What is a custody order?
What sounds so protective in theory has dramatic consequences in practice:
Children are separated from their parents from one moment to the next - sometimes for the rest of their childhood.
After that, they are permanently estranged from their parents.
In Germany, more than 66,400 children and young people were taken into state care and placed in foster families or homes in 2022.
Subtracting the 28,600 "unaccompanied minor refugees", who are also included in this figure, results in the
shockingly high number of 37,800 children who were - at least temporarily - separated from their parents.
On average, more than 100 children were taken away from their parents every day of the year.
However, in the early years in particular, stable relationships and caregivers are extremely
important for children's personal development.
Parents play a central role here. They give them support and security.
Children naturally love their parents, even if they are difficult characters or social cases.
Separating a child from its parents is a highly emotional process for both the children and the parents, which
can traumatize them and cause serious psychological damage.
For this reason, taking a child into care should only ever be a last resort.
It should only be carried out if there are no other options at all to avoid further endangering the child's welfare.
The fact is, however, that with the above-mentioned figures, Germany is an international leader in
terms of the number of children taken into care.
Are Germany's parents really so much more dangerous and incompetent than parents in other countries?
Or are there other reasons for these alarmingly high figures?
Of course there are cases in which there is no alternative to separating the child from the parents, for
example if the child is being sexually abused by them.
But are these justified exceptions really present in the majority of cases?
Reasons for child abduction
The reasons for taking children into care provide information on this.
In most cases, this is not due to violence, neglect or alcohol or drug addiction on the part of the parents.
With the exception of "unaccompanied refugee children", the most common justification is
the alleged "excessive demands on parents".
Other reasons given are "attachment disorders" or "attachment intolerance", i.e. that a divorced parent
wants to keep the child from the ex-partner or even "too close a bond between mother and child".
Such justifications are very surprising.
In divorce cases in particular, it is often a logical consequence that children move even closer together with the remaining
parent in order to compensate for the loss of the missing parent.
And especially when a child has a very close bond with its mother, it is all the more painful if it is deprived of this.
What is striking about these justifications is that they are relatively open to interpretation.
Abuse or drug addiction are concrete and verifiable facts.
However, it is at the discretion of the assessor to decide when parents should be overburdened or when
the bond between mother and child should be too close.
And this is precisely where a major problem arises.
Questionable expert opinions
Psychological court reports on the legal guardians are often drawn up in the course of taking the child into care.
These reports are an important basis for assessment for the competent family court judges, the content of which
contributes to the decision on the future fate of the children.
In over 90% of cases, the judges follow the recommendations of the experts.
However, these expert opinions often contain glaring deficiencies.
Dr. Andrea Christidis, expert witness, forensic psychologist and behavioral therapist, who has already written over 1000 expert
reports on family assessments, concludes from her research:
"I have yet to see a single expert opinion that really met all the technical requirements."
It found serious deficiencies in almost all of them.
In many cases, the parents or parents concerned were assessed by the experts after brief
discussions, sometimes only after telephone conversations.
Dr. Christidis explains this:
"Unfortunately, the current legal situation is that anyone who is appointed by a judge can prepare an
expert opinion. Whether he can is another question."
A study by the IB University of Applied Sciences Berlin confirmed Dr. Christidis' statement in 2015.
After evaluating 272 expert opinions, the university came to the conclusion that 75% of all expert
opinions in family law disputes in Germany are flawed.
Even trained psychologists often use unscientific methods, such as the Rorschach blot test.
In this method, children are presented with ink blots which they are asked to interpret: What does the child see in the blot?
Such tests are completely unsuitable as evidence in court and are nevertheless cited as the
basis for a decision on the child's welfare.
Any result desired by the assessor can be diagnosed on this basis, which is sometimes highly controversial in specialist circles.
Parents are often diagnosed with "lack of parenting skills" or "personality disorders" in the reports.
