Stuart Waiton: Fat family are abuse victims not their well-loved children

Published on Sunday 18 October 2009 21:42

MORE than a year ago The Scotsman reported on a story about the 'fat family' of Dundee, a two-parent family with six obese children, who had been instructed by social services to thin their kids down or have them taken away.

Now after a reported 114,000 spent supporting the family via the Dundee Family Project two of the children have been taken into foster care and the mother, who is pregnant, may also lose this child, once born, because it will be at risk of becoming too fat.

One parent whose children go to the same school as those of the 'fat family' kids was shocked by the news that they had lost their children because they were overweight.

As this mother explained to me, 'They seem to be a really loving family, always walking their children to and from school. The kids are all pretty fat but they seem happy'.

The solicitor representing the case is clearly upset by what has happened and has similarly described a loving family whose hearts have been broken by what has happened.

What is so remarkable about this case is nothing to do with the family or how big or small they are – as this could have happened anywhere in Britain and no doubt will happen again.

No, the remarkable thing is how quickly obesity has been transformed into firstly a social problem and then into an issue of child abuse – literally in the space of a few years.

Very fat kids are rare but are not a new phenomenon but never in the past would we have dreamt of taking them away from a family who love them.

Even the science about the 'risk' of being a fat child, for example a Newcastle-based study of 1,000 families, suggests that obese kids don't necessarily become obese adults.

Other research also suggests that for some children obesity has a genetic component.

The 'obesity as abuse' issue is however not really about science at all. It is an issue that has been politicised within today's obsession with regulating behaviour.

It is a development in the last decade that has led to a situation whereby state and paid professionals increasingly feel that it is their right to tell us how to eat, drink, gamble, smoke and even how to have sex.

Within this climate, private life and especially the activities of parents have been recast within an 'at risk' framework and social workers have to some extent been transformed into risk assessors.

It is also clear that if this family were wealthy this would never have happened.

Indeed the only reason social services found out about them was because the parents asked for some support with one of their daughters who had developmental problems.

Nobody in the community, the school, doctors – or anybody else who had come across the family had ever thought about reporting them for child abuse, quite simply because it is not child abuse.

The danger now is that the remaining children will be taken kicking and screaming from their home and that a child protection team will enter the labour ward as the new child is born and take it away too.

The result – a family destroyed and seven children in some form of care. And yet all the evidence suggests that a life in care is the worst of all possible outcomes for children.

If there is abuse taking place here it is the abuse of state power. The children of the 'fat family' who have been taken away should be returned immediately.

&#149 Dr Stuart Waiton is a sociology lecturer at the University of Abertay Dundee.