These children often come through the care system and are brushed off to unsuspecting adoptive parents, who have little or no idea of how this will impact upon their family lives.
The actress had just done a quick change in the wings from one outfit to another, and the hanger had attached itself as she brushed past it on the costume rail.
Mitt Romney brushed aside failure of the supreme court ruling to strike down the Affordable Care Act and vowed to put the repeal of "Obamacare" at the centre of his presidential campaign.
But Riss has brushed aside a co-operative model and no decisions on the paper's future will be taken until September.
Asked about the influence of her husband, Cooper brushed off the question, saying the suffragettes had fought for the right to think differently from their spouses and there were "echoes" of that way of thinking.
It was predictable that last week's House of Lords report on the constitutional implications of a yes vote in the Scottish referendum was brushed aside by David Cameron during his latest Scottish visit and simultaneously trashed by the Scottish nationalists.
The cave walls in this Indigenous protected area were, for generations, effectively artists' blackboards; new paintings would be blithely brushed over others that were thousands of years old, as urgent memories of new stories superseded the ancient.
Land owners were excoriated, the House of Lords demonised and his more timid colleagues brushed aside.
For Ballard, dissection enables psychological as well as physical forensics: "Sitting beside her, I pared back the skin of her shoulder, dividing the muscles and exposing the nerves of her brachial plexus, the strings that had once moved her arms as she caressed her husband, brushed her hair, cradled her child".
With a half-sentence that brushed the United Nations weapons inspectors aside and dismissed the security council for being "completely paralysed", Obama was saying in effect: "We are the empire.
But Heath had much to say on many topics and, as a man whose sleeve had been brushed by Hitler's at a rally in Nuremberg in 1937, he brought increasingly unique insights to the task.
