I've fled the country to stop social workers taking my baby
By ELIZABETH SANDERSON - More by this author >>
Last updated at 07:53am on 26th November 2007
Comments (41)
She is, on first impressions, just like any other first-time mother.
The cot and the pram are on order, she has bought more cuddly toys
than she will ever need and she has even given her little girl a name
- Molly.
With less than six weeks to go before the birth, the baby is kicking
and it brings Fran Lyon an undeniable thrill of pleasure. At least, it
does now she finally feels safe to enjoy it.
For all the innocent joys of impending motherhood have been denied
Fran since social workers warned her four months ago that Molly would
be taken away ten minutes after birth and placed with foster parents.
Fran, a third-year student doing a neuro-science degree at Edinburgh
University, is, to everyone who knows her, a sociable, kind and
intelligent woman. But to her local authority she is a danger to
herself and her baby.
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Pregnant Fran Lyon has run away to Europe to stop social workers
taking her baby away from her
Seven years ago Fran had an eating and selfharming disorder and spent
13 months in a psychiatric hospital followed by nine successful months
of counselling.
Now 22, and with her emotional troubles behind her, Fran is outraged
that she should be judged a risk to herself and her child despite a
fistful of medical re****ts that dispute this.
Last week, fearing the worst, Fran moved from her home in Hexham in
Northumberland to Birmingham, where she hoped a different authority
would treat her more sympathetically.
But with the birth so close, she felt she couldn't take any risks with
bureaucracy and on Wednesday, Fran took an even more drastic step. She
got on a flight bound for Europe - and went into hiding. Wary of
revealing her whereabouts, Fran agreed to talk about her nightmare in
a lengthy telephone call to The Mail on Sunday.
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Practical Fran has already had an appointment with a midwife, booked a
place at the local hospital and made contact with English-speaking
mother-and-baby groups
She will also be seen in an exclusive re****t tomorrow evening on
Tonight With Trevor McDonald. She said: "I wouldn't have done it
unless I absolutely had to. Every time there was a twinge, I was
absolutely petrified. I just kept thinking, 'Please don't go into
labour, please, not yet.' It was terrifying.
"It's a lot better now that I'm away. Lots of people suggested I
should leave but I always thought it was too extreme. Then when I went
to Birmingham things weren't going to happen quicklyenough.
Northumberland's plan stood until Birmingham made their own and I
didn't have vast amounts of time.
Now it's such a relief not to be constantly looking over my shoulder.
It has been so fraught with other people's interventions. For the
first time this will be just us: me and Molly. I just want to enjoy
it. I could never do that before.
"For months I've been reading a book called Molly The Hungry
Caterpillar and feeling her kicking about. It's lovely, but all the
time the fear has been in the back of my mind that these might be the
closest moments I will ever have with her."
Fran is in good health apart from suffering a rare condition,
angiodoema. It is possible her throat might swell and she has been
given tracheotomy equipment in case of an incident.
For such a young woman, Fran seems practical and level headed. In just
a few days, she has organised a lease on an apartment, had an
appointment with a midwife, booked a place at the local hospital and
made contact with Englishspeaking mother-and-baby groups.
It is a considerable testimony to her ability to cope - given what
social services had thrown at her. So why did Hexham Children's
Services feel it necessary to take such draconian - some might say
menacing - steps against a young woman who has battled to put her life
in order?
As with almost all cases involving county council children's services,
it is extremely difficult to discover why or how a decision has been
reached. As a result, it is nigh on impossible for people to challenge
what they see as a dubious outcome.
Fran's story began last April when she became pregnant. Although the
baby was unexpected, she was delighted. She says: "I was shocked
because I'd had the contraceptive injection. But I remember waking up
the first morning after I knew and feeling secretly thrilled.
"I didn't have a clue how I was going to make it work with university
and my job [for two mental health charities] but I was determined that
I was having her."
The first problem began when she and Molly's father fell out. She had
become unhappy about something he was doing and re****ted him to the
police. She ended the relation****p immediately and he is now the
subject of an investigation by police - who alerted social services.
She told them her story - that she was brought up in Northampton in a
middleclass household where her parents were teachers, and how at 14
she was raped by an acquaintance.
Traumatised, she became clinically depressed and spent the next three
years, on and off, in residential psychiatric hospitals after being
diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder characterised by self-
harming instability and suicidal tendencies.
For the final 13 months, Fran had individual psychotherapy sessions
and group analysis before being discharged into outpatient care. By
the age of 18 she had fully recovered and the diagnosis of borderline
personality disorder was removed. Despite it all, Fran earned nine A-
grade GCSEs, four A-grade A-levels and her place at university.
When she became pregnant, Fran accepted that social services might
take an interest in her and went out of her way to cooperate. "I was
very up-front with the mental health staff," she said.
"I told them my history and gave them the names of my doctors as I
assumed they would want to pursue it further. I thought I might need
to see the health visitor a bit more often."
Instead, Fran received a letter informing her that a "child protection
case conference" would be held on August 16. Social services contacted
a number of experts. One of them, Dr Stella Newith, the psychiatrist
who treated Fran as a teenager, had no doubts when called on to give
her opinion about her former patient.
In a letter to Northumberland County Council, Dr Newith said: "I
consider the risk of harm to a child to be so unlikely as to be
negligible.
"There has never been any clinical evidence to suggest that Fran would
put herself or others at risk, and certainly no evidence to suggest
that she would put a child at risk."
It was a view backed up by Dr Rex Haigh, a psychiatrist who worked
with Fran in the charity sector and acted as a character witness. He
advised: "I have no doubt that her diligence and capacity,
particularly in dealing with complex emotional situations, will stand
her in good stead for the rigours of parenthood. Your efforts to
protect children would be better directed elsewhere."
