If you look up Hansard, the parliamentary record, you can read the name of a man I wrote about three weeks ago. Prisoner X, whom I called Hugh, was jailed for helping his pregnant wife and her son to flee the country to escape from social workers. An MP has named him in the House of Commons, to express concern at his treatment. But The Times still cannot print his name.

It is a longstanding convention of British law that individuals who are incarcerated should be identified, and the charges against them made known. That is an age-old protection against tyranny. But today the “privacy of the child” trumps every other principle, whether or not the child in question wants his or her privacy protected. In this case it seems very unlikely indeed that the gag on everyone involved serves the interests of anyone except the authorities who put it there.

Prisoner X's mistake, in brief, was to fall in love with a woman who had been unfortunate enough to suffer a violent and volatile first marriage. As a result of the breakdown of that marriage, her young son had been taken into temporary foster care. A court stipulated that the boy should be returned to his mother once she had “sorted her life out” and found them a new home.

But even as she cleared every hurdle, social workers dreamt up new ones. The offers of her own mother and sister, both professionals with good incomes, to foster the boy, were apparently ignored. A psychologist cautioned that the boy was suffering dreadfully in care. One night in September, the boy let himself out of his foster home and ran back to his mother. Prisoner X, now her husband, drove them to Dover and on to Paris.

Many people would call this an act of love, a mercy mission. But this man is now serving 16 months in jail. Child abduction is undoubtedly a serious crime. But this was a strange kind of abduction. At the hearing it was made clear that the boy had packed his own suitcase, set his alarm clock for 4am and run away of his own accord to be reunited with his mother.

Nevertheless, Prisoner X is classified as a violent criminal. He is apparently unlikely to get early release, unlike the 1,730 robbers and 3,484 people convicted of violence against the person, who have been let out since June. Nor can he be put on a tag, because his classification is deemed to make him a risk to the public. But what risk? Surely not that posed by Joseph Booth, the convicted teenage mugger who, it was revealed yesterday, ripped off his electronic tag before murdering an innocent student. The attack was so savage that the victim's family could not recognise his body. Booth had previous convictions for threatening behaviour, assault, battery and robbery.

Prisoner X has never harmed anyone. He is 56 years old and has high blood pressure. Every day that goes by, he risks losing his business and letting down those he employs. Every day that goes by, his health is deteriorating. A friend says that he has aged ten years and gone grey with the worry.

The system is merciless to people who question the system. Charles Roy Taylor, whom I wrote about at Christmas, is in a similar situation. Mr Taylor is a 71-year-old with a heart condition. He was sent to prison for 20 months for being in contact with his stepgrandson, who has been in care since his mother died and who has repeatedly run away to see his grandparents. By breaching an agreement not to answer the door to him, Mr Taylor stands accused of “undermining the care plan”. But he and the boy's grandmother are the teenager's only living relatives. They will presumably be his first port of call when he comes of age and is thrown out of the care system. Mr Taylor may not survive that long: last week he suffered an angina attack that put him in hospital for four days. Is that in the interests of the boy?

Both of these men are under court orders not to talk about their cases. It is likely that these gagging orders will continue after they leave prison, even though they will have “done their time”. Yet they, at least, have had some control over their fates. They must have had some inkling of what they might be letting themselves in for. The boys they were trying to help have never asked to be let in for anything, except it seems for contact with their families.

Both these boys are gagged by the State. We are not entitled to know what they think, nor whether the boy who is now abroad with his mother is happy. We cannot hear from them why each wanted so badly to escape from care. Only social workers may translate their words and determine where their “interests” lie. Yet the two men who are now in jail did not risk going there for nothing. Each seems to have believed that they were saving a boy from something unpleasant. Why? Who are the real victims of this system of “child protection”? It is hard to see what the children gain from the incarceration of men who could be providing stability in their lives.

There are many good reasons why the law seeks to protect the identity of children. The problem comes when the rules are used to protect the identity of the professionals too. This prevents proper scrutiny of cases whose very complexity makes it almost inevitable that some will go wrong. The effect is to place social workers above the law, and innocent people under its thumb.

It is in no one's interests, least of all the children involved, to keep these two men behind bars. If only they could be released, if the system could show some mercy, perhaps we might be able to begin the long process of dismantling the bars that imprison the children too. Behind silence lurks injustice.

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