Mother branded as abuser for telling daughter of caesarean

Social workers have placed the five-year-old daughter of a professional couple on the child protection register for “emotional abuse” after the mother told the girl she was delivered by caesarean. Other allegations against the mother include cuddling her daughter for too long when dropping her off at nursery.

The intervention by Birmingham social services prompted the mother, Shahnaz Malik, to go into hiding with her daughter, Amaani, for two months, fearing the girl would be taken away.

An alert was put out to all British ports, and police conducted raids on a string of properties in the West Midlands. Two weeks ago police battered down the door of the family’s home in an apartment block in an attempt to find Amaani. She had been moved elsewhere by her mother, but her father, Vijay Bansal, 42, an IT consultant, was later arrested and held in a cell overnight for “obstructing” the search.



Officers also seized Malik’s car, took toothbrushes from the bathroom to analyse for DNA and raided the homes of relatives in the middle of the night, looking for the mother and girl.

“This whole case is madness as there is no reason for the state to be involved in this little girl’s life in this way,” said John Hemming, a Birmingham MP who campaigns against abuses by the family courts.

“The problem is that the system is using massive aggression to deal with the mother’s refusal to respond to a set of frankly silly concerns.”