Angels of Antichrist

Peter Klevius^*

ABSTRACT: The Nordic child protection system is resulting in parenthood being taken over by the state.  The roots of this movement and its results in Sweden are examined.  The social authorities' subjective interpretations of "the best interest of the child" means that children can be placed in foster care on the basis of purely subjective opinions.  This constitutes a serious threat to kinship and is destructive to the welfare of children.

In 1897, the first female Nobel Prize winner in literature, Selma Lagerlöf from Sweden, wrote in her novel Antikrists mirakler ("The Miracles of Antichrist") that socialism is the disguise of Antichrist, conceived as the power of evil in the mask of goodness.  Lagerlöf, however, also described women as helping poor people on a voluntary basis while bearing the growing idea of socialism in their hearths.  She ended the novel in an optimistic mood, saying that we need not fear Antichrist if we just put the picture of him beside the picture of Christ.

The simple Sicilian women in Lagerlöf's novel, following in the footsteps of the Good Samaritan, showed no signs of evil, but were certainly part of a movement which should become the most widespread political force ever.  The question, however, remains: is it an evil one?

A hundred years later, in 1993, another well-known Swedish novelist, Bible-translator, and professor, Agneta Pleijel wrote a "letter to Selma Lagerlöf" in the magazine Moderna Tider ("Modern Times") in which she asked, "What are we doing to our children?"  She was concerned over how limited she, as a parent, was in raising her own children, because her parenthood had been taken over by the social state in the sense that the state had ultimately the complete responsibility and say over her children.  From a will to help the poor, there had evolved a professional and legal centrally administrated compulsion.  What would Lagerlöf had thought about it?

The work in the caring area is still mostly done by women, but now professionally and in a much wider context than ever before.  The little child of Antichrist in Lagerlöf's novel has grown up and is now the strongest factor of peoples' social lives in Sweden and, in fact, is a serious threat against biological kinship and even against religion in its most primordial meaning.  The word "religion" can be traced to Latin re- "back" and ligare "tie," i.e. kinship tied back in the form of ancestor worship.  Kinship can therefore be seen as the main element in binding the society together and religion as the form in which this is done.  Today, the base upon which most child protection laws stand is the view that "the child is an independent subject of its own rights" (the Finnish child protection law of 1984) and hence stands in opposition to kinship systems and religion.  The text could also be translated, "the helpless and kinless subject of bureaucrats' arbitrariness."
 

"In the Best Interest of the Child"

"In the best interest of the child" in the Nordic child protection law ultimately implies that the child has to be protected by the authorities against the parents/relatives, and not vice versa.  It also implies that the interpretation of "the best interest of the child" is to be made by the authorities.  In doing this, the authorities are supposed to use experts of their own choosing.

The Swedish child protection law concludes (LVU par. 2) that, except for physical, psychological or sexual abuse and/or neglect, the decision for taking a child into the custody of the authorities could also rest on "... some other conditions in the home" which could cause a "manifest risk" regarding the "development" of the child."  As an example of such a kind of risk, "pathological symbiotic relationship" is mentioned.

In fact, as one female (most of them are) representative for the National Social Welfare Board put it, "It is enough if one thinks that the child is at risk in the future."  Unfortunately, most of the research results (especially the quantitative ones), indicate that the most obvious risk for the child is its position as a resource for the bureaucracy.

Furthermore, the Nordic law states that "the home could be every place the child has reached when it is, directly or indirectly, under the custody of its parents."  In other words, if anything happens whatsoever, the parents could be blamed and the child taken into the custody of the social authorities.  Unfortunately, most people are not aware of this aspect of the law.  They are even less aware that, even if the parents are not found guilty or blamed, the child could still be abducted.  This latter method has become quite popular in Sweden because it confuses the desperate parents and the bureaucrat does not need to prove them guilty of anything other than the fact that they apparently do not understand the needs of their child.  Who mentioned Kafka?

Technically, the Swedish system now, after some controversies in the 80s, provides the necessary legal possibilities for parents to appeal against court decisions.  The problem is the term "in the best interest of the child," which also could be named a "general clause without content," as barrister Lennart Hane used to put it.  Hane has, since the early 70s, been the most powerful Swedish defender of parents' legal rights in the juridical practice.  Another is pediatrician Siv Westerberg, who became a lawyer when she recognized how many children were abducted when they visited hospitals for injuries which, in her opinion, in no way could have been caused by the parents.  She has been quite successful in the European Commission, and her most well known case is Olsson vs. Sweden which now has reached reference status.  On the other hand, the European Commission and Court are under strong pressure from child protection lobbyists and there are already signs indicating a more "Swedish" attitude.

