Written by Marianne Haslev Skånland, Professor Emeritus
It has been planned for several years, and has now finally been produced: a film based on a child protection case from 2011 onwards, a case in which an Indian couple’s two children were taken by the Norwegian CPS, called Barnevernet, in Stavanger. The film sounds, from the info I’ve been given and have seen, as though it’s pretty realistic.
The real case had many details and elements that have been misrepresented by Norwegian CPS and also by others. The children’s mother was scandalously treated by the child protection services, and unfortunately the children’s father eventually turned against her, unjustifiably, and almost campaigned for the CPS. This is NOT a case of a mother making up false claims or trying to make life miserable for her husband to get her way. Rather, it is a case that many people recognize: Child protection services burden the family with unreasonableness and horrors which ultimately cause the marriage to break up.
Many details about how the case ran are known and some of them are found in writing, in articles and documents. It would all of it be too much to have to write about all this (again), or to try effectively to counter all the distortions, falsehoods and misrepresentations that are resurfacing now, just as they have in the past, about the way the case evolved and the children’s development then and later. The central accusation from the CPS, the one they always make in Norwegian courts and which the Norwegian people bow to in respect, was the quack diagnosis of Sagarika: that she had a mental disorder and had also caused an ‘attachment disorder’ in the children – they ‘were not attached to their mother (in a healthy way)’. But the CPS made various other claims as well. They find it easy now to say that these allegations either did not exist or were not the reason why the children were taken. This is what the CPS usually says in child protection cases when there is criticism.
Now that the film is coming, the story is moving again, with the same false claims from the then head of the CPS in Stavanger, Gunnar Toresen, and now also from the children’s father. And these incorrect claims are allowed by Norwegian newspaper journalists to be served up unchallenged. I am adding links at the bottom of this article to a few articles which, among other things, contain significant inaccuracies. Feel free to read them, but you should not believe anything without checking it with those who know the matter and preferably Sagarika and the family in India, and especially with those who were active in obtaining and publishing correct information.
There are two people who more than anyone should have respect and admiration in this matter: they are Sagarika’s parents. They did not allow themselves to be fooled by prejudice or power, did not allow themselves to be overwhelmed or imagine all the malicious filth that was hurled at their daughter, but welcomed her with open arms when she in deep despair and after near torture in Norway succeeded in getting home, and they helped her faithfully in the years that followed. The children’s lives and development became very good from the time when she got them home. And they are definitely ‘attached to’ their mother!
I have found some of the articles and posts that some of us wrote and received at the time, and have added links to them. The most important is the case report prepared by Indian experts in 2012: “The confiscation of the Bhattacharya children by Norwegian authorities – a case study”.
Signatories to the Petition to the Indian National Human Rights Commission:
The confiscation of the Bhattacharya children by Norwegian authorities – a case study –
(12 October 2012)
Marianne Haslev Skånland:
Norwegian CPS attacks an Indian family
The Bhattacharya case in Stavanger
(January 27 – February 1, 2012)Times Now:
“NHR Connect: Cultural ignorance or arrogance?” (Part 1)
YouTube video interview with parents 8 months after children were taken
(January 2012)Modern Times Article
Deprived of the children – siblings split
(January 2012)
Forum Redd Våre Barn:
Photos of Indians in Kolkata demonstrating against the Norwegian CPS’s confiscation of those two children. Some 6,000 people took part.
(Early 2012)Athene:
Norwegian CPS still keeps the Indian children isolated from their family
(February 2012)Marianne Haslev Skånland:
Norwegian “child protection service” and the children’s uncle
(The India/Stavanger case)
(11 February 2012)Marianne Haslev Skånland:
The curious case of ‘child protection’ in Norway
(April 2012)Siv Westerberg:
Norway and Sweden – where inhuman rights prevail
(7 May 2012, 11 November 2017)Suranya Aiyar:
Understanding and Responding to Child Confiscation by Social Service Agencies
(9 May 2012, 20 September 2017)
Petition: Indians want government to guard against CPS
(October 2012)Marianne Haslev Skånland:
Good news in India for the children in the Bhattacharya case
(10 January 2013)“Finally I got justice, says mother of children in Norway”
A 10-year-old (YouTube) interview with the real mother, Sagarika Chakraborti
Note: This was an interim decision that the children were going to be with their mother Sagarika. In the later court case she got permanent custody.
(10 January 2013)
Jan Simonsen:
“Child protection case damages Norway’s reputation in the Czech Republic”
(The footnote in this article has interesting details about the Stavanger/India case.)
