European Court of Human Rights hears forced adoption case

27 Wednesday Jan 2021

A case in which a mother living in Norway sought to set the adoption of her son aside on the grounds that her lack of consent was in breach of her right to family life, was heard in the European Court of Human Rights today.

The hearing in Strasbourg focused on whether Norway had violated Mariya Ibrahim’s religious rights as a Muslim in allowing her son to be forcibly adopted by Christians. The hearing forms part of what is a long and protracted case filled with conflicting professional evidence and what appear to be serious oversights with regard to the boy’s best interests.

Ms. Ibrahim became pregnant when she was 16 years old, and after a traumatic incident fled to Kenya in 2009 where she had family, and gave birth to her son in the same year.

In 2010, Ms. Ibrahim left Kenya with her son, travelling first to Sweden and then Norway, where she applied for asylum. Once she was granted refugee status, the mother asked for support to care for her son and was admitted to a mother and baby home.

The home grew concerned about Ms. Ibrahim’s parenting, and notified children’s services, who then forcibly removed her son and placed him in foster care in 2010.

The County Social Welfare Board applied for a care order, which the mother opposed. She then lodged another claim asking for her son to be placed with her cousin in Norway, or in a Somali or Muslim foster home. The mother’s claim was ignored, and the Board issued the care order and granted her contact rights of two hours, four times a year. Her son was placed in care with a Christian family.

In 2013, children’s services applied to revoke Ms. Ibrahim’s parental responsibility so that her son could be adopted by the foster carers.

A claim to cease all contact between Ms. Ibrahim and her son was also lodged with the court at the request of the foster carers.

The claims were allowed, and the mother appealed twice, arguing that while she accepted her son had settled into life with the foster carers, it would not be in his best interests to have no contact at all with his birth mother and sole connection to his cultural and religious roots.

Claims and appeals raised by the mother and allowed by various courts continued for several years, and looked at the levels of contact the mother had been allowed prior to the adoption and whether the High Court had, for instance, placed more importance on the foster parents’ opposition to an “open adoption” than to the applicant’s interest in continued family life with her child.

In December 2019, the European Court of Human Rights found that there had been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention (right to respect for private and family life), and allowed the mother’s appeal.

Speaking to Norwegian state broadcaster TV2 in 2019, Ms. Ibrahim said, “Norway steals children when they do it the way they have done it to me. It’s been so painful. I was only 16 years old and completely alone when I came to Norway. They should help mothers and fathers who are struggling, instead of taking the children.”

Norway, much like the UK, has been heavily criticised for the sharp rise in the number of children in state care. Campaigners say the large numbers of children in care in the two countries stem from a lack of understanding about the differences between neglect and poverty, and financial pressures and incentives to place children in foster homes and with adoptive parents.

Disrupted Adoptions – What Councils Don’t Want You To Know

07 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 45 Comments

Adoption was once viewed as the best solution for children in care, but research has proven that the only winners are councils and companies investing in the process.

While the world has become familiar with the UK government’s misguided practices when it comes to adoption – from financial incentives and targets for placing children, to taking children from birth parents without their consent – the phenomenon of disrupted adoptions has been kept quiet by agencies and local authorities with a vested interested in child placements.

This secrecy also validates the myth that adoptions are permanent, and are never undone. But adoptive families can give children back, and they are doing so at an alarming rate.

The technical term for this is adoption disruption, and happens when an adoption falls through, or adoptive parents decide to give their adopted children back to the agencies which hosted them.

Whether by omission or design, stats on adoption disruption are sketchy and there is currently no legal requirement on adoption services to keep a record of how many adoptions fall through or fail.

A Freedom of Information request in 2018 found that adoption disruption had been on the rise since 2012, peaking at 2016 and included breakdowns which happened after an initial placement was made.

Across all 152 local authorities the request revealed that there had been 87 breakdowns in 2012-13, increasing to 160 in 2015-16 and 132 in 2016-17. The figures offered are likely to be conservative estimates, according to Children and Young People Now Magazine which made the request.

However, some experts say at least one in five adoptions (20%) in the UK fail.

The latest stats, which haven’t been collected for 2018-2019 are likely to show a spike in disrupted adoptions, after several parents who spoke to the BBC said they had given back their adopted children because they were unable to cope with their needs.

It’s a heartbreaking scenario, and one which councils and adoption agencies must shoulder a large portion of the blame.

