Author Archives: Sarah Phillimore

The woeful state of our debate Part IV – Cascading the judgment in Re N

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore

On November 2nd, ironically as I attended a workshop on cross-border child protection issues, I received an email with the judgment in the case of Re N (Children) (Adoption: Jurisdiction) [2015] EWCA Civ 1112. This was a judgment from a hearing heard at the end of March 2015 but only now did it ‘cascade’ throughout our legal ranks.

The judgment covers a wide range of already familiar territory on matters of jurisdiction in care proceedings involving children from other countries. When the case was emailed I wondered if it was merely coincidence that this wider ‘cascading’ occurred just before the European Parliament Petitions Committee were to conduct their ‘fact- finding’ mission in London:

The Committee on Petitions is organising a Fact-finding visit to London on 5 – 6 November 2015. The aim of the visit is to meet authorities, practitioners (lawyers, social workers) and other stakeholders to exchange views on the petitions related to interventions by the UK authorities on issues of parental responsibility and allegedly abusive decisions on adoption as well as the placing of children in foster care without the consent of biological parents.

When I read Re N I saw that it was unlikely to be coincidence; this judgment appears to be a deliberate attempt to explain the practices and procedures of our court and I assume was thus ‘cascaded’ at this time for the benefit of the Petitions Committee. As the President comments at paras 4 and 5 of his judgment:

During the hearing of these appeals, the issues have broadened, and we have necessarily had to consider a number of very basic but nonetheless fundamentally important issues to do with the application of our domestic adoption law in cases with a foreign element. This judgment is therefore both wide-ranging and in consequence lengthy, as has been its preparation. This has, most unfortunately, led to even more delays in a case that has already been unduly delayed. I am very sorry.

Since our judgments may be read by those not familiar with our domestic constitutional arrangements, I should explain at the outset that within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (what for ease of reference I shall call ‘the United Kingdom’) there are three quite separate legal jurisdictions: England and Wales (which for ease of reference I shall call ‘England’), Scotland and Northern Ireland. We are sitting as judges of the Court of Appeal in England, applying, in addition to the relevant international obligations of the United Kingdom, the domestic law of England.

I am a little taken aback that the parties in this case thus presumably had to wait 7 months for the judgment in this case so that it could also stand as an ‘Introduction to Care Proceedings’ for our European brethren.

I certainly don’t dispute the need for greater clarity about what we do in the family courts and why we do it but why should the vehicle for this educative mission be a judgment in a case involving children? Matters concerning children should be resolved with the least possible delay.   If matters really need spelling out for the European Parliament, hasn’t that already been done in the report of Dr Fenton-Glynn? 

My unease is compounded by what the President then goes on to say about section 20 accommodation from paragraph 157 onwards. in his eagerness to show that we are putting our house in order with regard to the abuse of this section we now appear to have lost a useful and pragmatic mechanism to take some of the heat out of care proceedings.

It was common practice, when a LA was worried about a child returning to live with parents but the parents would not or could not agree to an interim care order, that the parents would consent to section 20 accommodation but agree that they would not exercise their right to remove their child without giving a period of notice, for example 2 weeks. This was a workable compromise which kept the child safe without pushing the parties into an early adversarial battle about whether or not an ICO should be made.

The President says this at para 169:

This is related to the fourth problem, the seeming reluctance of local authorities to return the child to the parent(s) immediately upon a withdrawal of parental consent. It is important for local authorities to recognise that, as section 20(8) of the 1989 Act provides:

“Any person who has parental responsibility for a child may at any time remove the child from accommodation provided by or on behalf of the local authority under this section.”

This means what it says. A local authority which fails to permit a parent to remove a child in circumstances within section 20(8) acts unlawfully, exposes itself to proceedings at the suit of the parent and may even be guilty of a criminal offence. A parent in that position could bring a claim against the local authority for judicial review or, indeed, seek an immediate writ of habeas corpus against the local authority. I should add that I am exceedingly sceptical as to whether a parent can lawfully contract out of section 20(8) in advance, as by agreeing with the local authority to give a specified period of notice before exercising their section 20(8) right.

Because of this judgment, I have already had to have conversations at court about whether or not the LA needed to apply for an ICO given the doubt now cast on the legitimacy of allowing parents to agree to a ‘notice period’ before withdrawing their consent to section 20.

This is potentially a very unhappy position to be in. The President may well be right that the parent cannot lawfully contract out of a statutory provision BUT the signing of such an agreement must surely mitigate against any later accusations that the LA have committed a crime! If the parties to care proceedings are not encouraged to make these kind of sensible and pragmatic ‘holding’ arrangements then what we are inevitably looking at is more contests at an early stage, more pushing parties into adversarial positions, more ‘findings’ being made at shorter hearings. The impact on the court lists will be obvious and severe.

As I keep saying (because it seems very few are listening) we will not solve the problems in our current system by demonising local authorities and those who work there. Is it not possible to point out problems without creating more? Judgements from our courts should not be delayed by many months in order to play to an audience far wider than our own jurisdiction. We are surely entitled to a system that we do not have to keep continually defending.

LATER THIS EVENING EDIT

I understand better the President’s anxiety to make sure his views are heard, when I remind myself who is discussing these issues with the European Committee.

 

 

FURTHER EDIT THIS MORNING

John Hemming confirms what he has been saying to the European Parliament. When a debate is predicated on the ‘immorality’ of a system, then hope of a constructive debate is seriously diminshed.

The woeful state of the debate about child protection Part III: UKIP’s contribution

The UKIP contribution to the debate.

This is a post by Sarah Phillimore

On Monday 26th October the Guardian published an article by Douglas Carswell the UKIP MP.  This called for the family courts to ‘open up’ in order to avoid ‘outrageous injustices’.  UKIP had previously discussed the child protection system in their manifesto, calling for a ‘far reaching child care review’:

A misplaced sensitivity to issues of race and religion, combined with fear, has been
shown to have stopped many investigations into the abuse of children. There is also
concern among the public at rising levels of ‘forced’ adoptions. Some of those charged
with protecting children in care are letting serious cases of abuse and maltreatment slip
through the net. Our children’s wellbeing lags behind many of our European neighbours
and we are seeing alarming rates of self-harm and poor mental health. UKIP is committed to bringing forward a full, open review of all childcare and child protection services in Britain, with a view to initiating wholesale reform of a system that is clearly failing. Our children deserve better and UKIP will investigate failings without fear or favour to deliver a safer, brighter, fairer future for our children.

In the Guardian article, Douglas Carswell was publicising a policy paper on opening up the family courts, written with Duncan Simpson, the deputy director of UKIP’s ‘parliamentary research unit’. I haven’t yet had time to read this policy paper in full, but note the Guardian’s precis of its main conclusions:

  • More use of special guardianship orders to allow grandparents to take over the care of a child.
  • The opening up of placement and adoption order proceedings to the media on the same basis as other family law proceedings.
  • A requirement that all judgments be published, except where the presiding judge seeks and obtains a contrary order from the president of the high court family division.
  • The media to be allowed access to expert reports on an anonymised basis with restrictions enforced only in the most exceptional cases.

The first suggested reform indicates that UKIP have a pretty shaky grasp on what is actually happening on the ground; particularly the disquiet expressed from many about the significant increase in the use of SGOs and how these don’t necessarily represent what is in the best interests of an individual child.

I have no problem with the second third or fourth; I think they are sensible and should be implemented.

However, the devil as always is in the detail. Douglas Carswell is quoted:

Ukip’s only MP suggested that his reforms would have prevented the heartache suffered by Karissa Cox and Peter Butler, who lost custody of their child after being wrongly accused of abuse. The child was put up for adoption after the couple took their baby to hospital after the six-week-old started bleeding from its mouth. Staff at the hospital noticed bruising on the baby, prompting the authorities to take the child into care and to charge the parents with child cruelty.

The parents were cleared this month, by which time the child had been adopted. “If our reforms had been in place that case could not have happened,” Carswell said.

The obvious question is – how on earth could the reforms as set out above have had any impact whatsoever on a case where the medical evidence was incomplete or incorrect – which was the fundamental problem for Karissa Cox and Peter Butler:

Defence experts discovered the child was suffering from Von Willebrand disease, a blood disorder that causes a person to bruise easily, as well as a vitamin D deficiency, which causes infantile rickets. An independent radiologist, commissioned by the prosecution, concluded that he doubted there were any fractures at all.

But its the next bit that really leapt out at me:

The Ukip MP said he accepted that in many disputed cases children need to be taken into care or adopted against the wishes of the parents. “I am not saying it is wrong for the state to forcefully break up a family. There are times when it has to do that.

“But at least the evidence should be tested in an open court. At least there should be some opportunity for people to know what it is they are being accused of ... and at least the people who are preparing the evidence ought to have met the people they are giving evidence about.”

First problem: to say that parents in care proceedings don’t have an opportunity to know the case against them is utterly and bizarrely wrong. Not only do parents know the case against them but the state will pay for their lawyers to challenge the case against them. It is baffling why lawyers are continually air brushed out of the narrative about the Evil and Secret Family Courts; maybe its because we are just so utterly ineffective, ‘legal aid losers’ in the pockets of the local authorities, etc, etc, etc.

Its an extremely irresponsible untruth to keep bandying about. Because no doubt it terrifies vulnerable people who are facing these kinds of proceedings. Is UKIP simply ignorant of how the court process works? Of the rule of law? Of the opportunities to challenge evidence? To cross examine witnesses, professional or otherwise?

Second problem: what does he mean about ‘people preparing the evidence ought to have met the people they are giving evidence about”?  Is this an accusation that expert evidence about parents’ mental or physical health is routinely provided by experts who don’t meet the parents? If he is saying this that, in my view it simply isn’t true – I accept there have been some worrying examples of bad practice but these are rare –  in my own experience spanning 15 years I have never had to deal with a psychiatrist or psychologist who reported without meeting my parent client (although I did make a complaint about a psychologist who was prepared to make an updating report 2 years after she met the parents, without seeing them again) .

Is he saying that doctors examining X-rays or the bruises on a child’s body ought to meet the parents first? If so, why?

Either UKIP just don’t know how the court system works, or they don’t care and would rather a sexy soundbite for a national newspaper than a contribution to responsible debate. This article doesn’t fill me with optimism that their ‘parliamentary research unit’ is going to make an helpful contribution to the debate about how we make our child protection system better.