(November 2014)Suranya Aiyar:
Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway: Child protection in its current form has failed
(March 2023)
Trine Overå Hansen, chief editor:
Barnevernet under lupen (Barnevernet under scrutiny)
Norge IDAG, 1 March 2023
(I can’t help but notice the difference between this article and the three articles below which “contain significant inaccuracies.” I understand that this news source, Norge IDAG, has an independent Christian orientation much different than most Norwegian publications. The editor of Norge IDAG has taken an interest in getting correct information about Barnevernet and knows a lot about the subject. -CR)
Examples of recent articles which, among other things, contain significant inaccuracies:
Norwegian CP case becomes Bollywood film: – Catastrophic consequences
“Norsk barnevernssak blir Bollywood-film: – Katastrofale konsekvenser”
VG, 25 february 2023
The fatal consequences are, of course, those envisaged for Norwegian trade and commerce, seen from the point of view of people who have, like our ‘Conservative Party’, never cared about these ‘finicky concerns about unsuccessful families and their unruly children’.“Former child protection leader on Bollywood film: – This is not the story as it happened”
“Tidligere barnevernsleder om Bollywood-film: – Dette er ikke historien slik den skjedde”
Dagsavisen, 26 februar 2023
In this article, former CPS leader in Stavanger Gunnar Toresen is allowed to repeat all the false claims and add some more false ones. He says that Sagarika kidnapped the children, that there was agreement that the children could not live with their parents. And he says that he doesn’t know anything about how things have gone for the children from the time Sagarika kidnapped them. But in fact we know, and HE could get to know, but of course he does not want any info from sources who do not implicitly bow to what the CPS claims to be the truth.
If Toresen and Barnevernet do not know how the children have fared, it must be attributed to their own behavior and that of the Norwegian authorities through the case if they cannot just by a natural and friendly enquiry get those in the know to tell them the news that life together with their mother has been good for two children whom Barnevernet had been supposed to help, much better than when they were under the ‘care’ of Barnevernet.
Actually, Sagarika has been taking an active part in demonstrations against Barnevernet’s attacks on families from other nations too. Here a survey of several demonstrations in 2016, triggered by Barnevernet taking away 5 children from the (Norwegian-Romanian) family Bodnariu, and some photos from New Delhi and in Kolkata to support the Bodnarius:Sagarika Chakraborti is there with the children, you see them on several photos, e.g. on the last photo, and some of the others, (e.g. the one with the big Norwegian flag and the people with posters, Sagarika in light blue jeans and a dark blue top, the children beside her).
“Father of the family in the child welfare case that becomes a film: – I am portrayed as the villain”
“Familiefar i barnevernsaken som blir film: – Jeg blir fremstilt som skurken”
Dagsavisen, 27 februar 2023Here is Anurup Bhattacharya, who turned on his wife when she would not agree to sign a binding statement saying that she would not ever be entitled to go to court in India to get the children back or get any connection with them. He ‘dreams’ up an even newer version of the story, picturing him as the discriminated against father who has not been able to see his children for 10 years. – Several questions are then pertinent, among them why he acted as he did in 2012. Why did suddenly the Indian newspaper Hindu write that Sagarika was after all a psychiatric case and mentally handicapped? Has the father paid any child support for these 10 years, and was his brother paid as a ‘foster father’ by Stavanger Municipality or the Norwegian State for the year the children were living in his parents’ house? One of the things the court in Bengal apparently said when they awarded custody to Sagarika, was that their father’s brother, who had been appointed by Norway and by his free will was to be the children’s foster father, had failed in his duties to them.
—————————————–
My comments:
It appears that I have gone over a year without writing anything about the state of Child Welfare. I have always been interested in the welfare of children but my interest grew dramatically with a story out of Norway in 2016. After some research I became convinced that children were being stolen by the organization in Norway designated to help families. My opinion has only been solidified by story after story like the Bodnariu case in 2016. Since then the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has found the Norwegian state guilty of severe violation of human rights involving child welfare in cases that took years to be decided, and Norway has now been given status as a ‘habitual offender’ by the ECtHR.
This new movie is a great opportunity to bring the subject back to the fore. The truth is that little to no headway has been made against the sinister and embedded systems within many governments that cause stories like the one described above. Norway isn’t the only culprit. Since I’ve been watching this situation, Sweden, Great Britain, the United States and others have been guilty of similar crimes. The cases in Norway are so blatant that they are hard to ignore.
The good people in Norway continue to try to educate others about the situation so that changes can be made. They have had a difficult task because for every item published attempting to describe reality there are 20 others published that are like those mentioned at the end of Marianne’s links above along with glowing advertisements by adoption agencies.
