Wednesday 26 July @ 4pm International Q&A with Sagarika Chakraborty, the mother whose struggle is told in the inspirational film Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway,plus Suranya Aiyar, lawyer and campaigner who supported her, and film directorAshima Chibber. The film exposes national & international abuse of power by child protection authorities.
The film (available on Netflix) is based on a book by Sagarika Chakraborty, a devastating account of how her two children were taken from her and her husband by social services in Norway and put into foster care, and her three-year struggle to get them back. Suranya Aiyar describes this abuse of power by the state as “a sin against motherhood”.
This is a striking example of what children and their mothers are facing internationally. In the past decades, laws which, in the name of protecting children from abuse, deny the right of children to be raised by their birth families and shattering the bond between mother and child, have been passed in a number of countries – not only the US, UK and other western countries, but India and elsewhere. Their implementation combined with financial interests profiting foster care and forced adoptions have seen a huge increase in the number of children taken from their families.
Sagarika Chakraborty finally won her children back. It’s a great victory for the movement of mothers everywhere that this film has been made and is being shown widely in cinemas across the world and on Netflix. It’s not often that mothers lives and struggles are reflected on the big screen in this way!
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