The Swedish social law thus provides endless possibilities for abducting children from their homes, not only because of the quality of the home or child neglect or abuse, but also because some "expert" (they are all trained in a school system based on a psychodynamic view) declares there could be some non-specified risk for the child's development in the future because of "something in the home or because of the special characteristics of the parents."  These "special characteristics" could, for example, include a too warm and close relationship between family members or a refusal to place the children in the community's day care or school.  Even criticisms against these institutions can easily end up in a tragedy for the family.  Such subjective reasons are, contrary to other countries, the most common ones in Sweden.

Actions severing family bonds takes the form not only of taking children into the custody of the state, but also, which worried Pleijel (1993) above, of marginalizing parenthood by an increasing amount of aggressive interventions by the social state in matters of rearing.  What has been forgotten in legalization of these efforts "in the best interest of the child," is the child's right to continuity with regard to its family and relatives.  The legal transformation of the Nordic child from belonging to its family and relatives to a position as an "independent legal subject" without any legal support to secure its right to belong to where it comes from, is as far you can get from ethnic religiosity.  Kinship is thus unknown to the present day Swedish law.  This fact, however, is unknown to most of the people in the world.
 

Social-Democratic Party Reforms and Kinship Bonds

The builder of the "People's Home" in Sweden has been the social-democratic party.  They have ruled this rich and sparsely populated country most of this century.  When they came into power, the Swedes were already to some extent prepared for weaker kinship ties because of the famous partition reform in 1827 which blasted the kinship villages away and populated the country with scattered farms with limited connections with each other.  This process, in turn, opened the way for organizations like Free Churches and the Temperance league, and at a later stage, the socialistic trade unions. Papakostas (1995) has made an interesting comparison regarding the urbanization process in Sweden and Greece.  He shows how the Greeks, without losing their connections to their home villages, moved along kin-routes to the cities while the Swedes moved alone and without possibilities to go back because they had no right to the land.

In the 30s, Swedish social-democrats gave a lot of attention to "social hygiene" and how to take care of children.  Most famous of these was perhaps Alva Myrdal, who later was accused by her son Jan of neglecting him when he was a child.  Though at first hesitantly, Swedish social-democrats also adopted psychoanalytic theory as a major element in their ideology.  For the social-democratic, as well as for the feminist movement, demolishing authoritarian phenomena was important.  These two groups finally met in the family, where the feminists shot the patriarch while the socialists took the children.

The continuing weakening of kinship bonds is now the result of the combined efforts of feminists and centralized social state power.  The Swedish social democrats want to transfer funds to the social state while at the same time reducing child and home aid, but are unwilling to discuss current statistics about poverty in Sweden.  At the same time, the social army of approximately 300,000 workers (in a population of 8.8 million) has never been questioned.  The main reform of social democracy in the last decade has been the escape from the production sector while investing even more actively in the social sector.  This policy is sometimes called the "Carlsson line" (after the Swedish prime minister); it could also be termed "social socialism."

Ingvar Carlsson proudly talks about the future European Union as a "social democratic project."  Social democrats must support employment (especially the traditional type most common in the public sector) and today this is the basis of survival for the social democratic party.  But what are the consequences for the individual?  The Carlsson line seems to lead directly to a future (Brave New World?) in which everyone lives separated from their biological children by employment and public care.  This burning question should at least be discussed before we find ourselves in a no escape situation.

One of the most important Swedish social-democratic ideologists over a long period, Tage Lindblom, concludes in his biography Omprövning ("Reconsideration" 1983) that socialism, instead of giving birth to the new man, ended up as centralized state power with no real democratic relationship between state and people, a manner of ruling not far from dictatorship.  "Paradoxically, free, equal and self-realizing man was destroyed in the system which was built to create him/her."

It is important to recognize the difference between politics where the main effort is to change society, and politics that are conservative and where interest in social political issues is virtually nil.  This is the main problem of the right but the major weapon of the left.  Political parties from the right wing "mutate" to the left in the area of social politics.  This "mutation" occurs mainly with the women in the party.

