30 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Researching Reform, The Buzz
The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:
29 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Inquiry, Researching Reform
An inquiry looking into whether details of convicted sex offenders should be made public has been confirmed in Australia, after a new report found that sex offenders got less supervision than other offenders even when they had a higher risk of reoffending.
The Upper House in the state of Victoria agreed to the inquiry on Wednesday, which was overwhelmingly voted through in a motion, with 35 members voting in favour of the inquiry and four against the proposal.
The inquiry was also called for by Stuart Grimley of Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, a political party which focuses on reforms to the justice system. The Justice Party is named after its founder, Derryn Hinch. Hinch would like to see sex offenders’ full postal addresses made public rather than just their postcodes.
Victoria Police has been asked by the state’s auditor-general to provide further details about its processes for handling registered sex offenders.
Data confirms that there were 8,286 registered sex offenders in Victoria in May 2019, 54 per cent of whom were required to report regularly to police.
Some politicians do not agree with making registered sex offenders’ details public, and say there is no evidence that making this kind of information available to the public reduces reoffending.
28 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in event, Researching Reform
A free event organised by the Centre for Child and Family Justice (CFJ) and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (FJO) will look at the preservation of family ties with children inside the care system.
The event, “Children in Care: Preserving Family Connections?” will look at new research from the UK and Australia focusing specifically on questions around family connections for children in care.
The programme includes sessions on trends and patterns relating to children and how they enter the care system in Australia and England; how contact and reunification between birth families and their children are dealt with in both countries; and alternatives to child removal.
There is a session at the end of the day which offers responses from birth parents too.
Attendees will be given a copy of the new rapid evidence review on Special Guardianship, published by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, (which you can download here without having to attend the event).
The CFJ will also share updates on its upcoming events, Nuffield FJO plans and new research projects. (You can follow new projects as they are launched here).
The event is taking place on 19th September from 10am-5pm at Forrest Hills in Lancashire. The venue is located next to Lancaster University, the institution which currently runs the Centre for Child and Family Justice.
You can sign up for the day’s sessions on the CFJ’s Eventbrite page.
If you have any queries about the event, you can contact Chris Millan at chris.millan@lancaster.ac.uk.
27 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in child abuse, Researching Reform
A family court expert in Australia has been charged with sexually abusing three children. The development could lead to contact decisions previously made using the expert’s reports being overturned.
The psychologist was hired as a Family Court expert to make contact recommendations in cases where one parent had accused the other of sexual abuse.
In one report, the court psychologist – who has not been named – recommended that a child continue to live with the father after the mother raised allegations of sexual abuse, telling the court he found no significant evidence the abuse had occurred.
The suspect remains on bail and the case’s next hearing is scheduled for October.
The article, which was published by Australia’s ABC news outlet, also talks about concerning problems inside Australia’s care system, which mimic the UK care system’s challenges.
The topics include unfit registration processes for expert witnesses which allow individuals to write up expert reports without the necessary qualifications, to an inability to get complaints properly assessed because ombudsmen continuously claim they do not have the power to investigate them.
Further reading:
Many thanks to Charles Pragnell for alerting us to this case.
26 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Adoption, forced adoption, Researching Reform
A new study from Australia suggests that a significant number of children who languish inside the care system may be going on to suffer much greater levels of psychological and physical harm than children who are placed with appropriate carers at an early age.
The study, which was published in the Australian Social Work Journal, also casts doubt on research from the UK which suggests that children who are adopted from care have similarly high rates of mental health problems to those who stay in state care.
The research paper, “Descriptive Analysis of Foster Care Adoptions in New South Wales, Australia”, was produced by Andrea del Pozo de Bolger, Debra Dunstan and Melissa Kaltner.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first piece of research identifying the care system as potentially posing a risk of harm to children.
In addition, the research also emphasises the need to preserve birth family connections.
Looking at post adoption contact, the researchers concluded that care plans for children being adopted needed to be fluid throughout a child’s life and include contact with birth parents where possible, rather than the current provision of one care plan which is intended to last for the duration of their childhood and which very rarely features face to face contact with birth parents.