What a pity. Because as UKIP set out in their manifesto they recognise that many things are going very badly wrong for our children. The last thing we need is just more ill-informed noise to distract us from the realities.

I will now add the UKIP policy paper to my reading list. Maybe I will find some answers to my questions there. But I hope you will forgive me if I am less than optimistic.

National Adoption Week – An Adopter’s view Part II

Who or what is helping traumatised children?

We are grateful for this second post about National Adoption Week from the perspective of an adopter. She queries why the only open and honest debate appears to be coming from adopters or adoptees. This is particularly so when talking about the impact of trauma upon children and their development. That the only intervention for traumatised adopted children appears to be to put them in section 20 accommodation is a ‘national disgrace’. 

I have spent a little too much time reading, listening and watching the coverage of National Adoption Week 2015. I was hoping for a bit more honesty than previous years. I am not at all surprised but am saddened that we really are having the same old tripe being spurted out by those who should know better.

The only honest, open, truly adoption focussed reality checks have come from adopters or adoptees.

We have seen this years strapline emblazoned on some important buildings in a few cities
`Too old at 4’. What the strapline or the hype don’t mention in a realistic way, is the level of trauma those children have suffered or the fight that adoptive parents will have to get them the help and support needed to live with that trauma.

A report published in 2014 ‘Beyond the Adoption Order’ gives a very detailed description of the difficulties.

Children who have suffered trauma – who promotes their ‘best interests?’

In this guest blog, I want to tell you about what can happen when those that should know better do not act in ‘our’ children’s best interests. When I use the term ‘our’ I am talking about adopted children who have, in reality, if not law, two families.

Our children’s trauma usually takes a while to surface, often years and often during the turbulent teens. There will have been a few signs during primary school days for many. Our children will struggle with friendships, with the structure of the school day. They will get far more than their fair share of fixed term exclusions and even permanent exclusions before anyone in local authority education depts will agree to assess them for an education, health and care plans.

The evidence is clear that children in care do not fair well in comparison to their peers and yet adopters struggle to get those in education to believe that our children will suffer the same , if not more, difficulties. We have been able to access the pupil premium over the last few years and we know how it should be spent to help our children. Sadly this doesn’t happen in most local authorities because our children do not have a right to have their education overseen by a virtual school head teacher like children in care do.

If our young people get through the education system, they may not be so lucky in the way their sometimes fragile mental and emotional health is concerned.

The failure of CAMHS Teams and the disgrace of long term section 20 accommodation

Despite their early maltreatment and unresolved trauma, many Child and Adolescent Mental Health (Camhs) teams fail to address the mental health of our children. Adopted children got a mention in an overview of current Camhs provision and their particular difficulties have very recently been the subject of a roundtable discussion.

Social care are often no better than education or health. Adopters have something that birth families, special guardians or kinship carers don’t. We have access to post adoption support social workers. Like many services nationwide, those services vary in quality. The good ones come into their own when our children start to live their trauma out in the here and now. The children make allegations of abuse against their adoptive parents. Thankfully, many of the allegations are false and in a tiny amount of cases where they are found to be true, we all need to know that those children will be kept safe.

However, the majority of allegations are false. We know why our children make allegations but childcare social workers have little experience of traumatised children who are now safe with their adoptive families , safe enough for the trauma of their past to leak everywhere.

Sometimes that trauma shows itself in the violence that our children perpetrate against us, their parents, to their siblings, their friends or even to animals. They can also turn the violence to themselves, taking risks that belie the range of normal teenage risk taking or self harming.
At this point in their lives, many of our children will become `looked after` for the second time in their lives. They will be voluntarily accommodated under Section 20 of the Children’s Act.

For many of our children, they will remain in the care of the local authority under S20 until adulthood. This is a national disgrace. That a maltreated child, removed from their birth family for all the right reasons, does not get the help they and their adoptive families need to resolve (or at least come to terms with) their trauma, is unforgivable in a civilised society.

My message throughout NAW was that children and young people must always be at the core of everything that is done in their name. Those who have returned to care are no different.

‘OUR’ Kids must always be the priority.

National Adoption Week – An adopter’s view

We are grateful for this post from an adoptive parent, who calls for an end to the distorting rhetoric about adoption; without honest and open discussion of what is gained and lost through adoption, we risk losing focus on what should be the fundamental core of all our endeavours here –  the children and what they need.

During National Adoption Week, as a society, will we be able to finally have the conversation we urgently need? Or will rhetoric and political agendas continue to stifle that debate?

I have come to understand that adoption is more about loss than gain

Today is the start of National Adoption Week (NAW) when Adoption Agencies (on behalf of the Government) want and need to inform the public about how their country needs them. Not to go to war but to parent children and young people through adoption when nothing else will do

I am an adopter. I have a few problems with National Adoption Week. I probably shouldn’t because I can recall seeing some daytime tv 16yrs ago and thinking – `yep, that is what we need to do.’ Hubby and I would make good parents and if children need a forever family, that can and should be us.

Over the years that followed that day, I have come to understand that modern adoption is more about loss than gain. I hope you will understand why I think that by the end of this week.

I am a member of a peer support group for the parents of traumatised adopted children and young people. Trauma is a term we think best describes the losses our children have lived with. It describes their loss of birth family, identity, childhoods where they had rights to be kept safe, physically and psychologically.

A few weeks ago a few of us attended the first Family Law Class open to all . It was a good class. We were well aware that ‘our’ children’s birth families could be sat next to us and that was ok. It was ok because we know about their loss, their difficulties with communicating and dealing with professionals at an immensely difficult time in their lives. We know because a minority of experienced adopters go through the same experience with social services as many struggling birth parents. I will talk about that later this week.

Today I want to talk about what I feel is often unsaid during NAW, about birth parents, adopters and ‘our’ children.

The elephant in the room – what will happen if my child’s birth parents didn’t harm them after all?

Those professionals and interested adopters will know that the answer to the question is – probably nothing. The circumstances under which any Judge will reverse a decision involving an Adoption Order (certainly after some time has elapsed) are very rare.

But experienced adopters are well aware of the miscarriages of justice that have happened in the UK. I speak for many adopters who feel that these miscarriages of justice are a travesty. A child and maybe their siblings will have lost their birth parents, each other and everything they hold dear. They may be moved from pillar to post within the care system, being sent to live with strangers and one day, will have to learn that none of that should have happened. Such a loss can never really be put into words can it?

Adopters feel for birth parents where miscarriages of justice have happened. We have genuine empathy for them and hope that agencies (& if necessary the courts) do everything in their power to ensure that those children, birth parents and adoptive families are enabled to build a mutually rewarding relationship in the future. It can be done, I am sure of it. Society needs it to be so.

But what of those children and young people that were rightly removed from their birth parents?

People approved for adoption will have been told and will have read reports written by social services about the children’s life with birth parents. We will have been told that the children need a new `forever` family because birth parents are not able to safeguard them. The birth parents are deemed by all in authority to not be `good enough parents’.  This is my first problem with NAW.

NAW will have you, the person wanting to be a parent, believing that that is absolutely the case. It may well be, but I have been concerned for a number of years that it isn’t that simple.
Prospective adopters need to believe that for `our` children to have been placed for adoption, their birth families must not have been ‘good enough’ to do the job. Parents need to keep the children safe, not to abuse or neglect them, to put the children’s needs above their own. Parenting isn’t just about loving them. Social services are meant to prove that to be the case. Family law courts are supposed to ensure that that is the case before they agree to a placement order and thereafter an adoption order. Adopters need to believe that social services have also ruled out that other forms of permanence would not be in their child’s best interest too.

We will be led to believe that some birth parents should either never have direct contact (I prefer to say `have a relationship with`), or should absolutely have a relationship. We need to know that all the decisions made in relation to `our` children are made with the best of intentions.

We adopters need to know these things because contrary to some rhetoric, adopters do not want to steal children, we are not a market of middle class do gooders or people that need to have a child as a fashion accessory. We are not the reason that children need to be removed from the otherwise loving caring homes any more than the government have `targets` for removing children to support some black market.

We are just people who know we can give love, nurture and care to traumatised children and young people. We can and do put our children’s needs above our own.

My message throughout NAW is that children and young people must always be at the core of everything that is done in their name.

`OUR’ kids must always be the priority.

SH v Italy – violation of Article 8 by failing to support family to stay together

The case of SH v Italy was decided on 13th October 2015  – the judgment is in French. Citations here have been provided in English via Google Translate. 

The court unanimously found violation of the mother’s Article 8 rights and awarded her 32,000 Euros in compensation. 

The Facts

The mother, had 3 children, born in 2005, 2006 and 2008. She had depression and was taking medication. On 11th August 2009 the Italian authorities removed the children from the care of the parents after several incidents where the children had ingested medication and required hospitalisation.

On 20th October 2009 the parents conceded they were struggling but they could care for the children with the help of Italian social services and the children’s grandfather. On 3rd December 2009 a psychiatrist concluded that the children should be reunited with their parents; the mother was following ‘pharmacological therapy’, was willing to undergo psychotherapy and had a very strong emotional bond with the children. The Italian equivalent of the children’s guardian agreed and recommended the reunification of the family with a support package.

On January 19th 2010 the Italian court ordered the return of the children. However, sadly in March 2010 the children were once again removed as the mother was hospitalised, had separated from the father and the grandfather was ill. There then followed a period of delay until the court ordered an expert’s report in October 2010. The report came in January 2011 and recommended that the children remain in foster care while contact with their parents was increased and the matter re-assessed in 6 months time.

However, the court rejected these recommendations and on 1st March 2011 ‘declared the children adoptable’ and contact ceased. The court relied upon the ‘serious mental problems’ of the mother and that the father could not show affection to the children and displayed aggression in his interactions with social workers.

