Author Archives: Sarah Phillimore

Garbage In: Garbage Out? The use of predictive algorithms in decisions about child protection

Machine learning is becoming a methodological substrate for knowledge and action. But machine learning is not ethically neutral. It is skewed by data and obfuscated by nature…

Dan McQuillan ‘People’s Councils for Ethical Machine Learning’

The use of Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and relying on algorithms to determine what children are at risk of harm have been in the news of late. The word ‘algorithm’ is an old word; imported into English from the name of a ninth century mathematician called al-Khwarizmi. Originally it meant simply what is now called the ‘Arabic’ system of numbers (as opposed to Roman numerals’) but later it took on a more particular meaning and is now defined as ‘a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer’.

James Hind describes AI in this way:

It’s the great fashion in recent years that everyone gets into AI, which usually means either they have something that automates a system, or it is a pattern recognition tool that pulls conclusions out of big data fed to a network, which acts on the conclusion….There is an obsession with big data, which always has to be cleaned up by low paid humans in places like India to be useable in a pattern recognition system.  These pattern recognition systems such as neural networks operate according to hundreds and thousands of data points, building up through statistics a model upon which conclusions and decisions are made. These models and processes are so complex that not even the designers know how they come to their conclusions, what is called a black box situation.

A positive case is made for better and more efficient identification of children who are most at need as early as possible. In the context of austerity and reduced spending on services such early identification is necessary in order to prevent harm to children’s development. Early identification could also help children avoid more intensive and intrusive child protection services – the end result of which may be removal from their families. There is also a view that decisions about child protection can be too subjective – it can only be a good thing to have some more ‘objective science’ about such important and often life changing decisions.

But there are many who have voiced serious concerns about the efficacy and assumed benign consequences of using artificial intelligence to determine if children are at risk.

The history of predictive analytics in child protection – Allegheny County

Discussions about child protection have long centred on the debate about what is better – removing children quickly from risk or trying to support families manage better?  This discussion has gradually enlarged to consider how we can best identify families which are most at risk and make sure that increasingly scarce services are targeted effectively.

A ‘predictive analytics algorithm’ is basically a sophisticated kind of pattern recognition, commonly used in credit reports and automated buying and selling in financial markets. Its application to decisions about risk in child protection services is not a ‘new thing’ but its applications to date have been fairly limited.

The social scientists, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, of the University of Southern California, and Rhema Vaithianathan, of Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand were asked to help investigate how predictive analytics could improve the handling of maltreatment allegations in the USA. 

Allegheny County in  the southwest of the U.S. state of Pennsylvania (with a population of 1,225,365 in 2016) experienced a tragic series of children dying after being ‘screened out’ as low risk by human call handlers dealing with telephone referrals about children who the caller worried were being mistreated. In 2016 Allegheny County became the first jurisdiction anywhere in the world to attempt to use a ‘predictive-analytics algorithm’ to try and do a better job of identifying families most in need of intervention.  76,964 allegations of maltreatment made between April 2010 and April 2014 were used as the basis of the algorithm.

What’s the problem?

The New York Times commented that the use of the algorithm appeared to be  having a positive impact on child protection in Allegheny County:

In December, 16 months after the Allegheny Family Screening Tool was first used, Cherna’s team shared preliminary data with me on how the predictive-analytics program was affecting screening decisions. So far, they had found that black and white families were being treated more consistently, based on their risk scores, than they were before the program’s introduction. And the percentage of low-risk cases being recommended for investigation had dropped — from nearly half, in the years before the program began, to around one-third. That meant caseworkers were spending less time investigating well-functioning families, who in turn were not being hassled by an intrusive government agency. At the same time, high-risk calls were being screened in more often. Not by much — just a few percentage points. But in the world of child welfare, that represented progress.

However It is important to note that the algorithm used in Allegheny County was to help to decide who got a home visit –  NOT to make far more intrusive decisions about removing a child.

Follow the money

Another important and positive distinction is that the workings of the algorithm in Allegheny County are public and transparent; the local community are involved and able to ask questions. Dan McQuillan commented in May 2018 about the repercussions of imposing ‘machine based learning’ and possible ways of challenging it via ‘People’s Councils’:

Unconstrained machine learning enables and delimits our knowledge of the world in particular ways: the abstractions and operations of machine learning produce a “view from above” whose consequences for both ethics and legality parallel the dilemmas of drone warfare. The family of machine learning methods is not somehow inherently bad or dangerous, nor does implementing them signal any intent to cause harm. Nevertheless, the machine learning assemblage produces a targeting gaze whose algorithms obfuscate the legality of its judgments, and whose iterations threaten to create both specific injustices and broader states of exception. Given the urgent need to provide some kind of balance before machine learning becomes embedded everywhere, this article proposes people’s councils as a way to contest machinic judgments and reassert openness and discourse.

When matters are not discussed openly and transparently, the concerns increase. As the New York Times commented, secrecy around algorithms marketed and guarded by private profit making firms raise very serious questions:

That’s a chief objection lodged against two Florida companies: Eckerd Connects, a nonprofit, and its for-profit partner, MindShare Technology. Their predictive-analytics package, called Rapid Safety Feedback, is now being used, the companies say, by child-welfare agencies in Connecticut, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Early last month, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services announced that it would stop using the program, for which it had already been billed $366,000 — in part because Eckerd and MindShare refused to reveal details about what goes into their formula, even after the deaths of children whose cases had not been flagged as high risk.

It is very disturbing to read that Hackney rejected a recent FOI request about its screening profile on this basis:

London Borough of Hackney is working with Xantura as a development
partner. Because of this, we believe that it would be damaging to
Xantura’s commercial interests to have the financial details of our
agreement made public. We believe that the public benefit of knowing the
financial details is in this case outweighed by the need to protect their
interests and, by extension, those of Hackney in developing the project.
We therefore exempt this part of your request under Section 43 of the
Freedom of Information Act.

It is not simply concerns about where the money goes. There are serious worries about how data is collected and analysed and what the repercussions could be in taking predictive analytics into fields far beyond simply call screening.

Political scientist and technologist Virginia Eubanks argues that automated decision making has far reaching consequences, particularly for the  poor. Louise Russell-Prywata commented on reviewing Eubanks work:

The story of Indiana’s welfare reform contains all the key elements of an automation bogeyman: an explicit aim to reduce costs and move people off benefits; a whiff of dodginess about the award process for a $1.3 billion contract to privatise a state service; widespread tech failure upon implementation; the inability to effectively hold the corporate contractor to account for this failure; the removal of human connections; and pressure on community services such as food banks to deal with the consequences.

Garbage In: Garbage Out

Emily Keddell and Tony Stanley discussed the concerns about predicative algorithms used by certain local authorities such as Hackney, in an article for Community care in March 2018 

They identify a number of concerns. Some are easy for me to understand. For example, how is consent obtained to use people’s data to inform these systems? There are serious worries about the actual accuracy of such tools and the risks of false positives are high – one tool developed in New Zealand was just 25% accurate at the top decile of risk over five years – meaning there were no findings of actual harm for 75% of those identified by the tool as high risk.

Some concerns however reveal the depth of my ignorance about how such systems work. Which is a worry. If I don’t understand it, how can I – a lawyer often acting for parents – ever hope to challenge it? The authors comment in the following terms:

The source and quality of the predictive variables, the quality of data linkage, the type of statistical methods used, the outcome the algorithm is trained on and the accuracy of the algorithm all require examination.

I think this translates to the famous phrase ‘Garbage In: Garbage out’ i.e. systems that manipulate data to produce likely outcomes, are only as good as the data they are fed. What happens if someone makes a false allegation about you? Is that ‘data’ that will be recorded to inform your future risk? How do you know what ‘data’ is stored about you and how do you challenge it?

The authors comment:

The big problem in an algorithm drawing on administrative data is that it will contain bias relating to poverty and deprivation. Where council housing data is used, for example, those who don’t need council housing will be absent. Those caught up in criminal justice systems and social services of any kind lead to an oversampling of the poor.

Big datasets such as these make some people invisible, while others become super visible, caught in the glare of the many data points that the council or government holds about them. Where such processes occur under the veil of commercial sensitivity, even the most basic of ethical or data checks are difficult to undertake.

Dr Patrick Brown, Associate professor, Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam; editor, Health, Risk and Society commented in a letter to the Guardian on September 19th 2018:

Our own research into child protection notes a weak evidence base for interventions, with social workers falling back on crude assumptions. Stereotypes discriminate against some families and lead to the overlooking of risk in other cases, yet may become entrenched and legitimised when incorporated into technology. Research is needed into whether these technologies enhance decision-making or whether they become uncritically relied on by pressured professionals with burgeoning caseloads. Enticed by software-driven solutions, our overstretched and decentralised child-protection system may lack the capacity for a robust ethical and evidence-based reflection on these technologies.

James Hind puts it this way:

If the reader has coded anything, they will learn that bad code and inputs result in bad outputs.  For example, if I dumped into an AI system voting intentions of a large sample of voters in Clacton UK, and used this to predict how the UK will vote in an overall general election, it might suggest UKIP would form the next government, but when the prediction is tested in real life, UKIP will if they are lucky only have control of the Clacton seat in Parliament. In a rising number of cases it has been discovered that the models built on big data are faulty, biased against certain groups, and are unable to handle unique situations.  People are forced to conform to a narrow set of categories to access services or be on the good side of a statistical artificial computer model that has no relation to reality.