Citizen salary (negative income tax) on a low level, combined with a system of compulsory health insurance could be the answer to the problematic aspects but has traditionally been avoided in the politics of the right.  In the future, however, it will become necessary to choose between a conformist, socialistic social state and a pluralistic society where no one would be completely without money, health care, and education (Klevius 1992).
 

Foster Care

Most of the foster children in Sweden are transferred to foster homes without any connection to their biological homes.  This tendency has become even stronger lately, despite evidence demonstrating the benefits of foster care by relatives.  Vinnerljung (1993) observes that social workers try to make the system more professional by avoiding placement with relatives.

In a recent and quite remarkable study, Flinn and England (1995) have shown how reduced kinship ties in the rearing environment increases children's stress as measured as cortisol levels.  The results are impressive and support closer and more extensive kinship ties and warn against leaving the child without such ties.  With all respect for the study, I am convinced an Aborigine or a Bushman knew this thousands of years ago.

Thus, as my own observations in Sweden and Finland (which in sociopolitical matters is a straight but slightly delayed copy of Sweden) has indicated, the social state creates its own problems in a way beyond all conceptions of human rights.  It may be noted, for example, that Finnish female officials used to seriously maintain that, "the best thing for children is if we pull them up with their roots and replant them."  Today this statement is offered as a proposed bill to the Finnish parliament.  Another proposal would make it much harder to have children restored to their families (after child protection investigations) than to take them into state custody.  At the same time, there are eight "experts" (social workers, therapists and psychologists) accused in the court of Helsinki for torture and kidnapping of a 5-year-old child (the famous Niko case [Ristoja & Ristoja, 1996]).  It is the first of its kind.

A further proposal in Finland will make it easier for the authorities to isolate pregnant women suspected of living in a way which could be harmful to the unborn child (the formulation does not say "her" child — the child is seen as the property of the state).  In my opinion this can hardly be in accord with the spirit and intention of the European Convention or of the UN Human Rights Convention.
 

Gender Segregation and the Influence of Fathers

The God of Moses was the god (father, ancestor) of a national group based on kinship.  For the Hellenistic Jews in Diaspora, God represented a continuing tradition still emphasizing family and kinship values.  Christianity, with its emphasis on a private God, was a step outside biology.  The development of modern protestant Christianity has been in a direction of even less emphasis on biology.  The French revolution and Saint-Simon, the original father of socialism, can perhaps be seen as the last, logical development on this path.  Progressive Christianity has never been far from socialism, but rather is side by side as Lagerlöf preferred.  The weakening of kinship ties was, however, probably not as big an issue for her as it would be for anthropologists.

Anthropologists of today differ radically from those in the late 19th century and are, in particular, restrictive regarding universalities.  Two topics where this is obvious are gender and kinship.  The main focus in recent years has been on the deconstruction of belief systems supporting family ties, especially if there is a patriarch involved.  According to Collier and Yanagisako (1987), Moore (1994), and other feminist anthropologists, patriarchal dominance is an inseparable socially inherited part of the conventional family system.  Their implicit suggestion of radical surgery does not, however, take into account unwanted secondary effects with segregated or non-segregated sex-worlds.  If oppression is related to gender segregation, then there is a serious problem of intellectual survival facing feminists themselves (Klevius, 1994, in press).

In the preindustrial and industrial society, men's and women's worlds were completely segregated and boys had to be reared by men and girls by women.  Although that need does not exist today, girls are still often reared in a segregated fashion.  This trend is even stronger in the totalitarian social state because of its feminized day care and school.  It should surprise no one that there are even fewer female students in Swedish higher technical education than in most of its competitor countries.  The high proportion of women in the Swedish parliament has no relation to this fact.  On the contrary, it seems plausible to argue that the Swedish system with its few possibilities for pluralism in child raising could give us the answer.

Swedish preschool and elementary school girls are, compared with boys, far from "independent and energetic" as Barrie Thorne (1993) put it, and if they were they would probably be bullied and labeled "tomboyish" and "abnormal."  Thorne, whose observations were not made in Sweden, continues, "Why call a girl a quasi boy just because she likes to dress comfortably, play sports, climb trees, go on adventures, or have boys as companions?"

