Independent But Alone? A Story of Discrimination and Ableism within the Icelandic Child Protection System

This contribution presents the co-authored story of a father with intellectual and developmental disabilities who recently had his daughter removed from his care after an extensive fight through the Icelandic court system. Our analysis demonstrates the entrenched ableism that is still found within the child protection system. Furthermore, the insistence that the father needed to reside alone with his child and to demonstrate ‘independence’ as evidence of parenting capacity ignores the interdependent nature of what parenting entails in practice. In turn, this supposed ‘dependency’ was interpreted as a sign of the father’s childlike status, reflecting long-standing cultural stigmas about people with intellectual disabilities. The fact that these forms of discrimination persist within an ostensibly changed human rights environment, informed and supported by the CRPD, suggests that these stories still need to be told and that further work needs to be done to realise the Convention in practice.