HELLO !!! LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF

My name is IAN JOSEPHS and I try to help parents who are desperately trying to recover or at least make contact with children who have been snatched by social services. I live and work in Monte Carlo where I own and run a language school. I have an Oxford University law degree but I am not a solicitor or a barrister. So. . . . Who am I really ? and Why do I do what I do ? 

I am NOT repeat NOT another "mother Teresa" and I never give to charity (in case I end up paying for the director's rolls royce!) but fighting the often brutal actions of Social Services is a cause very close to my heart. Social Services have never hurt me, my family or anyone close to me so I have no personal axe to grind but I HATE THE ABUSE OF POWER and particularly the way the bullies in social services ruthlessly destroy the very families they are supposed to protect. As a matter of principle I never charge a fee and never accept any money whatever for any expenses. I also promise that if ever I get offered a fee by a newspaper for introducing a family or writing about parents whose children have been taken then I promise to give 100% of any money received to the family concerned and keep nothing myself.I have no wish to imitate those disgusting people who make money out of the misery of parents who have had their children snatched by Social Services!! 

 Contact me for free legal advice and practical help by e-mail ianjosephs@wanadoo.fr or by phone 0033609095621. 

The reasons behind all this date back to the six years 1960-1966 when I was a Kent County Councillor and a mother came to me for help because social workers had taken away her son aged 12 of near genius IQ because he got bored at school and played truant! She was denied all contact and when I asked where he was and if as the mother's elected representative I could at least see him myself I was told to mind my own business ! I found him at a special private school owned by the deputy leader of the Labour party at the time that was charging exhorbitant fees more than 3 times those charged at ETON or HARROW ! Eventually after acrimonious debates in the council chamber and a court action he was returned to his mother and I was asked to help many other parents whose children had been removed for absurd reasons.

I applied in court for the discharge of care orders. I called the parents and sometimes the children themselves as witnesses in court against my own Council and I never lost a case so I was not best popular with my colleagues and the social workers! However after 6 years of neglecting my language school (then in Ramsgate) I decided not to stand at the next election as I really had to earn my living and look after my family so I reluctantly gave up the battle. . . . . for a time

In 2004 there was suddenly a lot of publicity when it was admitted that thousands of children had been wrongly taken from mothers who had been diagnosed with munchausen's syndrome, meaning that mothers who took their children to hospital too often were deliberately hurting them to draw attention to themselves ;This was one of the absurd notions of the now discredited professor Meadows which had no scientific basis that could possibly justify attributing the syndrome to so many unfortunate women. Worse still was his completely unproved theory that two cot deaths in the same family were 70 million to one ! Hundreds of women were condemned for murder. Their surviving children and babies born subsequently were taken away and given for adoption by strangers. Only later was it realised that genetic factors made it far more likely for cot deaths to repeat in the same family than elsewhere and odds reduced to about 60 to 1.

These cases were in the Criminal Courts so they got fully reported and this provoked me to write to the Daily Mail detailing some of my experiences on Kent County Council all those years ago. They published my letter and I was surprised subsequently to receive several requests from mothers and parents trying to recover and in some cases just to contact children snatched from them by social services. I am now comfortably off, my 7 children are adult, and I am in my seventies with the time, and still with the energy to once again take up the battle with social services