The latest child welfare items that should be right in your radar:
- Judge condemns ‘abomination’ of secrecy surrounding family courts
- Courts and Tribunals Tracker
- Illinois health officials announce first death of an infant with COVID-19 (US)
31 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted News, Researching Reform
inThe latest child welfare items that should be right in your radar:
30 Monday Mar 2020
Posted Question It, Researching Reform
inWelcome to another week.
As the novel Coronavirus affects UK family courts and child welfare proceedings, our question this week, is just this: has the disruption affected your rights – whether to a fair trial, or to see your children, for example – and how have courts and councils responded?
27 Friday Mar 2020
In our ninth Voice of the Child podcast, we address the myths about the novel Coronavirus and how it affects children, and discuss the latest paediatric research focusing on the disease.
South Korea, which has been hailed by the World Health Organisation as a global model to follow for stemming the spread of COVID-19, is several weeks ahead of the UK in battling the virus, and emerging research from the country paints a more complex picture of the disease and how it is impacting children.
Dr Un Sun Chung is the national lead for South Korea’s School Mental Health Resource Center and is regularly invited to discuss child welfare issues by national and international media. She works as a child psychiatrist at Kyungpook National University Children’s Hospital, in Daegu, South Korea, which pioneered the testing kits being used around the world today.
In this podcast, Dr Chung talks about how South Korea managed to contain the first wave of its outbreak, misinformation around the virus and how it affects children, ways we can help children who are being abused at home, and what parents and carers can do to support their children during the outbreak.
You can listen to the Voice of the Child here.
Useful Links
It Is Time for Doctors to Start Seeing the Signs and Hearing the Cries of Abused Children as Professional Guardians – Research Paper by Dr Chung
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Is an Important Issue for Korea in 2015 – Research Paper by Dr Chung
27 Friday Mar 2020
Posted Researching Reform, The Buzz
inThe latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:
26 Thursday Mar 2020
For our eighth Voice of the Child podcast, we look at how children are affected by domestic violence, and what we can all do as a society to protect them from harm during the UK’s lockdown phase as it battles with the novel Coronavirus.
Rachel Williams, a survivor and campaigner, Independent Domestic Violence Advisor (IDVA), and the founder of Stand UP To Domestic Abuse (SUTDA), speaks with the Voice of the child about her family’s own tragic experience of domestic violence, which led one of her sons to take his own life. She also offers important advice on how we can help children being abused during the outbreak.
TRIGGER WARNING: the podcast includes information about Rachel’s experiences, including a detailed account of the serious injuries she suffered, as well as discussions about suicide and abuse.
You can listen to the Voice of the Child here.
Let us know what you think of the podcast in our comments section, Facebook page, or on Twitter using the hash tag #VOTC.
Useful Links
Incident Tracker (Please contact the foundation for the app’s name)
25 Wednesday Mar 2020
Posted Family Law Cases, Researching Reform
inA deadly virus ravaging the world has managed to do in 24 hours what no judge in the history of the family courts has been able to do in over a decade: modernise the family courts.
New guidelines issued by Mr Justice MacDonald, a high court judge who specialises in child protection, call for the mandatory use of online video streaming platforms and electronic bundles in order to protect parties to hearings from the novel Coronavirus.
MacDonald has asked that the measures, which come as the UK government puts social distancing regulations in place to contain the virus, be implemented without delay after several successful remote hearings for child welfare cases were conducted.
Input from forward-thinking family judge Justice Mostyn and others have been combined to create the current rules inside the Remote Access Family Court guidance.
The guidance is a working document, meaning that it will be continually revised and updated when needed.
The document explains that the family courts continue to be fully operational during the outbreak, and offers the legislative background which enables the courts to conduct hearings using online platforms like Skype and Zoom.
The guidance also highlights the challenges the courts face in trying to ensure the hearings are carried out online, including getting judges to use online conference platforms, issuing applications and orders and recording hearings. Those who use technology will be aware that all of these issues are resolvable.
MacDonald also comments on the need to ensure transparency is key during the outbreak and that journalists should remain a feature of the family courts where appropriate:
“It is likely that FPR 27.11(3), which permits the press to be excluded if justice would be impeded or prejudiced is wide enough to permit the court to exclude the press from a remote hearing if the remote hearing could not, practically, take place if this step were not taken. It remains however, highly desirable, particularly at a time of national crisis, that the operation of the Family Courts is as transparent as possible in the circumstance.”
The guidance also offers extra support for Litigants in Person. MacDonald has asked that the courts intervene to ensure that they help LIPs with access to online platforms. Further guidelines have also been offered to court staff to help them provide access to LIPs through video and telephone conferencing sites.
MacDonald sets down a comprehensive list of online platforms and how to use them, which should help family professionals who may be new to the technology.
It will be interesting to see how this modernisation affects daily practice in the family courts after the outbreak has come to an end. It is inevitable that there will be the usual tensions between legal professionals wanting to bill for their time and the cost-cutting impact of technology on the system.
However, our prediction is that this terrible tragedy will provide a much-needed technological jolt to the family courts, and we are likely to see a much more electronic court process in the future.
You can access the guidance here.
24 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted Case Study, child abuse, Researching Reform
inA senior family law judge has called on Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to intervene in a case where a serving diplomat and his wife are said to routinely assault their children.