The parents appealed but this was rejected by the Appeals Court in Rome in February 2012:

The Court of Appeal observed that the authorities had made the necessary efforts to ensure support to parents and to prepare the return of children to their families. However, the project had failed, which demonstrated the inability of parents to exercise their parental role and the lack of transitional nature of the situation. Based on the findings of social services, the appeal court emphasized that the project’s bankruptcy had had negative consequences for children and adoptability was to safeguard their interest in being welcomed into a family able to care for them adequately, that their family of origin was not able to do because of the mother’s health and the father’s difficulties. The Court of Appeal noted that there had been positive developments in the situation, as the awareness of the mother of her health problems and her willingness to follow a treatment course and the father’s efforts to find resources to take care of his children or the availability of the grandfather to help his son. However, according to the Court of Appeal, these elements were not sufficient for the purposes of assessing the ability of the parents to exercise their parental role

A further appeal to the Supreme Court failed. In February 2014 the mother attempted to revoke the adoption order but was unsuccessful and thus she applied to the European Court, claiming a violation of her rights under Article 8 of the ECHR, in that the Italian authorities had not met its obligation to provide support to keep the family together. The children ended up in 3 different places; not only did they lose their relationship with their parents, but also with each other.

The Italian Government argued that it had acted to protect the children; the first attempt to reunify the family had failed and the children had suffered harm to their emotional development.

The judgment of the European Court

The court commented at paragraph 41:

It is for each Contracting State to equip itself with adequate and sufficient legal arsenal to ensure compliance with its positive obligations under Article 8 of the Convention and the Court whether, in the application and interpretation of applicable law, the domestic authorities had respected the guarantees of Article 8, in particular taking into account the best interests of the child (see, mutatis mutandis, Neulinger and Shuruk v. Switzerland [GC ] No. 41615/07, § 141, ECHR 2010, KAB c. Spain, No. 59819/08, § 115, 10 April 2012, X c. Latvia [GC], No. 27853/09, § 102, ECHR 2013).

The crucial question here was whether, the Italian authorities had taken all necessary and appropriate measures that could reasonably be required of them for the children to lead a normal family life with their own families.

The court noted at paragraph 47:

The Court notes that the expert appointed by the Court envisaged a course of rapprochement between parents and children, with an intensification of meetings and a review of the situation after six months. The proposed solution was based on the existence of strong emotional bonds between parents and children, as well as the overall positive assessment of the capacity of parents to fulfil their role and their willingness to collaborate with social services. The Court noted that the expert in question was lodged at January 13, 2011 and only two months later, i.e. on 1st March 2011, the court, contrary to the indications of the expert, said children adoptable and ordered the suspension of meetings. The decision to cut immediately and definitively the maternal bond was taken very quickly, without careful analysis of the impact of the extent of adoption of the persons concerned and despite the provisions of the law under which the declaration of adoptability must remain the extrema ratio. Therefore, the court, in refusing to consider other less radical solutions feasible in this case, such as family support project envisaged by the expertise, dismissed any final opportunity for the project to succeed and for the applicant to reconnect with his children.

The court examined other authorities where the positive obligations of the state had been examined. It agreed it was not always clear cut where the decision should be made that a state had failed to meet those obligations and member states retain a ‘margin of appreciation’.

However, at para 57 the court commented:

The Court does not doubt the need in the situation of the case, an intervention by the competent authorities for the purpose of protecting the interests of children. However, [the court] doubts the appropriateness of the intervention chosen and believes that the national authorities have not sufficiently worked to save the mother-child bond. It observes in fact that other solutions were feasible, as envisaged by the expert and particularly the implementation of targeted social assistance that will help overcome the difficulties associated with the health status of the applicant , preserving family ties while ensuring the protection of the best interests of children.

At paragraph 54 the court very clearly re-stated the role of state agencies in this kind of situation; vulnerable people require greater protection:

The Court reiterates that the role of social protection authorities is precisely to help people in difficulty, to guide them through the process and advise, among others, on how to overcome difficulties (Saviny v. Ukraine, no 39948/06, § 57, 18 December 2008; RMS v Spain. no 28775/12, § 86, 18 June 2013). In the case of vulnerable people, authorities must show particular attention and must ensure their greater protection (B. v. Romania (no O2) n o 1285 to 1203, §§ 86 and 114, February 19 2013; Todorova v Italy. n o 33932/06, § 75, 13 January 2009; RMS c. Spain, no 28775/12, § 86, June 18, 2013; Zhou, cited above, §§ 58-59; Akinnibosun c. Italy, cited above, § 82).

Impact for English courts

Despite the very clear declaration of the President in Re B-S about the positive obligations upon States to keep families together and that adoption must be a ‘last resort’,  it is clear that there is a tension between this obligation and the requirement that care proceedings must conclude as quickly as possible in or any event within 26 weeks. Access to mental health services is poor and parents will often find themselves on a waiting list for therapy, to be told this is ‘outside the child’s timescales’.

The salient facts here were the clear recognition of the strong bonds between mother and children and the fact that the consequences of failure to reunifiy the family were so serious, in that the children lost their relationship with their parents and each other. These considerations will not be present in all cases; proceedings involving babies removed at birth will not compell  consideration of an existing bond, but whether or not that bond should be permitted to develop. That may well lead to decisions to remove that are considered proportionate.

However, this very clear re-statement by the European Court of what is mean by a state’s positive obligation towards families, is another interesting authority to suggest that the UK may find itself vulnerable to serious criticism at some future point.

For example, it is interesting to note the positive research about the impact and efficacy of the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts and yet this model is still not being rolled out nationally. Are we really confident that the way we approach care proceedings with a care plan for adoption, is going to survive scrutiny in the European court?

 

Translation of professional jargon and avoiding cliches

This is a work in progress. We would like to continue adding to this list. Please feel free to make your own suggestions or comments about the included phrases and their definitions.

 

Translation of jargon phrases

What Professionals say What parents hear What you should say
‘disguised compliance’ I can’t do anything right Nothing. If you think parents are not genuinely engaging then test their engagement. Continue to assess.
‘attachment’ They don’t think I love my child We are worried about the way your child understands the world around him, and who he can trust to keep him safe. This sometimes happen if parents find it hard to be consistent in the way they look after a child. Here are some things we can do to make things better for you and your child.
‘good enough parenting’ As long as I don’t hit my child, I’m ok No parent can ever be perfect. But every child deserves to have his basic physical and emotional needs met. A lot of the time, that means parents are going to have to put the children’s needs first and above their own particularly while the children are very young and vulnerable.
‘pre-contemplative stage’ ???? It is often difficult to make changes to the way you live your life. Making changes comes in stages – first you have to recognise you have a problem, then you have to do something about it and then you have to keep doing it! If parents haven’t even got to the first stage of recognizing they have a problem, then it is difficult to help them
Significant emotional harm As long as I don’t hit my child, I’m ok Children can get hurt in all sorts of ways, not just by being hit. If they are ignored, shouted at or never praised, this can make it hard for them to grow up feeling good about themselves. Adults who don’t feel good about themselves are often very unhappy and sometimes make bad choices in their lives, which hurt them and everyone around them. Children deserve a chance to be able to grow up into happy adults.
Future risk of harm Social workers think they can gaze into a crystal ball and take my child away for no real reason If something happened in the past then there is a risk it will happen in the future. But no one is a prisoner of their past. You can show that you understand what went wrong before and that you want to change it. But you don’t accept anything did go wrong, and you won’t work to try and change it, then the court will be worried about what is likely to keep on happening in the chld’s future.

 

Words and phrases to avoid

Some words and phrases are not helpful in either establishing or maintaining a relationship between professionals and parents. They are seen as inflammatory and/or cliches .

There is a danger that such phrases are used as a convenient shorthand for a bundle of concerns which may lead to professionals failing to properly analyse what it is about the particular examples that is causing legitimate concern. Also, people find it difficult to engage with or listen to someone who appears to be talking in cliches.

For example: avoid saying ‘Parent X is lacking insight into his problems with substance abuse’. Instead say: Parent X has been using drugs for a long time and has not got any help to stop, even though I have asked him to and given him the address for where he needs to go to get help. Therefore i am worried Parent X just doesn’t understand that he has a serious problem with drug use and I don’t think he can safely look after his children unless he deals with this’.

It is always better to speak plainly and provide examples of actions or failure to act so that everyone is clear exactly what the problem is and what, if anything can be done about it.

Examples of words and phrases that are becoming unhelpful cliches/are not easily understood

I can see an immediate distinction here between legal ‘terms of art’, such as ‘recusal’ and phrases which risk slipping into unhelpful cliche, such as ‘lack of insight’.

Please add in the comments any words/phrases you think should be on this list. 

  • collusion
  • core assessment
  • CP Conference
  • domestic violence
  • emotional attunement
  • failure to engage
  • guardian ad litem
  • holistic needs
  • lack of insight
  • minutes of meeting
  • orange book assessment [I have no idea what this is!]
  • personality traits
  • professionals meeting
  • recusal
  • redacted
  • social work assessment

 

 

The woeful state of our debate about child protection, Part II: Hemming and the Latvian case

John Hemmings address to the Press Conference in Riga, Latvia.

On 31st August John Hemming uploaded onto YouTube a video.

I mentioned this on Twitter and expressed the hope the Latvian authorities are getting information from sources other than this. John Hemming has asked me to explain why I am concerned with what he says in his video.

What’s my problem? Summary

What’s wrong with this video? In general, to conduct the debate about the child protection system in this way, using inflammatory language, offering assertions as fact, displaying confirmation bias throughout and simply ignoring anything which might not support your argument simply underlines for me the very sad fact that the state of debate about our child protection system is woeful. It is embarrassing that we cannot do better.

It is all the more tragic because John Hemming does make some good points. He is right to point out that until recently LA were NOT aware of their obligations to inform other States that their citizens were facing care proceedings and the removal of their children. But that has been addressed and dealt with.  John Hemming should get credit for making a fuss about that, because it is important.

However, whatever good he has managed to do has, in my opinion, over many years been sadly submerged under a pile of ill informed and inflammatory assertions.  This does not promote debate or aid greater understanding or help children. Rather it drives proper debate further underground and the children are left to suffer in a system which is arguably not fit for purpose. 

If he is going to set himself up as an expert advising the Latvian authorities, I hope he will take the time to explain further to them his role as a ‘champion’ against the child protection system, and in particular his links with Ian Josephs and the ‘mums on the run’ network. 

I think the Latvian authorities ought to be fully informed about the background and activities of someone who proposing to ‘assist’ them in actions against another State. It is then a matter for the Latvian authorities whether they think they will be helped or hindered. For my part, I would urge them to act with extreme caution before accepting uncritically John Hemming’s views of the child protection system.

Particular problems.

It’s about a 5 minute video. This is what he says just 31 seconds in:

The Government sets targets to destroy families.