Sadly, the great majority of these cases in Norway do not end well. After the children are taken from their parents, the Norwegian Child “Protection Services” (called the Barnevernet) does not look to worthy extended family members to take the children in for a period of time while any problems are resolved. If more than one child is taken, and it is usually the case when there is more than one child, the children are split up into different foster homes and the parents are given very little visitation, sometimes only a few hours a year. Much of the time the parents have to travel hours to see their children because they have been moved so far away.
I have experienced one of these stories firsthand. Because I had been very active protesting these crimes on social media, a Norwegian mother and a friend of hers felt comfortable contacting me about her situation. She had just left a “Mother’s Home” in Norway where mothers are “observed” to determine if they are worthy to continue caring for their child. She was staying with her friend, a highly qualified nurse, and her family, until she could decide her next move in life. I still remember the day she called me on the phone and told me that her son had been taken from his crib by Barnevernet workers.
We were in shock. Not long after that the brave young mother decided that I should document her experience in spite of possible problems it might cause. She wanted the world to know about this evil thing that had happened to her. Over the next few months I wrote posts here describing what she was going through as she shared every important event with me over the phone. The entire series of posts was eventually shared here as well. They were shared in a post entitled: A Miracle in the Norwegian CPS? Following the young mother’s struggles is something I will never forget.
How can I forget about the American mother who had her son stolen from her almost 10 years ago? The child was a little underweight but well within any healthy metric one might conjure up. He enjoyed being breastfed and was a bit slow in taking to solid food. On a day in 2013, agents from Norway’s child protection services, along with officers from the Norway police force, stormed the mother’s home and forced her, her baby’s father and her son to go to a local hospital. Shortly thereafter, the mother had her parental rights taken from her and her son was taken into custody by Norwegian officials. The parents were granted a few visitation hours a week. After a year of visitations, she was told she could no longer see him. Almost 10 years later all the mother knows is that her son’s name has been changed multiple times just in case she tried to find him. She has no idea where he is. The incredible story can be found here: “Norway Took My Child”: Child Protective Services Takes Baby from American Mom.It is still happening. Nothing has changed. In fact, some think that things are getting worse. Many are afraid to say anything. Some have taken their children and left Norway. I don’t blame them. Mothers are being watched. They are being watched by school officials, neighbors, church members, and many others. There is no question that some mothers could use a little assistance in rearing their children. There is no question that there is a very small minority of women who should not be mothers. But when children are taken from their parents for questionable and even trivial reasons, there will be a reckoning. One day, those who are guilty of such crimes will face a natural and spiritual reality. It is a reality as real as the stories I have shared here. It is the reality that those guilty of such crimes will reap what they have sown.
Chris Reimers
Posted by Chris 
Wings of the Wind 
An incomplete list of reasons given by the child protection services (CPS) of the Nordic countries for depriving children of their parents
April 3, 2024By Marianne Haslev Skånland
The list below was initiated on the 14 March 2012 and new points are added as time allows. (Click on the link after the article to see that item #75 was just added.)
The list contains arguments all of which have been used by the Nordic child protection service (CPS) and/or allied professions and people, in actual cases, such as in case reports and in court when the CPS argues for the necessity of taking children away from their parents and placing them in foster homes or institutions. They bring up the same kind of arguments to prevent foster children being allowed to return home in cases in which both parents and children say clearly that they want to be reunited. A couple of standard arguments are then added: The foster child ‘has now developed attachment to its foster parents’ (even when the child says no) and ‘the child must have routines and stability and not be moved’ (even when the CPS has moved the foster child many times).
It is serious that these types of argument are allowed in our courts and are even accepted by our judges. Most revealing of all is the fact that such arguments are suggested by the CPS at all. If there are really as many children as the CPS claims living under so seriously bad conditions that it is clearly necessary to take them out of their homes, why then are arguments like those below brought up at all, and in case after case?
And why does anybody believe that ‘child experts’ who come up with that kind of argument – even had it been only in a single case – can be trusted in their ‘diagnosing’ of other cases?
No conclusion is therefore possible other than this one: Children are being taken away from their parents and their home for no acceptable reason. Social workers and psychologists who eagerly argue in favour of depriving children of their parents, have their reasons, but they are not acceptable and are not at all in the best interest of the child.
*
(1) The father is out of work and cannot support the family.
(2) The father is ill and the mother cannot get paid work. Therefore the family is too badly off to pay for toys and for school and after-school activities for the children. [The foster home received many thousands of crowns each month for each foster child.]
(3) Clean clothes are not placed in ‘military order’ in the cupboard.
(4) The psychologist registered that the mother could not make an omelet to his satisfaction and she cuts the bread into too thick slices.
