“Significant harm” has come to mean more or less whatever social workers want it to mean. For example, “significant harm” now includes “emotional abuse”. Although “emotional abuse” is defined in Government guidance as “the persistent emotional ill treatment of a child such as to cause severe and persistent effects on the child’s emotional development”, it is left vague as to what sorts of treatment will cause such “severe and persistent effects”. Social workers and psychologists have interpreted “emotional abuse” so widely that it now includes everything from being too indulgent with a child to not being indulgent enough, from moving your body in the “wrong” way in front of your children to feeding them too many grapes (each of these examples is from reports by social workers alleging that parents were guilty of “emotional abuse”). It is not even necessary to show that a child has been damaged in any way at all. All that is necessary is the claim that, at some point in the future, the child might suffer emotional damage — a claim which is of course impossible for any parent to disprove.

But surely, you object, the courts will not uphold a local authority’s claim to take a child from its parents on so flimsy a basis as “emotional abuse”? Yet that is exactly what many of them do. More children were placed on the “at risk” register on grounds of suspected “emotional abuse” than for any other possible harm except “neglect” — a category which at least is capable of reasonably objective definition. Being placed on the “at risk” register is the first stage to being taken into care. And although the statistics are not available (they are secret or not kept at all), it is a good bet that far more children are being taken into care because they are judged to be subjects of “emotional abuse” than because they are thought to be the victims of physical or sexual abuse.

Judges are almost never in a position to challenge the claims of social service officials that a child is being “significantly harmed” by his or her biological parents. The legislation leaves it up to social workers, and the “experts” they can get to support their claims, to provide the definition of what “significant harm” amounts to. Such allegations are not tested in court, for the simple reason that there is no procedure available to test them. If there were, the family courts would grind to a halt: it would take days of evidence to get through the many hundreds of pages that social services submit in support of their claims.

So allegations from social workers that a child is being emotionally abused are usually just accepted as fact by the family courts. I have met some parents who have been victims of this process, and read the judgments which led to their losing their children (committing a criminal offence as I did so). It is a profoundly shocking ­experience.