Why frame your argument in this way, right at the outset? Is this kind of inflammatory language remotely helpful in promoting debate and understanding between two States? Is this really what he thinks is the purpose of the child protection system in England? If that is what he really thinks, does he accept that he is going to need to provide some pretty clear evidence in support of such an astonishing allegation?

At 36 sections he says that the LAs act ‘wherever possible to remove children from their families’ Again, an inflammatory statement which is not a reflection certainly of the current law that makes it crystal clear that adoption is the option of last resort.

He references a recent case which I won’t identify here as it seems that the whole purpose of this video is to encourage the Latvian authorities to put pressure on the Supreme Court to consider an appeal in this case. An interesting way to mount a legal challenge, using ‘interesting’ in the sense of ‘utterly inappropriate’.

He makes particular assertions about the state of the evidence in this case, claiming that the only real independent evidence was a core assessment, which was ignored because the SW Managers put pressure on to get another child to meet their adoption targets. It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court make of this assertion.

He refers to statistics which show that ‘obviously’ a LA was biased because they have targets to increase adoptions ‘year on year’. Is he going to discuss with the Latvian authorities the efforts made by the Transparency Project to unpick and analyse his statistics? It clearly is not as obvious as he would wish to maintain that the Merton KPIs are irrefutable proof of a Government set target to ‘destroy families’.

I don’t disagree that the current ‘push’ for adoption is concerning – and I note this particular blog post with serious concern – but after years of searching, I haven’t been able to find clear or indeed any proof that the Government is setting out to ‘destroy families’. There are obviously problems in the system which we need to deal with urgently – but deliberate, malign targets of destruction are not one of those problems. See the ‘Forced Adoption’ post for further discussion.

The more time we waste posturing about issues which don’t exist then the less time we have to deal with the problems that clearly do. What does John Hemming have to say for example about the clear and stark regional differences about rates of children taken into care? The Merton rates are tiny; about 12 children a year are adopted or subject to a SGO. You are much more likely to be taken into care if you are a child in Blackpool. Why is this? Why isn’t John Hemming interested in this?

Could it be, a cynical voice inside me utters, that it is just more ‘exciting’ to set oneself up as an advisor to the Latvian government and enjoy the accolades that attach to such campaigning, rather than actually care about and do something about the depressing and mundane realities of inequality in our society? Not as much press interest in the latter I suspect.

The debate at the Transparency Project is here. John Hemming has been asked a number of questions about his statistics which at the time of writing he has failed to answer. I am particularly interested in his assertion that he has statistics from 1995 which will prove that there are ever increasing numbers of young children being taken into care and subsequently adopted. I would like to see this evidence.

 

Conclusion

As Claire Fenton Glynn commented on Twitter about John Hemming’s video.

Claire Fenton-Glynn ‏@CFentonGlynn
@SVPhillimore A number of fundamental errors of reasoning. There are definitely flaws in English system but this clouds productive debate.

Please. We simply have to do better. We are educated adults. We are surely capable of a debate that reflects all the nuance and complexity of the current problems we face.

I have to believe that but at the moment I am seeing precious little to reassure me from any source.

‘Disguised compliance’ as example of Jargon and Cliche – the chilling effects on working relationships

“… they are basically stripping us of any rights we have, freedom of speech, our private life, freedom of choice, taking away our descion making and how the sw precieves this Is exactly how it is there is no other version of things in their eyes their’s is the only view that’s right and if your don’t conform to it then you are being disguise compliance well it really is a case of do as I say or reap the consequences…”

This post arises out of a discussion on Facebook. The phrase ‘disguised compliance’ appears to be used more frequently in care proceedings recently. What does it mean? What do parents think it means? Is this just another example of the potentially very damaging impact of jargon upon effective communication and good working relationships?

You may also be interested to see our post where we attempt to translate some of the more commonly used profession jargon.

What is ‘disguised compliance?’

The NSPCC provide this definition:

‘Disguised compliance’ involves a parent or carer giving the appearance of co-operating with child welfare agencies to avoid raising suspicions, to allay professional concerns and ultimately to diffuse professional intervention.

The term is attributed to Peter Reder, Sylvia Duncan and Moira Gray who outlined this type of behaviour in their book Beyond blame: child abuse tragedies revisited :

“Sometimes, during cycles of intermittent closure, a professional worker would decide to adopt a more controlling stance. However, this was defused by apparent co-operation from the family. We have called this disguised compliance because its effect was to neutralise the professional’s authority and return the relationship to closure and the previous status quo.” (Reder et al, 1993, pp 106-7).1

Examples of disguised compliance would be a sudden increase in school attendance, attending a run of appointments, engaging with professionals such as health workers for a limited period of time, or cleaning the house before a visit from a professional.

Impact of use of jargon in working relationships between parents and professionals.

‘Jargon’ is defined in this way by Tony Proscio

The technical definition of jargon, the strictest, is language that is so technical that a person outside the field, the layperson so to speak, wouldn’t understand it, but that’s not the way most people that I work with think about jargon and it’s not generally the way I use the word either. For me, the definition of jargon is language that stops the reader instead of encouraging the reader to keep going, reader or listener. It’s language that either is grating or hard to figure out or seemingly wrong in some way that makes the reader or the listener stop and, instead of paying attention to your point, pay attention to your language.

Kate Wells has written about the importance of using language to communicate between social worker and parent. There is clearly a danger that the use of jargon seriously impedes communication. It may reassure the professional as a badge of their intelligence or learning – but it alienates, frustrates and confuses the lay person.

Mark Neary wrote about the use of jargon he encountered in the adult care system for his autistic son, and how this use of language meant his son’s life was further defined as ‘not normal’. For example where Mark Neary simply had ‘friends’ his son had a ‘circle of support and influence’. The alienating impact of this kind of language is clear.

But ‘disguised compliance’ is not simply jargon, it is also a cliche. It appears to be used increasingly frequently in assessments of parents.  The negative impact of cliches is described in this way by Tony Poscio, in answer to the question why cliches are so irritating:

It’s partly the effect of just hearing anything over and over and over again. After a while you just get first bored and then irritated. Hearing the same word used repeatedly gives the subtle, maybe subliminal, impression that the person speaking or writing doesn’t have much of a vocabulary. That is it actually undermines the impression that the writer is trying to give of intelligence or mastery of the subject and instead replaces it with the only word this person knows. We don’t necessarily know we’re doing it. In fact, I may be doing it in this call and you’ll probably get ten emails later saying the jerk was doing exactly what he was criticizing and that maybe because it is a human tendency when you find a word that works, that describes what you want it to describe, you tend to use it over and over again, but it’s a harmful tactic for communication because the effect on the reader is just grating.

The further danger of use of the term ‘disguised compliance’ is the frustration it causes in parents who cannot see what they can do to show professionals that they are taking concerns on board. If the parents refuse to co-operate they are viewed with suspicion; but co-operating doesn’t help either as this will be reduced to ‘disguised compliance’.

The use of jargon and cliche is particularly infuriating for parents when it is seen as an attempt to mask hypocrisy or lazy thinking. For example, a typical complaint from many parents, is if they are late for contact with their children, this will be written up as evidence of their lack of consideration for their children or their inability to plan their lives. Social workers who are late for appointments however will blame traffic jams.

Views of a parent

I’m speechless I’ve spent a couple of hours reading about disguise compliance and my honest view everyone on here is disguise compliance because we are taking a stand. Some of the advice on community care for social workers is don’t ever believe a parent, anyone that makes a complaint has issues with authorities, a parent may have a good relationship with one professional they clearly got motives to hide abuse …  if u don’t agree to the appointment they want to have with you because u made plans three weeks ago to meet up with a friend who you haven’t seen for a long time and they ring up the day before or sometimes hours before because you say you can’t your busy but any other day is fine you are avoiding in their eyes.
If they turn up early or late for appointment and you have not quite made it home or you have waited in hours for them.and you had to go out again you are hiding something if you refuse to consent to given the access to your medical records you are hiding something, well no you keeps saying the concerns are with my child why do u need to know my personal medical history it’s not going to show if the child is ill is it, they are basically stripping us of any rights we have, freedom of speech, our private life, freedom of choice, taking away our descion making and how the sw precieves this Is exactly how it is there is no other version of things in their eyes their’s is the only view that’s right and if your don’t conform to it then you are being disguise compliance well it really is a case of do as I say or reap the consequences…

Conclusions

There are strong temptations to slip into ‘industry speak’ – as a sign of your belonging, as effective shorthand when communicating with other professionals, etc. But we have to be aware of the impact of our language. Not only can it serve as a barrier to communication but it can have a detrimental impact on our ability to think about what we are really saying and what we really mean.

It was recognised and discussed at the Child Protection Conference in June 2015 that there was work to be done on simplifying and humanising the language used by professionals. Delegates were asked to give their definitions of commonly used phrases in care proceedings such as ‘pre-contemplative stage’ or ‘attachment’. Even when people were confident that the meaning of the word was ‘clear’ there were a great many variations on the definitions they gave; the words and phrases did not mean the same things to the same people.

Tony Proscio was asked if people got better results when they’re more direct, when they use simple language and avoid phrases like “engagement” or “advocacy,” . He answered:

… If the objective is to inspire people or to sort of prod them to action, the sounds and the words they hear ought to strike them as coming from friends and allies, not from a disgruntled professor. The whole point of inspiring people to do things is that you reach them at a level that’s both emotional and intellectual. The emotions are stirred by emotional speech and the intellect is stirred by originality. Neither of those things is going to come from a lot of cliché, jargon, abstractions, and technicalities.

Further reading

Adoption Statistics

Discussion about what the statistics do or don’t tell us about the rise (or fall!) in adoption rates has grown considerably throughout 2015. Therefore we have removed this discussion from the Forced Adoption post to consider it separately here.

Those who campaign against ‘forced adoption’ maintain that the initial ‘targets’ to get children out of foster care and into permanent families has lead to a ‘trickle down’ effect so that SW target cute ‘adoptable’ children and initiate care proceedings to get them into the system and thus improve their ‘adoption hit rate’. If this is true, can we find any support for it in the data which is published about applications for various orders and the orders that are eventually made? 

 

Lies Damned Lies and Statistics – what do the figures say about adoption rates?