(5) The child looks eagerly at strangers around it and smiles at them. This means that it is not attached to its mother. [The mother stood talking to some people after visiting the social security office, while the baby in the pram looked eagerly at people around it.]
(6) The baby turns its face the wrong way when its father washes it. [Probably an insinuation that the child did not want to look at its father because it disliked him. In reality perhaps it didn’t want to get soap in its eyes, so what is the ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ way to avoid that?]
(7) The mother uses too much soap when cleaning. [Reported to the CPS by a ‘home helper’ who had been instructed by the CPS not to help with practical work but to ‘observe’ the family.]
(8) The father is too active, the mother is too passive. [CPS observers are frightening enough to make anybody either, out of sheer nervousness.]
(9) The father has a foot injury and cannot stand on a ladder. Therefore he is not able to clean the top of the window frames.
(10) The house does not have an indoor toilet but outdoor conveniences. [This assessment made by the CPS makes one wonder how they imagine generations of people survived in Scandinavia in previous centuries when everybody had outdoor toilets (not in the open, of course, but in a shed separate from the house and without any heating) and no CPS to ‘protect’ children against them. They were even in use in some parts of downtown Oslo 60 years ago and are still common with summer cabins and also with many winter cabins up in the mountains – can be freezing cold.]
(11) The mother has made a previous landlord angry because her cats had urinated on the floor. [This had happened several years before her daughter was born, but it was used as proof that the mother did not provide a good environment for her daughter.]
(12) The child is not interested in the ‘concept training’ in kindergarten.
(13) The mother wants to let the children’s grandmother bring them to and from physiotherapy and other medical treatment which they need, instead of taking them herself. In this the mother puts her own interests before the children’s. [The mother, who is a single provider, has started an education and goes to classes at the relevant times. The grandmother is more than willing to take the children to their treatment. The CPS works to pressure the mother into giving up her professional training – which would keep her locked in the power of the social services for financial reasons – to take the children to treatment herself and they try to forbid the grandmother to do so.]
(14) The son plays truant from school. [The mother even took unpaid leave from her work in order to walk with him to and from school. The CPS still blamed her for the boy’s not liking school.]
(15) The parents have asked the CPS for help because their child does not keep up with what he should learn in school. [Actually, many cases start by parents asking for some kind of help. They are then branded as incapable of giving care.]
(16) The mother is very small. When the daughter grows to become a teenager, the mother will not be able to tackle her.
(17) The grandmother is 54 years old. She is too old. The mother’s sister is 28. She is too young. [The boy’s mother had died and the family wanted to care for him. He was 12.]
(18) When visiting the children the grandmother wanted to embrace them. The CPS had to stop that, since it can create an unwanted attachment.
(19) When asked by the judge if she wanted to go home to her parents, the girl replied ‘yes’, but that is what all foster children want. She did not give any reason for wanting to go home. [From a court judgment. The fact that all/many want to go home is, in other words, turned into an argument for denying them the right to be reunited with their parents. The girl was 13 years old. She later said that the reason she had not replied to their ‘Why?’, was that she thought the judges were insane, since they could ask at all for a reason why she wanted to go home to her beloved parents.]
(20) Well, the girl says she wants to go home but of course she must be allowed to go on living in the foster home. [Said in court by the girl’s lawyer, who had been appointed by the authorities, completely against the girl’s own wishes, to represent the girl’s interests. Such lawyers regularly ‘represent’ the private client(s) but say what the CPS wants to hear.]
(21) The mother suffers from depression so one baby is enough for her to cope with. [The mother had twins and the CPS took one.]
(22) The mother has a bad back. She cannot take care of more than one child. [The CPS took the other child.]
(23) The mother is physically handicapped and does not have the full use of her legs. Therefore she cannot play with the children in the sand-lot or go skiing with them in winter.
(24) The mother is a person who abuses medication. [The medication was prescribed by a doctor for a purely physical illness.]
(25) The parents want to keep the child with them and do not want it to be placed in a foster home. This proves that they cannot cooperate with the CPS in the best interest of the child.
(26) The father has a negative attitude to the CPS.
(27) The parents will not let the psychologist film them at home to show them how poor their interaction with the child is. [Such filming is often called ‘Marte Meo method’. There is, however, no particular method for selecting situations to be filmed, nor for analysing what has been filmed or what is ‘wrong’. One is reminded of German Nazis, who used to film the helpless victims of their medical experiments.]
(28) The CPS offered the mother a ‘home milieu therapist’ to visit the home. The mother would not receive this helper, she said she did not understand what the therapist was supposed to do. Therefore, the CPS has not been able to uncover the degree of neglect the children are living under. [As clear a disclosure as any of the CPS’s real purpose of sending someone into the home.]