Adoption is a much cheaper option when compared to foster care and family support, as it allows councils to shed themselves of children, and the associated and often significant costs that go with fostering and social care.

Placing children in adoptive families means councils and agencies no longer have to bear the financial costs of child care, which are transferred, often in full, to the adoptive parents.

To enable these placements, social services teams and independent adoption agencies are not being honest with adoptive families about the children on their books.

Poor data collection and an at times wilful failure to produce proper Life Story Books – which are supposed to chronicle a child’s life fully before, during and after adoption – allows adoption bodies to present piecemeal information about a child’s complex needs.

Adoption agents gloss over details, ‘forget’ to mention a child’s complicated history and tell adoptive families whatever they want to hear to secure an adoption.

The end result: even more adoption disruption, as adoptive parents overwhelmed and un-prepared to look after a child with sophisticated needs find they can’t cope, and give their adopted children back.

Speaking to the Yorkshire Press in 2018, a woman who gave back her adopted children said she felt social services “placed the children with us and ran for the hills. I felt abandoned. None of it was the children’s fault. Their behaviour is a result of their life experience. They are not responsible for anything to do with the breakdown.”

She went on to say, “There is a lack of support, energy and finance to do anything to help. I was spinning into a point of total despair and all the social workers would say was: ‘don’t worry, you are doing a fantastic job’. There was no recognition, no offer of support. What me and the children needed was just dismissed.”

And it’s not just adoptive parents who get short changed in the process. Birth parents are also abandoned, as councils prioritise cost-cutting over genuine care.

Birth families who need support and assistance have for a long time accused local authorities of removing children from them when they’ve approached their local councils for help.

Councils can see the costs coming a mile away, and the temptation to remove children and place them in adoptive homes is enormous. Adoption is much easier and more cost-effective than providing birth families with therapeutic services or specialist support.

And when an adoption order is made, birth families lose all legal rights to their children, so that when adoption disruption takes place there is no onus on the adoptive family or the agency to notify the birth parents of the change.

This oversight also limits the ability of councils to place children back with their birth parents, who may have turned their lives around or may now be able to demonstrate meaningful changes in their lives which would allow reunification.

But what about the children? By far the most important people in this process, they are reduced to numbers, data and failed policy, rather than highlighted and held up as our central priority, which of course, they should be.

We already know that an unprecedented number of children are being bounced around the care system, and research shows this is damaging children and their development.

We also know that adoption only works for a minority of children, and that quality of life is far more important than securing an adoption placement with families who are clearly not appropriate.

The myth that adoption is permanent, and offers a fairytale ending to a child’s difficult life journey, falls far short of the truth.

Links:

Image by Hans Kretzmann

Councils Showcasing Kids For Adoption Are Breaking The Law

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Foster Care, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 17 Comments

That’s what Researching Reform thinks about councils and agencies posting photos and information about children online, with a view to securing fostering and adoption placements. To expose the practice, this site has started a petition asking the government to acknowledge that the practice is illegal, and to end it.

Our petition explains how the current practice of children being advertised online and publicly, is a breach of their human right to privacy. The practice also ignores other legislation, which says that parents of children in care must be consulted on all important decisions affecting their children. Councils and agencies are routinely failing to get parental consent before marketing children online. The practice is also placing children’s lives at risk, as more and more children are being sourced through the internet to be sexually exploited.

We asked Twitter users what they thought of the practice, in a survey. The majority of those polled (82%) did not think councils should be able to advertise children publicly online for the purpose of finding adoptive families or foster carers, with 43% saying that placements were not about looks, and the remaining 39% believing that the practice put children in danger. A further 16% offered up other reasons as to why they felt the practice was not acceptable, or that it was reasonable, depending on their view. One tweeter thought that it was a pragmatic way to find children carers in an imperfect world, while another suggested that financial incentives for carers was a fair way to compensate foster families. Other survey takers were not comfortable with the fees offered to carers. A small minority of those surveyed (2%) thought that the practice was acceptable, taking the view that it was a buyer’s market.

When a child goes through child protection proceedings in the UK, names and other details that could identify these children are not allowed to be publicised in the first instance. The measure has been designed to protect a child’s right to privacy and ensure that they are not compromised through their identification, in any way. Most family court hearings are protected, which means that unless a judge gives permission for a case to be reported, and lists what information can be released, every detail that could identify a child remains private.