It is a tragedy that for reasons of money, faith in a flawed technology, and a lack of trust of the wisdom and knowledge of human beings with decades of experience in their fields, the AI has replaced the human with tragic consequences for individuals and society.  Families wrongly suffer their children being taken into care, or being imprisoned because the computer judged according to its model this was the right outcome, and nobody can challenge the system data model, because nobody understands how it came to the conclusion.

Conclusion

Even from my brief investigation and reading, there are clearly a number of issues of serious ethical and practical concerns that make it worrying that use of AI to identify children at risk appears to be something that is being enthusiastically touted by senior figures in the social work profession. I was glad to see Professor Lauren Devine of the University of the West of England tweeting today (September 24th) that she is concerned about the use of AI and will commence research funded by the Economic and Research Council in 2019 into the ‘risk of risk’. I will be very interested in her findings.

I will leave the last word to Tina Shaw who also commented in a letter to the Guardian:

Why are cash-strapped councils wasting money on predictive software telling us what we already know? It’s not rocket science. Poverty, addictions, poor health, school exclusions etc, have always been predictors of potential difficulties for children. They should be spending what little money there is on preventive services, Sure Start nurseries, youth clubs and teaching assistants.

EDIT September 26th – further comments

Some interesting discussion followed on Twitter. I have added additional resources to the list of further reading below and note the key concerns raised by those commenting:

  • Sophie Ayres emphasised the issue of legality of sharing information to feed the algorithm without the consent of the data subject: ‘how does a Children Services team have the right to information such as school attendance. Usually at the start of a social work assessment – consent forms are signed by parents to say sw can contact other agencies. If parents to not consent at CIN stage – SW cannot seek info’.
  • Lack of accountability concerned Professor Devine:  ‘also the content of their algorithm? These things are cheap to put together, unaccountable and sold for huge profit’.
  • SocialWhatNow echoed the concern about lack of accountability and wanted to know what the SWs using these systems thought about them: ‘Clarity needed. Some data not used in final models. Problem is it’s all under the radar. Embedded w/out consultation or discussion w/ the public or those who use it. Which leads me to ask, what do the social workers who use these systems think? Where are they?’
  • Dan McQuillan touched on the far reaching consequences of use of AI: ‘that’s symbolic of two other qualities of ai that affect services as well; the fragility of the algorithm and the thoughtlessness it can produce. the systemic effects may not be so obvious but are likely to be more far reaching’

EDIT NOVEMBER 17th 2019

Community Care report that Hackney have abandoned its venture into algorithms after it did ‘not realise the expected benefits’.

Further reading

London councils are using data analytics to predict which children are at risk for neglect and abuse, 18th September 2017 Jack Graham Apolitical

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor, Virginia Eubanks 2018

Can an Algorithm tell when kids are in danger? The New York Times 2nd January 2018

A Child Abuse Prediction Model Fails Poor Families 15th January 2018 Wired

21 Fairness Definitions and their politics 1st March 2018 Arvind Narayanan. Computer scientists and statisticians have devised numerous mathematical criteria to define what it means for a classifier or a model to be fair. The proliferation of these definitions represents an attempt to make technical sense of the complex, shifting social understanding of fairness.

Artificial intelligence in children’s services: the ethical and practical issues Community Care March 29th 2018

People’s Council for Ethical Machine Learning 2nd May 2018 Dan McQuillan

Councils use 377,000 people’s data in efforts to predict child abuse 16th September 2018 The Guardian

Don’t trust algorithms to predict child-abuse risk: Letters to the Guardian 19th September 2018

Government, Big Data and Child Protection 20th September 2018 Researching Reform.

New Algorithms perpetuate old biases in child protection cases Elizabeth Brico 20th September 2018

Documents relating to the Children’s Safeguarding Profiling System – Freedom of Information request made to Hackney – request refused as damaging to commercial interests.

Social Workers and AI 25th September 2018 Jo Fox

HOW FAIR IS AN ALGORITHM? A COMMENT ON THE ALGORITHM ASSESSMENT REPORT 7th December 2018 Emily Keddell

Predictive analytics and the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care — Connecting some dots the old fashioned way 11 February 2019 Social What Now

How do we judge standards of care for children?

I am grateful for this guest post from a parent who wishes to remain anonymous. She is worried about the way parents are judged on their ability to care for their child without being seen in context of the family’s particular circumstances. Why do parents appear to be held to higher standards than professionals, even though the latter are paid? She asks this question to those who work in this system – What kind of legacy will there be in years to come from what is happening here and now in the name of child protection?

Meaning: ‘a level of quality or attainment. Something used as a measure, norm, or model in comparative evaluations’

‘I’ve done the best I can for him. I’ve gotten the most resources I can for him.’ my son’s social worker said to me in what we both understood would be our last conversation together. I believed her and I appreciated her frankness as she went on to explain ‘You should be prepared for at least one crisis before he reaches twenty-one and you will need to be careful about what happens at that point – his package of support may tail off and you will may have a fight on your hands if so.’

She also explained to me that she had a close family member with his profile of strengths and difficulties and I knew she came from a country with a very different cultural approach to working with families to the one we found ourselves in. She was and probably still is, a good social worker working in a very flawed system in a very flawed world.

I thanked her for all her very committed work on my son’s behalf and her kindness and honesty to me.

Should I be able to ask for more?

As it happens the social worker’s predictions were 100% accurate. There was a truly horrible crisis that occurred as a direct result of poor local authority decision-making and yes, ‘his case’ was closed at 21. Good things happened too and I met more good people working in the system. I have to ask though – should I, as a committed parent who went looking for help from services for my son, be able to ask for more for him? Why is it acceptable that a system that sets itself up as ‘rescuing children’ can normalise young ‘rescued’ people experiencing extreme crises and being largely divested of support when they reach 21?

I suspect that Corporate Parenting Principles were articulated in the Children and Social Work Act 2017 in recognition of the low bar of what is and should not be acceptable. I also believe that there are many good people in the system like my son’s then social worker, who will do the best they can for the children and young people in their care and yet in many cases they will fail – corporate parenting principles or not. They will fail because not everything is fixable or the timescales are wrong – what is fixed may come unstuck, what is broken may be mended over time – or for a myriad of other reasons to do with complexity and resources.

…And by contrast

Just ask yourself – What parent who has need of social care help keeping their child safe could say ‘I’ve done the best I can for him’ and not expect to be challenged about why they haven’t ‘done x or y, engaged with a or b, sought help from c or d and tried m or n method of parenting.’ This is a completely different and much higher standard than the one parents can hold professionals to even though professional are paid to deliver, while parents are not.

High standards are good but they are also problematic

High standards are good but they are also problematic if they are based on poor understanding or inability to acknowledge underlying difficulties preventing standards being met. They are also problematic when they give a ‘get out of jail free card’ to one ‘side’ and ‘throw the book ‘at the other. These kind of ‘standards’ are of little value to anyone. Good people will still try and do good things and bad people will still keep doing bad things. Sometimes even good people will do bad things working in bad systems with bad cultures.

What will be the legacy in years to come?

Where the general public are affected by or come up against professionals with a ‘professional’ understanding of abuse and neglect (most often con-joined together as in this very problematic Health and Social Care NICE standard) who are told to suspect that anything that causes a child distress or to ‘malfunction’ could be seen as an indicator of bad parenting or frames every parent without enough material resources as deficient – people question what is happening. As Louise Tickle, a Guardian columnist, noted at the CPConf2018, they are at first confused and then outraged. I know I am and I also know there are risks around that outrage too – risks around professionals doing good work on behalf of abused and severely neglected children becoming thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the public.

My question to professionals who work in this system is one around ‘legacy’ -What kind of legacy will there be in years to come from what is happening here and now in the name of child protection? What will our children’s children judgement be of the standards used that for example ignore context including disastrous welfare policy, particularly affecting the disabled and poor and frame those affected by these policies as ‘abusive and neglectful of their children’? Will the response ‘We tried our best’ be enough?

I very much doubt it. Standards can and are likely to change. I think their question would be ‘How could you have been part of this and not fought against it? How come you saw it happen, knew it was happening and just went about your business as usual? How come you were not part of the solution, only part of the problem’.

#CPConf2018 – putting ‘future emotional harm’ in context

On Saturday 15th September The Transparency Project supported the third Child Protection Conference and Bath Publishing kindly sponsored, thus ensuring those attending had some biscuits and some reading materials. 

I will publish here below my presentation at the conference and will shortly publish a summary of what was said by all the speakers and the audience. As ever, thanks go to those who came to speak and also those who were prepared to listen. In honour of Lady Hale – the one dissenting voice in the Supreme Court in judgement of Re B – I wore her face on my chest for the day. 

The aim of #CPConf2018 was not only to launch The Transparency Project’s Guidance note on the use of experts in family proceedings, but to begin the discussion on what would be needed for a further Guidance Note about how risk assessments are carried out, and how we can best understand them and challenge them if needed. 

 

The Children Act 1989 and the introduction of ‘risk of future emotional harm’.

