her parents in 6 months they must be put up for adoption.

This was manipulated by staff. Parents, who often lived a long way away and didn’t have money to travel, found themselves tricked out of their children.

I met a former European Commission official, Roelie Post, who had been responsible for the child protection portfolio mainly dealing with Romania. She had met mothers whose lives were devastated by the loss of their children.

According to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty:

“Some 30,000 children from Romania were adopted between 1990 and 2004, according to data from ANPDCA, which acknowledges lacking any such information from before 1994, when Romania didn’t systematically track court-approved adoptions.”

Romanian couples found they couldn’t adopt children.

Why?

Because they fetched a higher price abroad.

This meets the definition of trading in human beings.

Through Roelie, I met Marion le Roy Dagen. She was taken from Romania and adopted in France.

Radio Free Europe (ibid.) reports:

“Until the age of 20, she [Marion] believed that her biological parents had died long ago, because that’s what she had been told. After the fall of communism, Dagen increasingly questioned her identity and eventually returned to Romania, where she discovered that her mother was not only alive but had been convinced that her daughter had died shortly after birth.”

Marion is a member of the group Racines et Dignite (Roots and Dignity) concerned with adoptions that took place in Romania from the 1970s to 2005, to

• Denounce the child trafficking of which they are victims
• Collect the words and testimonies of as many victims as possible
• To have the moral damage they have suffered recognized
• To have their birthright, which was taken away from them by full adoption, recognized
• Re-establish links between the birth families and the adoptees who wish to do so
• Allowing Romanian families to regain their dignity and helping them understand the facts

Marion and her mother, Ana, are now fighting for legal redress and compensation.

Please contribute to their crowdfunder here.

Today, having learned from this experience, Romania is quite sensitised to the danger of trafficking through the child protection system. However, the country is always under political pressure from other States to adopt the commoditised model of “child protection”.

What a pity that this family had to fall victim to it in the UK.

Aftermath

On the evening of 23 July Leeds the BBC reported that a “family court” had ordered that the distressed children should be placed for the time being with extended family members, and that the family was overjoyed at this stepping stone to being reunited.

(I use inverted commas for the name “family court” because, since these bodies have no respect for evidence or the law they do not meet the criteria for being courts of law.)

A Cafcass officer opposed the placement with family. This will not surprise families who have had dealings with this atrocious body. It cannot be shut down quickly enough.

Thankfully, the judge made a ruling in opposition to the Cafcass officer. This does not happen very often.

Hopefully the family will slowly be able to piece back together their lives and be reunited.

I am certain that the Harehills community will repair the damage. I am proud of my fellow Green Party member Councillor Mothin Ali, who braved the flames to protect local homes and worked tirelessly to keep the community united. With a sense of humour.

I am grateful to our Green member of the House of Lords, Natalie Bennet, who travelled to Leeds this evening to take part in a community meeting in Harehills.

The family courts, the privatisation of children’s social care and their impact on families was one of my key reasons for standing as a Green Party candidate in the 2024 General Election. The Green Party is the only party that is committed to ending the privatisation of critical public services.

My campaign to stop the abuse of families and bring our children home does not end there.

I am writing this to help provide context around what happened, as it is difficult for people who have not experienced how the “family courts” and children’s services work to understand how truly awful they are.

Unfortunately, the Harehills community was subjected to racist attacks and the parents were publicly villified.

I see a community that has suffered deprivation for years but had the heart to rally around a distraught family and protect children.

Is this what it will take to stop the traumatisation of families in Britain?

Let’s hope it will.

Enough is enough.