the door to his grandson
These two articles by Camilla Cavendish were published in the Times, the first back in December and the second a couple of months ago. They need no comment from us …
December 2007
Two MPs have put down an early day motion in the House of Commons to bring attention to what they believe is a miscarriage of justice. It notes that a man named Charles Roy Taylor has been sent to prison for 20 months for being in contact with his stepgrandson. It "wonders if this is a good use of scarce prison resources; and calls for the Secretary of State for Justice to consider whether he should be released for Christmas". Jack Straw no doubt has bigger things on his mind. And no story like this is ever as simple as it looks. But it deserves attention.
Charles Roy Taylor is a 71-year-old with a heart condition. He knew that a jail sentence was the penalty he might pay if he did not take steps to avoid his stepgrandson. But this seems desperately unfair. The teenager, whom we shall call John, has been in care since his mother died of an overdose. He has been phoning his grandparents and running away to see them for some time. In the end, social services became concerned that the grandparents were "undermining the care plan" by continuing to see John. It does not appear to be clear to the grandparents what the care plan is. But it does not seem to include them, even though they could presumably be John's first port of call when he leaves the care system at 18.
It is not the local authority's fault that this child had a difficult childhood. In taking responsibility for him, social workers were doing their best. Neither he nor his grandparents sound like the easiest people to deal with. But as in so many cases of this kind, bitterness between the family and the authorities appears to have escalated into a ludicrous situation, which simply cannot be in the best interests of the child.
After a great deal of argy-bargy that I cannot go into for legal reasons, Mr Taylor last year gave an undertaking not to communicate with John until he was 18. But asking a man not to pick up the phone to a child, not to take him in when he turns up at the front door, is a harsh demand. It is tantamount to asking him to deny that the child exists, when what that child may need most is attention.
In stalking cases, when Person A is ordered to avoid Person B, it is usually at the explicit request of Person B, who fears assault. In this case, Person B was apparently desperate to see his grandparents. He seems to see them as his best hope. So in whose interests was such an order? If he has broken his undertaking, Mr Taylor has surely been responding as humanely as most of us would. A jail sentence seems wholly disproportionate.
When I first learnt of this case I felt that there must be more to it. That perhaps the grandparents were suspected of abuse. I can find no evidence of any such allegation. Indeed, the authorities initially seemed happy to leave them in contact with John. What appears to have happened is that the exchanges between the family and social workers became increasingly bitter, all of whom no doubt believed themselves to be in the right.
The council cannot comment on individual cases. It will say only that "Mr Taylor was sentenced by the High Court after he breached a court order". It cannot comment on John's treatment in care. John seems unhappy. He has apparently asked to be discharged. But his voice can only be heard within the system, a system he seems determined to rebel against.
There is a growing campaign on the internet to release Mr Taylor. This has two parts. The first is that a 20-month jail sentence is preposterous when the prisons are so overcrowded that dangerous criminals are being released early. The second is that Mr Taylor was allegedly committed to jail in a "secret court". This seems unlikely. But it is an allegation that is made frequently. Legally, you cannot send someone to jail in a secret court. In practice, it is questionable whether a judge sitting in a family court from which press and public are excluded, who declares the court open for a few minutes to pronounce sentence, is really "open".
This matters, because the view of the legal profession increasingly seems to be that the less we know the better. The justification for keeping family courts closed, despite the recommendations of the Commons Constitutional Affairs Select Committee, is to protect children's privacy. Yet this argument is no longer confined to the family courts. It is increasingly being trotted out in criminal cases too.
In the past month, one court has ruled that the defendants in a witchcraft trial, who were alleged to have done unspeakable things to children, could not be named in case this led to the identification of their victims. Another court banned publication of anything about a mother accused of poisoning her child with salt, in case the information affected her surviving child. The Times has recently succeeded in overturning yet another ruling, that a man who pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children could not be named in case his relatives might suffer. The Court of Appeal found that the man should be named, and that the attempts to restrict the proceedings were invalid.
The law must not become a secret process. Some lawyers seem convinced that the media want to identify vulnerable children, but it is always possible to write these stories without doing so. Seeing that justice is done is a fundamental part of law.
What is sad is that our elaborate system of child protection, which is designed to put children first, has sometimes become a way of avoiding accountability. The two MPs are right to ask whose interests Mr Taylor's jailing serves. Presumably, the last thing John wants is for his grandfather to be in jail. They are both victims of a system that asks us to take on trust that it knows best. But prison is surely the wrong place for Charles Roy Taylor.
March 2008
If you look up Hansard, the parliamentary record, you can read the name of a man I wrote about three weeks ago. Prisoner X, whom I called Hugh, was jailed for helping his pregnant wife and her son to flee the country to escape from social workers. An MP has named him in the House of Commons, to express concern at his treatment. But The Times still cannot print his name.