1. The 1989 Act was born following:
(1) a review by the Law Commission of England and Wales of the private law relating to the guardianship and upbringing of children (culminating in Law Com No 172, [1988] EWLC 172, Review of Child Law: Guardianship and Custody, 1988) and
(2) an interdepartmental review, led by the Department of Health and Social Security, into the public law relating to child care and children’s services (Review of Child Care Law: Report to ministers of an interdepartmental working party, 1985, HMSO).
2. The aim was to replace the existing ‘complicated and incoherent system’ with “a simplified and coherent body of law comprehensible not only to those operating it but also to those affected by its operation” (Second Report, Session 1983-84, Children in Care, HC 360).
3. It was considered to be a benefit to the new legislation that it was prepared to look to the future and protect children against a serious risk that they would suffer future harm, rather than waiting until actual harm had occurred until taking action.
4. However, it is clear we still have serious problems;
(1) identifying emotional harm,
(2) agreeing how serious it is and
(3) assessing the risk of it happening in the future.
5. There is no doubt that ‘emotional harm’ has been found to have really serious impact on children as they grow. Note for e.g. N. Hickey, E. Vizard, E. McCrory et al., Links between juvenile sexually abusive behaviour and emerging severe personality disorder traits in childhood, (Home Office, Department of Health and National Offender Management Service, 2006).
6. However, there are infinite number of variables about people’s behaviour and their reactions to it. We can agree that somethings are generally bad all of the time – for example, hitting or shouting at a child on a day to day basis. But some children grow up ok, possibly due to having other safeguards in place, supportive school or grandparents etc. It is simply not possible to provide a catch all definition of ‘Emotional harm’ and predict with much certainty what impact will be born by each individual child.
7. the concept of emotional harm, let alone future emotional harm, seems to cause a lot of people unease and disquiet. Either they don’t understand it or they think it misused – I suspect both. I recall the French documentary makers of ‘England’s Stolen Children’ were utterly horrified by it, calling it a concept ‘unknown’ to legislation elsewhere.
8. To me this is the crucial point – law must exist to serve the people, not impose shadowy misunderstood and misapplied concepts upon them. Professor Devine and many others make the point that our current system of child protection is seen through a lens of risk which clearly impacts on how social workers will assess the situation before them. There is abundant evidence that the language we use impacts on the way we think about a situation – note the work of Professor Kelly at the Harvard Medical School who experimented with two different descriptions of someone addicted to drugs. One was “substance abuser,” the other described as having “substance use disorder. When testing these phrases with both doctors and the general public, both groups displayed much more punitive attitudes towards to the ‘substance abuser’.
9. I also note that ‘emotional abuse’ of children is NOT currently covered in the criminal law, for example. See Children and Young Person’s Act 1933. There were calls for reform in 2013 stating this law was not fit for purpose as based on historic and outdated understanding – see ‘The criminal law and child neglect, independent analysis and proposals for reform’ Action for Children 2013. But I don’t know what if anything is happening – I suspect not.
10. The amount of care cases involving emotional harm is clearly growing so there is an urgent need to be clear about how it is identified and how we make decisions about how serious it is or could be. NSPCC statistics show neglect cases rising from 17,930 in 2013 to 24,590 in 2017; emotional abuse from 13,640 to 17,280.
11. All of this I hope we can discuss today. I would like to touch briefly on what happened in the Supreme Court decision of Re B in 2013 as this is such an important decision that sets the scene for the current law and practice. Lucy Reed is going to discuss further the lawyer’s perspective about how the current law is operating.

FUTURE EMOTIONAL HARM – the SUPREME COURT PERSPECTIVE

12. Guidance from Re B 2013 UKSC
13. ‘Amelia’ was born in April 2010 and immediately removed from her parents’ care. This case is described by Julie Doughty (rightly) as:
‘A remarkable case where a child is to be adopted although she has not suffered any harm attributable to her parents, both of whom have established and maintained positive contact with her for more than 2 years since she was removed at birth’.
Julie Doughty (2013) Re B (A Child) (Care Order) (2013) UKSC 33, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law
14. The concerns about the parents and particularly the mother were based on their past behaviours. The mother had been involved in a dysfunctional relationship with her domineering step-father who started having sex with her when she was only 15, resulting in 6 abortions and one child, who was also taken into care in 2011. She had several criminal convictions for offences of dishonesty. She had been diagnosed as having somatisation disorder, a psychiatric illness in which the sufferer makes multiple complaints to medical professionals for which no physical explanation can be found. She was found to be a ‘pathological liar’ and continued making serious false allegations against a variety of people even when no longer under the malign influence of her step father.
15. The father had 52 criminal convictions dating from when he was 13 and was very unwilling to co-operate. For example, rather than agreeing to take a drugs test in 2010, he told the LA to ‘kiss my arse’ until eventually agreeing in July 2011 – thus contributing to a year’s delay for decisions about his daughter. (This could not happen now of course – the 26 week timetable would have meant the final care order being made no later than October 2010!).
16. The court decided in 2012 after a 15 day hearing, with evidence from a variety of experts, that Amelia should be adopted. This was on the basis that although Amelia had suffered no actual harm in care of her parents and they had been able to maintain a positive and loving relationship with her over 2 years of supervised contact, if she went to live with them, there was a serious risk that neither parent could create and maintain a safe environment for her as she was growing up.
17. There are obvious worries about this case – any case that gets to the Supreme Court is raising clear and serious issues of general public importance. Although the Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the first judge on the basis that his judgment was ‘long, detailed and careful’, they found the case ‘troubling’ as an example of state intervention regarding a ‘much loved child’ in the subjective area of moral and emotional risk, rather than physical abuse. The famous statement of Hedley J is relevant again; Re L (Care Threshold Conditions) [2007] 1 FLR 2050 para 50
Society must be willing to tolerate very diverse standards of parenting, including the eccentric, the barely adequate and the inconsistent… it is not the provenance of the state to spare children all the consequences of defective parenting’.
18. So the case continued to the Supreme Court. The appeal was dismissed but it is important to note both that this was not unanimous and the dissenting Judge was Lady Hale. She agreed, with some reluctance that threshold was crossed but regretted that the first Judge had not explicitly identified what exactly tipped this case over the threshold. It has to be something of character or significance to justify the compulsory intervention of the state.

This case raises squarely the problem of how should courts assess risks that are ‘conditional’ or unrealised?

19. There is a clear worry here that not enough attention was paid to the impact on the parents of the system itself on what worried the judges most about them – their unwillingness or inability to co-operate with professionals.
20. As Julie Doughty comments, Lady Hale was the only judge to refer to facts that made the parents anxieties about Amelia’s health and their distrust of professionals less irrational. For example, that Ameila was born prematurely at 32 weeks and was initially cared for in intensive care. The parents received no ‘pre proceedings letter’ . The mother in particular had escaped a horrifically abusive relationship with her own step father.
21. Lady Hale did not accept that Amelia being adopted was a ‘proportionate’ response to the risk of harm identified. She was concerned that the most drastic option for a child (closed adoption) was the choice in a case where even the first Judge had not found threshold crossed ‘in the most extreme way’.
22. What is also interesting is that the commentary on this case on the Supreme Court’s own website is critical. I note:
As Lady Hale highlighted in her dissenting opinion, this case brings into stark relief another difficult question. When should the state take away a child, not because physical abuse or neglect is feared, but because the character of the parents is such that they cannot help but be deficient parents? What was remarkable about this case is that, though the parents clearly had significant problems, their care of their daughter was held to be highly satisfactory. As parents, they appeared to be competent; as people, apparently less so.
The decision made here is problematic for two reasons.
Firstly, it is based wholly on future harm. The risks identified may never materialise. Further, it is enough that such harm is “possible”; it need not even be “probable”. It is not a perfect comparison, because the one deals with the past whilst the other deals with the future, but it is worth noting that we do not convict people of crimes unless we are “certain so that we are sure” that they have committed them: in contrast, we will take children away from their parents on the basis of a “real possibility”.
Secondly, even if the harm identified does materialise, is it enough? We have decided as a society that, as a general rule, it is more important for children to be brought up in their own families than to be brought up in “better” families. Does the effect of the parents’ dishonesty and mother’s psychiatric illnesses justify removing Amelia permanently from their care? As Hedley J observed in Re L (Care: Threshold Criteria) [2007] 1 FLR 2050, 2063: “Society must be willing to tolerate very diverse standards of parenting, including the eccentric, the barely adequate and the inconsistent”.

23. I am not confident that one can so neatly make a distinction between who we are as ‘people’ and how we are as ‘parents’ – if we are rude, impatient or violent as ‘people’ we are highly likely to display similar traits when wearing our parent hats. ‘How you do anything is how you do everything’
24. However, if more cases are going to be determined on the basis of a risk of something that hasn’t happened yet, and that something is as potentially nebulous as ‘emotional harm’ then we do need to take more seriously the fact that parents appear to be increasingly alienated and confused by care proceedings. This problem is compounded by the very bad advice I have often seen on line about refusing to co-operate. The likely consequences of that refusal is to increase concerns and escalate the probability of serious action being taken, or pessimism about the parents’ abilities to change. Lucy Reed will look at this problem in more detail.

25. Guidance on threshold from the Supreme Court.

(1) Court’s task is not to secure for every child a happy and fulfilled life but to be satisfied the statutory threshold are crossed
(2) This requires the court to identify as precisely as possible the nature of the harm which the child is suffering or is likely to suffer.
(3) This is particularly important where the child has not yet suffered any, or any significant, harm and where the harm which is feared is the impairment of intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development.
(4) Significant harm is harm which is “considerable, noteworthy or important”. The court should identify why and in what respects the harm is significant.
(5) The harm has to be attributable to a lack, or likely lack, of reasonable parental care, not simply to the characters and personalities of both the child and her parents.
(6) Finally, where harm has not yet been suffered, the court must consider the degree of likelihood that it will be suffered in the future. This will entail considering the degree of likelihood that the parents’ future behaviour will amount to a lack of reasonable parental care. It will also entail considering the relationship between the significance of the harmed feared and the likelihood that it will occur. Simply to state that there is a “risk” is not enough, the harm must be ‘likely’.