Yet the social workers decided, instead, to give more weight to the
views of consultant paediatrician Dr Martin Ward Platt - even though
he made it clear he had never met Fran.
In a letter, Dr Ward Platt said: "If the professionals were concerned
from the evidence available that [this woman] probably does fabricate
or induce illness, there would be no option but to put the baby into
foster care at birth pending a post-natal forensic psychological
*****sment."
Fran says she was told by social services that she was in danger of
suffering from Munchausen's by Proxy, a controversial and unproven
condition in which a parent - usually the mother - invents an illness
in her child to draw attention to herself.
Apart from Dr Ward Platt's letter, there has been no other evidence
presented to Fran suggesting that she was at such risk. The syndrome
was first identified by Sir Roy Meadow, the now-discredited doctor
responsible for evidence that led to the wrongful convictions of
Angela Canning and Sally Clark for murdering their children.
Dr Ward Platt also recommended that Fran be *****sed by professionals.
Social services drew up their "birth plan" without doing any of these
*****sments. In October, Fran was told the plan would mean that Molly
would be immediately removed into care, minutes after she was born.
Fran was also told she could not be trusted to breast-feed her, for
fear that she might try to take strychnine as a way of poisoning her
own child.
Fran says: "I was just horrified. It was horrific to sit in this room
with these people and realise that they could not only conceive of
such a bizarre, terrible thing, but think that I was actually capable
of it.
"In some ways I think the whole thing was compounded by a lack of
understanding. There is no evidence that Munchausen's by Proxy exists.
I was being asked to prove that I wouldn't do something. But how can I
do that? They were asking me to do the impossible."
Fran engaged the help of Bill Bache, the lawyer who overturned Angela
Canning's conviction, and John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP and
chairman of the pressure group Justice For Families. And yet all the
time, she tried to find a compromise with the social workers.
She says: "I asked to go to a mother and baby unit so we would be
under 24-hour supervision. I thought it would show I was willing to
cooperate and there could be no argument about Molly's safety, but
there was a lot of resistance to the idea."
In one last attempt to find a middleway through the nightmare, Fran
agreed to yet another *****sment. The *****sor was to be appointed by
the social workers but would be officially independent. They chose
Professor Douglas Turkington, a psychiatrist based at the Royal
Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.
In his re****t, he said that Fran should not be separated from Molly
but should instead be "supervised during the immediate postnatal
period in her bonding with Molly and be allowed to breast feed".
It is the breakthrough Fran has been hoping for - but she says she
can't risk waiting to see if social services view it in the same
light. On November 9, the birth plan from Northumberland Social
Services arrived in the post. Fran was expecting it but nothing could
have prepared her for its conclusions.
"I just fell apart," she says. "It's only when you see it in writing
that it becomes real. It said I would get ten minutes with Molly until
the umbilical cord had been cut."
Fran and her baby would then be parted and the baby would be taken to
another room in the hospital. Fran feared that the conditions of the
birth plan would mean that even her mother, who she said she was very
close to, would not be able to see the child.
She added: "They said if I didn't consent they would get a police
protection order as soon as she was born. This effectively meant that
there would be a policeman stood outside the delivery suite.
"She would be only a few minutes old and by herself. That was the one
thing that tore me up inside . . . the thought of Molly lying in some
horrible hospital baby cot with no one that loves her.
"I'm not an impulsive or dramatic person. I want to sit down and work
things out. But this was agonising. I knew I had to do something."
She didn't know, then, that something would mean fleeing abroad.
Despite the drastic upset, Fran is not bitter. "I suppose I feel very
disappointed. It didn't seem possible for anyone to backtrack just a
little bit, to say there was another way. That's what I found so hard.
That and the fact there was no compassion. They said it was about
Molly but it certainly never felt like that."
But perhaps most worrying of all is the fact that Fran's case, while
undoubtedly extreme, is also indicative of a disturbing trend. Two
thousand babies less than a year old were taken from their parents
last year by social services - three times the number of ten years
ago.
Fran's story already has echoes of Nicky and Mark Webster, formerly
known as the Hardinghams, whose case was highlighted in this
newspaper. They, too, fled the country in order to stop social
services taking away their newborn baby, a boy called Brandon, after
their first three children were adopted over abuse allegations.
The Websters have since returned to England and have won a landmark
case to keep their fourth child. And what does the future hold for
Fran Lyon, a young mother who was dealt a rough hand as a teenager and
fought to get a normal life and now just wants to do what's best for
her daughter?
Perhaps social workers know something Fran is not revealing. Last
night a spokeswoman for Northumberland County Council said: "We are
unable to comment on individual cases, and we do not believe that it
is in the best interests of any mother or child to discuss personal
details through the media, but unfortunately it does mean only one
side is being heard.
"Safeguarding arrangements in Northumberland were rated as good in a
recent rigorous Government inspection. Ms Lyon and her legal adviser
have attended all of her case conferences and have been fully informed
of the concerns of the professionals involved in her case.
"Where a child or unborn baby is subject to a child-protection plan
and they move to reside in another authority or country,
responsibility would normally pass to the new authority or relevant
authority in another country. Northumberland County Council would make
sure the new authority has all the relevant information it needs to
make informed decisions."
Mr Hemming said: "I think it's appalling and very disturbing and,
sadly, Fran's case is not unique.
"Of course there are situations where you've got to intervene but the
system all too often fails to intervene where it should and then
intervenes where it shouldn't. It's a steamroller of a system and it
steamrollers mothers and children."
Only one thing remains certain. If Fran proves herself to be a good
and loving mother, Northumberland's carefully worked-out "birth plan"
can only ever be seen as an act of almost unimaginable cruelty by the
State.
Fran's story is told on Tonight With Trevor McDonald, tomorrow at 8pm
on ITV1.
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