Unlike the UK, Australia appears to be committed to keeping birth family connections alive, which the researchers say is demonstrated by the frequency of face-to-face contact in the sample cases they studied from New South Wales (NSW).
In the UK, post adoption contact usually takes the form of indirect letterbox contact twice a year.
The research does make one mistake, though. It claims that recent legislative changes in NSW are consistent with what the researchers see as a drive to increase adoptions in the UK.
That is no longer the case in the UK, after several successful challenges in the European Court of Human Rights clarified the law in this area, namely that adoption should always be a method of last resort.
The researchers make several interesting observations:
The research also offers alternative explanations for these outcomes:
On early adoptive placements that lasted:
“The finding [that children who are adopted at an early age and who receive consistent care] may suggest that an agency is more likely to pursue an adoption application if the child does not experience high needs.”
“Second, the finding may be the product of the timing of the data collection. An English study suggested that children adopted from care have similarly high rates of mental health problems to those who remain in care…
However, the data were gathered some years after adoption, whereas the present study describes functioning at the time of adoption.”
“Therefore, a longitudinal study under the new legislative arrangements is required to determine if this outcome is enduring. This study should include comparison groups featuring children placed early in stable foster placements to ensure that any developmental outcomes observed are not erroneously attributed to placement type.”
On post adoption contact:
“In regards to the arrangements for post adoption contact recorded in adoption plans, some important issues emerged…
Contact plans suggested the NSW Supreme Court attempts to contemplate fluid circumstances as well as consideration for broader birth family ties. This is consistent with recommendations from international literature…
Thus, a single contact plan is unlikely to meet a child’s needs as they develop. Likewise, further exploration of the impact of face-to-face contact on children’s wellbeing is necessary to inform Australian practice, given its infrequent use in other settings.”
Researching Reform advocates for a system which offers birth families in need tailored and dynamic support, while ensuring that contact with birth families remains, wherever possible.
This could be done through a truly open adoption process which allows birth parents to remain in frequent contact with their children while allowing adoptive parents and highly trained child welfare professionals to assist with the day-to-day love and care all children need.
Alternatively, where needs are less great, allowing children to remain with their birth families while providing families with expert support, including regularly updated care plans to reflect the ever changing needs of children.
It is absurd that we don’t do any of this already.
Further Reading:
23 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Researching Reform, social work
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has ordered a council to apologise to a grandmother and pay a total of £400 for its poor handling of a child protection case.
The complaints body, which investigates council misconduct, found Lancashire County Council guilty of maladministration and service failure, which included errors in paperwork, assumptions made by staff that were reported as fact and failures to organise meetings.
The grandmother said that the process had left her feeling frustrated and demoralised.
Four areas were identified in the complaint, each made up of several incidents:
The council was ordered to pay £100 for the inconvenience caused and a further £300 for the distress the grandmother experienced because of the council’s failings.
The latest decisions published by the Ombudsman highlight an ongoing trend in complaints by parents around adoptions and foster placements, despite the Ombudsman not being able to rule on such cases.
Complaints centred around false allegations by councils, unprofessional social work reports, data breaches, failures to follow the law and procedure, and inappropriate placements for children.
There had been an initial dip in the number of complaints after Researching Reform wrote a post explaining the Ombudsman’s inability to investigate care orders, but the lull was short-lived and could suggest that parents are turning to the complaints body out of desperation.
This week’s complaints and the decisions made by the Ombudsman can be read here.
22 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Case Study, Research, Researching Reform
In the first study of its kind, psychologists from the UK and Canada examined previous research and offenders’ cases to try to discover whether psychology-based treatments were responsible for reductions in sexual and domestic violence.
The study found that some programmes for sexual and domestic violence offenders led to significant reductions in reoffending.
The report also concluded that the best results were achieved through ongoing engagement with a qualified psychologist and that the clearest results were associated with sexual offence programs.
The clinical psychology review, which was published in Science Direct on June 29 and produced by the University of Kent in England and the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, looked at 70 studies which included information on over 55,000 individuals.
The report explains how researchers broke down the results of their findings:
“Three specialized treatments were examined: sexual offense, domestic violence, and general violence programs.