Further guidance S & H-S (Children), Re [2018] EWCA Civ 1282 (06 June 2018)

(7) It is good practice to distil findings into one or two short and carefully structured paragraphs which spell out the court’s finding on threshold identifying whether the finding is that the child ‘is suffering’ and/or ‘is likely to suffer’ significant harm, specifying the category of harm and the basic finding(s) as to causation.
(8) When making a finding of harm, it is important to identify whether the finding is of ‘significant harm’ or simply ‘harm’.
(9) A finding that the child ‘has suffered significant harm’ is not a relevant finding for s 31, which looks to the ‘relevant date’ and the need to determine whether the child ‘is suffering’ or ‘is likely to suffer’ significant harm.
(10) Where findings have been made in previous proceedings, a judgment in subsequent proceedings should make reference to any relevant earlier findings and identify which, if any, are specifically relied upon in support of a finding that the threshold criteria are satisfied in the later proceedings as at the ‘relevant date’.
(11) At the conclusion of the hearing, after judgment has been given, there is a duty on counsel for the local authority and for the child, together with the judge, to ensure that any findings as to the threshold criteria are sufficiently clear.
(12) The court order that records the making of a care order should include within it, or have annexed to it, a clear statement of the basis upon which the s 31 threshold criteria have been established.

https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1040841426194636800

If a parent has parental responsibility and no one cares, what remedies do they have?

 

I am very grateful to the mother of Shayla for giving me permission to post this. I shall call the child murdered by Matthew Scully Hicks (MSH) by the name her mother gave to her at birth. It is one of the sad and poignant features of many in this case that at the time of her death Shayla was known by at least four different names, which made it difficult to find relevant records about her short life. Page 15 of the Review notes that ‘at the point of her death it was difficult to get the information about when she had seen medical professionals. This was due in part to a number of different IT systems and that S was known by four different combinations of her birth and adopted name.’

Another more poignant issue is her mother’s belief that, had she been told of Shayla’s injuries when in the care of MSH before the making of the adoption order and when she still had parental responsibility, her baby would still be alive. The mother may or may not be right in that belief. But now, sadly, we shall never know. 

What rights do parents have to know their child has been hurt? Even if the parent isn’t caring for their child? Even if there is no chance the parent ever will?

In brief, S was injured on several occasions in the care of MSH before the adoption order was made. Shortly after the adoption order was made he assaulted her again and this time she died. The mother was never told about any of these injuries despite retaining parental responsibility until it was extinguished by the making of an adoption order. She remains of the belief that had she known, there would have been something she could have done to stop her daughter’s death.

Other parents have told me online, and in person, that the same thing has happened to them. That their children suffered sometimes really serious injuries whilst in foster care but they were never told. Just what is going on here? Why is parental responsibility apparently so carelessly ignored when children are looked after? The clue is found in the Review at page 15:

the child while still legally a child looked after, was considered an adopted child and so this shaped the way professionals shared information.’

I suspect what we are seeing here is the logical conclusion of the mantra that ‘adoption is best’ and that ‘children need to be rescued’.  If a child is seen entirely in isolation from his or her parents, if those parents are seen as unsuitable or undesirable then it is hardly surprising that their legal rights are not seen as something worthy of much attention. But this is wrong. It hurts both parents and children.

Even if parents cannot care for their children, by reason of circumstances within or without their control, it is rare to find a parent who doesn’t care about them, who doesn’t have knowledge about their child. Even the very ‘worst’ ‘monster parent’ still has something to offer, even if it is only some sense of identity or history.

I do not think what appears to be widespread negation of parental responsibility when children are looked after is acceptable and it says profoundly ugly things about our society.

 

The review of Shayla’s death.

The only written document I have seen relating to these proceedings is the Extended Child Practice Review C&V CPR 04/2016 (‘the Review’) which was commissioned by the Cardiff and Vale of Glamorgan Regional Safeguarding Board on the recommendation of the Child and Adult Practice Review Subgroup in accordance with the Social Services and Well Being (Wales) Act 2014 Part 7.

What happened between September 2014 and S’s death in 2016.

At page 4 the Review sets out what it is has done and who has been seen in order to complete the work. I note that both the mother and the maternal grandmother were interviewed and the Review explicitly recognises how difficult and emotional it has been for both.

S was placed in foster care in November 2014. A care and placement order were made in May 2015 and S was placed with MSH and his husband in September 2015. The adoption order was made in May 2016 and she died shortly afterwards. MSH was convicted of her murder in November 2017.

The Review sets out the care planning for S at page 6 and concludes it was appropriate; all the evidence suggested that adoption would be in S’s best interests.

MSH and his husband were first approved as adoptive parents in August 2013 and had their first child placed with them in October 2013. The first child was adopted by them in April 2014. They were assessed again in February 2015 and approved in July 2015. In September 2015 the Agency Decision Maker approved the match between S and the adoptive parents and she moved to live with them.

The Review sets out at page 7 that they had access to key documents about this assessment process and considered it was ‘robust, detailed and comprehensive’. All the evidence suggested this would be a positive outcome for the child. There is no mention here of any member of the assessment process or any social worker being related to MSH’s husband. If this is true, I would expect comment.

The Review then considers S’s placement with the adopters. In November 2015 she is taken to the GP by one parent, it is not clear which (reference is made to ‘dad’ or ‘father’ rather than ‘primary carer’ which would have clearly identified MSH) and found to have a fracture to the bone at the end of her left leg. However she is seen only by a Registrar who was not overseen by a consultant; in fact she had two fractures of two different bones in her left leg and this was not discovered until after her death. The doctors, unaware of the second fracture, find the parents’ description of what happened to fit with the injuries found and a cast was put on S’s leg.

In December 2015 MSH texts the Adoption SW to say S has a large bruise on her forehead. The Adoption Review makes no reference to that bruise. Five days later a health professional notes (presumably) another bruise to her forehead and eye. The health professional does not tell anyone else.

In March 2016 MSH telephones 999 to say S has fallen though the stair gate at the top of the stairs, does not lose consciousness but vomits. S goes to hospital for 4 days. Medical professionals accept MSH’s explanation. S is then seen by a GP for a ‘unilateral squint’. A referral is made but she dies before this can take place.

In May 2016 S is seen by consultant neonatologist for routine follow up and no concerns identified. Later than month MSH calls 999 to say S is limp, floppy and unresponsive. He gives different explanations about what happened. S never regains consciousness and died in hospital with bleeding on her brain. The police arrest MSH.

The Review does identify some serious flaws in these procedures:
a. The bruise(s) to S was not recorded and not considered at the Adoption Review
b. S was not taken to the GP until 5 days after the ‘accident’ that led to the fracture of her left leg and in fact a second fracture to the top of her left leg was identified after she died. It was considered highly unlikely for any child to break two separate bones in one accident and had the second fracture been found at the time, ‘concerns would have undoubtedly been raised and child protection procedures instigated’.

The Review notes that immediate organisational changes were made.. I note at page 15 the Review comments ‘the child while still legally a child looked after, was considered an adopted child and so this shaped the way professionals shared information.’

The Review comments on the mother’s views in the following terms:

The Birth Mother shared her concern that it was several months before she was informed of her child’s death. She indicated that she would have preferred to have been informed of her child’s death by somebody that was known to her. Following being informed, she felt she received information from several sources in an ad hoc fashion. Understandably the emotional impact of the child’s death on the birth family has been very significant.’

However the Review does not appear to make any substantive comment on these issues and how they could be dealt with better in the future. I would have liked to see at least some discussion of that.

At page 12 the Review identifies what they have learned from S’s death. A key point appears to be that although MSH, his husband and some of the extended family knew that MSH was under stress caring for two children, this information wasn’t shared with any professionals and only became clear in the criminal proceedings. The Review notes that ‘the overall presentation to the agencies was one of a happy and united family’.

It is clear that MSH was viewed through a ‘positive’ lens and there was nothing throughout the adoption assessment process that could have indicated MSH would injure and kill S. However, as the Review concedes, this ‘positive lens’ led to a minimisation of concerns about S’s injuries, 2 incidences of delay in getting medical treatment to her and MSH informing the HV he had sought GP advice about a bruise when he had not. The Review comments that ‘… with the benefit of hindsight, the monitoring and review of children placed for adoption can be strengthened by ensuring that safeguarding responsibilities are given due emphasis’.

The mother would have liked to have been part of that process to ensure that S was safe. But she was never given any opportunity.

The ‘Key Learning’ identified is set out at pages 14-15 – no discussion of failure to provide information to those who hold PR

  • When children are seen at hospital, Paediatricians are key professionals in recognising the possibility of injuries being caused deliberately
  • Professional judgements should be based upon consideration of all the evidence available rather than individual events
  • Professionals need to ensure the details of a child’s injuries are recorded as significant events.
  • Each agency has a professional responsibility to ensure that they are aware of all the significant events in a child’s life. – no one agency or worker held all the relevant information about S.
  • Adoption reviews should provide opportunities for robust professional scrutiny and challenge – a holistic understanding of the child’s story was not gained
  • The recording and retention of information received via text and other messaging services are an increasingly important source of information.
  • Learning after S’s death – this was made more difficult by the fact that it was difficult to gather all the relevant information due to different IT systems in use and S being known by up to four different names.

 

I note again a failure to refer to the lack of provision of information to those who have PR.

The overall conclusion of the Review is that some systems and practices should be improved but that there was no information during the assessment stages of the parents that could or would have predicted what happened to this child.