It is a longstanding convention of British law that individuals who are incarcerated should be identified, and the charges against them made known. That is an age-old protection against tyranny. But today the "privacy of the child" trumps every other principle, whether or not the child in question wants his or her privacy protected. In this case it seems very unlikely indeed that the gag on everyone involved serves the interests of anyone except the authorities who put it there.
Prisoner X's mistake, in brief, was to fall in love with a woman who had been unfortunate enough to suffer a violent and volatile first marriage. As a result of the breakdown of that marriage, her young son had been taken into temporary foster care. A court stipulated that the boy should be returned to his mother once she had "sorted her life out" and found them a new home.
But even as she cleared every hurdle, social workers dreamt up new ones. The offers of her own mother and sister, both professionals with good incomes, to foster the boy, were apparently ignored. A psychologist cautioned that the boy was suffering dreadfully in care. One night in September, the boy let himself out of his foster home and ran back to his mother. Prisoner X, now her husband, drove them to Dover and on to Paris.
Many people would call this an act of love, a mercy mission. But this man is now serving 16 months in jail. Child abduction is undoubtedly a serious crime. But this was a strange kind of abduction. At the hearing it was made clear that the boy had packed his own suitcase, set his alarm clock for 4am and run away of his own accord to be reunited with his mother.
Nevertheless, Prisoner X is classified as a violent criminal. He is apparently unlikely to get early release, unlike the 1,730 robbers and 3,484 people convicted of violence against the person, who have been let out since June. Nor can he be put on a tag, because his classification is deemed to make him a risk to the public. But what risk? Surely not that posed by Joseph Booth, the convicted teenage mugger who, it was revealed yesterday, ripped off his electronic tag before murdering an innocent student. The attack was so savage that the victim's family could not recognise his body. Booth had previous convictions for threatening behaviour, assault, battery and robbery.
Prisoner X has never harmed anyone. He is 56 years old and has high blood pressure. Every day that goes by, he risks losing his business and letting down those he employs. Every day that goes by, his health is deteriorating. A friend says that he has aged ten years and gone grey with the worry.
The system is merciless to people who question the system. Charles Roy Taylor, whom I wrote about at Christmas, is in a similar situation. Mr Taylor is a 71-year-old with a heart condition. He was sent to prison for 20 months for being in contact with his stepgrandson, who has been in care since his mother died and who has repeatedly run away to see his grandparents. By breaching an agreement not to answer the door to him, Mr Taylor stands accused of "undermining the care plan". But he and the boy's grandmother are the teenager's only living relatives. They will presumably be his first port of call when he comes of age and is thrown out of the care system. Mr Taylor may not survive that long: last week he suffered an angina attack that put him in hospital for four days. Is that in the interests of the boy?
Both of these men are under court orders not to talk about their cases. It is likely that these gagging orders will continue after they leave prison, even though they will have "done their time". Yet they, at least, have had some control over their fates. They must have had some inkling of what they might be letting themselves in for. The boys they were trying to help have never asked to be let in for anything, except it seems for contact with their families.
Both these boys are gagged by the State. We are not entitled to know what they think, nor whether the boy who is now abroad with his mother is happy. We cannot hear from them why each wanted so badly to escape from care. Only social workers may translate their words and determine where their "interests" lie. Yet the two men who are now in jail did not risk going there for nothing. Each seems to have believed that they were saving a boy from something unpleasant. Why? Who are the real victims of this system of "child protection"? It is hard to see what the children gain from the incarceration of men who could be providing stability in their lives.
There are many good reasons why the law seeks to protect the identity of children. The problem comes when the rules are used to protect the identity of the professionals too. This prevents proper scrutiny of cases whose very complexity makes it almost inevitable that some will go wrong. The effect is to place social workers above the law, and innocent people under its thumb.
It is in no one's interests, least of all the children involved, to keep these two men behind bars. If only they could be released, if the system could show some mercy, perhaps we might be able to begin the long process of dismantling the bars that imprison the children too. Behind silence lurks injustice.
One of the articles drew this response from a Times reader …
This year two of my friends, as close a couple as I know, sought professional help for the troubled behaviour of their daughter, and the reaction of Social Services has been to take both their children into care, extensively investigate my friends but not any other possible cause to their child's problems, and now they are living apart as the only way that at least one of them will regain care of their children.
I don't know what evidence there is against them - its seems that to call it 'circumstantial' would be generous to the Social Services - but given the secrecy of the family courts I'm not legally allowed to know more. And all this time the children have been given NO specialist support, giving lie to the idea that the system is set up to put their interests first.
… and another …
Both my son and I are disabled. My son, the most beautiful little boy in the whole world, has Downs Syndrome and is 14 years old. I am a wheel-chair user with arthritis.
Over 2 years ago he was taken into foster care for 2 weeks while I had to go into hospital. He is still there. I see him once a month and was told he would never come home.
The GOS says: … like I said, no comment. None needed.
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