These can then be reasons for the loss of custody and the placement of the children in foster families or homes.
Expert opinions - a lucrative business
The assessments, which have the potential to tear entire families apart, also have to be paid for by the parents.
The costs for this can be up to 15,000 euros.
If the parents don't have the money, the taxpayer has to step in.
Several 100 million euros are generated in this way every year.
It seems that certain networks have formed between experts, youth welfare offices and family courts.
One example is the Bavarian GWG, the "Society of Scientific Forensic and Legal Psychology".
It has recognized this market and tailored its business model to expert opinions for family courts.
It provides expert opinions for the courts very quickly via its affiliated experts.
The experts must pay her 40% of their fees.
The GWG organizes training events for family court judges in Bavaria and thus forges links with the judiciary.
As a result, the Bavarian Minister of Justice had to explain in 2008 why the family courts
predominantly award their contracts to the GWG.
The court in Ingolstadt, for example, had awarded eleven out of twelve contracts to GWG within a year.
Critics therefore speak of a monopoly position of GWG.
Third-party placements - a market worth billions
But the reports are just the start of the big business. 128,000 children were living in care in
2023 and around 87,000 children in foster families.
Accommodation in a home costs €42,000 - €54,000 per child per year.
For taking in a foster child, foster families receive a monthly care allowance of between 700
and 900 euros, depending on the age of the child.
Taxpayers pay 4.9 billion euros a year for these measures.
A youth welfare worker with decades of experience commented on this in an interview as follows:
"The inpatient area is already the area that generates the most money.
I mean, at the end of the day, you can see that inpatient facilities are expanding more and more over the years.
Those who throw the children onto the market, so to speak, are the youth welfare offices."
"Let me say this quite deliberately: throw it on the market!
Because that's the way it is: it's about money, it's about money.
And if I am offered a young person by the youth welfare office for a certain daily or monthly rate, then I make an
offer to the youth welfare office, and the youth welfare office says whether I accept this offer or not.
It's a business after all. And the youth welfare offices are ultimately happy if they have a
provider that takes the young people off their hands."
How the children are doing in the facilities and whether the measures taken there are sensible and helpful for the children is
often not sufficiently checked by the youth welfare office staff.
Scandals have repeatedly come to light about children from Germany being handed over to foster families and homes abroad.
They did not attend school there, nor were they accompanied or supervised in any other way.
The best interests of the child were then apparently no longer of interest.
For the facilities with this abusive practice, however, it means big business.
A German institution receives up to 5,000 euros per month for one child from the youth welfare office.
However, if the institution sends the child to a foster family in Poland, for example, only 600 euros per month
must be paid for the child's placement in this family.
What happens to the rest of the money is often not checked.
State of emergency in the youth welfare offices
This is a consequence of the severe staff shortage in most youth welfare offices.
Many of the authority's employees suffer from constant overwork.
There is a lack of time and staff to monitor the whereabouts and welfare of the children.
Many social workers are quitting their jobs because they can no longer support the way work is done.
This further exacerbates the emergency situation. There is also a shortage of skilled workers.
No remedy to be expected from politics
It cannot be assumed that politicians will remedy this themselves, as they themselves
benefit greatly from the business with children.
We are currently experiencing a major struggle for the budget funds with which politicians support their often
questionable, ideological projects, including "sea rescue" and so-called "feminist foreign policy".
In this context, taking children into care is an instrument that has a rewarding effect
on the financial scope of federal politicians.
The business with children generates money because it is labor-intensive.
As a result, unemployment figures are falling and the federal government has to pay out less unemployment benefit.
At the same time, the wage and income tax paid by employees in the child and youth welfare sector is used to
flush a lot of money into the state coffers, which then goes mainly to the federal and state governments.
The costs of taking children into care, on the other hand, are not borne by the federal government, but by the
local authorities in addition to the parents, who receive relatively little from income tax revenues.
The state can also use child deprivation to its advantage in other ways - namely as a restrictive measure.