On 30th September 2014 the government issued a press release applauding the rise in adoption numbers. Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education said:

Today’s figures show a significant and sustained rise in the number of adoptions – an increase of 26% in the last 12 months. This means thousands more of our most vulnerable children are finding the loving and permanent homes they so desperately need.

We also promised to remove delay and frustration from the process for both children and adopters. Today’s figures show that we are delivering on that promise. The system is working more quickly, as well as providing more support to families after an adoption has taken place.

However, In November 2014 Sir Martin Narey raised concerns that since February 2014 LA decisions to pursue adoptions are down by 46% and number of placement orders granted by the courts has halved.

His concerns were so great that the National Adoption Leadership Board issued ‘myth busting’ guidance about what the court does or does not say about when adoption is necessary.

For further discussion see Pink Tape’s ‘Take me to your Leadership Board’.  We look at this issue in more detail in the post ‘When can the courts consider adoption is necessary?‘

It is clear that the Government remain committed to increasing the numbers of children in care being adopted and refer to the recent authorities as ‘set backs’. See this answer from the Prime Minister at Parliamentary Questions in 2015:

Hansard from Wed ( October 14th 2015 ) : Q4. [901524] Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con): The Prime Minister recently spoke movingly and shockingly about the life of despair that still lies ahead for too many of our looked-after children.
Notwithstanding the vital work that has been done in recent years, will he expand on the reforms that he proposes for these, our most vulnerable citizens?

The Prime Minister: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who knows a lot about this from the work he did in London when working for the Mayor.
I think that there are two areas we need to look at most of all. First, we need to speed up adoption processes. We should be reducing the number of children in care by ensuring that they can find loving family homes. We have made some progress, but frankly we have had set-backs, not least because of some of the judgments in our courts, so we need to get the level of adoption back up again. Secondly, we need to take some of the knowledge from our education reforms and use it to reform social services.

The rise and fall of adoption rates.

So there was no doubt that adoption rates were rising. But they are probably going to fall again given that decisions by LAs to pursue adoption have fallen by nearly half.

See further the excellent article by suesspiciousminds about newspaper reports in May 2015 concerning the ‘freefall’ in adoption rates after the ‘chilling effects’ of various cases. 

So have the anti forced adoption campaigners had an impact? Are they responsible for this fall by unmasking the truth behind ‘adoption targets’?

We believe the short answer to that question is ‘no’.  To consider this in more detail,  we need to look at the reasons behind the previous rise in the number of adoptions. There are a number of possible explanations:

  • First; that the governments plans to speed up adoption rates for the children already in care were working well; OR
  • LAs were generally under pressure to avoid another Baby P scandal and were pushing for adoption in cases where before a child might have returned home; OR
  • LAs were suffering the consequences of difficulties in recruitment and retention of social workers so cases were not being assessed as carefully as they should be; OR
  • LAs were deliberately targeting younger, more ‘adoptable’ children and social workers would lie to ensure the children’s removal from loving and blameless parents.

 

Can the statistics help us decide what’s been going on?

The danger with statistics is that often they can be used to prove any kind of argument you want. Some opponents of the system have at times offered quite contradictory views about what is going on – see this report from the Daily Mail in 2011 which asserted that adoption rates were falling because adoptive parents were afraid of being called paedophiles.

The blogger Second Daddy comments:

If you want to learn about Forced Adoption then look into it yourself, make your own mind up. If you want to see the raw figures for adoption in 2010, the year quoted by John Hemmings MP in the above Wikipedia article, it’s here. You’ll see that there were 4550 adoptions in England & Wales that year; John Hemmings stated that there were 1360 “Forced” adoptions that year, 29.89% of the total. 1000 of these he claims were “wrong”, 21.89% of the total, 73.53% of the “forced” adoptions. So a third of Adoptions are “forced”. That’s a fairly big number, and it is something we’re aware of and it is a concern, but. But. It’s a guess. With the greatest of respect, Mr Hemming has no idea how many of these were “wrong”. He pulled that figure out of his ass, he has no proof, just a hunch.

However, if it is true that local authorities are or have been targeting younger and hence more easily adoptable children to improve their adoption rates, we should expect to see that reflected in the statistics and we should be able to see a clear rise since 2000 of babies being taken into care and subsequently adopted.

 

We have found the following statistics.

Children in Care and Adoption

In 1976 4,000 babies were adopted. In 2011, 60 (according to the Daily Mail).

Research from Karen Broadhurst (see below) shows a significant and worrying increase in the numbers of newborns who end up subjected to final care and placement orders.

The article ‘Adoption Targets Row; the Sector Responds’ from 2007 in Community Care gives the following figures:

  • 2,490 under-fives in care were adopted in 2006, up from 1,010 in 1995.
  • 4,160 under-fives were first taken into care in 2006, up from 2,870 in 1995.
  • 1,300 babies aged younger than a month when they were taken into care were adopted in 2006, up from 540 in 1995.
  • The average age at adoption in 2006 was four years and one month.
  • 3,700 children were adopted from care in 2006, up from 2,700 in 2000.

So we can see there has been an increase in children being taken into care and being adopted over time from a low starting point, but that the average age for adoption in 2006 was over 4 years old. So 4 years after Hemming argues that babies are being targeted, this does not appear  to be reflected in the average age on adoption.

Compare this with statistics from 2013 

6% (4,310) of children looked after on 31st March 2013 were under 1 year old
18% (12,360) were aged between 1 and 4 years old
19% (13,260) were aged between 5 and 9 years old
36% (24,450) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
20% (13,730) were aged 16 and over

The average age at adoption in the year ending 31st March 2013 was 3 years 8 months

2% (90) of children adopted during the year ending 31st March 2013 were under 1 year old
74% (2,960) were aged between 1 and 4 years old
21% (850) were aged between 5 and 9 years old
2% (70) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
<1% (10) were aged 16 and over

So we see that only 6% of looked after children in March 2013 were under one year old.  Only 90  (2%) were under 1 year old when they were adopted. There is a small decrease from the average age at adoption in 2006 of 4 years 1 month, to 3 years 8 months in 2013 – six years later.

However, in 2013, 13 years after LAs were supposed to be targeting babies, across the country, they have only managed to get 90 babies adopted and the average age at adoption is nearly 4 years old.

On these figures, if there is a deliberate conspiracy to target and remove babies and young children, then the LAs are doing a pretty poor job.

In 2013 there were still 3 times as many children needing adoption as there were adoptive placements. This also points against any argument that care proceedings are targeting the ‘adoptable’ children – otherwise why are there so many children in care who can’t find adoptive families?

See further the article in Community Care;  ‘An ideological approach to adoption figures means we are missing important trends’.

Removal of new born babies

However, research by Karen Broadhurst at the University of Lancaster, in December 2015 has shown a significant increase in care proceedings involving removal of new born babies from mothers who have been involved in repeat care proceedings and have lost many proves children. She found a ‘disproportionate increase’ : from 802 in 2008 to 2,018 in 2013.

The research can be downloaded here.

The Nuffield Family Justice Observatory reported in October 2018 ‘Born into Care, Newborns in Care Proceedings in England’. You can read a summary of the report which links to the full report here.  In brief, the research showed that numbers of newborns being removed were on the rise (defined as babies under 7 days). In the decade covered by the study, 173,002 children were involved in care proceedings and 47,172 (27%) were infants. At the outset, 32% of care proceedings were for newborns – by the end that had increased to 42%. Newborn cases also increased in volume over time; at the outset 1,039 cases were issued involving newborns; at the end 2,447. Thus the likelihood of newborns in the general population become subject to care proceedings has more than doubled.

The total percentage of newborns subject to final care and placement orders was 47%. 21% were placed with extended family. 13% were placed with birth family. This requires further investigation – we need to know more about the circumstances behind those percentages.

Thus does show a significant increase from 90 babies being adopted in 2013 and we need to know more about why this is happening. It does seem to support an assertion that babies are being ‘targeted’ as easier to adopt.

 

What happens in care proceedings?

See these statistics from the second quarter of 2015. 

John Hemmings and others often asserts that almost all care proceedings result in care orders (and thus parents should leave the jurisdiction rather than engage with care proceedings).

Figure 3 shows the proportion of children subject to which final orders at the end of care proceedings. This does not support the assertion that ‘99%’ of applications for a care order end up with the child being removed from the parents or the wider family.

  • Care Order 30%
  • Supervision Order 18%
  • Residence 12%
  • Special Guardianship 14%
  • ‘Others’  11%

 

ITV Exposure Documentary

On 15th July 2014 barrister Martha Cover stated on the ITV documentary Exposure – Don’t take my child  that orders ‘permitting adoption’ had risen by 95% in the past three years.  This seemed high to us so we are very grateful to Andrew Pack for doing some digging and commenting:

Placement Order applications since 2011, and Placement Orders made by the Court since 2011.  These taken from the Court stats spreadsheets.

  • In 2011 – applications made 5821, orders made 5109.
  • In 2013 – applications made 7178, orders made 6082.

That’s about a 20% increase. Annoyingly, I don’t have the stats for 2010, which is presumably when Martha is calculating from, but I’d be REALLY surprised if it was as high as claimed. For that to be right, the applications in 2010 would need to have been around 3500… Interestingly, you can see a downturn on both in the last 6 months (i.e. since the Re B-S stuff was really percolating through) – and it is almost 50% down in the first quarter of this year from the high point.

I reckon the error here is in taking the numbers of children each year who are subject to Placement Orders, which is going up at a significant rate, as demand for placements outstrips supply and we add to the numbers each year with new cases, but also don’t clear the decks of the children the year before who needed placements.

A 20% increase in something as drastic as placement orders is still reason for concern, but it isn’t 95%, not by a long chalk.

Follow the money

You may be interested in these articles by Andrew Pack for more detailed consideration of whether it is possible that there  is a financial motive or incentive driving care proceedings.

He comments:

What I would say, for the ultra-cautious people, is that I would agree that the lack of transparency on ‘payments and adoption targets’ is deeply unhelpful and creates a genuine reason for people to feel sceptical, uncomfortable and unhappy. The absence of clarity and transparency is itself very shabby. It may or may not have distorted how many times adoption was recommended in final social work evidence, it may or may not have had an impact on individual people’s cases. At this point, we don’t have the evidence to draw a proper conclusion and that in itself is wrong. It creates at best, a fishy odour, and as we well know, “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done”

The impact of the continuing ‘push’ for adoption

it will be interesting to see what impact the continuing ‘push for adoption’ has on statistics in the coming years. The PM made this comment in October 2015:

Hansard from Wed ( October 14th 2015 ) : Q4. [901524]

Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con): The Prime Minister recently spoke movingly and shockingly about the life of despair that still lies ahead for too many of our looked-after children. Notwithstanding the vital work that has been done in recent years, will he expand on the reforms that he proposes for these, our most vulnerable citizens?

