Children refused right to express their wishes in court

From Christopher Booker

"In May I reported on the bizarre ruling by Mrs Justice Williscroft in Derby that a young girl, then nearly nine, should be taken from the home she happily shared with her loving mother, to live in a small one-bedroom flat with her long-absent father, a former drug addict with a criminal record.

The judge explained that, although it might initially be upsetting for the girl to be removed from her mother, she would soon settle to a new life with a man she didn’t want to live with. Almost immediately the girl began running back to her mother, sobbing that her father hit her, and would often have another man to spend the night with them in their tiny flat.

This, I wrote, was almost a carbon copy of the story I reported earlier this year where, on the orders of Judge Laura Harris, two boys aged 11 and 14 had been dragged out of bed by four policemen at 7.45 on Christmas morning, to be handed over to live with the father who had walked out on them years before. Again the boys repeatedly tried, after violent incidents, to flee back to the mother they loved...

Not the least disturbing feature of these stories is that, in each case, the children repeatedly asked for the right to express their wishes in court, and were each time refused..."

Read more http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/11140139/Family-judge-ignored-law-over-9-year-old-girl.html