(29) The parents have complained that their son is bullied at school and that the school authorities do nothing to stop it. This points to the parents not being able to cooperate with the school.
(30) The parents have publicised their case in the media in order to get their daughter home from CPS care. This is so sensitive for the daughter that she would not be able to function in the local community outside their own house. [On the contrary: The local community was in reality solidly on the family’s side. After the girl had fled the foster home and absolutely resisted being carted back to the foster home once more, she of course functioned very well back in her parents’ home in company with her friends, at school and in the local community generally.]
(31) The daughter does not like fish-balls. This is a clear sign of incest.
(32) The child eats so fast that it must have been exposed to incest. [Reported by the personnel in a kindergarten, who are trained – like CPS workers are – in looking for ‘signs’ of abuse or neglect.]
(33) The child eats so slowly and unwillingly that it must have been the victim of incest.
(34) Alcohol is consumed in the home. [The children’s grandfather had been having a beer while he watched a football match on tv. When such a completely normal situation in very many Norwegian homes is mentioned in the CPS report, it at once insinuates that the alcohol habits in the home were beyond the acceptable.]
(35) The child is selective as regards whom she will play with in the kindergarten. She plays with little stones a lot. [Given by the kindergarten as one of the reasons for reporting the parents to the CPS. The girl was 6 years old. All her playmates had been slightly older and had left the kindergarten and gone to school. Not unnaturally, she was bored by being with only younger children. The CPS were alerted by the kindergarten about this ’cause for worry’.]
(36) The child’s linguistic development is delayed, due to insufficient stimulation from its parents. [Children vary up to several years in how their language develops. No particular stimulation is needed, however, the development up to full competence is biologically driven and takes care of itself, unless everybody in the child’s environment is a hundred per cent quiet.]
(37) The mother puts her own needs before those of her daughters. [Stated by a CPS psychologist in court to be a general characteristic of the mother’s behaviour. Asked to specify at least one instance of this, the psychologist thought for several minutes and finally said that the mother had taken a quarter of an hour out of a visitation with her daughters to go away from the daughters and smoke a cigarette outside. – The visit in fact lasted for a whole day. Both mother and daughters longed to be reunited and the girls longed for home. The mother was at one point on the edge of crying because she was not allowed to let them go home with her. She did not want the girls to see her in tears, out of fear that the CPS would, if she cried, accuse her of ‘exposing them to emotional outbursts’, which she knew from experience that the CPS would do. Going outside to smoke helped her master her emotions. She went outside also because she did not want to smoke indoors or expose her daughters to smoking. – The daughters were actually not upset to be alone for 15 minutes, since they knew their mother was just outside and they knew about not smoking indoors.]
(38) The parents have tried to make the County Governor and politicians take up their case in order to get their daughter home from foster care. They thereby prove that they are not able to give care.
(39) Take their passports away from them! [Suggested by the head of a CPS unit wanting to stop parents whom the CPS wanted to ‘investigate’, from going abroad. She evidently wanted the Norwegian police to carry out these confiscations on behalf of the Norwegian state, but still intended not only Norwegians passports to be taken but also those of foreigners in Norway holding passports issued by their countries.]
(40) The mother will not give us insight into her private life, which indicates that she has something to hide. [CPS workers are always looking for something – anything – to use against parents. If a parent is open about private matters, any problem they may have or have had sometime in their life, however normal, is sure to be used against them in the case documents and in court. If the parents choose to say ‘My purely personal affairs are nothing to do with the CPS’, that is, as in this case, also used by the CPS.]
(41) The boy’s parents fail in their care for him; they do not give him enough to eat. [The mother of one of the boy’s friends noticed that he ate a great deal of cake when he visited her son in their home, and she reported this to the CPS as a cause for worry.]
(42) The parents do not want our therapy. They say they are depressed after their child has been transferred to the care of the CPS but they refuse to receive therapy which would make them understand that they must put their own wants behind what is best for the child.
(43) You must write quite differently if we are to win through getting the child transferred to public care. [Said by an instructor to a class of general social workers whom he was teaching about child protection. They had as an exercise been asked to read through the documents in a case and write a report summarising the information as a preliminary to further case procedure. They had written a realistic report, mentioning and assessing good as well as bad in the family’s situation.]
(44) On one occasion the child found a piece of paper and started nibbling at it. The mother did not discover this. [Claimed by a social worker in her report of an inspection she made in the home. The mother objected that she had in fact discovered it and taken the paper away. Since she had no video-recording of the inspection visit, the social office would not accept her information, stating that she could not prove it.]