The Prime Minister: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who knows a lot about this from the work he did in London when working for the Mayor.I think that there are two areas we need to look at most of all. First, we need to speed up adoption processes. We should be reducing the number of children in care by ensuring that they can find loving family homes. We have made some progress, but frankly we have had set-backs, not least because of some of the judgments in our courts, so we need to get the level of adoption back up again. Secondly, we need to take some of the knowledge from our education reforms and use it to reform social services.For example, we need to see the best graduates going into social work.

Adoption Leadership Board reports December 2017

The summary noted that the trend in making adoption orders was upwards until a dip in 2013 following the Re B-S decision. But now about 4,000 placement orders are made each year, which suggests that the use of adoption is comparatively higher now when compared with last two decade.

 

Further reading about statistical trends

Forced Adoption

I am a passionate believer in the value of adoption in appropriate circumstances… But I fear that, in making all those orders, I never gave much attention to the emotional repercussions of them. In particular I fear that I failed fully to appreciate that an adoption order is not just a necessary arrangement for the upbringing of some children… the order is an act of surgery which cuts deep into the hearts and minds of at least four people and will effect them, to a greater or lesser extent, every day of their lives…

Lord Wilson Denning Society Lecture 13th November 2014

‘Forced adoption’  is a phrase we often hear used by people like Ian Josephs  and the former MP John Hemming  We have provided links to their sites under their names – but we hope that if you visit their sites, you will also stay here and read what we have to say.

See this post for discussion of the case law which judges have to consider before agreeing to any care plan for adoption. See this post for general discussion of the law around adoption and placement orders. 

 

The debate begins

Adoption, the means by which a child’s legal relationship with his birth parents is eliminated, did not become law in England and Wales until the Adoption Act 1926; some time after the USA, Australia and Canada. Many babies born out of marriage in the Victorian era were ‘farmed out’ or placed with married couples who would pretend the baby was their own.  There were increasing concerns about the lack of regulation of this private adoption industry which led to statutory intervention. Under the Local Government Act 1929, local authorities (LA) were given powers to remove children from parents, if the LA decided they could not care for them.

See this post from the Guardian giving a time line of the history of child protection. 

In 1968, 25,000 adoption orders were made, reflecting a society where illegitimacy was still stigmatised, birth control less reliable and welfare benefits less accessible.  In 2014 only about 5000 adoption orders were made. Adoptions now rarely involve babies.

The often highly polarised debate about ‘forced adoption’ and what this means for child protection work, gained increased traction around 2007 and became the focus of renewed attention towards the end of 2013. This followed discussion of Alessandra Pacchieri  (the ‘forced caesarean case’ ) and media interest in reports of parents wrongly suspected of abusing their children who were actually suffering from various medical conditions.

You can read comment on Ms Pacchieri’s case and the judgment here. The court made an adoption order in relation to her child in April 2014. The case is here. For an explanation of what sparked John Hemming’s interest in the child protection system, see ‘Hemming’s Way’ the article by Jonathan Gornall in 2007.

However, despite the enormous reduction in adoption orders over 40 years, the debate about the entire concept of adoption continues to grow. There have been serious concerns about the child protection system for many years. Those unhappy with the UK’s approach to ‘forced adoption’  raised their concerns in November 2014 with the European Parliament’s Petition Committee.

In fact, it was this 2013 ‘forced adoption’ debate that encouraged us to set up this resource as we were concerned that a lot of justifiable criticism about the system was getting lost or taken over by those who wanted to believe the more extreme ‘conspiracy theories’  – i.e. that the entire system was corrupt and that social workers are paid bonuses to snatch babies from loving homes.

For a sad example of the damage that can be done to a parent’s chances of keeping their family together, by  a ‘siege mentality’ and belief that concerns about their parenting are fuelled by a conspiracy, see Hertfordshire County Council v F & Others [2014] EWHC 2159.

We have attempted to debunk some of the more specific myths here and in particular the frequently made assertion that adoption targets exist to take babies away, rather than to promote finding adoptive families for children who have already been through care proceedings and don’t have a permanent home.

 

The Conspiracy Theory: Allegations of Systemic Corruption

People who are unhappy with the current child protection system often refer to it as a system of ‘forced adoption’ which is almost unique in Europe.

However, this assertion is not supported by the 2015 Report by the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development from the Council of Europe which notes that adoptions without parental consent are possible in Andorra, Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Montenegro, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden and Turkey.  A further 7 countries permit adoption without parental consent in ‘rare’ circumstances. See further, this post from the Transparency Project. See also this post from Claire Fenton-Glynn confirming that EVERY European country has a mechanism to provide for adoption without parental consent. 

They say that children are taken from parents for no good reason in order to meet LA’s ‘adoption targets’ set by various Governments and this is shown by the increased numbers of children being taken into care.

It is further alleged that family courts are secret and people who try to speak out will be sent to prison. Parents aren’t allowed to see the evidence against them and lawyers, experts and Judges are all in each other’s pockets and just rubber stamp the decisions made by the LA and social workers.

There are many on line groups for parents who are convinced that their children were removed on the basis of deliberate lies. The view expressed here is typical:

UK Social Services/CAFCASS are the most prolific and serious perpetrators of Domestic Violence in the country. UK Family Law Courts a close second. One day, history lessons will describe the horrific details of what is happening to families all across the country. The descendants of those who have perpetrated this abuse, will be ashamed of their ancestors and try to distance themselves from them….

Worries about social work practice come from a variety of sources. Colin Brewer wrote in the Spectator in the aftermath of the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal:

The Rotherham report suggests, as June and I suggested 34 years ago, that social workers excel at empathy but lack the ability to carry out ‘coherently planned action’. Social work with troubled teenagers is doubtless even more challenging today than it was in the 1980s, yet the report’s conclusions reveal many of the unhelpful institutional and ideological features that we identified are still with us…

It seems these were not just individual failures, occasional and regrettable exceptions in a generally efficient professional culture, but a persistent feature of a profession that emphasises doing good rather than doing it efficiently. This happens despite the fact that social workers have relatively modest case loads, especially compared with doctors.

These are not fanciful concerns. We should all be interested in the state of our child protection services. However, while we accept that sadly there have been serious examples of injustice we don’t accept that this is a result of deliberate corruption within the system itself, or chasing after ‘adoption targets’.

What is clear is that a growing number of people DO believe exactly that. We need to understand why and what we can do about it.

 

Adoption Targets: How did this belief take hold?

In 2000, the government introduced a national target to increase the number of children adopted from care by at least 40% between 1999-2000 and 2004-5. Tony Blair had been horrified by the numbers of children who remained in care for long periods of time without a permanent home.

Therefore, these were not targets to take children from their homes in order to get them adopted but a well intentioned attempt to help children who were already in the care system and hadn’t been found a permanent home.

Claire Fenton-Glynn describes the situation in her study on the UK system, presented to the European Parliament in June 2015:

The Prime Minister’s Review of Adoption in 2000 put forward the belief that the system was not delivering the best for children, as decisions about how to provide a secure, stable and permanent family were not addressed early enough. As such, it advocated an increase in the use of adoption to provide children with permanency at an earlier stage. The Review gave the opinion that there was too great a focus on rehabilitation with the birth family, at the expense of the child’s welfare. It emphasised that the first choice should always be a return to the birth family, but where this was clearly not an option, adoption should be seen as a key means of providing permanence. Foster care, on the other hand, was viewed as a transitional measure, which should be used only as a temporary option.

Following on from this, the government produced a White Paper entitled Adoption: A New Approach, which outlined the government’s plan to promote the wider use of adoption for looked after children, establishing the target of increasing adoption by 40-50 per cent by 2004-2005.39 The White Paper also announced that the government would require local authorities to make a plan for permanence – returning home, placement for adoption, or special guardianship40 – for a child within 6 months of being continuously looked after.

It was in this context that the Adoption and Children Act 2002 was introduced, with the explicit aim of promoting the greater use of adoption. The Act changed the process of adoption itself, by making the welfare of the child the paramount consideration for courts and adoption agencies in all decisions relating to adoption, including in deciding whether to dispense with the birth parents’ consent to adoption.

The Government’s official position about targets to get children taken into care is clear: they don’t exist. Matthew Dalby of  the Ministerial and Public Communications Division of the Department of Education said in October 2014, in response to an email from a parent:

I must explain that there are no targets on the numbers of children in care. In fact the law is clear in that children should live with their parents wherever possible and that families should be given extra support to help keep them together. In most cases, support from the local authority (LA) enables concerns to be addressed and children to remain with their families.

The Transparency Project responded in September 2015 to John Hemming’s assertion that the London Borough of Merton has ‘targets’ to take children from their birth families. There are certainly concerns that ‘key performance indicators’ promoting adoption could risk impacting on the integrity of decision making for individual children; the Transparency Project is investigating further and has made a number of FOI requests to other local authorities; watch this space.

Judicial response to allegations of systemic corruption

John Hemming raised very specific allegations about the corruption in the family courts in the case of RP v Nottingham [2008] which were rejected by Wall LJ as being without evidence:

97. It is plain to me from these documents, that in addition to the allegations set out above, Mr. Hemming believes that HJ was in the pay of the local authority and thus was “the local authority’s expert”. For good measure, he asserts that the system is “evil” and that “there does seem to be little concern in the legal profession about the reliability of opinion offered in court.”. The clear implication behind the “witch findings” items on the website set out at paragraph 95 above is that “experts” like HJ are in it for the money; that they are happy to “manufacture ‘evidence'”; and that they are in receipt of “phoney” letters of instruction. The result, Mr Hemming asserts is a “disaster”.

98. In my judgment, these comments are not only wrong and ill-informed; the simple fact remains that they have no foundation in the evidence presented either to the Nottingham County Court or to this court. That they are made publicly by Mr Hemming once again strikes me as an abuse of his position.

