From the UK Daily Mail.
Excerpt:
An Indian couple have had their children taken away by Norwegian social workers because they were feeding them with their hands and sleeping in the same bed as them.
Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya lost custody of their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter eight months ago after authorities branded their behaviour inappropriate.
[…]Norwegian Child Protection Services removed the youngsters from their home in May, 2011, leaving their parents horrified with the outcome of the report.
Father Anurup told Indian television channel NDTV: ‘They told me ‘why are you sleeping with the children in the same bed?’.
‘(I told them) this is also a purely cultural issue. We never leave the children in another room and say goodnight to them.’
Anurup added: ‘Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child.
‘They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences.’
[…]The parents have been told that they can only see their children twice a year, for an hour during each visit until the kids turn 18 when they will no longer be bound by the current restrictions under current Norwegian law.
Norway’s Child Protective Service has come under much scrutiny in the past for excessive behaviour in their handling of child cruelty.
Lawyer Svein Kjetil Lode Svendsen said: ‘There has been a report in UN in 2005 which criticized Norway for taking too many children in public care.
‘The amount was 12,500 children and Norway is a small country.’
With the Bhattacharyas’ visas set to expire in March, they have revealed that they will be forced to stay against their will until the return of their infants.
Norway is a welfare state with a big intrusive government and small citizens. But Norway isn’t the only European country that likes to seize children from their families.
This article about homeschooling in Sweden was just posted this week.
Excerpt:
A leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party last week called for a change in the country’s social services law so that the government can take children away from home-schooling families more easily by allowing social workers to do so.
The call for the change comes amidst already stringent penalties in Sweden for home schooling. The Home School Legal Defense Association and Alliance Defense Fund have applied to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one family whose child was abducted by the government in 2009 and have filed a brief in a Swedish appellate court on behalf of another family fined an amount equivalent to $26,000 U.S..
Liberal Party politician Lotta Edholm called for the change to the country’s social services law in a Jan. 10 column in Aftonbladet, a prominent Swedish newspaper. Edholm then wrote on her blog: “Today I write with Ann-Katrin Aslund on Aftonbladet’s debate page that the social services law should be amended so that social services are able to intervene when children are kept away from school by their parents—often for religious or ideological reasons.”
This kind of thing happens all the time in Europe. It happens in Germany. It happens in France. It happens in the UK. This is what secular leftists believe – that children are the property of the state, citizens of the world, and they should not be overly influenced by their parents. It’s the government’s job to decide what children will believe, not the parents. The parents are just there to work to pay the taxes for the public day cares, public schools and social workers.