You arrived at this page by selecting:Do Authorities have the authority? (YEP 07/02/08)
You may have heard in the news about a baby boy which was snatched from his mother's arms at 4am, only two hours after he had been born. If you have not heard about it you are probably thinking, “how terrible, who would do such a thingâ€. Well it seems those who would do such a thing are the social services.
It seems they decided that the mother was to be separated from the child (without contact unless supervised by social workers) due to her troubled child hood and mental health problems. The social workers took the baby after showing the hospital staff a 'birth plan' which they had prepared. A judge ordered the return of the baby to its mother in hospital which happened 8 hours later after the mother obtained an emergency high court order.
What worries me is that there is still an almost in-built assumption in most of us to assume that where authority figures are concerned that they must have the right to do what they are proposing to do. (They have legal departments who tell them what they can and can't do, so surely they must be in the right.)
It seems however in this case that they did not have proper authority to do what they were doing and may have even committed an unlawful act. How could this happen?
The general rule is that you can only remove a child if a police constable is acting to protect a child, or there is a court order. The Hospital staff could not have been expected to know any different and would have made understandable assumptions that social services must have been within their rights.
It is events like these that illustrate that we really do need to be careful to ensure powers are used correctly and to give proper thought to the consequences when we are granting powers to the state to exercise on behalf of us all. This can apply particularly when at first glance the requested powers are said to be required for the “greater good.â€
The arguments for increasing the powers of the police to allegedly combat terrorism are one such area. Most people stand firmly against terrorism but the picture of an elderly heckler being excluded from the Labour conference using the Terrorism Act was perhaps not what most people had in mind when considering the issue. Even more recently claims that officers from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch having been bugging MP's and legal advisors without appropriate authority reinforce concerns that powers once given can sometimes be misused.
My advice is to think before supporting decisions to give people in authority extra powers and don't make assumptions that just because someone looks, or is in a position of authority, then they must have the power to do what they are doing. They might just not!
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