Wall LJ went on to say at para 127:

In my judgment, the arguments advanced by Mr Hemming in this case are ill-informed and tendentious. They are contradicted by the evidence, and must be rejected. I think this most unfortunate. Nobody who works in the Family Justice System regards it as perfect: most of us see it as under-resourced and struggling to deal with the work loads thrust upon it. Constructive criticism, particularly from those in a position to bring about change, is to be welcomed. I am myself in no doubt that the system must change and adapt, and I have spoken many times in public in support of my belief that there needs to be greater transparency in order to combat the partial, tendentious and inaccurate criticisms made against the system. I therefore welcome the opportunity provided by this case to demonstrate that the system has operated properly, and that the criticisms made are unfounded.

Rejection of the official position

However, following the introduction of targets to speed up finding a home for children in care, some then argue that the ‘law of unintended consequences’  came into play and these targets acted to promote undesirable behaviour from those in the child protection system.

John Hemming has argued that these targets did little to help the older children already in care but rather had the effect of encouraging local authorities to issue care proceedings with regard to more ‘adoptable’ children so they would filter through the system, end up adopted quickly and improve the adoption rates.

This was denied at the time; see this report from BBC News On Line in 2008:

The Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan has denied claims that young children are being taken into care by local authorities to meet adoption targets. Mr Brennan has written to two national newspapers to say there has never been any financial incentive for councils to meet national adoption targets. The claims surfaced over the case of a baby in Nottingham placed into care just hours after being born. Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has accused the council of baby-stealing.

In a letter to The Times and The Daily Mail, Mr Brennan says there were national adoption targets designed to place more children in care into loving, family homes. But, he writes, “they ended in 2006; and there was never a financial incentive for local authorities to meet these national targets.”

The belief that children are removed from loving homes in order for LA’s to meet their ‘adoption targets’ persists to date.  There is no doubt that this version of events feels very ‘right’ to a significant number of people.

As Claire Fenton-Glynn comments:

While national adoption targets were set for some years, these ceased in 2006. The government emphasised that targets were intended to make sure more children who had been adjudged to need an adoptive placement were found permanent homes. They were not intended to affect the judgment of whether the child was in need of an adoption. However, despite the government’s statements, there is a danger that such targets do impact on such an evaluation, or at the very least, create the perception that they do so. Moreover, the government’s focus on adoption risks disadvantaging those children in care for whom adoption is not suitable. In the year ending 31 March 2014, only 16% of children who left the English care system were adopted, with others returning home, being placed with relatives, or with a special guardian, among other options. As such, an excessive focus on adoptive placements can mean that these others do not receive sufficient attention.

So what is really going on?

There are a number of elements we need to look at to try and work out whether assertions about a deliberately corrupt system contain any truth. Without doubt, the child protection system is not working well. We need to think more deeply why that is.

  • The continuing and repeating pressures on the child protection system which lead to growing distrust between parents and professionals;
  • The cost of care proceedings – why would a LA bear these costs without very good reason?
  • What do the statistics tell us about adoption rates for babies or very young children?
  • Adoption rates are now set to fall in the aftermath of the judgment in Re B-S.

 

A system under pressure

Helping children is a human process. When the bureaucratic aspects of work become too dominant, the heart of the work is lost.

The Munro Review of Child Protection Final Report

We consider the  history of concerns about the child protection system in more detail in this post. In brief, it seems that for very many years the system has become overwhelmed by the demands placed upon it. Excessive bureaucracy, dangerously high caseloads and low morale amongst social workers combine to work against good decision making and protecting children.

Some argue that it is the Children Act 1989 itself that has contributed to the problems, as it has pushed the law into ever less measurable levels of ‘abuse’ rather than setting out realistically measurable standards to govern the protection of children.

The fact that the system is under considerable strain and pressure is a serious problem for us all – but it is not evidence of deliberate malignity on the part of those decision makers.

 

The cost of care proceedings

It seems odd to suggest that LA deliberately set out to target children to adopt to ‘make money’ when you consider just how much care proceedings will cost them.  Research from the University of Bristol in 2011 said this:

Bringing care proceedings is a costly and time consuming business for local authorities. It has been estimated that each care case takes up 20 per cent of a full-time social worker’s working hours for a year (Plowden 2009). In addition, the local authority will have to contribute towards independent assessments ordered by the court and may need to instruct barristers (counsel) to represent it at court. In order to ensure that proceedings are used only where the local authority can prove its case and court orders are required, as well as to control expenditure, local authorities have established internal procedures for approving court applications. Legal advice and senior management approval are generally required even where an application if made for an order to remove or detain a child in an emergency (Masson et al 2007; DCSF 2008, para 3.3).

However, some will assert that the cost of care proceedings is actually an illustration of the problem – it’s a ‘gravy train’, keeping lawyers, social workers and experts in employment.  So if the financial burden on the LA does not reassure people that care proceedings are not taken lightly, what can we see from the statistics about children taken into care?

If Hemming and others are right, we should see a clear rise from 2000 in the number of babies or very young children taken into care and then adopted.

 

Lies, damned lies and statistics

See here for government statistics regarding looked after children. For more discussion of statistics put forward by John Hemming in August 2015, see these posts from the Transparency Project. The Full Fact Organisation considered the statistics in October 2015.

The statistics do NOT support an argument that more babies and young ‘adoptable’ children have been targeted since 2000, although it is clear that the number of children being adopted has been rising.

On 30th September 2014 the government issued a press release applauding this. Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education said:

Today’s figures show a significant and sustained rise in the number of adoptions – an increase of 26% in the last 12 months. This means thousands more of our most vulnerable children are finding the loving and permanent homes they so desperately need.

We also promised to remove delay and frustration from the process for both children and adopters. Today’s figures show that we are delivering on that promise. The system is working more quickly, as well as providing more support to families after an adoption has taken place.

However, In November 2014 Sir Martin Narey raised concerns that since February 2014 LA decisions to pursue adoptions are down by 46% and number of placement orders granted by the courts has halved.

His concerns were so great that the National Adoption Leadership Board issued ‘myth busting’ guidance about what the court does or does not say about when adoption is necessary.

For further discussion see Pink Tape’s ‘Take me to your Leadership Board’.  We look at this issue in more detail in the post ‘When can the courts consider adoption is necessary?‘

 

The rise and fall of adoption rates.

So there was no doubt that adoption rates were rising. But they are probably going to fall again given that decisions by LAs to pursue adoption have fallen by nearly half.

See further the excellent article by suesspiciousminds about newspaper reports in May 2015 concerning the ‘freefall’ in adoption rates after the ‘chilling effects’ of various cases. 

So have the anti forced adoption campaigners had an impact? Are they responsible for this fall by unmasking the truth behind ‘adoption targets’?

We believe the short answer to that question is ‘no’.  To consider this in more detail,  we need to look at the reasons behind the previous rise in the number of adoptions. There are a number of possible explanations:

  • First; that the governments plans to speed up adoption rates for the children already in care were working well; OR
  • LAs were generally under pressure to avoid another Baby P scandal and were pushing for adoption in cases where before a child might have returned home; OR
  • LAs were suffering the consequences of difficulties in recruitment and retention of social workers so cases were not being assessed as carefully as they should be; OR
  • LAs were deliberately targeting younger, more ‘adoptable’ children and social workers would lie to ensure the children’s removal from loving and blameless parents.

 

Can the statistics help us decide what’s been going on?

The danger with statistics is that often they can be used to prove any kind of argument you want. Some opponents of the system have at times offered quite contradictory views about what is going on – see this report from the Daily Mail in 2011 which asserted that adoption rates were falling because adoptive parents were afraid of being called paedophiles.

The blogger Second Daddy comments:

If you want to learn about Forced Adoption then look into it yourself, make your own mind up. If you want to see the raw figures for adoption in 2010, the year quoted by John Hemmings MP in the above Wikipedia article, it’s here. You’ll see that there were 4550 adoptions in England & Wales that year; John Hemmings stated that there were 1360 “Forced” adoptions that year, 29.89% of the total. 1000 of these he claims were “wrong”, 21.89% of the total, 73.53% of the “forced” adoptions. So a third of Adoptions are “forced”. That’s a fairly big number, and it is something we’re aware of and it is a concern, but. But. It’s a guess. With the greatest of respect, Mr Hemming has no idea how many of these were “wrong”. He pulled that figure out of his ass, he has no proof, just a hunch.

However, if it is true that local authorities are or have been targeting younger and hence more easily adoptable children to improve their adoption rates, we should expect to see that reflected in the statistics and we should be able to see a clear rise since 2000 of babies being taken into care and subsequently adopted.

 

We have found the following statistics.

In 1976 4,000 babies were adopted. In 2011, 60 (according to the Daily Mail).

The article ‘Adoption Targets Row; the Sector Responds’ from 2007 in Community Care gives the following figures:

  • 2,490 under-fives in care were adopted in 2006, up from 1,010 in 1995.
  • 4,160 under-fives were first taken into care in 2006, up from 2,870 in 1995.
  • 1,300 babies aged younger than a month when they were taken into care were adopted in 2006, up from 540 in 1995.
  • The average age at adoption in 2006 was four years and one month.
  • 3,700 children were adopted from care in 2006, up from 2,700 in 2000.

So we can see there has been an increase in children being taken into care and being adopted over time from a low starting point, but that the average age for adoption in 2006 was over 4 years old. So 4 years after Hemming argues that babies are being targeted, this does not appear  to be reflected in the average age on adoption.

Compare this with statistics from 2013 

6% (4,310) of children looked after on 31st March 2013 were under 1 year old
18% (12,360) were aged between 1 and 4 years old
19% (13,260) were aged between 5 and 9 years old
36% (24,450) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
20% (13,730) were aged 16 and over

The average age at adoption in the year ending 31st March 2013 was 3 years 8 months

2% (90) of children adopted during the year ending 31st March 2013 were under 1 year old
74% (2,960) were aged between 1 and 4 years old
21% (850) were aged between 5 and 9 years old
2% (70) were aged between 10 and 15 years old
<1% (10) were aged 16 and over

So we see that only 6% of looked after children in March 2013 were under one year old.  Only 90  (2%) were under 1 year old when they were adopted. There is a small decrease from the average age at adoption in 2006 of 4 years 1 month, to 3 years 8 months in 2013 – six years later.

However, in 2013, 13 years after LAs were supposed to be targeting babies, across the country, they have only managed to get 90 babies adopted and the average age at adoption is nearly 4 years old.