That right to privacy is taken away from children once a care order (placing a child in a children’s home or with foster parents), or an adoption order is made.

The removal of that right to privacy, which is protected by both the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, amounts to a breach of the law. In addition to these protections, both the UN Convention and the Children Act 1989 make it compulsory for all government bodies to ensure that any decisions made about children are always in their best interests.

If the government wanted to argue that the practice of publicly advertising children online and elsewhere to find them foster homes and adoptive families – and removing a child’s right to privacy to do this – was in their best interests, it would be an impossible position to hold today.

Research has made it clear that the government’s processes for finding children foster homes and adoptive parents are not working. A recent report by the Children’s Commissioner confirms that a large proportion of children in care experience more than one placement during their childhoods, with almost 2,500 children in care experiencing five or more changes over a period of three years.

That process includes advertising children online and in physical newspapers and magazines. The advertisements are intended to give prospective adopters and carers a chance to virtually meet these children and see if they like ‘the look of them’, but given the number of adoptions and fostering placements that break down, it’s become apparent that the practice is doing nothing for these children, and very obviously doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

It also puts children at risk of sexual exploitation, and death. The UK is facing the worst child sex trafficking epidemic it has ever seen within its borders. Last year, 10,000 children in care in the UK went missing, sparking fears that they were being sexually abused and exploited. The NSPCC called the internet “a playground for paedophiles”, and in a report published in 2011, The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre confirmed that a disproportionate number of sexually exploited children were looked after by a local authority, before or during exploitation.

Councils and agencies have no formal right to publish children’s photos and details online, especially in circumstances where children are old enough to understand the practice, or where family members still have parental responsibility for a child.

If a school wants to upload a photo of a child who is not in care onto its website, permission always has to be given by the child’s parents before the school can post the image. That is because parents have parental responsibility for their children, and a request by a school to upload an image of a child onto the internet is significant enough for it to require parental permission. Parental Responsibility is more than just a general description of a parent’s duties towards a child. It is a legal term which vests a duty in parents to look after their children and to be involved in material decisions which affect them. That responsibility still belongs to parents whose children are in care and have not been made the subject of an adoption order. This means that most of the time, decisions like posting photos of their child online, still rests with the parents, and not the local authority. If we follow the logic through, councils then, must always ask parents whose children are in care for permission to use their photos in adverts.

The government might also argue that being able to post these photos is no different to a child posting a photo of themselves on social media, but that’s not right. Being placed on a website where people know you’ve been in care, and that you’ve had difficult experiences, carries a stigma and can be extremely traumatic for children. Unlike a child posting a photo of themselves on social media, that breach of their privacy, not only places them at risk of identification from peers in their community, but also signals to sexual predators that they are vulnerable and by virtue of the agency’s details being on the site, much, much easier to locate, and target.

Getting the government to ban this practice won’t be easy. Despite an economic downturn and massive budget cuts to the family justice system, the fostering sector is booming. Valued at £1.7 billion, fostering agencies have become so lucrative that the sector has seen a sharp rise in foster care companies backed by large private equity funds. The adoption sector, too, is driven by financial incentive, as can be seen by these interagency fees from the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies. The government has also introduced adoption targets, which invite councils to hit a certain number of adoptions in order to qualify for a cash prize.

Adoption and fostering agencies count on these advertising techniques to secure placements, often with the addition of deeply misleading narratives about the children they’re marketing. And if agencies are able to make money from multiple placements per child, there is little incentive to stem the high number of placements that break down.

While our petition demands that the government acknowledges that the posting of children’s photos and details online and in public documents for adoption and fostering placements, is illegal, there is more that needs to be done. The following issues are also connected to the marketing process used by councils and agencies:

The need to ensure that councils always ask parents’ permission to post these details where parents still have parental responsibility
A review is needed to see which aspects of the fostering and adoption process are not in a child’s best interests and which policies and cultural norms inside the adoption and fostering sectors are breaking the law
A consultation into better ways forward for finding high quality placements for children who need carers, without breaching children’s right to privacy
The current failure by adoption and fostering agencies to be open about these children’s pasts and make sure that their disclosure during the placement process is full and frank, and meets the highest standards of disclosure.

If you would like to sign our petition, you can do so here.

A very big thank you to Jane Doe, and several other parents who very kindly spoke with us, and shared evidence and personal stories for this post.