This is true but rather skates over the concerns in the body of the Review that the significance of some of this information was missed; either because it was unknown (the second fracture) or because it was not seen in its proper context – serious bruising and delays in taking S to the GP for example. The reason for this is given as that the adoptive parents would inevitably be seen through a positive lens, as adoption is inevitably seen as a positive thing for a child. Thus as the Review concedes there was a ‘lack of professional curiosity’ regarding S’s experiences.

I am concerned about this.  There were two categories of information that were not given to the mother.
a. information that S had been injured and suffered a fractured leg in the care of the adoptive parents prior to the making of an adoption order and while the mother still had parental responsibility (PR).
b. Information about S’s death which occurred after the making of the adoption order, thus extinguishing the mother’s PR.

Information withheld while the mother had PR

The mother was never told about her daughter’s injuries. The failure to inform her was a breach of her continuing Article 8 rights as a holder of parental responsibility. The local authority may argue that this breach would be seen as proportionate and lawful given regulation 45 of the Adoption Agency Regulations 2005, which disapplies section 22 of the Children Act 1989 and thus removes the local authority’s duties to ascertain the wishes and feelings of the parent and take them into account when coming to any decision about the child who is subject to a placement order. However, asking about wishes and feelings is not the same as providing information.

I do have to accept that it is likely that even if the mother had been told about S’s fractured leg, I do not think this would have made any difference to the LA approach as the significance of that injury was that there were in fact two fractures and the second was not found until after S died. I can speculate that if the mother had been told about the bruising and raised complaint, this might have pushed the various agencies into looking more closely at the overall picture painted by the bruising and late presentation to the GP. However, I suspect that absent any information that MSH was struggling to cope – which was not shared by MSH or his husband with any agency – that the mother’s intervention would have made little difference as there was no evidence before the LA to challenged the ‘positive lens’ though which the adoptive family were seen.

However, whether or not the mother could have ‘done’ anything with the information, I do not think is the relevant point here. She still had PR. She should have been told. Parents in this situation should have a remedy pursuant to the Human Rights Act for ‘just satisfaction’.

Is Article 8 ECHR extinguished after adoption? I don’t think so

After S’s adoption, the convention wisdom of the family courts is that all Article 8 rights fall away and thus the mother was no longer seen as anyone with any relevant interest in S’s life or death. This may be the current view of the courts –see Seddon v Oldham MBC (Adoption Human Rights) [2015] EWHC 2609 (Fam) but in my view it is based on a misunderstanding of what is actually protected by Article 8 – protection of family and private life encompasses protection of psychological integrity.

A sound mental state is an important factor for the possibility to enjoy the right to private life (Bensaid v UK para 47). Measures which affect the physical integrity or mental health have to reach a certain degree of severity to qualify as an interference with the right to private life under Article 8 (Ben-said v UK, para 46).

I imagine that the mother’s distress arising out the circumstances of her daughter’s death and the failure of other agencies to provide her with any timely information, would bring this case into the necessary degree of severity of harm.  An adoption order did not change the fact that S was the mother’s daughter and at some point in the future, had she lived, may have sought her out. The pull of biology is recognised as strong and important for most and is reflected in such initiatives as life story work and the Adoption Contact Register.

If the law does says that the mother had no right to learn of her daughter’s death because an adoption order ‘wiped out’ her Article 8 rights, then in my view the law is wrong and should be challenged.

It is my very firm view that no law should be permitted to stand that is capable of imposing such a cruel situation upon any parent, no matter their previous failings and no matter that their child has been adopted. I suspect the problem here is what was identified by the Review at page 15:  ‘the child while still legally a child looked after, was considered an adopted child and so this shaped the way professionals shared information.’

 

Shame

Thank you for this post to a parent who wishes to remain anonymous.

“I will be back on Monday, you see, I just need a loan to get a van on the road” I happened to be a spectator as a man vented his rage . I gathered that he had been ordered to attend a basic skills course as part of the jumping hoops that goes hand in hand with claiming job seekers allowance.

At one time I would have just dismissed this man as bad tempered and full of pride. Today I recognise the primary driver of his rage as shame. In part of his diatribe he announced he was a time served painter and decorator, he had plenty of work just waiting for him.

Shame is the brother of guilt and the two are often confused. Put simply guilt tells us that we have done something bad whereas shame informs us that we are bad. Guilt can be a positive emotion, it regulates our behaviour. Shame tends to escalate behaviour, rage, irrationality, increase of mental health problems, even suicidal thoughts can all arise out of shame.

We are all guilty of using shame to control others, it increases our power and diminishes theirs. It is also a useful short cut when we are lacking time or stressed ourselves. It is wrong though. Shame eats away at pride, self esteem and dignity of the victim. It isolates and makes any chance of a fruitful relationship almost impossible.

So back to our decorator, the trainer was a woman in her thirties, he was certainly nearer sixty. Of the generation when a school leaver could finish school without any formal qualifications on a Friday and walk into an apprenticeship on a Monday. He  was now being faced with having his literacy and maths  assessed after years of employment, he would have felt humilated. It was not the trainer’s fault, but nevertheless he reacted out of shame.

The Care Crisis Review https://childprotectionresource.online/care-crisis-review/identified a culture of blame and shame within child protection. Shame is dishonouring, it tells a person that they are less than, not good enough, it shatters  self esteem and sets up a cycle of conflict.

It can be intentional, just as matter of unfortunate circumstances or it can be intentionally built into a system. I would suggest that  in some Government schemes such as benefit sanctions shame is embedded into system. I can also see that within the child protection system ,children can exhibit shame based behaviours after intervention and family members certainly do.

Certainly some shaming is deliberate, it is one of the prime tools of bullying, as it gives power . When used personally , it is also a sign of immaturity, small children use it to regulate each others behaviour. Shaming is also widely used in social media, probably more so than in “real life”.

Families often come into child protection because of problems of domestic violence, addiction or mental health impairments; all of which are to some extent shame based. Domestic violence certainly can be fuelled by shame, a perpetrators  need to control and shame their victim may arise out of their own feelings of inadequacy. The victim in turn, feels too ashamed to get help. Addiction and mental illness, which are often intertwined can often be traced back to childhood trauma, sometimes inter generational trauma, which is shame based.

Those of us who live with shame on a daily basis learn the shame game, we react rather than act. Interventions in our lives our perceived as personal threats whether they are or not and we defend ourselves, by shaming back and/ or avoidance.  In other words the classic fight or flight response. Parents aggressively  shame social workers and judges on social media and withdraw from working with professionals. There seems to be too much at stake as any intervention seems targeted at undermining the very person we perceive ourselves to be, making us feel small.

It’s ugly. What encourages me though it is certainly no more gross than the apartheid in South Africa which came peacefully to an end through reconciliation. To some extent , the regular contributors on this forum have demonstrated this willingness to listen and respect each others viewpoint and it has worked , we have found common ground despite our diverse backgrounds. We have said ” I hear you” , even if I don’t like what you do I will see you as a human being with something valuable to contribute to the debate. Not always, but for a very good percentage of the time.

As I  said, it happened in South Africa, it was not about forgiveness, though that sometimes was the outcome, it was about having space and safety to have the injured parties story told. If you think I have gone off on a tangent , I haven’t; people were imprisoned , killed and segregated for being non white. They were shamed for being born the wrong colour. As Helen Sparkles says parents are mainly sad not bad, they may have been brought up in care themselves or have a combination of the problems already mentioned. They can be shamed through the system, for a variety of reasons, some of which relate to lack of resources. I am not saying they are all victims , but some are. The power imbalance is enormous and shaming is related to power.

When working with parents displaying shame based behaviours, I would suggest trying to build them up rather than taking them apart. Assertion training is excellent and gives woman in particular options other than passive /aggressive behaviour.  She can then model these learned skills to her children. I am not being condescending, just writing from experience. When I was treated with respect by a social worker, I relaxed, he relaxed and we formed a working relationship. I do recognise that social workers themselves are often working in shame based environments, for instance is not disrespectful to expect them to hot desk, what does this actually say about what their employer thinks about them?

I would like all those involved in what ever capacity in the child protection system to consider the following:

  1. Become aware of how and why you shame people in your relationships.
  2. Notice your payback through shaming
  3. Work through the implications of the damage that occurs to others and yourself through shaming.
  4. If you do need to confront someone, try and accomplish this with respect.

This is a huge subject, I have in this blog post just tackled the tip of the iceberg. It is important as it is such a negative feeling, endemic on all sides in child protection and never leads to a positive outcome.

What happens when you abandon the rule of law?

On August 25th I attended the ByLine Festival which has as its tag the phrase ‘dance, discuss, laugh and change the world’. I can’t comment as to the first three as for at least two of them I am temperamentally or physically unsuited. However, ‘changing the world’ is a bold ambition and its worth unpicking what kind of ‘changes’ are meant within this.

That morning I ended up at  ‘The New Age of Consent: What #MeToo means to Millennials’. This was by accident not design as it was late starting and the eventual line up I think was different to advertised. But I was glad I stopped by, if only because I think it is very important to understand what is happening and just how dangerous it is.

The panel was made up of three young women, who I think were all journalists but I will confess to not initially paying much attention. However, some comments made me sit up, stop playing Candy Crush and pay some very close attention.

There were some sensible and interesting points made, most particularly that we need an urgent change in attitudes about sex and how we talk about it – it is clear we are failing to educate our children and give them the tools they need to navigate sexual misconduct as they grow into sexually active adults. I assume this is because we are too embarrassed or afraid of tarnishing their ‘innocence’. Instead we are creating a generation of young adults raised on porn but without the confidence or knowledge to claim their own bodies and express out loud what their boundaries and preferences are.  So I agree entirely with that point and would have liked to have heard more discussion about how we can achieve more open and healthy conversation about such a fundamental part of human existence.