(45) The mother suffers from a deep ambivalence regarding entering into inter-personal relationships. [Stated by the CPS in a would-be ‘evaluation’ of her ability to ‘form a relationship’ to her child as well as to other people. The mother’s partner said that he had never noticed any such ambivalence.]
(46) Because of her good intellectual functioning and verbal skills we are of the opinion that the mother has been judged to function better than she really does.
(47) The mother wants to stay in bed in the morning. [The baby usually woke up at about 6.30 – 7 in the morning. The mother would then get up and change and breast-feed it. The baby used to go to sleep again at about 10 a.m. The mother, who by then was tired, wanted to rest while the baby slept. She was denied this by the personnel at the institution for mother-and-child, run by the CPS, where she was living.]
(48) The CPS is worried about children growing up with parents with psychiatric conditions. [The CPS makes no attempt to differentiate between conditions that do not harm the relationship parent-child and those that do. ‘Psychiatric conditions’ here includes everything from heavy psychoses to light, temporary feelings of depression or dejectedness or worry over practical problems. By some psychologists/psychiatrists about 800,000 Norwegians are estimated to be subject to such conditions.]
(49) Parents will never be able to fill the parental role if they for example tell their child coming home from school: “Tomorrow we are going to move.” [Stated by a social worker in a newspaper article arguing for the CPS as superior caretakers of children. – The CPS is actually even more abrupt than such condemned parents: They fetch children out of the classroom saying “You are being moved away from your family now.”]
(50) No, it’s you who are mad. [Said by a CPS worker to a very alarmed mother who said of her son: “Oh, but he is ill!” The boy had been taken by the CPS, and when his mother was after many months allowed to see him, he had lost almost 10 kilos. He was about 12 years old.]
(51) The boy is thirsty and drinks a lot. This is his mother’s fault. She has given him bad food-habits at home. [Said by the foster parents (of the same boy as in (50) above). The boy finally had to be taken to hospital and was at last diagnosed with diabetes. His mother was chased away from the hospital when she wanted to visit him there. The boy was even after this neglect shown by the CPS and the fosterparents not allowed to go home but was sent back to the foster home. He tried to commit suicide there by injecting himself with an overdose of insulin. When telling the foster father what he had done, the foster father was irritated and sent him to the hospital alone in a taxi.]
(52) The mother has been in CPS care herself. [One would think that the CPS, who maintain that their ‘care’ is unquestionably good and always saves children, would count it an asset that a mother had been in public care. But no, even persons who have been in their care for 10 years or more in their childhood, are regarded with suspicion when they become parents. Suddenly the CPS ‘care’ they have been given is not trusted to have benefited them after all. Any failing on their part is labelled ‘failure to give care’ and attributed to their own parents having ‘failed’ them and passed on this defect as ‘social inheritance’. The contradictory nature of CPS actions revealed by this argumentation is never admitted by the CPS, the courts or bureaucrats and politicians supporting the CPS.]
(53) When the child fell over, the mother just picked her up and put her back on her feet, without comforting her verbally. [The little girl had not cried and was not unhappy. She was just beginning to walk and often fell over without hurting herself.]
(54) The parents have a very small network. [Used in very many cases, to insinuate that neither are the parents surrounded by a lot of relatives and friends who can give help, nor are they likeable persons who give their children a good social setting.]
(55) The fact that the mother, at the age of 38, moves back to live in her widowed mother’s house, is not likely to convince us that she is able to take care of her son as a responsible adult should. [Stated in a writ to the court by the municipality which had taken her son. The municipality/CPS were confronted in court with the fact that they had in this way tried to ridicule the mother over having chosen living arrangements which are extremely common in communities all over the world. She was a single mother, and had moved from Oslo, where there was no longer any reason for her to live as far as work or the presence of friends were concerned. She had moved back to her childhood community both for sensible financial reasons and to be close to her relatives and some friends. (The presence of a network is, in other words, here not at all counted as positive, cf (54) above.) She at first lived in her mother’s house with her child, who was returned to her by the court, and was later able to build her own house in the neighbourhood.]
(56) If the boy is not kept under firm CPS authority until adult age, but is allowed to go home to his mother, he will likely develop into a dangerous criminal. [Stated in a letter written to the court by a psychologist the CPS wanted to use against the boy in court, even after they had been stopped from using that psychologist in the court case in which the boy and his mother tried to free him from the CPS. The boy had been taken from his parents when he was five, on the basis of a wrongful incest accusation. The parents had long ago been found innocent and received compensation in court. Still the boy was kept away from his family by force by the CPS, in foster home and institution life, both of which had made him desperately unhappy, for more than 10 years in all. – It is actually statistically quite on the cards that children who have been ‘treated’ by the CPS will go into crime, and the prison-like conditions under CPS is even found by many to be worse than ordinary prison. But the CPS completely fails to face the realities of cause and effect.]