Across all programs, offense specific recidivism was 13.4% for treated individuals and 19.4% for untreated comparisons over an average follow up of 66.1 months.
Relative reductions in offense specific recidivism were 32.6% for sexual offense programs, 36.0% for domestic violence programs, and 24.3% for general violence programs.
All programs were also associated with significant reductions in non-offense specific recidivism.”
While the results for domestic violence programmes were much less clear, the report makes an interesting finding on what may actually work in this context.
The report suggests that the most effective treatments for domestic violence may be feminism-focused education programmes, rather than psychology based treatments.
This is what the paper had to say about its findings:
“Due to relatively small k for the domestic violence programs, establishing more definitive program predictors of decreased recidivism and, hence, improved treatment success was more difficult.
However, a set of key predictors did emerge: treatment rated as lower quality; treatments using the Duluth approach; and treatments that were provided at a single institution (vs. multiple institutions).
Initially it was unclear why treatments rated as less evidence-based exhibited more effectiveness. A close examination of program content, however, showed that they tended to be Duluth or purely psychoeducational programs.
This suggests that it is the provision of educational information—that may or may not be rooted in feminism—that is important for reducing domestic violence, rather than complex psychotherapeutic manipulations designed according to “best practice” (Edleson & Syers, 1991).
This may explain why Duluth and psychoeducational approaches produced superior recidivism reductions relative to CBT (cf. Babcock et al., 2004).
However, readers should note these suggestions cautiously since they are just that and are based on relatively small ks.
Finally, the superior outcomes associated with treatments administered at a single site suggests that treatments are most effective when administration is tightly focused.”
The study also highlights an important point, which is that the data does not confirm a direct correlation between the programmes and reductions in re-offending. What it offers is the suggestion that these programmes may be able to help with reducing sexual and domestic violence.
You can read the study in full here.
21 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in News, Researching Reform
20 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in Researching Reform, The Buzz
The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:
19 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in child abuse, Researching Reform
The Sunday Mirror has launched a campaign to highlight the number of children murdered by their parents after a nine-month probe carried out by the tabloid.
The probe found that 63 children had been killed by their parents from 2004 to 2019.
The data collected confirmed that 52 of the 63 children were killed by fathers known to authorities for domestic abuse. A further seven children were killed by both parents in cases where the fathers had similar histories.
All of the children who died had parents who were known to either police, social workers or family courts for being violent.
The investigation also revealed that family members often tried to warn authorities about the dangers but were ignored.
The “Save Kids from Violent Parents” campaign aims to ensure that parents and carers convicted of violent crimes, child abuse or sexual offences and known to the authorities do not have automatic access to their children.
The campaign is calling for an amendment to the Government’s domestic abuse bill which would make it harder for violent parents to have contact.
Shadow Home Office minister Carolyn Harris is set to table the amendment to the Government’s domestic abuse bill in response to the newspaper’s investigation.
Domestic violence charity Refuge is working in collaboration with the Sunday Mirror.
Chief executive Sandra Horley told the Sunday Mirror:
“Domestic abuse needs to be taken more seriously by family courts as children are paying for decisions around contact, sometimes with their lives. Ending unsafe contact and improving how family courts respond to domestic abuse is essential if we are to end this widespread problem.”
The Sunday Mirror’s campaign features three demands:
“1. A change in the law, which means anyone who has been convicted of violent crime, child abuse or sexual offences can’t have automatic, unsupervised access to their kids. The same rules would apply to those who’d had similar findings made against them in the civil courts.
The ban could only be overturned by a judge if the parent had undergone a thorough assessment by an independent expert proving they have been rehabilitated.
2. Mandatory, standardised training in domestic abuse for judges, social workers and any other professionals involved in child access arrangements.
We also want to see domestic abuse training for coroners overseeing domestic homicide inquests.
3. More State funding to support the hundreds of thousands of children in the UK affected by domestic abuse – including the 3,627 kids currently being supported by Refuge.
It is only with the right support, such as specialist therapy, that these children can recover from the trauma they have experienced.”
You can read more about the campaign here. (WARNING: The article contains details about child deaths).
Researching Reform 