The sense of that point however was overshadowed for me by something far, far darker. During the course of comments from the panelists, I heard the following:

https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1033292038618394624

https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1033292792200613889

https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1033293298545446913

https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1033294090417434624

These comments were justified primarily on the basis that

  • False allegations make up only 3% of cases – women just wouldn’t lie about this kind of thing
  • The ‘rule of law’ and due process is a ‘straw man’ (this comment, horrifyingly, from another journalist in the audience)

There are a number of things I would have liked to say but didn’t have the opportunity.

Explain your evidence base

Where does this 3% come from? I have a vague memory of being referred to this in other online debates but as no-one has ever bothered to explain the provenance of this statistic and I don’t have time to go digging, we are left with this figure of ‘3%’ floating about. I need to know a lot more about how that figure is determined. If it is a figure representative of just the number of women who end up convicted of perjury or perverting the course of justice, then that is as useless as relying on the low number of rape convictions to argue that rape isn’t a problem. The number of criminal convictions for an offence are a guide, no more, no less. And sometimes a very misleading guide. No one can realistically argue that the rate of conviction for rape, for e.g. is a reasonable reflection of the popularity of rape.

I am not at all sure that ‘false allegations’ from women about the bad behaviour of men are vanishingly rare. That very morning the Times reported, for e.g. on a woman who made a false allegation of being threatened with a shot gun by a man with whom she had been in a sexual relationship that went sour. She was found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice but escaped a jail term. Her victim had to spend 18 hours in custody until CCTV revealed the lie.

And even if they are ‘only’ at 3%, let me make a gloomy prediction. If we continue down this route of denial of due process and simply ‘believing’ any allegations at the moment they are made then that 3% is going to grow and grow.

Those who dismiss the rule of law also seem to struggle with the law of unintended consequences. It will give me no pleasure to be proved right about this but I am remarkably confident that I will be.

The Rule of Law is a ‘Straw Man’

I am not sure I even understand what is meant by ‘Straw Man’ – the now ubiquitous retort it seems to any attempt at dialogue that does not mirror your own preconceptions. It is defined on line as:

an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.

This is actually quite terrifying . What on earth was that speaker trying to achieve? Suggest that my wish to defend due process in fact masked my desire to allow as many men as possible to carry on sexually abusing without redress?

To hear the rule of law dismissed in this way by someone identifying as a journalist was truly disturbing. Even more so in a context where the panel themselves cheerfully admitted they hadn’t given any thought to how their calls for summarily dismissal of any man accused of sexual harassment would pan out, other than hey, it wasn’t really a problem as they weren’t asking them to be put in prison and ‘no system is perfect’.

No system is perfect

Of course no system is perfect. But this childish plea for perfection being used as excuse to simply jettison the current system is an astonishingly naive and stupid thing to hear from people who tell me they are journalists. I am often highly critical of journalists cut from the cloth of Sue Reid and Christopher Booker, for example – but I thought the best of journalism represented the best of humanity; fearless independence, analysis, critical thinking and speaking truth to power.

I have watched with mounting concern the same desire to diminish or disregard the rule of law in other professions, most notably social work. The rule of law is the protection of us all against the arbitrary imposition of state power or allowing us to be victims of an individual’s malicious grievance.

Woody Allen was referenced by the panel. They ‘couldn’t believe’ he was still in work after all the allegations made against him. But here’s the thing panel; those allegations of sexual abuse of his daughter didn’t go to a criminal trial. They were investigated within the civil proceedings relating to child custody and no findings were made. It is clear that Dylan Farrow, her mother and brother Ronan ‘believe’ with all their hearts something horrible happened. But it is equally clear that this is denied by Woody Allen AND their brother Moses who was also present during the time sexual abuse was alleged to have occurred.

To proceed on the basis of ‘I believe’ means you must also say ‘but I don’t believe YOU’. Why is Dylan Farrow afforded immediate ‘belief’ but Moses is not? Why would anyone call for the imprisonment or poverty of a man on the basis solely of another’s ‘belief’? If Harvey Weinstein is a brute, then who is Asia Argento? Presumably we all ‘believe’ what her alleged victim says?

These are only two examples out of many. But, in my view at least, they reveal the insanity of attempting to defend any kind of movement that seeks to remove one category of crime from the process of allegations, proof, investigation and determination at a court or tribunal hearing.

I wonder if the rule of law, like feminism, has done the heavy lifting for so long behind the scenes that we are all somewhat careless now of its efforts and achievements. Nothing else I can think of explains the casual dismissal by some of the importance of both.

I am both sad and angry by what I heard on Saturday. I certainly hoped and expected better from journalists, than the embrace of such dangerous platitudes based on no thought about the consequences for us all that would inevitably flow from their adoption.

 

Failure

I am grateful for this guest post from a parent.

Failure

Meaning -” lack of success, the neglect or omission of expected or required action.”

It is essential and right that the Care system exists. It represents a failure on very many fronts that it has to.

In most cases if a child enters care there will have been a catastrophic failure in one or more spheres – in a parent’s capacity to safely support their child at home for whatever reason, in services ability to support parents in their parenting role, in the State’s failure to invest in an environment where families (one of the key building blocks of society?) are supported. In most cases the care system is the safety net for children and young people when one or more of these failures have occurred.

In my case, by the time my son entered care I was at my wit’s end. I had tried everything I could to get help for him and the effort brought me closer to my breaking point that anything I’d experienced before or since. I felt as though I was fighting for his life largely unsupported. I’m sure there were those who believe I was too interventionist because of my own fears and those who believe if only I’d been a better mother that there would not have been these problems. What I would say to the people who feel I was too interventionist is “I did not make the decisions by and large. My son and the various professionals who became involved because of my interventions to try and make things better for him, did.”

I do not see my son now nor do I know how he lives, what he lives on, if his hayfever is affecting him at the moment, whether he eats, whether his clothes or shoes fit him, whether he has a dentist or a doctor and who he turns to when he needs help. I’m also aware that his former corporate parent is in the same position. Even if they did, as I was told again and again, they would feel their duties around confidentiality to him would mean that I could not be told anything about his wellbeing. In my dealings with professionals I only met one doctor who unambiguously crossed that ever present red line about sharing. I am very grateful to him for this because it often seemed to me that ‘not sharing’ with me was damaging for my son and needlessly turned into an exercise in inhumanity and cruelty to me.

Is that the price of failure? If so whose?

The thing that gives me comfort when I try to make sense of it all is knowing that I tried to do the right thing at the right time with the resources available to me in each and every situation. I do not have regrets on that front although I know I probably made some wrong moves along the way. I am hopeful that some of these may yet come right. No one knows what the future holds and life is nothing if not unpredictable. It is a better strategy to hope than worry when you cannot affect outcomes.

With my very mixed experiences, I always feel nervous when I hear the case being made, generally by people involved within it in one capacity or another, that the Care system is inherently good. Do we want anyone’s child to have to experience what my son did, what our family did and then call it a good outcome because the Care system was there for him? Do we want any child or young person to face such an uncertain future, essentially alone and unsupported, as he does now that he is a Care Leaver?

I want the best Care system possible for children like my son who enter it because whoever has failed or wherever failures have occurred, children affected pay the highest price and the failures are never theirs. They must never be failed further by a broken safety net nor a cut-price Care system.

It is essential and right that the Care system exists. It represents a failure on very many fronts that it has to.

A little less conversation – a little more action.

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore

‘A patient is the  most important person in our hospital. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our hospital, he is part of it. We are doing a favour by serving him, he is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so’

Mahatma Gandhi

I would like to consider a variety of reports that have come to my attention recently. These are

The Needs and Challenges of Adoptive and Special Guardianship Families – Working Together to Help Our Children report from June 28th

Children’s Commissioner’s report on vulnerability – July 2018

Working together to safeguard children – updated 4th July 2018

 

The Needs and Challenges of  Adoptive and Special Guardianship Families is a report produced by a group of parents who are either Special Guardians or who have adopted children. Their chair comments:

I can see deep systemic problems that affect adopters, and special guardians, which is why we have joined forces. These same problems seem to impact on families where a child has disabilities and special needs where services are required. Austerity has made support harder to achieve, and whether it is from health, education or social care, it so much more difficult to obtain from cash strapped local authorities looking to save wherever they can. We, who rely on services, bear the brunt of austerity, and at the same time can find ourselves victimised by a blame culture that makes us, and our children, extremely vulnerable when our children have behavioural problems and anxiety issues.

Key points from the report

In summary, the report considers the families needs and challenges and their experiences of working together with professionals.

  • Over 500 parents and carers were involved in providing information. Two surveys were conducted and four cases were chosen from group members where children had re-entered care to look at children and lives in context.
  • Over 700 children were  part of these families, many facing very difficult challenges; a high level of disability, numerous complex trauma related mental health problems and life-long conditions such as autism and FASD.
  • Parenting children with such serious needs can make family life difficult and respite was identified as ‘vital’ but often not available or hard to come by.
  • Parents had mixed experiences of working with professionals. Bad experiences deterred adopters and special guardians from help seeking and made them feel frightened of social services.
  • Parents felt that injustices are not adequately scrutinised by the Family Courts as their limited remit is insufficient for such complex cases. The adversarial court system cannot easily ‘problem solve’ and is unable to compel local authorities who do not allocate professionals with adoption or special guardianship expertise to the support of children and families.

The report identified no models, or good practice guidance to assist the safe rehabilitation and reunification of adopted and special guardianship and concluded that this does not seem to be a priority for local authorities.