Was The Family Drug And Alcohol Court A Threat To The Adoption Industry?

21 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 14 Comments

As it’s revealed that the government is shutting down The Family Drug And Alcohol Court (FDAC) – the UK’s most successful family court – Researching Reform decided to make a Freedom Of Information request, to find out which ministers might benefit from the sudden, though not completely unexpected, move.

FDAC is the only family court to date that has a proven, long term track record of helping parents kick addiction habits. FDAC is also more effective than local authority driven, care proceedings.

It is also the only court in England which actively prevents children from entering the care system. And it repeatedly saves the government money. A lot of money. Because the unit helps more children return safely to their families, £17,000 less per case is spent on adoption and fostering.

What seems at first glance like irrational government decision making, becomes clearer if we look at the patterns from a profit-driven perspective. FDAC is in direct competition with government ministers and child protection professionals, who outnumber FDAC supporters and team members, invested in a system which farms children and processes them through care homes and fostering agencies for cash.

Research published in 2015 by Corporate Watch revealed that eight commercial fostering agencies made around £41m profit between them, from providing foster placements to local authorities. An expose by ITV in December of last year confirmed the worst – whilst children in care are given the bare minimum under these kinds of arrangements, private companies are siphoning off the majority of the funds. Many of these agencies are being run by social workers and other child welfare professionals already operating inside the system. It’s a growing financial opportunity inside a broken and bankrupt sector, which could still produce dividends if it fails – some companies and stakeholders make even larger profits if the care homes implode.

At the end of last year, the Education Committee produced a report, in which it confirmed that a vast number of foster placements were made for financial reasons rather than best interest ones. FDAC stands on its own, as an exception to the rule. It is saving the government money, and keeping children at home.

And that’s no good if you’re trying to make money out of placing children in adoption and foster placements. Recent figures by the Local Government Authority tell us that at least six classrooms worth of children are placed on child protection plans every day. If FDAC units were rolled out across the country, that would change.

FDAC’s success, and its ethos, sit in stark contrast to the failings, and motivations, of local authorities, who are increasingly being called out for routinely breaking the law, and wrongfully removing children from their parents. In a letter to The Guardian, Legal Action For Women criticised the government for attempting to cash in on adoption and fostering incentives, by allowing its councils to unjustly remove children from their parents.

But who has financial interests in these care homes and fostering agencies? Our Freedom Of Information request tries to answer that question. Split up into five requests – we had to write to each relevant cabinet department separately for this information – this is what we asked:

FOI HO

Each request we made asked the same question of each department, and they can be accessed below:

We also made the same request to each department asking for details about adoption agencies.

Researching Reform had the privilege of being there at the start of FDAC, and we have followed its journey to the present. Judge Crichton, the family court judge who pioneered the unit in the UK, after exporting it from America where he had seen it in practice, is something of a renegade. Unwilling to play by the rules for the sake of judicial promotion, Crichton set out to make a difference for children and families. We watched his frustration in meetings and in private, over the government’s bizarre reluctance to fund a system which was actually working. It’s a frustration we still share.

In a world where cash comes before kids, we desperately need an army of people like Judge Crichton and FDAC professionals, to join together and tip the balance. The closure of FDAC isn’t just about social care, it’s about all of us.

It’s Time To Stop Making Foster Care A Financial Incentive

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 24 Comments

One of our greatest bug bears here at Researching Reform is the continued insistence by government, foster care and adoption agencies of trying to source carers for vulnerable children through financial incentives. It is a battle we have been fighting for several years and we are dismayed by the current figures showing a sharp rise in children going missing from foster care.

Clearly, the current system does not work, and it is making things worse.

As far back as 2012, adoption agencies for example, have been at liberty to not only advertise children for adoption, using their photos, names and other personal details, but they have shown no hesitation in using so-called ‘benefits’ to attract carers. Remember Foster Care Agent? They were, and still are, an active agency looking to recruit foster carers through financial incentives like holiday breaks, income and other sources of financial ‘reward’.

And remember this?

“The reality is that ££ grab people’s attention, just as it has yours.” Yes, but the difference is that we are not looking to take children into our home so that we can increase our income. We are reading on, in horror.

Google the phrase “why foster care fails” and what comes back is astounding. From glaring oversights where children have been subjected to the most awful sexual and emotional abuse, to the ongoing debate over whether carers should be paid ‘professionally’ for parenting often very vulnerable children (the comments section makes for enlightening reading), the one thing that seems to be missing from these discussions is the critical aspect of love.