Sir Justice Mostyn asked the ministers to try to arrange for the diplomat’s immunity to be waived during the proceedings. Williamson and Raab originally accepted the request, but later refused to engage with the case without giving an explanation.
The case, which involves serious allegations of physical and emotional child abuse against a serving diplomat, is the first of its kind in the UK.
The facts of the case are grim.
The six children in this case are living in London with their parents in the family home. The father is a serving diplomat on a diplomatic mission. The children are S (5), G (9), A (14), N (17), E (18) and D (18, a paternal half-brother).
The proceedings, which began in January, only concern the three youngest children, though all of the children offered their input during different stages of the case.
The children have said siblings are being beaten with belts, hit with a broken chair leg, pulled by the hair, and made to contort their bodies in unnatural positions for long periods of time leading to enormous physical pain.
One child said their eyesight had been impaired after a violent blow to the side of their face, while others described bleeding from their injuries.
The reasons for these ‘punishments’ have been included in the judgment, but we will not repeat them here.
The children came to the attention of the courts after one of the siblings alerted the Local Authority to the physical abuse of one of their siblings by their father. A primary school teacher then alerted social services after a sibling disclosed that they had been hit daily with a thick belt by both parents. This is the heart-breaking extract from the teacher’s referral, which is shared in the judgment:
“During an English vocabulary lesson the chn [children] were defining the word ‘lashing’. When I described ‘lashing’ as being hit with a whip or a belt [G] said ‘oh, I get hit with a thick belt everyday by my Mum, but my Dad is much worse’. I asked him to clarify if he meant what he had said and he said ‘yes, every day for watching too much TV.’”
The case becomes even more concerning when details of the parents’ attempts at concealing their abuse come to light in the judgment.
One of the children says that the father had hit them with a broken chair leg to avoid any obvious marks showing up on their skin. The child said the father had “wanted to ‘beat her’ but did not because she had an optician appointment the next day.”
Additional information offered about the parents’ concealment tactics included the mother putting hot water on one of her children’s faces to try to reduce marks from where she hit them.
One of the children told a social worker that their father had said they would pay for alerting social services. The parents then woke the children up at 4 am one morning and told them to write an email retracting their allegations and say they had lied so that they could stay in the UK for university. The children wrote the email.
The parents were then asked to sign an agreement enabling the local authority to work with the parents, which they initially refused to do, denying all the allegations made against them. However, the parents eventually agreed to sign an undertaking not to hit the children.
But the parents’ legal team had been stalling the child protection investigation throughout the proceedings on purpose, knowing that with the father’s diplomatic immunity came the ability to block the proceedings.
The proceedings were halted, after the judge was unable to get the Education Secretary and the Foreign Secretary to intervene in the case.
Of key significance is the lack of response from the foreign country to which the diplomat belongs, as it has the power to strip the diplomat of immunity. In this case, the foreign country was alerted to the proceedings and requests were made to intervene, but the country’s government has not yet offered a response.
Mostyn does an excellent job of arguing why immunity for serving diplomats should not be allowed in cases like these, and puts forward convincing legal and child protection focused arguments for why the law needs to change in this area.
He also offers a route around the current dilemma in his judgment.
Mostyn doesn’t terminate the proceedings, he stays them instead, explaining that there is an outstanding request by the Guardian asking the foreign government to waive the diplomatic immunity enjoyed by the family in this case, so the children can be properly protected in proceedings under Part IV of the Children Act 1989.
Mostyn goes on to say that if the waiver is granted, the stay can be lifted and the proceedings can be relaunched.
He then outlines another solution, in his judgment. This is what he says:
“First, it is open in a case such as this for a Local Authority to write to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office drawing the facts to the attention of the Secretary of State and inviting him to take such diplomatic steps as may be necessary.
Second, it is open to the Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs, on receipt of that information, to seek to persuade the foreign government to waive diplomatic immunity in respect of the diplomat and his family so that the necessary protective measures can be taken.
Third, as a last resort, it is open to the British government to expel the diplomat and his family so that on their return to their homeland protective measures can be taken in respect of the children there.”
The judgment offers a very clear explanation on how the law as it stands creates an impossible situation in which children in these terrible settings cannot be helped in the first instance (see paras. 22- 44 of the judgment). That’s why it is imperative that our government does the right thing and uses the powers available to protect these children.
The judgment can be accessed here.
23 Monday Mar 2020
Posted Researching Reform
inThe latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:
20 Friday Mar 2020
Posted Researching Reform, The Buzz
inThe latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:
19 Thursday Mar 2020
For our seventh Voice of the Child podcast we investigate whether councils and adoption and fostering agencies are breaking the law when they advertise children online.
Despite legislation which makes it clear that birth mums and dads with parental responsibility should be consulted on every significant decision relating to their child, local authorities and agencies are routinely failing to involve parents in the advertising process.
Whether through a lack of understanding, or a desire to ensure birth parents don’t cause difficulties during the placement process, most parents are never consulted about their children being advertised online.
And no one is asking those children how they feel about being exposed on the internet.
Simon Haworth, an expert and lecturer on social work, speaks to the Voice of the Child about the law and process behind this policy and why he feels adoption and fostering placements need to be reformed.
You can listen to the Voice of the Child here.
Let us know what you think of the podcast in our comments section, Facebook page, or on Twitter using the hash tag #VOTC.
From the podcast:
Adoption Agency Marketing Children On Facebook Sparks Public Fury
Ombudsman Decision: London Borough of Bromley (18 015 715)