You could see that in corona times:
Here, custody was a sharp sword used by the state to intimidate critics of the coronavirus measures.
In several cases, children were taken from families because the parents did not insist that the children wear a mask at school.
Massive damage caused by child abduction
Meanwhile, the families that are torn apart in this context experience a catastrophe.
The children are sometimes forcibly removed from their families, schools or kindergartens by the police.
In our program "Systematic child abduction - custody under the microscope", those affected
report on how they experienced these interventions.
There is also shocking footage of mothers being snatched from their screaming children.
Such a violent separation alone is a shock for life for the little ones, often leaving them severely traumatized.
This leads to deep injuries and behavioral changes in the children.
For example, two-year-old Paul stopped speaking when he was taken from his family and has had speech problems ever since.
This is often followed by weeks and months in which the children are hidden from their parents.
After the court hearing, visitation appointments with the children may then be held.
But only very rarely and under strict regulations.
The parents are not allowed to show any feelings or talk about their shared past.
This way, the children don't even realize that their parents are also suffering from the separation.
This forced, unnatural behavior of the parents has a very disturbing effect on the children.
If the rules are broken, however, visits are banned altogether.
Placement in institutions is not associated with improvement in most cases.
The children often have behavioral problems.
They may then be transferred to a child and adolescent psychiatric ward, where they are
treated with psychotropic drugs and Ritalin.
Psychologist Dr. Christidis:
"So children are not helped at all in institutions.
This can only be the case with children who have actually been severely abused and where forensic medicine has clearly
established serious injuries in children. Sexual abuse..."
She testifies that there are entire studies that have found that almost 90% of young people are damaged before they get out.
They are either addicted to drugs or alcohol, or they have even become criminals.
They don't get proper qualifications, so they often end up paying the state afterwards.
Dr. Christidis: "What is done with the children in the children's homes? They are kept in custody.
They have a staffing ratio that makes you want to cry.
So savings are being made there too, everything is privatized.
They all just want to make a profit. So the children are put aside and not supported."
In addition, there are repeated reports of even worse damage in care homes and in alternative accommodation.
In Berlin, for example, children were placed with pedophile foster parents for decades on
the advice of social pedagogue Helmut Kentler.
Kentler is now dead, but it can be assumed that the felts and networks of that time still exist, as a
proper and consistent reappraisal has not yet taken place.
More information on this can be found in the documentary "Kentler Gate" by the action group "Demo for all".
There have also been various scandals in care homes involving the mistreatment and sexual abuse of children who are
helplessly at the mercy of abusers without parental protection.
Dr. Christidis mentions an SOS Children's Village where children were abused by the super-rich for years.
She speaks of 160 cases.
During its research into the documentaries on paedophilia and satanic-ritual violence against children , Kla.TV has also
repeatedly come across the fact that influential perpetrators have shamelessly made use of children from children's homes.
Resistance is forming
Dr. Andrea Christidis is probably the most important campaigner against unlawful custody in Germany.
Over the years, it has had to fight against enormous resistance.
She has now founded the "AXION-Resist" association to join forces with doctors, scientists,
lawyers and criminologists to combat these abuses.
In addition to supporting affected families, Axion Resist carries out valuable public relations work, such as the symposium
"Zielscheibe Kind & Bindung", which can be found in full length on their homepage https://axionresist.com
or as a shortened summary at www.kla.tv/29203.
However, Dr. Christidis and her colleagues need support from all of us in this important work.
Snatching children from their parents for no really serious reason is a crime against the weakest members of our
society, with lifelong consequences for those affected.
The fact that these many children and parents are permanently separated from one another from one moment to the next
can hardly be surpassed in terms of drama for both parties.
As these withdrawal procedures are not normally public and the media only report on them in fragments, we are all called upon
to help bring this issue to the forefront of social debate and put pressure on politicians to finally remedy the situation!