As long as we allow cost to dominate the debate in foster care, we will never make any headway in helping distressed children blossom into confident, happy adults. And whilst everyone understands that looking after a child is an expensive affair, this element of parenting, because that is really what this is all about, should be very much secondary to ensuring that these children get what they need – a loving, and secure home.

We already know that placements break down because the families taking in children are not prepared or able to look after and love them, and we also know that a lack of stability runs through the entire system, making children feel even less cared for and secure. The most commonly cited factors for foster care placement breakdown are:

A change of social worker
Over-optimistic expectations
Placement breakdown, particularly for teenagers
Any policy or practice which generally discourages children from remaining fostered after the age of 17
The child’s level of emotional disturbance and motivation to remain in the placement also appears to be a key factor.

It should be obvious that these factors cannot in any way be addressed by financial incentivisation. What we see is a system which is under incredible strain, staffed by fleeting and often less than competent professionals, and far too many carers who are clearly not fit to love and care for these children. Financial incentive does not target and attract the right carers – it simply fulfils a function by dumping children with anyone who will take them.

Isn’t it time we looked at the way foster care, and adoption is run in this country?

MK 2

More Money For Adoption Agencies, But The Only Hands We See Being Held Are Not The Children’s.

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Natasha in Children

≈ 49 Comments

It’s official, Edward Timpson, the Children’s Minister, is going to throw 16 million pounds into the voluntary adoption agency market to help create more opportunities for recruiting adopters, but whilst children all over the country are raising their arms up for help, the only waving arms we see being supported are grown ups’.

Community Care’s article makes for concerning reading. The funding is being touted as a way of bringing on board new agencies, spurring on ‘creative working’ and providing agencies with training and coaching to expand. In other words, all of the money is going to go to business consultants and top end management inside adoption agencies, both old and new. How this is supposed to help the 4,000 children whose futures, Timpson says, “hang in the balance” “, is laughable, because once again, we are watching the government steal from the public to try to boost business, rather than to fuel these organisations to improve the lives of children on the ground.

The sector desperately needs funding, but not the kind that creates large, genetically modified organisms, which provide absolutely no sustenance to those who need it. It will be a short-lived windfall, which will be used for short-term gratification. Once the money is all spent, we would like to wager that children who need loving homes will be as badly off as they are now.

Because finding loving homes for children who need them, is not about pumping cold, hard cash into Management to boost the size of an organisation, it’s about the quality of service offered, the mechanisms used to find prospective adopters and putting the right kinds of barriers in place, which should be useful, not obstructive.

And to make matters worse, off the back of the new funding, the government has issued a not-so-veiled threat to councils all over the country: boost adoption numbers or we’ll outsource the work to other, hungry, grabbing adoption agencies in the sector. With that mantra, it’s hard to believe that councils across the land will take up their pitchforks and retaliate with the cry that good adoption practice requires great adoptive parents – and that, can take time. This, coupled with the Children and Families Bill, which will also place pressure on councils to ‘perform’, will mean that there will be no looking back, as councils join in the financial feeding frenzy, gorging themselves without a guilty conscience. Their post-mortem of the funding fiasco will be simple; they will say they had no choice.

But the way these issues are tackled are still devoid of any common sense. Mr Timpson seems to be under the illusion that more money means more happiness for children in care homes waiting to be adopted, yet attracting more adopters is not synonymous with attracting the right kind of adopter. Financial incentives are unlikely to draw out the genuine and earnest Earth mothers and fathers, although we don’t deny that financial help when taking on more children is a positive thing, but the way the government seems to do these things sits at odds with what actually needs to be done.

And yet, it is really so simple. Make care homes loving, warm environments, filled with people who genuinely love children, and give these children a great education with all the support they need. How hard would it be to ensure that for every thirty children in a care home, there were two or three Mother and Father figures there to love and nurture them, until each child finds the right parent for him or her. And if they don’t, it won’t matter, because they will have a home already, with the other children in the care home and the people who love them there.

Is this picture realistic? Does it cost more than the government is willing to give? The answer to the first question must be yes – it will be far easier to find a few good men and women, to love these children and support them (with the right kind of training for children who are emotionally traumatised beyond a certain level), than to scour the country for parents to take thousands of children on a year. In the long run, it will save the government money; loved and nurtured children very rarely go on to be dependent on the state and it will ensure that these children will go on to live happy and fulfilling lives, which will benefit the country and its economy.

