Italian court gives ‘off-grid’ Australian mother more access to three children

London: An Italian court has granted an Australian mother a chance to rejoin her three children after they were removed from the family’s rustic home last November over health fears.

The decision allows Catherine Birmingham and her British partner, Nathan Trevallion, to gain access to their children in a gradual process under the supervision of social services staff.

But the ruling by the Juvenile Court in L’Aquila, in central Italy east of Rome, will keep the children in a residential care facility until authorities believe it is safe to reunite the family in their own home.

Birmingham told the Nine Network earlier this year that the Italian authorities had been wrong to remove the children, declaring she would keep fighting to take them home.

“What I’m fighting is the very, very, very ignorant belief that what we have done to our children was wrong,” Birmingham said.

The couple were raising the children, an eight-year-old girl and two six-year-old twin boys, in woods near the town of Palmoli in the central region of Abruzzo.

The Italian social services expressed concern at the fact that the off-grid home had no toilet, no electricity and no running water. They also claimed the children were kept isolated and were not being properly homeschooled.

The removal of the children made headlines in November as Italian politicians and observers debated whether the “family in the woods” should be allowed to continue their off-grid lifestyle.

On Tuesday, the Juvenile Court ‌approved a staged process under the supervision of social services that could ultimately allow the children to leave residential care.

“The ruling partially revises previous court decisions and sets out ​a gradual reunification process, allowing the children to return home for daytime visits immediately ​and, from October, for weekend overnight stays with their family,” said lawyer Simone Pillon, who acts for the family.

The children were taken into care in November after being poisoned by mushrooms, something the parents described as an accident.

Birmingham was allowed to stay in the residential care facility, seeing the children for set periods, until a court ruled in March that she should be removed because of tensions with the staff.

In April, the family lost a claim in the Juvenile Court seeking to regain access to the children.

The latest decision requires social services to ​assess the children’s reintegration with their parents before any permanent reunification can take place.

Pillon said the family planned an ‌appeal to pursue a faster, more complete process to reunite the family.

Court documents reported by the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program in March declared the home was a “dilapidated ruin” without utilities and that there was a lack of essential care for the children, who had no paediatrician and were not attending school.

The couple argued, however, that they were practising “parental education” without a curriculum and drawing inspiration from the Steiner system to encourage creativity.

“They know how to sew, they know how to knit, they know how to chop wood, they know how to grow plants from seed,” Birmingham told 60 Minutes. (The Nine Network is the publisher of this masthead.)

“They’re learning other life skills that every child that sits there playing with the toys is not learning.”

While the home did not have an indoor bathroom, it had an outdoor compost toilet and a tub for washing.

“The base philosophy behind it for us is that the children are growing up in this environment where they have freedom with a boundary,” Birmingham told the program in March.

Trevallion said: “You wake up in the morning and do whatever you feel like doing. We don’t have to run out the door to take the children to school. It’s just a very relaxed way of waking up, eating breakfast together as a family and continuing through the day.”

With Reuters

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