Sweden’s War on Parents

Daniel Samson and his wife, Bianca, are living every parent’s nightmare. Their children have effectively been kidnapped by the Swedish state. 

In December 2022, the Samsons had an argument that is common in practically every family. Their eldest daughter Sara, then aged 11, wanted her parents to buy her make-up and a smartphone. Daniel and Bianca refused, believing that their daughter was still too young to have access to either of these things and knowing that other children at Sara’s school were using their phones to view pornography. Upset and frustrated, Sara told the school that her parents were abusive and that there was violence in the home. In response, Swedish child-protective services swooped in to remove Sara, as well as her sister, 10-year-old Tiana, from the Samsons’ care. 

Naturally, these very serious allegations prompted the police to open an investigation, during which the Samsons agreed that their daughters should be placed in temporary foster care. Two months later, they concluded that there had been no abuse—something that Tiana had maintained from the start, telling authorities that her sister had made up the story. Even Sara herself retracted the accusations. And yet, two years on, Sara and Tiana remain in care, separated both from their parents and from each other. The Swedish authorities have even refused to release the girls into the custody of the foster system in the Samsons’ home country, Romania, to which the family has returned after living in Sweden for almost a decade. 

The toll this separation has taken on the family is unimaginable. Daniel told me that their daughters are regularly sent to different foster families, each one further away than the last. “At one point,” he said, “we would have to travel 1,400 kilometres in a loop just so we can see them.” And, while they are normally allowed just one supervised visit with the girls per month, “there were periods when we didn’t see them for months.” The removal from their family has affected the girls immensely, both physically and mentally, to the point where Sara has even made multiple attempts to take her own life. Both of them repeatedly plead to be reunited with their parents. Worse still, Daniel complained that the social services appear to have very little interest in helping the girls or providing them with support and comfort. After one suicide attempt, he begged social services to let Sara speak with a Romanian priest, a request that was refused. “They would let the children suffer on their own,” Daniel said, “and then they would bombard them with pressure to confess against the parents.” 

A major reason why the Swedish child services are still refusing to release Tiana and Sara to their parents is because they have decided that the Christian Samson family are “religious extremists.” The authorities seem to believe that Daniel and Bianca are forcing their children to go to church, and that the fact the family go to services three times a week is evidence of this supposed extremism. They also point to the fact that the Samsons refused to buy their daughters makeup or a smartphone as further proof of their alleged radicalism. Their religious beliefs, the family was told, were “not compatible with Swedish society.” The girls even had religious materials given to them by their parents confiscated while in care. Apparently, the Biblical audio stories were too violent for the girls to listen to. 

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International believes there is a significant element of anti-Christian discrimination at play here. As such, the ADF is currently supporting the Samsons’ case, serving on their legal team as the couple files a case against Sweden in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). After attempting all other avenues of legal action in Sweden (including being denied a hearing by the Supreme Court earlier this year), they are now hoping that the ECtHR will find that the Swedish authorities have violated their parental rights. 

It should be clear to anyone that none of what the Swedish state has done here is in the best interests of Tiana and Sara. The two girls are desperate to simply go back to their family and try to return to some semblance of a normal life. As Daniel told me, all the disruption has led to their daughters falling behind multiple grade levels in their schoolwork, despite the fact that they were previously good students. And, once the Samsons do finally get their daughters home, it will take years to even make a start on recovering emotionally. Daniel said that the medication Sara is currently taking has left her a shell of her former self. “The way she looks, she’s not looking at you. She’s looking through you. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s destroying us as a family.” 

It’s difficult to see what more the Samsons could have done to prove their suitability as parents. They have cooperated with social services at every step of the way. They successfully completed a parenting course by the social services and were assessed by therapists. They have been cleared by Swedish police of any criminal wrongdoing. Social workers have conducted numerous visits to the family home and have witnessed how the Samsons’ other five children are safe, happy, and loved there. Now, Daniel is desperate to just have his daughters home, telling social workers, “You can come visit us daily. I will even allow you to put cameras in all the corners of the house, but please just let them return home.” 

These days, there may as well be cameras in every family home. Parents are no longer trusted to look after their own children—especially not when they are Christian parents. Increasingly, the idea that parents have some natural right to raise their child and have authority over them is seen as reactionary and dictatorial. Instead, the state sees its role as the ultimate parental figure, delegating that responsibility to nurseries, schools, youth clubs, and even the media. While Christianity as a religion is viewed with suspicion and a possible avenue to child abuse, schools are free—if not encouraged—to teach pupils ideas like transgender ideology and critical race theory as though they were fact. Just recently, we saw that the European Union is pushing to allow kids to identify as whatever gender they please in school, regardless of age or parental consent. 

Curiously, Islam seems to be exempt from the war on parental control. While there have been a few well-publicised cases of the Swedish social services seizing children from Muslim families, these tend to be on the very extreme end of the religious spectrum, where the child in question was clearly in danger—for example, being taken by their parents to an active war zone, or when a minor intends to travel to join ISIS. Children are not, it seems, being removed from the custody of their Muslim parents when girls are forced to cover their hair or are kept isolated from the outside world. So why are Christian families uniquely punished for living out their religious beliefs? 

Daniel and his wife now hope that, by taking their case to the ECtHR and drumming up more publicity, they can raise awareness of what is happening in Sweden—both to them and to other families like theirs. “There are so many families that have been abused,” Daniel said, “families that have lost sons and daughters. … There are tens of thousands of children that have been taken away and tens of billions of euros being spent. They say it’s for the benefit of the children, but in reality, they are destroying entire families, and they don’t care.” 

The Samsons’ case is thoroughly Kafkaesque. The daughters are begging to be sent home. The parents are desperate for them to return. The police have found no evidence of abuse. Romanian politicians have even stepped in to demand that the girls be given back. And yet the Swedish authorities refuse to relinquish their control over this family, who, by all measures of investigation, have done nothing wrong. 

This is, unfortunately, the future that awaits us in Europe. As governments continue to chip away at parental rights and responsibilities, every mother and father will become suspect. All parents will be forced to prove their innocence, and their compliance, in order to keep their children. This is clearly less about protecting children and more about punishing parents.