The answer to the second question must be, no. If we were to add up all the ‘funding’ to this sector over the years, it would run to sums beyond our wildest dreams. But the government, nor the adoption agencies who survive on its handouts, seem to care about implementing solutions that actually tackle the problems faced by children in care, still focusing on the profitability of pumping sterling into sketchy strategies designed to make the sector look a whole lot of busy, but which in reality, is busy doing nothing.

So, let’s hear it for the Masters of Shuffle at Westminster. It’s another tragic moment in the history of child welfare, and we’re starting to feel even more uncomfortable, the more we see.

Panelist Pulls Out Of Awards Ceremony After Sponsor is linked to Windrush Scandal

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, social work

≈ Leave a comment

A former social worker sitting on the judging panel of the social care sector’s biggest awards ceremony, has pulled out after discovering that management company Capita, was sponsoring the event. Capita has been embroiled in several high profile scandals, which include the company’s involvement in creating financial incentives at the Home Office to remove people from the UK (Windrush).

Nick Berbiers announced on Twitter last week that he would not be attending The Social Worker of the Year Awards. It’s not the first time that Nick has raised concerns about sponsors at the annual event. In his statement, Nick describes previous attempts at trying to alert the organisers to unsuitable sponsors. The statement gives the impression that the Board did not take Nick’s concerns seriously, leading the social worker to periodically step down from the judging panel between 2010 and 2016. Nick says in his tweet that he missed the sponsor’s name when he initially got involved in this year’s event, however upon noticing Capita’s presence, decided to step down from the panel.

Social Workers Without Borders, a charity nominated for an award at the ceremony, has also said it won’t attend, after discovering that Capita was sponsoring this year’s event.

The embarrassing fiasco has led to the ceremony’s board of trustees promising to hold an “ethics audit” of the annual event’s sponsors.

Capita has a long record of marks against its name, which spans not only the Windrush scandal, but features a scathing review from the Commons Select Committee over its callous handling of medical assessments for disability benefits, which it managed on behalf of the government. The Committee concluded that 60% of Capita’s reports were unacceptable. A subsidiary company belonging to Capita which employed immigration removal escort staff, was also deemed this year to have used excessive restraint on detainees who were flown out of the UK, by HM Inspectorate of Prisons.

This development comes during a particularly difficult time for the social care sector. Hit by increasingly sharp budget cuts and in freefall as it struggles to cope with an out of date child protection system and rising referrals for support, the sector is constantly looking to find ways to balance its budgets. This has resulted in unlikely, and often unethical partnerships between organisations. An example where these kinds of pairings raise the greatest concerns involve children’s charities like Barnardo’s teaming up with adoption agencies to help bolster their support services.

Agreements which would ordinarily be viewed as deeply unethical, are now the norm inside the sector.

The government will be holding a debate today, looking at ways to fund the social care sector. Members of the public are able to attend the event free of charge, which starts at 3.35pm, and will be held in Committee Room 1, at the Palace of Westminster.

New Report Targets Parents And Children Fleeing Child Protection Investigations

27 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, social services

≈ 7 Comments

A new report produced by London based charity, Children & Families Across Borders (CFAB), urges greater cooperation between the UK and international authorities in cases where parents and children flee abroad to avoid child protection investigations. The call comes as the UK prepares to leave the EU, potentially reducing the ability of local authorities to locate children who leave the island after being classified as vulnerable by social workers.

CFAB is the UK branch of the International Social Service network and works with partners overseas in over 100 countries on cases that require cross-border cooperation. The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, which funded the report, is one of the largest independent grant-makers in the UK.

Parents leaving the UK with their children after social services raise child protection concerns is on the rise in Britain, as families claim financial incentives for adoptions are leading councils to remove children unjustly. The adoption and fostering industry, which has suffered under budget cuts, has also been criticised for unethical practices, including pushing incentives for adoptions and allowing social workers in councils to start their own agencies to recruit and place children.

Researchers and academics are also starting to question the effectiveness of social work practices in the UK. A newly discovered research paper, “Parenting Capacity Assessment as a Colonial Strategy”, looks at whether the current process of assessing parents’ capacity to parent is perhaps an outdated way of supporting vulnerable families.