(57) There is hardly anything in the way of children’s clothes and toys for the boy in the flat. [The mother’s response to this accusation in a CPS report was to laugh, open cupboards and drawers and show them that her son had plenty of toys and clothes. The next version from the CPS was then to claim that the mother was unnaturally concerned about clothing and toys.]
(58) We cannot know what kind of life the children have with their parents. [Reason given by a municipality board as justification for letting the CPS take the children from a family and refusing to let them return home, in spite of copious evidence given before the board of a very good home life. After being taken the children had guards every minute at school to stop them from escaping, and were not even allowed to close the door when they had to go to the lavatory at school. Both parents had professions at which they worked in their home, and wanted to home-school the children, but the children had had plenty of other interaction with other children in the area.]
(59) Some pairs of children’s skis were lying on the ground instead of being placed in strict order up against the wall. This shows the family to lack in order and structure. [Used as an argument in a report from a ‘home visit’ by the CPS.]
(60) The mother says no to letting her fourteen year old daughter go to a party. [Pointed out by a school psychologist in a report to the CPS, as an argument against the mother’s care. The girl wanted to go to a large rowdy do. The mother had said “No, you are not to go to that booze-up and stay out all night.” The girl then complained to the psychologist. He advised her to ask her mother again, and furnished her with arguments to use against her mother’s refusal. The answer was still no. The psychologist then wrote a report in which he claimed that this mother had difficulties establishing clear limits for the daughter.]
(61) The mother’s own parents died early. That will make it difficult for her to be a good mother herself. [An example of a typical, primitive environmental-deterministic view found among CPS social workers and their psychologists, who hold that people have no ability to manage their lives in a positive, self-reliant way.]
(62) No! Nobody is able to work their way out of their problems themselves. They just get heavier and heavier until one breaks down. [Stated by a head of the CPS in a court case against the CPS for damages caused to a mother whom the CPS had harassed with ‘investigations’ when she was in a temporarily difficult situation for which she had sought advice. – The same general view as in (61).]
(63) The mother is clumsy when using the tin-opener. [Statement by a psychologist.]
(64) The father seems stressed when the CPS workers are present. [Hardly to wonder at. The opposite would have been more abnormal, considering how the CPS proceed and the powers they have.]
(65) The mother does not stimulate the child verbally in the food-situation.
(66) A 12 year old son and his mother eat when they are hungry and not at a fixed time every day. [The CPS were not interested in the fact they had a very healthy diet.]
(67) The parents do not notice the child and the child’s needs. [Cf (68).]
(68) The parents are too concerned with the child and over-protect it. [Cf (67).]
(69) But you have siblings in the foster home, haven’t you? [Argument suggesting that the foster home was a better place than the home of the parents, because there were also other foster children in the foster home. The argument came from a member of a county committee (an administrative unit which makes first decisions in cases regarding forced removal of children from their parents or their return home). The case was one in which the parents and the daughter wanted to be reunited and the girl had fled the foster home. To the argument about ‘siblings’, the girl answered, with contempt: “There were some people living there. They are not my siblings.”]
(70) The boy shows strong reactions during the process of being returned from the foster parents to the parents. The child protection service has the theory that this is due to his having been traumatised by his mother breast-feeding him for the first two months of his life, and that he was re-traumatised at the returning process. [Argument used by the the child protection service of Haugesund as a reason why they refused to obey a judgment from the Supreme Court which decided that the boy should be returned to his family.]
(71) They have moved a lot. [This mother had moved, with her child, 3-4 times. The last time was when she moved from a flat in the basement to a flat some stories up in the same apartment building, because it was a nicer flat with more sun. – Moving is in some instances a result of poor economy and being unemployed. To consider moving negatively has long roots in Norwegian ‘culture’: a nomadic way of life is looked down on as suspicious. The worst manifestation of such views has been the persecution of the ‘Taters’ (a gipsy-type population group in Scandinavia), who have been regularly hunted down and the children abducted, sterilisation also used. The opinion of moving is standardised in the CPS idea of ‘vagabonding’ and is considered a factor in ‘care failure’. The ‘care’ of children in the CPS’s hands often leads to considerably more moves (up to 10-12), from temporary foster home to ‘permanent’ foster home and on to other foster homes and institutions, again and again, without, however, this being considered care failure carried out by the CPS. When parents move with their children, the children at least have the parents stably with them all the time. When the CPS moves them, they have nobody permanent.]
(72) There really must be something about you which we don’t know about, something which makes you a bad mother. [All previous reports and opinions in the case had shown this to be a good mother. But the CPS ‘considered’ her to be a bad one, and this was the argument they held to support their opinion. They had no other arguments.]