The report recommends that

  • more ethical policies can be developed through the proper involvement of those with‘lived experience’ at a decision-making level in future.
  • setting up a Task Force to develop practice guidance for when a child re-enters care to enable relationships between family members to be better supported and develop models for reunification for children where family members are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

The fundamental point, it appears to me is this:

it is certainly time to have dialogue with those who lives are affected by legislation when the courts cannot be ‘problem solving’ as they should be, when problems are very complex.

Report of the Children’s Commissioner

I do not think there is much, if anything, in this report from the Special Guardians and Adopters with which I disagree. I have been commenting for some time now on the particular pressures that come to bear upon the whole system of child protection which render it arguable ‘not fit for purpose’. See for example this post on ‘Forced Adoption’. 

Its broader concerns that the current system does not work well to support vulnerable children and families, are supported by the recent report of the Children’s Commissioner which sets out in stark terms what is being faced by the child protection system. This report found:

The 2.1 million children growing up in families with these complex needs includes:

  • 890,000 children with parents suffering serious mental health problems
  • 825,000 children living in homes with domestic violence
  • 470,000 children whose parents use substances problematically
  • 100,000 children who are living in a family with a “toxic trio” (mental health problems, domestic violence and alcohol and/or substance abuse)
  • 470,000 children living in material deprivation
  • 170,000 children who care for their parents or siblings

Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner said

Over a million of the most vulnerable children in England cannot meet their own ambitions because they are being let down by a system that doesn’t recognise or support them – a system that too often leaves them and their families to fend for themselves until crisis point is reached.

“Not every vulnerable child needs state intervention, but this research gives us – in stark detail – the scale of need and the challenges ahead. Meeting them will not be easy or cost-free. It will require additional resources, effectively targeted, so that we move from a system that marginalises vulnerable children to one which helps them.

“Supporting vulnerable children should be the biggest social justice challenge of our time. Every day we see the huge pressures on the family courts, schools and the care systems of failing to take long-term action. The cost to the state is ultimately greater than it should be, and the cost to those vulnerable children missing out on support can last a lifetime.

“We get the society we choose – and at the moment we are choosing to gamble with the futures of hundreds of thousands of children.”

About the same time as this report, the revised Working Together guidelines were published – this is a lengthy document of 112 pages. Small wonder its so dense, as it makes the clear point that there are a large number of different agencies/organisations who must be putting the child at the centre of their thinking and are under statutory obligations to do so. Under the heading  ‘Identifying children and families who would benefit from early help’ it says:

Local organisations and agencies should have in place effective ways to identify emerging problems and potential unmet needs of individual children and families. Local authorities should work with organisations and agencies to develop joined-up early help services based on a clear understanding of local needs. This requires all practitioners, including those in universal services and those providing services to adults with children, to understand their role in identifying emerging problems and to share information with other practitioners to support early identification and assessment.

Conclusion

We all know what we need to do. Children need to be at the centre of our thinking, while respecting the principle that children’s welfare must be seen in the context of their families and communities; families ought to be supported to look after their children rather than the first assumption being that they are places of sinister evil from which children must be ‘rescued’.  A stitch in time saves nine, for want of a nail the battle was lost etc etc so we ought to be doing what we can as early as we can because fire fighting is a lot more costly than dealing with problems prior to your house burning down.

But all of this requires time. Time for professionals to build relationships of trust with children and families so they don’t simply become troublesome units to be risk assessed and dealt with in a way that will save agencies from adverse comment down the line. And it requires money. To pay enough professionals to have enough time to be able to identify services and support that could actually help. To devise a coherent strategy of intervention that does not see children and family bounced from a variety of services and individuals.

It is really good that we are talking, and that more efforts are being made to cross professional boundaries. But I am still worried from what I read and hear about the debate around child protection that the compulsion to polarise, to find a ‘gang’ and be part of it remains very strong.  Social workers are either ‘corrupt liars’ or parents are ‘monsters’. I have written on many occasions about the dangers of naive or wilfully misinformed allegiance to a position at the expense of actual fact. See as just one example, Linda Arlig, her hammer and some nails.

But the mess we are currently in is not the product of just one profession or one political persuasion. its been building up over many, many years. It is becoming increasingly urgent to translate talk into action. It is particularly difficult when the court and legal system has become, since the Children and Families Act and the 26 week time limits, part of that framework of potential oppression.

Possibly hypocritically in light of the above, I hope that if you have read this far you will consider joining me and many others on September 15th at the Conway Hall in London to discuss the issue of ‘future emotional harm’ as a justification for removing children from parents. This has been for many years a particular bug bear of parents and not something I think is well understood, even by professionals. The focus of the day will be conversation between what I hope will be a large number of different groups – parents, lawyers, social workers, care leavers – with the aim to turn conversation into action.

 

Further reading

Abuse and neglect – how is it identified and what support is offered? Post from parent October 2017

Care Crisis Review 2018 Family Rights Group

The Adoption Enquiry BASW – their website is down! but you can read my post about it here. 

MP Tim Loughton, a former Tory children’s minister has blamed the government’s “woeful underfunding” of local authorities for a crisis in child protection that is putting the safety of vulnerable young people at risk. vThe Guardian, July 11th 2018.

Storing up Trouble – July 2nd 2018 report from All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children (APPGC) following September 2017  inquiry into the causes and consequences of varying thresholds for children’s social care. The inquiry found:

  • Vulnerable children face a postcode lottery in thresholds of support
  • 4 in 5 Directors of Children’s Services say that vulnerable children facing similar problems get different levels of help depending on where they live.
  • Children often have to reach crisis before social services step in.
  • Decisions over whether to help a child, even in acute cases, are influenced by budget constraints.
  • Children and young people in care and care leavers highlighted the difficulty they faced gaining insight into their personal histories. They called for better support in accessing and understanding information contained in official files.

Summary of the changes to the Working Together Guidance from the NSPCC

 

 

Address by McFarlane LJ to Families Need Fathers

On 25th June McFarlane LJ addressed the national conference of Families need Fathers. You can read the press release here or the full text of the speech here. 

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore. I am grateful for and agree with entirely his comments about the need for open dialogue and engagement with a variety of perspectives. He is also entirely right about the need for early fact findings. But I will remain politely sceptical about the ability of any suggestions for reform to make much headway if we fail to grapple with the underlying and serious difficulties that get in the way of resolving parental disputes about children; lack of judicial continuity, lack of legal aid and lack of consistent enforcement of court orders. Underpinnning all of these however, I will continue to maintain is the refusal to accept that courts are inevitably the wrong kind of arena to try and repair a fractured family. 

 

We need to talk

McFarlane LJ began by acknowledging the respect that senior member of the judiciary hold for FnF and the need for dialogue. He recalled his days as part of the legal team working on the Norgrove review into family justice and the recommendations that produced to improve private law disputes:

to ‘make parental responsibility work’ by enabling parents to reach agreements, while ensuring that the child’s welfare remains paramount. We recommended the replacement of the pejorative labels of ‘residence’ and ‘contact’ with ‘child arrangement orders’. We recommended that there should be ‘a coherent process of dispute resolution’ starting with an online information hub to help couples resolve issues, moving mediation, MIAMS, SIPS and then, if necessary, to a tightly controlled court based resolution process conducted by the same judge throughout.

McFarlane LJ recognised that he has been far removed from the ‘coal face’ for some time now and will carry out over the next year vists and consultations at different courts with different groups to gain a proper understanding of the impact of those reforms, recognising of course that the removal of legal aid from many of these cases has brought its own problems.

I will comment here that it is surprising to find ‘contact’ and ‘residence’ labelled ‘pejorative’ although I accept they did tend to support an unhelpful ‘winner takes all’ attitude. Nevertheless, they are 100% less cumbersome and more easy to explain to a parent than a ‘child arrangements order’. However, there is no need for me to worry about nomenclature as it is clear that the media will never move beyond ‘custody’ and ‘visitation’.

The rather larger problem however is just how well on the ground translate such lofty ambitions as ‘making parental responsibility work’ and providing a ‘coherent scheme’ of dispute resolution. I suspect most lawyers and parents participating in the system would say ‘not very well at all’. The reasons for this are many and various and I will look at some in this post.

His address focused on three issues: Domestic abuse, alienation and possible future developments.

Domestic Abuse

McFarlane LJ recommended that all those present read research published by Women’s Aid in May 2018 entitled  “What about my right not to be abused? Domestic abuse, Human Rights and the Family Courts.” He accepted that this report had limitations; nonetheless it was an important piece of work, representing ‘the other side of the coin’ to the arguments sometimes made by or on behalf of fathers about the inherent bias in favour of women in the family justice system (an assertion which I just don’t think is true and have discussed at greater length in this post – Is the Family Court system biased against men?)

I agree it is vital for both sides of the debate to be heard; neither side has the monopoly on facts or truth and both perspectives need airing. I strongly suspect ‘the truth’ will be found more in the middle than at either side of the spectrum and bold assertions about male violence or female manipulation.

 

Alienation

McFarlane LJ rejected a pre-occupation with agreeing a label for bad behaviour by parents. Rathe than debating if ‘alienation’ was the right label or a ‘proper’ mental health condition  it made more sense to focus on the particular behaviour in question.  He referred to the attitude taken towards Fictitious Induced Illness, which should be adopted for ‘alienation’.

If that behaviour was found to be abusive then action was taken, irrespective of whether or not a diagnosis of a particular personality or mental health condition in the parent could be made.

