[Sheila Struthers]

http://www.channel4.com/news/reveale...ocial-services

The families say they are forced to flee because they will not get a fair hearing in the UK in the family courts. They turn to shadowy networks, often based online, and run by other parents, many of whom have already lost their children to the care system.

The scale and sophistication of the networks is extraordinary. We were told of safe houses across the UK where parents and their children could lie low before heading overseas, of fake birth certificates and of keys for rented homes in foreign countries that are exchanged in the middle of the night by strangers connected only by the networks.

As to the numbers involved it is impossible to verify, but we were told by one woman central to several groups that help parents get out of the country, that there has been "anything [from] 300 to 600 families in the past year that have left [the UK] from the involvement of social care".

The most popular destination is the Republic of Ireland, but the networks extend across Europe, Mediterranean countries being the other main destinations for families on the run.

From UK foster care to Cavan

We went to Cavan, a small town in the Republic of Ireland and one of the hubs for the network. There we met a mother who described a meticulously-planned snatch operation to steal her four-year-old son from foster care in the UK. At an organised contact session, she arranged an untraceable car, fake ID papers and even had a wig waiting in the car. "I knew I had to get him and get to the boat straight away. I knew that if I got caught, I would be done for kidnap," she says.

Her son had originally been put into voluntary care after she had a breakdown. She insists she got better but they refused to return him - leaving her, she says, with no choice but to run.

Having made it to Ireland she turned herself in to the authorities in the belief – shared by many in these networks – that she would get a fairer hearing from Irish social services. "They are not idiots over here but it's the way they act [and] work completely differently," she says. "They took him, completed the assessment and decided what was in my son's best interests."

For this mother that decision turned out to be that she could keep her son. Having been helped by the network herself, she in turn began to help others. This is how the networks regenerate themselves and grow.