The feminists, though lacking any kind of generally agreeable theory, emphasize the view of a society contaminated by women-hostile "patriarchal thoughts."  An alternative view, however, would derive from the fact that women and men in most societies have lived in separate (sex-segregated) spheres.  When sex segregation as a consequence of a changing world rather than of feminist efforts is no longer absolute, the male advantage in a technical world becomes more obvious (Klevius, in press).

Kristian Ramstedt (1996), in a study of Swedish students named "Electrical Girls and Mechanical Boys," reported "strong significant differences between classical mechanics, being an area favoring boys, and electricity, being an area favoring girls."  His results are comparable to those of Karin Sandquist (1990, discussed below) and to the above argument regarding sex segregation.  The understanding of mechanics is facilitated by well-developed spatial brain areas (common in average men's brain profile) which in turn could be the product of "boyish" activities in childhood.  In contrast, electricity is almost entirely based on mathematics and it is a well-known fact that girls are more studious than boys.

Agneta Pleijel (1993) observed the apparent weakness in Swedish girls' self-esteem, despite the high number of female workers and feminine influence in day care, preschools and elementary schools.  This is in line with the view above.  With disappearing gender separation, the playroom for girls has widened dramatically.  But how about their possibilities in technical areas?  Most of the girls are raised in intimate contact with the ideals of their mothers.  No wonder they do not always fit so well, especially in technical fields.  Consequently, in Sweden there is much concern over the little interest girls show in technical studies.  Could it have something to do with the high number of single mothers and absent fathers in Sweden, and in how this affects girls?

Educator Karin Sandquist (1990) found that girls who have been raised in intimate contact with or alone with their fathers are more independent as adults and also reach higher educational levels than do other girls.  She reports that fathers stimulated their daughters in the direction of natural sciences while their mothers stimulated them toward studies in the social sciences.  She also found that Swedish fathers, to a higher degree than did American fathers, encouraged their daughters in more masculine" fields.  If they also had a son, the fathers still paid at least the same attention to the success of their daughters.

Given the importance of fathers suggested by this study, it is unfortunate that there are so many absent fathers in Sweden.  Many of them are unsuccessfully struggling for permission to see their daughters.  An unknown number of fathers are in jail for incest they have not committed.  In a Finnish study consisting of 7,000 15- to 16-year-old children, the incest (sexual abuse at home) figures for girls raised by their biological parents was less than .15 % while the figures for girls living with step-fathers or in completely non-biological environments, were 15 to 30 times higher (Sariola, 1990).
 

Exporting the Nordic Child Protection Model

The Nordic model, with its high degree of public organization of social and individual life, is being exported through such channels as the UN Child Convention, the European Union, and various women's organizations.  Most of this is done under the flag of child protection, and criticism of it is seen as a backlash against those praiseworthy efforts.  Unfortunately, child protection defenders outside of the Nordic countries have not understood the attack on kinship ties that is part of the non-pluralistic, centralized, family-hostile Nordic social state model.  Is this because of the feminist rhetoric that accompanies discussion of the issues?

The Swedish child protection model's export success is illustrated by a news report from Russia, where a healthy, well-groomed social worker dressed in an expensive fur coat had removed the children from the astonished, crying parents, who were living in a poor, shabby, but functional household.  Abducted children are then often put into prison-like orphanages whereupon the social worker may add some more saved children" to her career.

We must ask whether there is satisfactory protection for children against the social authorities' arbitrariness and whether it is good for children that their families and relatives are, according to these authorities, suspect and of little importance to the children's welfare.  Who wants, in the future, to have children if they belong to the state?

The world record for taking children into the custody of the state away from their relatives was set during World War II.  This movement was initiated by the wife of a Swedish minister with connections to the Save the Children organization and ended up with more than 60,000 Finnish children placed into foster homes and institutions around Sweden.  Although the Finns initially refused to send children, the Finnish social democrats eventually agreed and even started a campaign to support the eager efforts of the Swedish child protection women.  Few, if any, of these children were without care at home, but the Swedish invitation and the inducements they were offered were hard for many parents to resist.  Today most of them regret what happened.
 