(73) The mother is extremely changeable in her contact with her daughter, either very intense or passive.
(74) A is a smiling baby. [From case document.] A is a silent and rigid baby. [Somewhere else in the same document.]
(75) The parents are not capable of cooperating with the school. That is care failure on the part of the parents. [Their child was especially interested in mathematics, was ahead of his class in the textbook, and wrote more advanced problems and their solutions into his workbook. His teacher did not like it, told him off, and repeatedly erased the advanced problems from his workbook. The parents objected to this and asked that some suitable guidance in mathematics to stimulate the boy’s interest be given to him, citing the law, which states that every child has a right to teaching adapted to the child’s abilities and level of knowledge and understanding. The school did not want to give the boy any such help, and instead reported the parents to the CPS, claiming that parents who demand something from the school and disagree with them, are deficient in their child care. The CPS, and the superior authority of both the CPS and the school: the municipality, agreed with the school and would not back down. The CPS, protected by the municipal authorities, initiated an investigation of the parents’ mental health. At one stage their accusation was added to: from being a charge against the parents’ attitude to the school it was strengthened by a charge (with no evidence) that the boy showed long-lasting, severely aberrant behaviour, supposedly a reflection of the parents’ enmity to society. A case exhausting to the family dragged on for several years, even though the realities of it had been described in newspapers and everybody in the community knew it.]
“(76) You are not to help the mother with anything, neither with the care of the baby nor with housework. You must only be a grandmother. [Said to a grandmother to prevent her from giving her daughter practical help. Because of illness, her daughter was in need of some assistance. (So are other mothers who have had their first baby, too, just after its birth.) The CPS wanted to prevent her from getting assistance, so that they could claim that she did not ‘cope with the role of mother’ and they could take the baby and have that accepted by the court. They themselves frequently invaded the house, but only to ‘observe’ and write down their ‘observations’, not to help in any way. They would not say what ‘just being a grandmother’ was supposed to be in the circumstances.]”
The article: https://www.mhskanland.net/page10/page122/page122.html
Here is an article that speaks to the same topic:
Should your kid be taken away if they don’t like fish-balls? Norway says so
My thoughts:
This list is absolutely incredible. Here is one example:
“(16) The mother is very small. When the daughter grows to become a teenager, the mother will not be able to tackle her.“
This is just one of the ridiculous reasons on this list. Does this Nordic country wish for mothers to be able to tackle their children? In countries where corporal punishment is outlawed, how can such insane reasons be used?
Compare #16 to #18:
“(18) When visiting the children the grandmother wanted to embrace them. The CPS had to stop that, since it can create an unwanted attachment.“
So, a mother must be able to tackle her child but a grandma can’t give her grandkids a hug.
After reading parts or all of the list above you may be wondering if things have gotten any better in Norway in 2024. According to one of my good sources in Norway:
“things in 2024 are less bad than in 2012 in the sense that the number of takings into care has gone down (because of protests and revelations and especially the judgments by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg
(see my post “Two New Convictions of Norway in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in cases concerning child protection (Barnevern) and a similar case from my own “backyard”)
but conditions are just as bad in that Barnevernet’s ideology is unchanged, they use the same reasoning and arguments as before (and the same amount of lies, force and power). In the cases for which Norway has been condemned in Strasbourg, Norway still prevents those children from being set free to go back to their parents or even to get contact with their parents which would facilitate a return. The ideology used to prevent contact and return is of course “attachment” to the foster parents or adoptive parents. Of course, in reality an adoption is NOT valid if it has been driven through by fraud, but Norwegian ideology is that adoption is irreversible.
We should also realize that although the number of children taken into care has gone down just recently, that is from an all time high that had been building until around 2010-2015. Before the great increase, the number was also far too high and the reasons given were of the same kind as on the list. The CPS takes as many children as they dare to take at any time.”
My understanding is that the CPS was terrible before the last 20 years also.
Here is an article that includes “Attachment theory and other ideas”.
Here is an article that includes a section about “Adoption”.
I would like to thank Marianne for allowing me to publish this list here. Her endless efforts to educate others about these crimes are admirable and valuable.
Imagine having your child(ren) taken for any of the reasons stated above. I haven’t had the experience so I have no idea what these parents go through. I have read about the cases though and have commented in many posts here how insane some of these CPS policies are. The crimes continue and it seems there is little correction of these horrid offenses. Here is a short video made by two of my Facebook friends just yesterday. Suranya Aiyar and Marius Reikerås have been very involved with this problem for years and they give a good assessment of how things are now.
CR
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