On these figures, if there is a deliberate conspiracy to target and remove babies and young children, then the LAs are doing a pretty poor job.

In 2013 there were still 3 times as many children needing adoption as there were adoptive placements. This also points against any argument that care proceedings are targeting the ‘adoptable’ children – otherwise why are there so many children in care who can’t find adoptive families?

See further the article in Community Care;  ‘An ideological approach to adoption figures means we are missing important trends’. 

 

ITV Exposure Documentary

On 15th July 2014 barrister Martha Cover stated on the ITV documentary Exposure – Don’t take my child  that orders ‘permitting adoption’ had risen by 95% in the past three years.  This seemed high to us so we are very grateful to Andrew Pack for doing some digging and commenting:

Placement Order applications since 2011, and Placement Orders made by the Court since 2011.  These taken from the Court stats spreadsheets.

  • In 2011 – applications made 5821, orders made 5109.
  • In 2013 – applications made 7178, orders made 6082.

That’s about a 20% increase. Annoyingly, I don’t have the stats for 2010, which is presumably when Martha is calculating from, but I’d be REALLY surprised if it was as high as claimed. For that to be right, the applications in 2010 would need to have been around 3500… Interestingly, you can see a downturn on both in the last 6 months (i.e. since the Re B-S stuff was really percolating through) – and it is almost 50% down in the first quarter of this year from the high point.

I reckon the error here is in taking the numbers of children each year who are subject to Placement Orders, which is going up at a significant rate, as demand for placements outstrips supply and we add to the numbers each year with new cases, but also don’t clear the decks of the children the year before who needed placements.

A 20% increase in something as drastic as placement orders is still reason for concern, but it isn’t 95%, not by a long chalk.

  • Andrew has commented further about statistics in this post for the Transparency Project.
  • To see government data showing the speed at which Local Authorities place children for adoption see these statistics from January 2014.

 

Follow the money

You may be interested in these articles by Andrew Pack for more detailed consideration of whether it is possible that there  is a financial motive or incentive driving care proceedings.

He comments:

What I would say, for the ultra-cautious people, is that I would agree that the lack of transparency on ‘payments and adoption targets’ is deeply unhelpful and creates a genuine reason for people to feel sceptical, uncomfortable and unhappy. The absence of clarity and transparency is itself very shabby. It may or may not have distorted how many times adoption was recommended in final social work evidence, it may or may not have had an impact on individual people’s cases. At this point, we don’t have the evidence to draw a proper conclusion and that in itself is wrong. It creates at best, a fishy odour, and as we well know, “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done”

See also our post on the issue of bonuses paid to social workers.

 

Why we reject the allegation of systemic corruption

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

The court judgments, culminating in Re B-S that have so concerned Martin Narey were right to point out the dangers of sloppy analysis. But why had some cases got into such a mess?  Because the system was ‘evil’, the social workers were telling lies to get their bonuses and that all the lawyers and judges closed their eyes to this because its actually a government policy?

Or is it more likely , that what we have is a child protection system that is often inefficient and/or overwhelmed by case loads? where mistakes are made, but rarely due to deliberate malice?

The conspiracy theories take hold because they feel ‘right’ to a lot of people who may have good cause to feel that they have not been listened to or treated fairly. This can lead people to  be unable or unwilling to consider a reality which does not accord with their strongly held perceptions:

People say: “Let the facts speak for themselves”; they forget that the speech of facts is real only if it is heard and understood. It is thought to be an easy matter to distinguish between fact and theory, between perception and interpretation. In truth, it is extremely difficult.

For further fascinating discussion about the impact of cognitive bias and how hard it is to get people to abandon their narratives, even if they are based on a false premise, see this article ‘Your Brain is Primed to Reach False Conclusions’.

 

What is our reality?

We have not been able to find evidence to support the assertion that the child protection system is designed and maintained deliberately to be corrupt or ‘evil’. Recent research from Cafcass says that LAs were right to make applications for care orders in 80% of cases they reviewed.

But that of course does not mean the system is perfect. Far from it. If 80% of cases are ‘right’ we still have 20% which are not and that is worrying. There are also serious concerns that an ideological ‘push’ for adoption is masking proper consideration of statistical trends.

We agree with that justice needs to be seen to be done and there should be as much openness as possible about such serious matters.

  • We accept that there can be serious consequences when a system is overwhelmed by cases; individual practitioners may lack support, and there is a risk of bad or even no decisions getting made. There is a particularly sad example of that in the case of A and S in 2012 where the boys’ Independent Reviewing Officer had a case load three times in excess of that recommended by good practice.
  • Sometimes mistakes are made because lawyers and doctors got it wrong about the medical evidence. Here is an example of a case where the court decided there wasn’t enough evidence to conclude that a child suffered non accidental injuries as this child also had rickets due to Vitamin D deficiency.
  • There is no doubt that the Government wishes to speed up the adoption process and there are legitimate concerns about how the new Children and Families Act 2014 will operate. See further this article by Cathy Ashley of the Family Rights Group and here for the views of Barnados on the need to speed up adoptions.
  • We note the conclusions of the the Report of the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development of the Council of Europe which was concerned by the high numbers of children in England and Wales who were adopted without parental consent, and commented (see para 74) that the UK’s refusal to reverse adoption orders where there had been a miscarriage of justice was a ‘misunderstanding’ of the best interests of the child, who had a right to return to his birth family.
  • Possibly the most serious problem is that social workers in child protection work are asked to wear ‘two hats’ at the same time – they are tasked with supporting families at the same time as they are gathering evidence against them. The tension and difficulties inherent in this dual role are obvious. See Wrennall, L. 2004 Miscarriages of Justice in Child Protection: a brief history and proposals for change.

But what we don’t accept is that these problems – as serious as they undoubtedly are – can legitimately lead to a conclusion that the whole system is corrupt and operating to ‘steal children’ to meet government endorsed targets.

We think it would be a great shame for children and parents if legitimate debate about problems in the system is overwhelmed by allegations that have no basis in fact and which serve only to make parents even more worried and frightened about what the system might ‘do’ to them and their children.

 

The Way Forward.

However, we accept that it is odd, if adoption really is the ‘gold standard’ for children that other jurisdictions do not seem to share the UK’s enthusiasm for adoption without the parents’  consent.

We should always be open to more discussion and debate about what we should be doing to secure the welfare of children.

You may be interested in this post describing the different approach in Finland, where children who are taken into care will Iive with foster families or in institutional care.  
You may also be interested in this article by an adoptive parent in the Guardian from 2012, discussing the difficulties caused by lack of post adoption support.
There are also concerns expressed by adoptive parents that they haven’t been given the full picture about their children’s backgrounds and this has caused enormous problems for the family. 

  • We agree that everyone who works in the system should be aware of the dangers of an insular or paternalistic approach to child protection issues.
  • We agree that adoption may not be the best plan for every child and there should not be an automatic assumption that adoption is best. There is an interesting article criticising ‘adoption driven systems’ here.
  • However, we think for many children subject to a final care order, it will represent their best chance of achieving a stable and loving home throughout their childhood.
  • We agree that placements with family members should continue to be investigated thoroughly.
  • We also agree that we need more consideration to how we support adoptive placements after an order is made as studies show the breakdown rates for adoptions can be as high as 25%. There is interesting research from the US here which looks at rates of adoption disruption and why they break down. Research published on April 9th 2014 by the University of Bristol offers another perspective on adoption disruption rates, concluding that they are low but emphasising the importance of post adoption support, particularly for older and more challenging children.
  • Social workers need more help to deal with the bureaucracy of their job, so they can focus on working with and supporting families – the ‘reclaiming social work’ model needs wider implementation.
  • What we don’t agree with is a debate that polarises around the term ‘forced adoption’ and politicians who advise parents to leave the country rather than engage with social workers.
  • Where we all hopefully agree is that every child has the right to grow up in a safe home and that any child protection investigation must be carried out quickly and fairly.

We hope this site can be part of sharing resources and information to promote open and honest debate about the child protection system.

You can read here about government sponsored research into the reasons why people are motivated to adopt or foster.

You may also be interested in what we say about post adoption contact.

 

 

Key Messages from the Department of Education Research

The Department of Education published ‘Adoption Cases Reviewed: an indicative study of process and practice’ in 2013 which provides a comprehensive review of contested adoption proceedings. Its key messages are set out below. While the review certainly did not find that everything was perfect, it did not conclude there was any evidence of systemic corruption or orders made for trivial reasons:

  • The study confirmed routine local authority and judicial compliance with the required procedural and legal framework for adoption. Parents’ rights to due process in contesting and opposing care, placement and adoption applications were ensured. Decisions were taken by the court in an appropriate way, following the full testing of evidence.
  • Local authority practice in the study cases pre-dated current statutory guidance, in which permanence is required to provide the framework for all social work with children and families. Where it lacked this perspective, social work intervention could not be relied upon to pursue effectively the protection and care planning that might have secured child safety on a permanent basis at home.
  • In addition, quality assurance of child protection and care planning was insufficiently robust.
  • Where risk assessment and protection and care planning lacked confidence and decisiveness, the right of the child to have a safe and permanent family life secured in a timely way could be compromised. Similarly, the right of parents to effective intervention to help them make necessary changes could be neglected where permanence principles were not applied equally to the process of rehabilitation.
  • While no clear pattern of contestation emerged in these cases parents often argued that the local authority had sought merely to gather evidence to make the case against them, rather than intervene purposefully to support the changes required to keep the child safely at home.
  • Extensive use of independent expert evidence and advice provided a guarantee that harm and risk had been assessed fully and decisions appropriately informed, once the case was in proceedings. However, the use of experts also caused duplication and delay. Current proposals for reform will need to ensure such evidence is deployed effectively within the sharper case management regime.
  • This study suggests that the enhancement and quality assurance of the expertise and effectiveness of social work within the inter-agency system should attract policy attention. Timely and proportionate decision making is undermined as much by lack of case management continuity and of grip in making a judgement about parents’ capacity to change in the local authority as it is in the court.
  • The reform process should be underpinned by a review of the philosophy, organisation and support of local authority case management in protection and care planning, to ensure reliability of compliance with current statutory guidance that a permanence perspective is employed as a matter of routine.
  • The reform process should also include a review of the availability and effectiveness of post-placement support for birth parents in all forms of permanent placement, including placement at home.