Arrested for seeing her grandmother

Last week brought a further horrible twist to of the most disturbing stories I reported on last year –involving Kathleen Danby, the diminutive grandmother in her 70s, who had been sentenced to three months in prison for contempt of court after she was caught on CCTV hugging her beloved teenage grand-daughter in a pub car park.

The girl, who has been officially deemed to have “a mental age of nine”, was originally taken into care by Derbyshire social services in 2007, after her father was spotted grabbing her “roughly” to safety when she had run out into a busy road: an action for which he was given a prison sentence. Ever since then the girl has been kept miserably in state “care” at a succession of foster homes and institutions.

More than 200 times the girl has managed to escape, to get back to the only two people in the world she wishes to live with, her father and grandmother, both of whom have been forbidden by the courts to see her. In 2014, after one escape when she pleaded with her granny to meet her in that pub car park, Mrs Danby was sentenced by Mr Justice Cardinal in the Court of Protection to three months in prison for breaking the court order.

But because the family home was in Orkney, out of English jurisdiction, the police were unable to arrest her – until in January 2015 she came to visit a theatre in Liverpool. The police pounced, and for three days she was kept in prison cells. Only after this had led to the intervention of John Hemming MP and considerable press publicity, was she again brought handcuffed before Cardinal, who ruled that, since she promised not to see her grand-daughter again, she had “purged her contempt”, and could be set free.

Two weeks ago, however, the girl yet again managed to escape and late that evening rang her grandmother from Crewe station, where she had arrived without any money. Mrs Danby arranged with a hotel to put her up for the night and came down the next day to take her back to Orkney.

Last week, walking round Kirkwall, they noticed the proprietor of the “care home” and another man following them. That evening the men pushed a bundle of official papers through the door, to say that they would be taking the girl back to England, and that her father and Mrs Danby had been breaking the law by “harbouring” her. Next day the girl was arrested by police and handed over to the two men, who took her to the mainland, to drive her through the night back to the institution 500 miles away where she is forced to live.

So here is a girl, about to be 21, who is perfectly capable of using a computer and the mobile phones which are repeatedly removed from her, who is being held wholly against her will, at huge public expense, in a place she regards as “a horrible prison”. The only people she wants to be with are fearful that, if ever they set foot in England again, they will be arrested. Yet again we see that yawning gulf between the real world and that dehumanised system which, in so much that it does, makes a complete mockery of the empty mantra that, in our system of “child protection”, the “interests of the child must always be paramount”. God help us, if only that were true.