The Royal Court has approved a care plan for siblings Emma and Ben – not their real names – to be placed outside Jersey after hearing the pair had suffered ‘significant harm’ in their upbringing.
Although the court agreed to the Health Minister’s care plan for the siblings to receive long-term foster care or be subject to a residence order outside the Island, it criticised Children’s Services, saying the department ‘had not covered themselves in glory’ when dealing with Emma and Ben.
The court noted that the timetables for delivering documents were frequently not met, which had resulted in the mother and the children’s grandmother having to ‘deal with proposals that come forward much too late’.
According to a recently published judgment, the children were made subject to a 12-month supervision order in 2016 after the mother was bound over for 12 months when she pleaded guilty to two charges of intentionally or recklessly exposing a child to a risk of harm.
Details of some of the ‘significant’ physical as well as emotional harm and neglect the siblings have endured during their childhoods were outlined to the court.
‘The mother had been found in a car where Emma was not wearing an age-appropriate seatbelt and Ben was sitting on her lap without any proper protective seatbelt – in circumstances where the driver of the car, as was known to the mother, was on the Sex Offenders Register,’ the judgment says.
On another occasion the mother, who has alcohol dependency, failed to get her children to school.
The judgment says: ‘The school could not contact the mother on that day; indeed, she was unable to care for them, as she could not wake up and kept falling asleep and the children had to put themselves to bed.’
Meanwhile, the children were said to have suffered significant harm as a result of the abusive relationships the mother had been in.
Although the mother agreed she was not able to provide care for the children she wanted her son and daughter to be cared for by a family member and did not consent to the Health Minister’s care plan.
However, the court found that it was ‘satisfied’ that it was in the children’s best interests to live outside Jersey.
‘There was no other realistic option,’ the judgment says. ‘No family member was both willing and appropriate to look after the children, and there was no long-term foster care in Jersey available for them.’
The Bailiff, Sir William Bailhache, and Jurats Jerry Ramsden and Elizabeth Dulake were sitting.