The CFAB report, “Cross-border child safeguarding: Challenges, effective social work practice and outcomes for children”, is part of an emerging body of research looking at children’s social work. The study was undertaken in 2017-2018 in order to better understand policy and practice related to cross-border children and social work cases involving families.

Here are some key stats from the report:

A total of 330 children were involved in the study
The researchers audited 200 cases, 100 of which involved children in need of protection who had travelled to another country or had come into the UK
More than three-quarters (157 cases) involved an outgoing case with a request from the UK to another country
The age demographic with the largest representation was 0-5 years (133 children)
The majority of children in the study were non-British EU nationals (142 children), followed by British nationals (102 children)
It took an average of 45 days for an international child protection alert to be issued when a child deemed at risk had travelled abroad, perhaps due to an inability to locate the child’s whereabouts overseas

One of the most interesting facts mentioned in the report stems around what happens once a child flees the UK. The study says that a large number of cases involving a welfare visit following a child protection alert to another country or to a UK local authority resulted in no further action. Of the 53 cases where a welfare visit was completed following a child protection alert, the vast majority (70%) ended in no further action. The study is quick to suggest that this finding may in part be due to poor assessment standards in foreign countries, but does not consider the possibility that social services in the UK may have incorrectly assessed families in the first instance.

While the study claims to cover two areas – children crossing international borders, who social workers flag as in need of protection; and children in the social care system who can be placed with family in another country – the emphasis appears to be on families who leave the UK to avoid child protection proceedings. It also appears to focus on trying to retain control of cases once they go overseas by inviting the production of a new framework in which social workers in other jurisdictions agree to effectively hand over the reins to UK social services.

The authors of the report were CFAB’s CEO, Carolyn Housman and social worker Angela Wilson, who also works at CFAB. The Research Advisory Group were:

David Jones, CFAB Trustee
Marion Davis, CFAB Trustee
Brian Littlechild, University of Hertfordshire
Karen Lyons, London Metropolitan University
Dez Holmes, Research in Practice
Emily Halliday, CAFCASS
Helen Johnston, CAFCASS.

Crosses, Spaghetti Carbonara and The Qur’an.

30 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 14 Comments

Whilst the case of a Christian toddler forced to live in a Muslim household in England has reignited the Far Right and caused uproar worldwide, a much bigger and more important story is being missed. It’s a story about a broken care system, one which routinely fails children and which fights to stay alive through financial incentives.

There can be no excuse for sending a vulnerable child into an environment where they feel scared and alone. Leaked social work reports confirmed that the toddler had sobbed and begged not to be returned to the family after being told to remove her cross and prevented from eating spaghetti Carbonara because it had pork in it. The child was recorded as being deeply distressed and sometimes unable to understand the family, who spoke Arabic as well as English.

The family’s actions have understandably sparked a debate about the practice of Islam, however this kind of behaviour is motivated by ignorance, not religion. Being orthodox, whether as a Muslim, Jew, Christian or any other faith denomination does not prevent believers from accommodating others, even if they are under their roof. A lack of education and understanding does.

The fault lies squarely with Tower Hamlets local authority, whose inadequate rating by Ofsted saw that the council made the news for its “… widespread and serious failures in the services provided to children who need help and protection in Tower Hamlets.”. Someone should have asked whether the carers would be comfortable taking on a child whose daily rituals would be different to their own. Uprooting a vulnerable child in need is one thing, removing any vestige of normality, any sense of familiarity they hold, should never be allowed.

At the tender age of five, the girl’s cross was not a religious symbol to her, it was a source of comfort, something that she relied on to feel safe in a world full of uncertainty and fear. The spaghetti too, a sense of home, and warmth. That no one stopped to think about what these things meant to the toddler is a disgrace, and yet it is exactly the job of social services to be aware of contexts like this one.

A lot has happened since The Times broke its story about the case, on Monday. The little girl has since been reunited with her grandmother. The Family Court held a hearing on Tuesday, in which Judge Sapnara ruled that it would be in the child’s best interests to live with a member of her family who could meet her needs “in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion.”

This begs the question, if this was in the girl’s best interests, why wasn’t the placement made at the outset?

To understand that, we have to go beyond the debate about orthodox religion, prejudice and hate, and look closely at a child welfare system which puts profit before protection – and exploits families in poverty.

