Tomorrow Friday 8 September from 12.30 lunchtime, please join the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign at a Support Not Separation vigil outside the Indian High Commission WC2 4NA, to demand an end to children from the Global South being removed from their families and kept from them by social services in Global North countries.
Press Release FROM SUPPORT NOT SEPARATION
G20 summit: Global North stop taking & holding children from the Global South
Friday 8 September, 12.30pm, India House, Aldwych, London WC2B 4NA
Contacts:
Delhi: Suranya Aiyar +919818886808 contact@saveyourchildren.in @thinkfirstindia
London: SNS 0207 482 2496 sns@legalactionforwomen.net @NotSeparation
Scotland: Scottish Kinship Care Alliance 07490720123 scottishkinshipcarealliance@gmail.com @ScKinship
US: Give Us Back Our Children 215-848-1120 philly@allwomencount.net @womenstrike_us
As part of international actions coinciding with the G20 summit opening in New Delhi, mothers & supporters gather outside the Indian High Commission to demand an end to children from the Global South being removed from their families and kept from them by social services in Global North countries.
The international Support Not Separation network joins mothers and campaigners in India calling on G20 governments to stop removing and holding our children. This includes children such as those featured in the landmark film Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway, whose Indian mother fought for three years to get them back after the Norwegian state took them.
An open letter from retired judges in India, including four former Supreme Court judges, calls on the G20 to address the increasing numbers of children taken from families from the Global South while they are living and working in Western Europe, UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.
As mothers campaigning to stop the family courts in UK, US and elsewhere taking our children, especially if we are single mothers, low income, immigrant, of colour or have a disability, are domestic violence survivors and/or care leavers, we know from experience that the family court process which forcibly removes our children is sexist, racist and class ridden. We are outraged but not surprised that children taken from immigrant families are not even being repatriated to India where they could be cared for by their extended family. We know families who are facing this in the UK.
The Indian judges point out that
Denying a child any possibility of growing up in its country of origin and changing their nationality or forcing them to assimilate in the fostering country amounts to removing the children of any one group to another group, which is one of the five forms of genocide recognised under the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
A child removal industry has been created. In every G20 country mothers are struggling to care for children (often on top of waged work and other caring responsibilities) in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. In some, like the UK, other European countries and the US, millions are spent on privatised foster care, forced adoption and residential homes for children, which profit from breaking the bond between mother and child.
Children need and have a right to the protection of their mother or other primary carer. To break that bond is not only to inflict lifelong trauma but to make children vulnerable to every form of abuse in institutional ‘care’.
We cannot forget the long history of children of Indigenous communities being forcibly removed – in Australia, Canada, the US, for example – as well as the children of single mothers – in Britain and Ireland, for example. What is happening today is a continuation of this sexist, racist horror and must be stopped.
Children everywhere need their mothers’ care and protection!
G20 take away our poverty, not our children!
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