They sound like a chilling legacy from the bad old days of the Soviet Union — secret courts that have taken thousands of children from their families and put them into foster homes or farmed them out for adoption.

There can be no appeal nor legal redress for most traumatised families. Lone judges, sitting without a jury, sever loved ones from each other on the word of omniscient medical “experts”. Any parent foolhardy enough to protest to the press risks dire penalties.

Yet this is the Kafkaesque nature of family courts in England and Wales — an iceberg of civil litigation that lies submerged beneath a few high-profile criminal cases that hit the headlines. In a blaze of publicity last month, the pharmacist Trupti Patel was found not guilty of murdering her three babies. Earlier this year the solicitor Sally Clark was freed from jail after being wrongly convicted of killing her two baby sons.

Both cases cast doubt on the credibility of Professor Sir Roy Meadow as an expert medical witness — now under investigation by the General Medical Council — but the joyful outcomes partly reflected the high standard of proof required in criminal cases.

By contrast, family courts do not demand that a doctor’s diagnosis of child abuse should be beyond reasonable doubt, but rather on the balance of probability. The courts’ culture of secrecy, sternly policed with the commendable aim of protecting children’s identities, has had the unintended effect of shielding experts’ flawed deductions from public scrutiny or comment. As a result, an unseen and unheard process of winnowing children from their parents is taking place, largely on the say-so of doctors whom they have often never met.

According to Beverley Beech, chairwoman of the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services: “It is, I believe, an underestimate to say hundreds of children have been taken away from their families. It must now run into thousands. I have seen with my own eyes newborn babies seized from their mothers in maternity wards.”

Statistics suggest that each year thousands of families undergo the ordeal of having to prove their innocence against false accusations of child abuse. According to government figures in 1997, there were 160,000 reports of child abuse in England and Wales, of which 120,000 were ruled false. Of the remaining 40,000 cases, 25,000 were put on the “at risk” register, but the number of people pursued through the courts and separated from their children is unknown.

The main instrument of the final processing is the family court. When a child has died, and in other serious cases, a criminal prosecution may be pursued.

William and Michelle Carter (not their real names) lost their four children in 1999 on the sole evidence of Meadow at a family court; the elder two, aged 17 and 14, are in foster care and the younger ones, aged eight and six, have been adopted.

The family’s future was decided at the family division of the High Court in London, the largest branch of the system and the scene of a protest last week by angry parents, many of whom have had children taken from them on Meadow’s evidence.

Most cases are heard in county courts, presided over by specialist district judges. Children, supposedly protected by hearings in camera, do not appear in person but are usually represented by an independent social worker.

The Carters’ nightmare had begun nearly a year earlier, when their youngest daughter, then 16 months old, fell ill and was taken to hospital where she suffered multiple heart attacks and a stroke.

Although she made a full recovery, six months later social services contacted the Carters to say a urine sample taken from the girl had shown traces of a powerful drug. Police dismissed the case after the Carters explained that one of the tablets prescribed to their eldest daughter to stop her wetting the bed must have fallen on the floor and been accidentally swallowed by the infant.