Individual Rights and Child Protection

The main characteristic of a Utopia is the absence of individual rights.  The combination of reformist eagerness and total ignorance of individual rights can make a social democratic party the most dangerous force in the modern social world, not least because so many women give their votes to it.  The situation resembles that of the German National Socialistic Party in the 1930s except for the fact that now the evil comes through democracy, while nationalism is blamed.

People labeled "unworthy of living" in Nazi Germany were, in fact, to a large extent identified and picked up by female social workers.  At the same time and in the following decades, Sweden ran an "eugenic institution" and interest focused on sterilizing people who were not considered fit to be members in "the people's home of Sweden."  Many women died as a consequence of this "hygienic" treatment (Broberg & Tyden, 1991).

Claudia Koonz (1988) describes the goal of Nazi Germany in Mothers in FatherLand as " ... a society where men and women live in different worlds and the citizens' bodies first of all belong to the state."  Koonz also points out that the Nazi women expected increased influence in ''women's areas'' such as social welfare, education, and reproduction.  It was quite shocking for them when they finally understood that the family had no importance except for the nation and the purity of the race.

The rule appears to be that the stronger the social state, the weaker are families.  In the women's congress in Peking, one of the few results was a statement regarding strengthened rights for children against their parents.  This was initiated by Swedish socialists.

Most people believe, in sharp contrast to the reality, that Nordic child protection is concerned about cases involving badly abused and mistreated children.  But, according to a large research project recently carried out in Finland, proportionally few badly abused and mistreated children are in biological families; most are living away from their families (Sariola, 1990).

Pippi Longstocking, the world famous fighter against the child protector "Pruseluskan," was originally published by her creator, the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, in 1945, the same year Karl Popper's The Free Society and its Enemies became available.  Both books defend freedom.  In the case of Pippi, freedom is upheld against the social state as well as against a limited "girls' world."  It is worth mentioning that Astrid Lindgren, the pride of Sweden, had to escape from her country in 1926 because she was a single, poor, pregnant woman and then gave birth to her first child in Denmark.  The first general child protection law had actually been ratified in Sweden in 1924.  This historical law, three years after women's suffrage in Sweden, was a creation of the same group of mostly socialistic women who had set up the "Save the Children" organization a few years earlier.  The Swedish "Save the Children" was also a major force behind the UN Convention of Children's Rights and has been, perhaps not illogically, an too overeager supporter of the sexual abuse hysteria in Sweden (now confirmed in public by their own representative).  They have, for example, joined with a public educational institution for social workers to invite the notorious psychiatrist Tilman Furniss to lecture in Sweden.

The system now functions in a way not totally unknown for previous Soviet-bureaucrats.  The Soviet Union, which actually clearly worried Popper, has now fallen, while the Swedish "pruseluska" (child welfare officer) who was always chasing Pippi, has grown even stronger as has the social state which feeds her.
 

Long-term Effects of Adoption and Foster Placement

Most of the limited research regarding adopted and foster children and their success as adults shows negative trends and in no way justifies continuing the placements, except when there is no relative available to care for the child.  With few exceptions, biological ties between children and those who raise them are a clear winner in the long run.  Adoption is undoubtedly superior to foster families or an institutional environment, but even the best adoptive families (if not biologically related), selected from the upper middle class, are statistically outdistanced (Bohman, 1979) by poor, unemployed, uneducated, single, biological mothers when it comes to crime and drug abuse among their children at young adult age.  Though children of such disadvantaged single mothers are overrepresented among teenage criminals, they are not as adults.  Kin support is crucial and provides significant long-term benefits (Flinn & England, 1995).

The effort that has been devoted to proving adoption to be a positive measure is aptly illustrated by the Finnish psychiatrist Pekka Tienari and his lifelong longitudinal study of Finnish adoptive families.  In a paper published in 1994 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Tienari tries to convince the reader of the positive effects resulting from a good environment, on children adopted away from schizophrenic biological mothers.  But readers should check this article.  I cannot find evidence in it to support Tienari's proposition.  On the contrary, it leads to a number of questions regarding the methods used by the research team, such as the weighing of the outcome of an interview with a tool called OPAS, constructed by the interviewers themselves and the validity of the records of "congruence between the interviewer's and the interviewed family's view of the family."  In my opinion, their OPAS sounds dangerously like a suitable tool to prove just about anything.  Tienari, as many other Nordic psychiatrists, seems to have been trapped for life in the visions of R. D. Laing in the 60s.
 

