Are we failing parents whose children are taken into care?
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Version 0 of 1. Leah can’t stop wringing her hands. Every fingernail is bitten to the quick. This 23-year-old mother of two boys wears a silver ring that spells out “Mum”: she’s never taken it off, she tells me, since being given it for her 20th birthday by the foster carer at the mother-and-baby placement where she lived briefly after her eldest son, Jamie, was born. But Leah isn’t able to be a mum. Jamie was taken into local authority care at four months old and has been adopted. In December she lost Harley, born last year, after caring for him for nine months. The anguish of each loss is plain. Her story emerges haltingly, in fragments. “I almost didn’t come today,” she says abruptly. “It’s hard for me to trust new people.” It is now well understood that women whose children are taken from them by social services will frequently keep having babies to replace those they have lost. Subsequent babies are often each removed at birth. Some women have had four, five, six and more children removed; infants can be subject to interim care orders and removed from their mothers from the moment they are born. Some family solicitors and barristers report dealing with cases involving babies eight, nine and 10. The human catastrophe this wreaks ensures the cycle of misery goes on. In his final judgment confirming the local authority’s application to place Harley for adoption, family judge Stephen Wildblood QC details with icy precision the failings of a system that seeks to protect children but pays little attention to the welfare of mothers like Leah who are themselves deeply damaged, often as a result of child protection failures when they were growing up. Wildblood describes a process whereby, time and again, reports are produced during care proceedings saying that a parent needs therapy, but that “the beneficial effect of therapy would be ‘outwith the timescales for the child’. In this case for instance, Wildblood says, it would have been perfectly obvious to all that, when the mother was referred before birth, she was a prime candidate for therapy. “The sheer misery of this case,” he adds, “is that the mother remains devoted to the child and the child continues to develop appropriately. It is the backlog of profound emotional damage that the mother has suffered that causes the vulnerabilities in her parenting.” There is now increasing concern in the courts that parents’ mental health and emotional needs should be addressed as a priority: Wildblood makes clear his determination to encourage much earlier therapeutic intervention. Judi Evans, a barrister at St John’s Chambers in Bristol, represented Leah in the care proceedings. Evans cannot comment on the case, but having acted for more than two decades for local authorities and parents, describes a familiar pattern: “There’s nothing more professionally upsetting than knowing what the problem is and saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do, go to your GP and try to get a referral for therapy,’ knowing in your heart that, really, there’s not going to be a good outcome because the services aren’t there,” she says. “People might say, ‘Well, that’s just the way it is – these parents have problems.’ But surely if we’re removing and removing and removing … surely the emotional cost to everyone, the financial cost, means that we should be brave enough and reflective enough to say, ‘Could we do this differently?’” Leah is not addicted to drugs. She doesn’t drink and didn’t abuse her babies. Both boys were meeting their developmental milestones, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she strived hard to care for them. But Leah suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which was only diagnosed during the care proceedings for Jamie. As her story unfolds it is obvious that the harm inflicted in her childhood could hardly have resulted in anything else. “My stepdad abused me when I was a child. And my stepbrothers,” she says in a mumbled rush. She can’t bring herself to say more and falls silent for a minute, fingers twisting as she mentally regroups. Related: Thousands of mothers have multiple children taken into care When Leah first disclosed the abuse, which was sexual and included rape, social services stepped in. But her mother didn’t cooperate and Leah was taken into care. In foster homes from the age of 13, Leah was moved 11 times in 18 months. When Leah gets stressed, her mood plummets and she trashes her living space. Dirtying her environment is her reaction to the abuse inflicted on her: she does it to repel people, to keep the world out. When social workers, worried for the wellbeing of her babies, told her to tidy up, all she could hear was “make yourself unsafe”. But dirty nappies and other rubbish strewn around the house is not a safe environment for an infant who is starting to crawl. Leah suffered postnatal depression after giving birth to Jamie; unsurprisingly her mental health further deteriorated when he was taken from her. Two years later, the terror of wondering if she would lose Harley, too, only worsened her fragile mental state. Social services’ continued concern that Leah’s inability to cope alone would place her babies in harm’s way is why her sons have been permanently removed. Without any close relationships, this young woman has been bereft of family support for a decade. Her personal tragedy continues to unfold now that her children are gone. Unable to return to the mother-and-baby foster home where she had left Harley to be in court for the judge’s decision – despite her distress, she chose to attend, she says, to be there for the last moments in which she could be a mother to her son – she pleaded with the council to rehouse her. The offer she got was a room in temporary hostel accommodation; out of 17 residents, 13 are male. Nobody is taking care of Leah. She is more alone than anyone I have ever met. Can therapy really work for these women who have suffered serious emotional harm? Dr Freda Gardner, consultant clinical psychologist and expert witness to family courts, says it can. “Parents experience