Tusla removed two foster children from house after bruising raised abuse fear

The Child and Family Agency sought an emergency switch of foster placement amid suspected sexual abuse of a pre-school age child while he was in foster care.

The case, one of 38 published today by the Child Care Law Reporting Project, also involved the court being told that significant bruising around the young child’s face was due to “non-accidental injury” rather than the explanation given by the foster parent that it may have been due to the child falling on a wooden toy.

A consultant paediatrician drafted in by Tusla said the child’s responses to bruising on the back of his legs and buttocks raised the issue of child sexual abuse.

However, while the child made no disclosure regarding how he sustained his injuries under specialist interview, a forensic physician could not rule in or out child sexual abuse, with the two foster children removed from the foster family although the family’s two birth children remained until the conclusion of an assessment.

The CCLRP reports come from courts around the country and in six of the 38 cases, the mother was homeless at the time the case was being heard, although that was not deemed the immediate cause of the application to take the children into care in any of those cases.

However, the CCLRP noted even though drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence were the major reasons for interim care orders being granted, the issue of homelessness did become an obstacle when it came to trying to reunify families later on. In one case, a guardian ad litem said of a mother seeking to get her children back but living in emergency accommodation: “She can’t even make a sandwich for her children.” The judge, speaking about a possible family reunification, said: “It is not suitable for a young family to be in a hotel.”

In another case, a father told the court he was moving to Ireland from overseas to take care of his children and their mother had become homeless, while in a separate case, an order was extended after a court was told Tusla was trying to contact a mother via homeless agencies as her whereabouts were unknown.

In another case, a High Court judicial review quashed an earlier district court emergency care order where a new-born baby was forcibly taken from his breast-feeding mother in hospital a day after his birth.

The High Court found not all possible alternatives to the removal of the child had been considered.

A number of cases had an international element, including that of one child whose mother was suspected of being forced into a marriage. Tusla was assessing the young woman’s consent to the proposed marriage amid concerns that an arranged marriage had been set up for her with two suitors. Her guardian ad litem told the court: “The mother herself said she was not able to say no.”

In another case, an interim care order was extended for a child who had arrived in the State as an unaccompanied minor 18 months earlier amid suspicions she had been trafficked here. The court was told Tusla was engaging with an international agency to locate the mother in Africa, and that the child’s father had died and that another man claiming to be the adoptive father of the child had been removed from the proceedings.

In another case, a judge refused an order to send a child to her extended family in a non-EU country due to concerns about the standard of care and protection she would receive there.

Concerns were also raised over the lack of step-down facilities for children in special care, while in one case Tusla sought to make a young person in special care a Ward of Court to facilitate the transfer to a special placement in the UK for a minimum of six months, which was not possible under special care legislation.

childlawproject.ie