Wings of the Wind

By Marianne Haslev Skånland
 
I have read Mia Kristensen’s account of the experiences of a family deprived of their children by Scandinavian ‘child protection services’ (CPS), in Norway called Barnevernet. I have for over 30 years now been engaged in trying to assist in some of the work for families hit in this way and I know that what Mia writes is true for so very many, and is the result of a country’s very dysfunctional ‘child protection’.

The stories are most often told by parents or grandparents. The children who are in the hands of the child protection system are usually prevented from writing or saying openly anything that goes against the official version of the story, or they are afraid to speak because if they do, they know they will be isolated even more radically or their parents will be sanctioned against. For example, the rare, allowed meetings children-parents will be cut down on or taken away altogether.

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But in some cases we hear more about the children’s perspective. Here are two stories. I know them to be true.

The first is about a day of celebration which is something like Christmas for Norwegian children: The two children of a family were taken into foster care. In spring came the ‘seventeenth of May’. It is Norwegian Constitution Day and is often called ‘children’s day’, the celebration being concentrated around happy events for children.
   The CPS have a principle of preventing reunions on occasions which can make children feel emotional about their family. However, in this case the 9-year-old girl was allowed by the CPS to visit her parents. Her younger brother was not. So the day was a misery for the girl. She did not want to take part in any happy celebration or watch parades, did not want to eat anything (children’s favourite food and ice creams are usually high points for them on ‘syttende mai’). She cried helplessly all day because her brother was not allowed to be with them and because they were not allowed to show that they loved their parents.

The other case has been taken up by Wings before:
Landmark Report Exposes the Realities of Norwegian Child Protection. It concerns the municipality of Samnanger in Norway, which had got a new mayor and a head administrator and several politicians who wanted radical change, standing up against what the CPS had been doing. There was quite a fight in the community, but they managed to commission a realistic and revealing report of three local CPS cases. The report and some newspaper articles let the children have a voice too. One of the cases concerned a family of father and four children, now of age.

One of the boys said: “I didn’t have so many friends at school. Then the CPS also took my family from me.”

The oldest was a girl who had been 17 at the time and had not been taken. But although she had been allowed to remain with her father, she too was hit hard by the destruction of their family life: The CPS took everything I had – and smashed it.

The youngest, a girl, had been only 7 years old when she was separated from her father and all her siblings. Her reaction had been to be desperately frightened, unhappy and upset. The diagnosis of the CPS was, as expected, not to face the fact that this was the result of their actions, but to put her into institutional care and through her childhood and youth have her treated with various drugs, supposedly to calm her down and lessen her ‘abnormality’.
   The two lawyers making the report found her, on the contrary, to be normal and to communicate very realistically about the CPS ‘care’. She told them that she had been very afraid all the years in foster home and institutions. – It should take no great imagination on our part to see that she had experienced simply a variant of what prisoners from concentration camps and other places of torture tell us.

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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has found the Norwegian state guilty of over 30 violations in 24 CPS cases concentrated around Article 8: the right to private and family life. But the Norwegian authorities have not been willing to return the children even in these cases.
   There seem to be fewer takings into care now in 2025 than earlier, but the way the CPS practice ‘protecting’ children is of the same kind as before. Mia Kristensen’s story could be from Norway any time between 1950 (or before that) and today.

One item of ideology is to my mind a dominant factor explaining official intransigence: It is widely believed in our society – and the teaching of this in the education of social workers has not changed – that biological family is of no particular importance to children, that siblings are just playmates for the time being, and parents simply replaceable ‘caregivers’ doing a job of providing a stimulating environment for children who are with them nearly accidentally. Therefore, families who desperately want their children returned home are simply seen as self-serving and vain.
How Norwegian experts came to reject biological kinship as relevant in child welfare policy
   There is no understanding in the social work of many Western countries, certainly not in northern Europe, of how deep the natural bonds of love are which bind close relatives together. Or, in a variant formulation: Love is taken to be only a product of success. Only perfect parents and children, who are also completely satisfied with each other and whose lives develop in every way splendidly, are thought to experience mutual love and solidarity, as satisfaction. Hence, such imperfections as poverty and illness are suspect in the eyes of these ‘experts’, cf for instance  A Christmas Wish,
and examples e – h here:
The Child Protection Service (CPS) – unfortunately the cause of grievous harm
Part 2: Content, dimensions, causes and mechanisms of CPS activities

This belief in the cause of a feeling of belonging and trust is age-old and is found in many societies. In the USA there was a wave of this ideology about 25 years ago:
Hillary and Bill Clinton – zealous promoters of forced adoptions in the USA
(Section 3 of the article traces it, in a very short sketch, back more than 2000 years.)

I know there have been cases where U.S. authorities have separated children from parents when arresting them as unwanted immigrants. But there have also been loud protests against it.
    I recently came across three videos in connection with disregard of children’s needs of their family and of the home or country they feel is their own. The videos stem from a Senate Hearing in Washington DC on 3 December of this year. The hearing concerns proposed legislation about one particular tragic action of Russia in the present war: abduction and down-right enslaving of Ukrainian children. The Hearing was bipartisan and with representatives of the House invited as well:
–Breaking news: Senate holds critical hearing on Russia war crimes against Ukrainian children | AC14
–U.S. SENATE HEARING: Ukrainian Ambassador Exposes Russia’s Child Abductions | DRM News | AC1F
–Lindsey Graham Asks Ukraine Ambassador If Russia Has Admitted To Abducting Children In Occupied Land
What is shown in the videos is glass clear and I very much hope that this initiative in the U.S. Senate will carry over to a clearer understanding that not everything we do to the children of our own societies is in ‘the best interest of the child’ either.
   In Europe too the emphasis has become very clear that the return of Ukrainian children to their own country, and to their own families if they are alive, is the top priority in a peace settlement, and that the abduction of them is a very serious war crime.
   Norwegian society is generally more placidly subservient and admiring of our own authorities than I think Americans are, so ideology without a solid, factual basis is even more difficult to see through in Norway. I do not see what we can do but continue to try and find out about it and document it as well as we can, and continue to spread information about it – in the true best interest of the child.

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Marianne Haslev Skånland has worked as a professor of linguistics at the University of Bergen, and is now retired. She has worked on analysis and criticism of science, both generally and in areas of linguistics, psychology and child protection, and was a member of the scientific advisory board of Stiftelsen för rättspsykologi (The Foundation for Forensic Psychology) in Stockholm. She has functioned as an expert witness in child protection cases before a District Court, an Appeal Court and a County Committee, altogether five times in Norway, and once before Länsrätten in Sweden. 
She is engaged in social questions concerning human rights and health, and specially interested in the question of the scientific basis of the views of social services and the justice system concerning psychology and social life. She has lectured for many years on the position and influence of behaviorism and other schools of thought in linguistics and anthropology.