'The scandal of the baby snatchers'
Two-year-old Crystal Walton smiles at the camera, her blonde hair blowing in the wind. The photograph of the enchanting little girl looks as though it should have pride of place in a treasured family album. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. This picture was used to advertise Crystal's availability for adoption - appearing in a tabloid national newspaper with an accompanying blurb describing her as a "clever, lively, cheerful toddler" who likes puzzles and swimming. A phone number was printed alongside for anyone interested in becoming her new parents. Perhaps a million people saw the heart-breaking advert which had been placed by a London council, and streams of callers offered to take care of her. Yet that is not the whole story. The truth is that Crystal had become a pawn in an adoption system that should shame In 2000, Tony Blair set new targets to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent - to a total of 5,400 every year. He promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve the targets. Some have already received more than £20million for successfully pushing up the number of adoptions. This sweeping shake-up in social policy was designed for all the right reasons: to get older children languishing in care homes into happy new families with parents. But the reforms didn't work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash, councils began to earmark those children who were most easy to place in adoptive homes - babies and cute toddlers such as Crystal. The resulting nightmare is that thousands of children of under four have since been removed from their birth families and adopted. Seventy per cent of all adoptions are now in this age group. These cases often involve mothers and fathers who may have been in previous contact with social services over alleged incidents such as being accused - though not convicted - of maltreating their children. More chillingly, others have been told by social workers they must lose their children because, at some time in the future, they might abuse them. One mother's son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance she might shout at him when he was older. It was, said social workers, emotional abuse.New figures revealed to the Mail this week show that 1,300 babies were taken from their families in England last year and sent to new homes - a 300 per cent rise in less than a decade. More than 900 were newborn or less than a week old. The rest were aged under a month. The Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has become so concerned about the increase and the way that the adoption system is being run that he has asked the United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner to investigate the 'systematic abuses'. He wants to know why so many tiny children are being 'snatched' needlessly from their families in what he calls a 'national scandal'. In his formal submission to the commissioner, he said: "Children are being removed from families merely to satisfy government targets for the right numbers of children adopted."