further trauma and profound loss when intervention is not available and their child has to be removed. Many are desperate for help and engage well with the right treatment when it’s provided,” she says. However, there is no statutory obligation to offer any support when a child is removed: while a mother’s multiple needs may result in child protection concerns, Cathy Ashley, chief executive of the Family Rights Group charity, says that “on their own, the parent’s need doesn’t meet adults’ services threshold for intervention and support”. Gardner, who runs a family assessment centre in Taunton, feels so strongly about the lack of access to trauma therapy that she founded the Orchard House Trust to raise money so that the diagnosed mental-health needs of mothers – and sometimes fathers – can start to be treated, improving their ability to parent. She never has enough funds to meet the demand. Leah was offered the same generic counselling service that anyone would get if they approached their GP with low mood or anxiety. She has never been given the option of specialist therapy to deal with long-term trauma. Her experience is not unique. Interviews that Dr Karen Broadhurst, of Manchester University, has done with more than 60 birth mothers in five local authority areas for a Nuffield Foundation study demonstrate, she says, “that mothers feel completely abandoned after their child has been removed. There would be more attention paid to your rehabilitation if you were a criminal.” Related: Radical thinking to break cycle of repeat children taken into care A few scattered initiatives to give distraught women an opportunity to recover are just getting under way. The Pause project in Hackney provides intensive treatment for mothers who have suffered the loss of multiple children: it recently won Department for Education funding to replicate its work in Doncaster, Newham, Southwark and Hull. That money will also pay for a linked project to help women who have had just one child taken away. A different pilot, the Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) has proved there can be an effective route to a second chance – but only if a parent’s problems involve substance abuse, and only if they live in certain parts of the country. The first FDAC was set up by Judge Nicholas Crichton in London in 2007: it wraps tailored family support and therapeutic treatment around parents struggling with addiction who are at risk of permanently losing their child. The second FDAC launched in Gloucester two years ago. It’s run by district judge Julie Exton, and on a blustery Friday in March I arrive to observe the FDAC in action. Four sets of parents are due to be seen today: three agree that I can sit in. Funds from the county council and local NHS trust pay for a team of five professionals dedicated to supporting every family accepted on to the programme through a tough journey in which they must prove they are drug and alcohol free, can sustain their abstinence and safely care for their children. Today’s second case involves a woman in her mid-30s and her new partner. She has had six babies removed, the last one 10 years ago. Her seventh is just a few weeks old and was taken into care close to birth. Both parents look careworn and anxious. But, crucially for the FDAC process, they do not come across as defensive. Both are alcoholics in recovery: it becomes clear during the next half hour that they are committed to change. Exton is hopeful that, this time around, the outcome will be different. “What is the point in issuing care proceedings time after time?” she says with evident frustration, when the court’s business is done. “It’s costly, it’s time-consuming, and the human toll is terrible. Why not instead invest some time and money in therapy and support straight away? Even if therapy is successful, you might not be able to improve that first child’s chance of staying with their birth parents because it might all take too long, but when child number two, three, four comes along, the mum and dad will have had a chance to develop the skills they need.” Around half of parents who go through this programme succeed in regaining parental responsibility for their children, significantly more than in ordinary care proceedings. Karen Broadhurst has found that, of more than 46,000 mothers with one or more children in care proceedings, 7,060 were repeat cases: 44% of the repeats involved mothers who first had babies as teenagers. “The data shows that if you’ve already had one infant permanently removed, there is diminishing hope that you’ll get a second chance to care for a baby you go on to have later,” she explains. Leah says she won’t be needing more chances. Her desolation is illustrated in a rationale that makes complete emotional sense to someone living with overwhelming guilt and grief. “I don’t want any more children,” she says, “because if I do, and I managed to keep it, I don’t want Jamie or Harley saying: ‘Why did you change for that baby, but you couldn’t change for me?’” Judi Evans is now trying to set up a partnership of professionals in Bristol that would offer treatment options for mothers in Leah’s situation before cases go to court, and believes it’s imperative to find an alternative to the bleak reality she deals with every day. She points out that, unless they are assessed as having suffered, or being at risk of significant harm, every child is entitled under article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights to be cared for by their birth parents. “Before a child is removed permanently, if something can reasonably be done, then it should be done, and at an early-enough stage so that the child has got a fighting chance of his or her own parent being able to engage with help,” she says. “There are some people whose problems are too huge, some who are not ready, some who lack the insight to engage, and for them, it’s not an option. But if you take a child away from its natural family, and we haven’t as a society looked at effective treatments that could reasonably be made available to keep that parent and child together … then we fail society. We fail the people in it.” Some names have been changed. |