Your Voice Election 2017 – Karl Pearce’s experience of CYFs: The Horrors, The Losses and The Wins

As part of our election coverage of shaming the neoliberal welfare state who treat the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us with contempt, here is Ann Johns* experience of how CYFs killed her son

Journeys through CYFs: The Horrors, The Losses and The Wins.

There are a lot of assumptions made when talking about Family Court and Child Youth and Families (CYFs). That Mothers will always automatically get the children, hence fathers are assumed to be second rate, that Family Court and CYFs primary care is to keep families together if at all possible, and certainly if a Child is taken off a family and worse still the mother, then they must be a bad mother or family and don’t deserve to have the child in their care.

Unsurprising that as a Massey University trained BSW with Honours I too made the same assumptions. To be fair mine were taught, but for the rest of us these assumptions are propagated by the departments themselves and the media, well at least until recently when people started to stand up and tell their stories.

A friend of mine had her children taken from her, it seemed to me with some reason however not enough to take one child off her and give her to the father and certainly not the other taken days after birth, and how the ‘uplift’ was enacted was malicious and cruel, to the point where one was left questioning if that is actually how the uplift occurred and if my friend was telling the truth. I was to realise later that she was telling the truth and it didn’t only happen to her but it has happened to many mothers and parents.

I got involved when I was asked to support her during an Family Group Conference (FGC) and I was shocked at the farce and personal onslaught I witnessed. First it was a CYFs run FGC so it wasn’t independent. These reports for this meeting were provided to the mother’s lawyer and lawyer for child the afternoon before the meeting. The mother was not allowed a copy, yet was allowed to read through the document just hours beforehand and take photos if she had a smartphone or camera handy. The reports used were CYFs reports, with CYFs recommendations and used old information, in some cases years old, were full of hearsay and thanks to lazy CYFs workers (I don’t call them Social Workers) full of inconsistencies. When I questioned these they stopped the meetings and I was labelled a disturber of the proceedings (little did they know who I was). Moreover, when I asked why the recommendations don’t match up with the rest of the report I was told that the full report had not been provided and what we saw was the “nice version” of a much larger report. I’m sorry but WHAT? Isn’t the idea of an FGC is to provide the information required so the family unit be supported and maintained? Needless to say after this farce the mother and her lawyer decided to take her case to court.

An ‘independent’ report was commissioned by CYFs and produced by ACCROSS Social Services who, not so incidentally, was the local social provider for CYFs parenting contact time. In other places this happens to be Barnardos. This report was hastily written as CYFs had not informed ACROSS that one needed to be done until the last minute and as a result an FGC had to be cancelled. As my friend was now staying at my house I was interviewed to see how “safe” my friends new situation was, albeit very short term, for the safety of children. Again the report was released to lawyer for mother and child the day before the FGC and contained not only inconsistencies but contained false allegations aimed at myself, presumably received from a Salvation Army Social Worker which was pure hearsay. When I asked where these allegations came from I was told that they were on CYFs files. So I applied for a POI* (Privacy Act Information Request) and as it happens they have no information on their system about me, so once again a report with lies in it. However this was not to be the last time an ACCROSS report would contain hearsay and lies, Indeed, during the court process CYFs were willing to provide to court ACCROSS documents and their own CYFs ‘psych reports’ that were fraudulent. These I will go more indepth with later blogs.

After what I witnessed first hand what my friend and her children had gone through I thought there must be more people who have experienced the same, and I put word out for their stories. The response was overwhelming and there are large communities of people out there with horror stories dealing with lazy and bad CYFs workers. After meeting with many of them, those who had children uplifted based on lies and hearsay, women who have been placed in ‘homes for mothers’ and or sterilized with the promise of receiving their children back, which had not happened. Adult survivors of CYFs and Grandparents of children in CYFs “care”, mothers who have had their children die in CYFs care and nothing in the media and families of these children treated with contempt. There are similarities through all their stories which point to a larger harmful abnormal culture within CYFs, that is not only normalised but seems to be fostered in some cases. Finally we are told that there is less than a handful of adoptions performed by CYFs yearly. But with the “Home for Life” option that CYFs workers have, CYFs can provide children that are taken to potential adoptive parents, and as Home for Life children have very little if no contact with their birth families it allows for what is essentially closed adoptions which is now legally difficult under the current adoption laws.

I will be sharing stories over the coming months of people’s “Journeys through CYFs: The Horrors, The Losses, The Wins” because some have won through the system and how they beat the system. I will also be talking about what I have witnessed with Family Court and some recommendations myself and fellow activists think will help those who the system is supposed to help.

*POI is the CYFs internal Official Information Act and Privacy Act request process with a POI office operating

Karl Pearce BSW (Hons.). has been a political commentator and activist in and around Papaioea Palmerston North, New Zealand, for 15 years with the last 8 in both student and community radio. Karl currently produces and hosts his show ‘On Point w/ Karl Pearce’ on Access Manawatu and is a regular political guest commentator on other radio shows around New Zealand. Karl is academically published and intermittently blogs. His radio show can be found here. 

Have you been treated poorly by our neoliberal welfare state and wish to bring attention to your experience anonymously so that they can’t punish you? Check out our 2017 election campaign to do just that.