However shocking this may sound, though, it is already the system which operates in our family courts. Behind a wall of secrecy, they routinely turn all the familiar principles of justice upside down in just this way. Among the dozens of cases I have reported where children are removed from their parents, often for what appear the most absurd reasons, I have been astonished to hear how judges accept extraordinary claims by social workers and lawyers without allowing the parents to challenge them. Hearsay evidence is accepted in a way that would never be allowed in a normal court, and parents are condemned on evidence they are not allowed to see.