The Trading of Children

Professor in jurisprudence Jacob Sundberg, who has defended human rights against the Swedish system for decades, became a serious dissident on the University of Stockholm in the late eighties (the ius docendi affair).  His efforts and the incorporating of Sweden in the European Union have forced the Swedish juridical system to pay attention to what earlier was called the "strange thoughts of Catholic reactionaries from the south."  But the Swedish strategy now seems to be an attempt to avoid these "strange thoughts" by lobbying their own.

Today, the social state, more or less, runs its own race with little dependence on political parties.  The legal actions against children are largely subjective; there are relatively few drug abusers, alcoholics, and clearly mentally disturbed persons among the parents.  This trading of children has expanded beyond all imaginable limits, and today constitutes one of the heaviest costs of the municipalities in Sweden.  Thus, the proportion of foster children in Sweden is 6 to 12 times higher than in Japan, a welfare state where, according to UN statistics, the quality of children's lives is valued more highly than anywhere else in the world.  It hardly needs mentioning that Japan is the oldest and most family-centered high-developed country in the world.

In fact, the interventions by social authorities has been roughly proportional to juvenile delinquency.  In Japan, child criminality is still on a very low level whereas the Swedish figures may be among the highest in the world.  We are hampered in a realistic assessment about this, however, since such cases are transferred to the social authorities, out of reach for gathering statistics and international police agreements.

For parents, the natural reason for having day care available for children is the possibility of having a job.  But the social state has two quite different motives.  First, they want to provide jobs connected to the day care system.  Second, they want to extend day care because it is an excellent tool for "observing" the family.  This day care function most likely produces many mistaken wrong child abuse accusations since it provides endless possibilities for misunderstandings.  The abuse accusations produce even more jobs for the social sector.  Behind the pleasant front of the typical Nordic day care center, parents can perhaps sometimes imagine a monstrous will to "take care" of their children around the clock and forever.

In Sweden, the authorities are also eager to take into custody children from refugee families.  They now want to change the domestic (LVU) law so that if the family does not get permission to stay, the parents have to go back without their children.  In doing this they refer to the UN convention of children's rights.

As a consequence of the considerable fees paid for foster children, there has been a growing tendency in Sweden to establish commercial "orphanages" and to order clients to them through connections among the bureaucrats.  Sometimes, the bureaucrat functions as a partner in the orphanage business.

The social authorities in the Nordic countries maintain that whatever measure they take "is in the best interest of the child" and that this supersedes all other rules, policies or court rulings.  Even if parents should somehow manage to get a court order to have their child returned to them, nothing can stop the social bureaucrats from preventing them from visiting their child or from taking the child into immediate custody again.  A mother, going to the psychiatric hospital where her child was locked in and showing the staff her court order, was pushed down and injected with a heavy sedative "to prevent an incipient psychosis from breaking out."  Her child was then sent, in something resembling a transport of convicted prisoners, to a secret address.  Electrical fences, locked doors and fees from 12,000 to more than 100,000, Sw. Cr. per month (compared with the Swedish family allowance of 700, Sw. Cr. per month) are common in these kinds of places (family homes in the lower end of this scale and treatment homes, which sometimes do not differ that much, in the upper).
 

Conclusions

After such a clean sweep, what is left on the dining table to eat?  There is not actually very much that presents itself in the way of alternatives to a rigid, biological, fundamentalist society.  Some sort of protection, however, is needed for the free, atomized souls inhabiting society, motherless and with limited or, in practice, nonexisting kinship ties.

A rule of law based on human rights is clearly needed, but these rights must be formulated in such a way that they provide a real bulwark against the very real enemy threat — the social state.  Individuals have to be protected by the rights of the individual, in sharp contrast to the collective (society's) rights of the socialistic ideology.  Pluralism versus centralized state power.

In conclusion, I should like to quote a hesitant Swedish feminist, Maud Edwards (1983): "But can women trust the state to take care of their interests?  And will a society ruled and regulated by the state, with poor possibilities of private life, benefit women?"  This, I argue, is a relevant question for women, men, and children all around the world.  Though it is a rare one, the book I should dearly like to read, part II of Selma Lagerlöf's "The Miracles of Antichrist" is even rarer because she never came to write it.  My guess is that its name might have been "Angels of Antichrist."
 

References

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