Budget cuts spurred on by austerity measures have left councils cash strapped and social workers tearing their hair out trying to work inside teams bound by red tape and dwindling resources. There are good child protection professionals on the ground, but at management level things become more complicated.

Directors and team leaders are under increasing pressure to ease the government’s social burden by removing children from vulnerable parents whose ongoing difficulties cost the state serious money. One way of doing this is through fostering. To galvanise councils into action, the government has routinely offered financial incentives, both for fostering children and adopting them.

Reports like this one from Oxford University suggest that those who come forward to foster have mostly altruistic motives for doing so, though there is little evidence to substantiate this claim.

Whilst virtually no data exists on life circumstances of UK foster carers or the kinds of income they earn before taking on children, emerging research could offer clues about deeper motivations. A toolkit produced by the Fostering Network in 2012, called “The Motivations To Foster”, received 1,400 responses to its survey asking about reasons for fostering. The respondents were members of the Fostering Network, which is made up of 42,000 foster carers – less than 4% of the network’s membership. The survey reveals that of those who took part, the majority who fostered were between 35 and 45, with 84% of carers having children of their own and most moving into fostering after deciding to leave work.

The Oxford university study also highlights research that suggests a significant number of foster carers do in fact choose to foster after losing a job, or because they are looking to cover every day costs. This implies in part that the money being given to foster carers to look after children is seen as a convenient way to cover household bills and other every day expenses. These findings leave open the door for an important debate on fostering income as a way to fend off poverty for families who themselves may be in need.

The family in this case may well have chosen to foster for income. In 2014, Tower Hamlets had the second highest unemployment rate across London and almost half (49%) of children in Tower Hamlets were in poverty. As of 2016, it is now the worst place in England for child poverty. Families in the borough are clearly struggling and could be looking for ways to make ends meet. Fostering offers a way to do that. Parents can stay at home, raise their own children and cover utility bills without having to juggle conventional employment at the same time.

Making fostering an attractive option has become a brazen pass time for agencies, who look to target those thinking about caring for children. Private agencies like Simply Fostering offer around £450 a week for taking on a child, and outline breakdowns of yearly ‘earnings’ on their website as well as financial ‘perks’, quick to tell prospective carers that it’s tax free income. Bragging about incentives is a common feature of the fostering sector, with agencies openly admitting that parents come forward for the cash. No mention is made of the often emotionally exhausting work in caring for traumatised children or the ongoing battles with biological parents looking to reverse care orders. All of that is conveniently swept under the carpet to ensure smooth transactions between agency and parent.

It’s mass exploitation of families in need on both sides of the deal, and though no research has been done in this area could be an important factor in a lack of stability within placements which break down at an alarming rate.

This disturbing case is not about Muslim customs or the rights and wrongs of faith. It is about the need for better social work training, properly allocated budgets and finding alternative ways to source foster carers who have the insight and stamina to take on children in need of deep love and affection. It is about child protection professionals understanding what judges have been saying for years, what the law and policy tell us about rehousing children – that family members and friends must be considered first before sending a delicate child into an unfamiliar environment.

MPs are now being urged to relaunch a government review into fostering – if it does, the review’s priority should not be scapegoating religion, it should be investigating financial incentives inside the care system and how we can meaningfully address every child’s best interests.

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Tell Politicians What You Think About The Family Courts

19 Friday May 2017

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform

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Researching Reform is very privileged to have a readership which includes families and children with experience of the Family Courts, however politicians, peers and judges also visit the site daily, and we know they read your feedback.

As politicians publish their manifestos and go about making pledges this month, they will also be reading your thoughts on the system in order to understand what’s not working, so now is a good time to let the future government know what you think about the family justice system.

We are adding our Top Ten Bug Bears below:

Inefficient Monitoring Of The Impact Of Financial Incentives Across Child Welfare Organisations And Agencies
Culture Of Mistrust And Disrespect Towards Families And Children
Inadequate Training For Social Workers And Judges
No Efficient Mechanism For Correcting Material Errors In Judgments and Court Bundles
“The Race To Adoption” Process
The 26 Week Rule In Care Proceedings
Forced Adoption Practices
No Hub For Professionals And The Public Offering Simple Guides About The System And The Latest Relevant Research
The Need To Refine The ‘Risk Of Future Harm‘ Threshold To Avoid Miscarriages of Justice
No Current Guidelines On Child Welfare Professionals Using The Internet And Social Media To Track And Trace Parents