He accepted that ‘parental alienation’ was certainly ‘a thing’- and I agree:

I readily accept that in some cases a parent can, either deliberately or inadvertently, turn the mind of their child against the other parent so that the child holds a wholly negative view of that other parent where such a negative view cannot be justified by reason of any past behaviour or any aspect of the parent-child relationship. Further, where that state of affairs has come to pass, it is likely to be emotionally harmful for the child to grow up in circumstances which maintain an unjustified and wholly negative view of the absent parent.

Where do we go from here?

I was intrigued to see the comment about the importance of findings of fact.

 It is, as I have already observed crucial, both to the interests of the alleged victim and, in fact, to those of the alleged perpetrator, for any significant allegations of domestic abuse to be investigated and determined as matters of fact, similarly any significant allegation of“alienation,” should also be laid out before the court and, if possible, determined on the same basis.

Anecdote from other practitioners and my own experiences, suggest that findings of fact are something the courts now try to avoid, which simply shunts the problem further down the line. If parents are utterly divided about the truth or otherwise of some really serious allegations then it is imperative that the ‘facts’ – in so far as they can ever be determined – are found. This is one of the key suggestions I make for attempting to avoid cases of implacable hostility bedding down over years.

My own recent experience is of yet another case where allegations were first raised in 2013 about issues starting in 2011. Two successive CAFCASS officers raised need for fact finding – no court ever ordered it. The case fizzled out in 2018 with no orders for contact and a child who had not seen his father since 2013. This is sadly not an unusual scenario, at least in my own experience.

 

He also suggests more thought about an ‘Early Intervention’ Strategy

At the core of the EI approach is the need to manage the expectations of parents as to the post-separation arrangements for their child from the earliest point. Key to this approach is the issuing of general guidance on what a court would regard a reasonable amount or pattern of contact to be (in cases where there is no safeguarding risk to the child); to be of weight, such guidance can only come from the judiciary.

EDIT – ‘the new normal’

The Transparency Project commented today about ‘the new normal’  suggested by McFarlane LJ, i.e. investigating possible judicial guidance on what is a ‘normal’ range of contact whilst outcomes are decided. This is an interesting point on which I should have commented.

The Transparency Project say:

This guidance, if agreed, could apparently take the form of ‘standing temporary orders’ which would aim to maintain reasonable amounts of safe contact while issues were being resolved. Such an idea will no doubt raise many questions about the individuality of cases and the welfare of each child, so it sounds like a very useful exercise to consult widely across these topics. If the lower courts are reluctant to follow PD12J and make findings – why is this? And what are the potential effects of new Cafcass guidance sending its practitioners down ‘abuse’ or ‘alienation’ ‘pathways’ before any determination of the facts has been made by a court.

I welcome any initiative to promote more consistent and coherent decision making in the family courts, so that parents can have a better idea of likely outcomes. However, it will be very interesting to see the results of consultation about this because certainly at first blush it appears to offend against the other important consideration – of early decisions about the actual FACTS in each case, to inform a welfare decision about what is best for each individual child. If anyone can identify the ‘one size fits all’ – I would be interested to know what that is!

Conclusions

I am very pleased to learn that McFarlane LJ is to embark on a year long process of consultation and dialogue and his speech marks a welcome beginning. The commitment to talking, listening and understanding is self evident. He is right to press for both sides of the debate to listen to what each other is saying – for too long I have been complaining about the harmful and chilling impact of rhetoric and polarisation in this field. He is also right to recognise the key importance of early fact findings. However, and of course, there are many more issues that need to be addressed and some – possibly the most important ones – will require some financial investment and clout that will not come from simply talking about them. Three of the key issues, in my view, are lack of judicial continuity, lack of legal aid and lack of consistent and rigorous enforcement of orders. This three issues bleed into one another. All will need tackling.

But, at the heart of it all I go back to my now wearily familiar mantra. The family court cannot hope ever to solve the problems of family dysfunction. It isn’t the arena, it doesn’t have the tools and is unlikely to ever get them. The key solution – in my mind – is for better education at the earliest opportunity for our children. What makes a healthy relationship? What discussions and agreements should you be having with your partner before you decide to bring a new life into the world?

The suggestion that we could do more work on ‘early intervention’ would seem to be supporting my views here; expectations need to be managed at the earliest stage, rather than suggesting the family courts can work miracles and render the unreasonable parent reasonable. I would rather have commitment to rigorous and early education/discussion about healthy relationships but this will do for a start.

 

Further reading

Contact – a point of view Lord justice McFarlane March 2018

The Woeful State of Our Debate Part 8: Men versus Women Child Protection Resource Online May 2016

 

 

Adoption and Child Protection Trends in England

I am grateful for this information provided by Andy Bilson and Elizabeth Hunter Munro about the recent study examining two cohorts of children in a variety of local authorities which revealed the startling difference between different areas in the number of children adopted; these differences were not related to contrasts in affluence/deprivation.

The number of children being investigated is on the rise; so too the numbers in the categories of neglect and emotional maltreatment.

Andy will be joining the Panel for the afternoon discussions on September 15th at the Conway Hall, to consider if risk of future emotional harm is really a justifiable reason to remove chlldren from their families. Please see here for more details and how to buy tickets. 

 

Background to the study

In 2000, the government announced its intention to increase adoption and introduce a new form of permanent placement called special guardianship (SG) to reduce the numbers who stay for long periods in care. All subsequent governments have promoted adoption and, more recently, government has called for the number of adoptions to be doubled. A key aim of this policy is to reduce the number of children looked after, especially those who spend long periods in care, and instead to find permanent homes through one of these two means. By 2017 the rate of adoptions had more than doubled since 1999 and when SG is added almost four times as many children left care to these permanent placements . Between 2000 and 2017, 92,610 children left the care system to these permanent placements . Despite the dip in the annual number of children leaving care to be adopted since the 2014-15 financial year, the number of those aged under 18 who have left care to be adopted is higher than at any time this century . Over the same period the number of children in care has increased by 25% and is higher than for over 30 years and more children are spending long periods in care. This has led to Sir James Munby, the President of the Family Judiciary saying that the family court service in England faced a “clear and imminent crisis” because of large increases in the number of care cases (cited in Bowcott, 2016).

The incoming President, Sir Andrew McFarlane confirmed the continuing crisis and its link to reducing support for families saying:

“It may properly be said that we have reached a stage where the threshold for obtaining a public law court order is noticeably low, whereas, no doubt as a result of the current financial climate, the threshold for a family being able to access specialist support services in the community is conversely, very high” (McFarlane 2018)

Underpinning these trends in care and adoption there have been large increases in the number of children who have been investigated under section 47 of the 1989 Children Act (hereafter referred to as child protection investigations) because of concerns that they may have suffered or be likely to suffer significant harm (Bilson and Martin, 2016). The proportion of referrals and children in need that receive an investigative response has grown significantly in recent years and the biggest impact is felt in areas where deprivation is highest. Bilson et al (2017) estimated that, before the age of five, 22% of all children living in the most deprived 10% of communities were classified as having been in need because of abuse or neglect or the related category of family dysfunction.

In order to understand how these trends relate to each other and whether there are differences in practice between local authorities this paper provides an analysis of data from new freedom of information requests to the Department for Education and local authorities in England concerning two cohorts of children and their experience of children’s services before their fifth birthdays in the years ending 31st March 2012 and 2017.

The Study

The study used freedom of information requests with responses from around half of all local authorities to compare involvement with children’s services before their fifth birthday in 2011-12 and 2016-17. The number of children adopted and the number subject of section 47 enquiries increased by 50% in just five years. By 2016-17, 6.4% of all five year-olds, one in every sixteen of the more than 350,000 five-year-olds in these authorities, had been subject of investigations. These changes were not evenly distributed and rates of children who had an adoption decision before the age of five, either being adopted or on a placement order at the age of five, varied significantly across the country with a twelve-fold difference between the highest and lowest rates. These differences were not simply due to differences in deprivation. For example Southampton, which had the highest rate of children adopted or on a placement order at the age of five (1.85% of five-year-olds), had significantly higher rates than its ‘statistical neighbours’ in the study.

The twenty local authorities with the biggest increases in adoption decisions had a 96% increase in the number of children adopted or on placement orders in five years. Across these authorities all aspects of children’s services activity had increased more than in the other 50 local authorities with child protection investigations changing most – they increased by 90% and 7.8% of all children were investigated under section 47 before their fifth birthday. The research thus raises the question of why these authorities had such a large change in concerns about significant harm (child protection plans increased by 52% while investigations increased by 90%) and asks the question of why rates of adoption vary so much between local authorities.

The study confirms earlier findings that 1 in 5 children are referred to children’s services before the age of five but shows rapidly increasing levels of child protection investigation and rapidly growing numbers of children separated from their parents when the cumulative effects of adoptions and special guardianship are taken into account. These trends suggest that the impact of reduced funding for family support and the increasing stress put on families through growing inequality are impacting strongly on children and families.

Neglect and emotional maltreatment

Of particular interest to the discussions at CPConf2018 are the findings about neglect and emotional maltreatment – these were by far the most common reasons for a child protection plan being the key category in three-quarters of plans. Child Protection plans starting because of emotional maltreatment and neglect had increased by 50% from 7,403 children to 11,097 in the five years between these cohorts. Child protection plans thus mostly focussed on these areas rather than physical and sexual maltreatment.

 

Further reading

Risk prediction tools in child welfare contexts: the devil in the detail, Emily Keddell 6th April 2018

The Care Crisis Review  June 2018 The Family Rights Group – A sector-led Review of the rise in applications for care orders and the number of children in care

Postcode Lottery for Adoption June 2018 The Bureau for Investigative Journalism