Researching Reform

Natasha

Children in care in Southern Australia are 52% more likely to be hospitalised by their mid-teens than those children who have had no contact with the care system, new research has found.

Elevated hospitalisation rates for children in care continued on into adulthood, with most being admitted for mental illness, drug abuse and physical injury during childhood and beyond.

The research, produced by the University of South Australia and published in the Child Abuse and Neglect journal, is the first ever study to examine the impact of child abuse and neglect from data about 608,540 South Australian born children since 1986.

Lead author for the study, Dr Emmanuel Gnanamanickam said the research highlighted the lack of proper support given to children within the care system.

The research identifies several alarming trends:

Children who had at some time been placed in Out of Home Care (OOHC) had an average of 7.7 hospital admissions by the time they reached 16.5 years, about four times the mean of 2.0 for children who had never had contact with Child Protection Services (CPS)
People aged between 15 and 32 years, who had contact with CPS in their childhood, had 2 to 4 times more hospitalisations than those with no contact.
Children with substantiated child abuse or neglect and had entered OOHC, were shown to be at highest risk.

In a press release on the university’s website, Gnanamanickam said, “Rates of hospitalisation for children who are placed in out of home care, because these cases are the most serious, are highest, and further research is required to unpack how the elements of abuse and neglect interact with removal from family, to ensure the negative outcomes for these children can be mitigated as far as possible.”

Our experience at Researching Reform suggests that the reasons behind this elevated risk are because of poor care these children receive inside the child protection system, inappropriate and dangerous out of home placements, and in many cases re-traumatisation caused by the permanent removal of children from their birth parents, causing long-term damage.

Given the universal nature of the impact of removal and poor protection mechanisms for children in place across other parts of the world, including the UK, this research should sound an alarm bell for the children’s social care sector in England and Wales.

Natasha

The NSPCC and the Children’s Society have recently unveiled plans to enlist food delivery companies, plumbers and postal workers to look for signs of child abuse while visiting people’s homes.

The charities say the campaigns have been set up in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, which has left vulnerable children isolated at home while many schools and community centres remain closed.

On Friday, the Children’s Society launched a poster campaign in partnership with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, advising anyone concerned about a child being abused to reach out.

The training initiative set up by the NSPCC was announced last week, with 5,000 Deliveroo drivers already signed up to take part in a course designed to help workers detect child abuse.

Drivers who are concerned about a child being in imminent danger will be told to call the police, while queries about suspected abuse and more general concerns will be fielded to the NSPCC’s support line, where drivers can get advice and staff can make a decision about what to do next.

The NSPCC will then decide whether to call the police or a local authority for cases they think should lead to a referral.

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Some experts fear Deliveroo’s involvement might encourage drug gangs and paedophiles to pose as drivers concerned about the welfare of children in homes, but who are instead looking to locate, groom and exploit young children.

On Monday, several national media outlets reported that county lines gang mules had been disguising themselves as Deliveroo drivers to sell cocaine and heroine during lockdown. Young runners groomed by gangs were used to smuggle the Class A drugs.

One such article, published by The Guardian on July 5, offered more details about how County Lines gangs had been using Deliveroo as a cover for drug dealing:

“Criminal gangs have been dressing young drug mules as nurses and Deliveroo workers to deliver cocaine, heroin and illegally acquired prescription drugs during lockdown, according to a senior officer in charge of tackling county lines dealing at one of the UK’s biggest police forces.

Supt Andy O’Connor of Merseyside police said Liverpool drug lords forced to return home during lockdown were operating a “click and collect” service for couriers disguised as key workers to travel in and out of the region with drugs.

He said the looming recession coupled with high unemployment could make it easier for criminal groups to recruit vulnerable people and their families as lockdown is eased.”

“People were dressed as key workers, we’ve got evidence to show there were people stop-checked purporting to be nurses or Deliveroo drivers. Crime groups are clever and ingenious. They still want to deliver their commodity, there’s still a significant amount of money to make,” O’Connor added.

The majority of Deliveroo’s drivers are male (93%), while 73% are young men between the ages of 18-34, making it easy for drug runners, and paedophiles in the UK who are mostly male (80-95%), to blend into the workforce without arousing suspicion. Some experts have expressed concern that county lines gangs might use the NSPCC’s scheme to target and groom young children.

A spokesperson for SPACE, an award winning organisation that protects children from criminal exploitation, said the scheme could make it much easier for criminals to target and exploit children.

“Whilst clearly well-intentioned, there should be alarm bells ringing with this initiative given the well-publicised, lockdown-driven adaptation by County Lines gangs of using drug runners as Deliveroo drivers,” they said.

“If it remains effective and lucrative, there is no reason why this diversification in operation won’t continue post lockdown, so we’re looking at individuals the public nor safeguarding professionals would want anywhere near vulnerable children and adults heading straight into the same space as them, with a view to recruiting, exploiting, abusing and trafficking.”

“Sexual exploitation also features within County Lines, and that becomes an additional concern. Such an initiative could create an easy bridge for criminal exploiters to access vulnerable victims with legitimacy and ease,” they concluded.

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Helen Westerman, a local campaigns manager for the NSPCC, said she was not aware of the development in a conference call with this site on Friday, and did not know whether Deliveroo had taken steps to address the breaches. She was also unable to confirm whether Deliveroo’s drivers were CRB checked, DBS checked or were vetted before being hired.

We reached out to both the NSPCC and Deliveroo’s communications teams, and will update this article with any responses we receive.*

The NSPCC’s training, which Deliveroo drivers have yet to undergo, is provided through a free 15 minute video, entitled, “It’s Your Call”, which offers an introduction to the course, signs to look out for when trying to spot abuse, interactive tasks, and information on how to report concerns. Viewers can fast forward through some of the segments and pause the content as they move through the film.

The course is not accredited, but Westerman said the training had been developed by the charity’s staff and experts.

Westerman added that the decision to roll out the video training to Deliveroo drivers came after a driver called the NSPCC helpline, having grown concerned about a child at a property where he regularly delivered alcohol.

“During the pandemic the normal places where child abuse and neglect would normally be spotted were restricted, like schools and health and the community sector and social care, so we’re much more reliant on people like Deliveroo being the eyes and ears,” she explained.

“It’s great that we’re able to offer something, fairly basic, but helping people understand the signs of abuse and how to report it. I think the partnership is a positive one and hopefully we’ll save a lot more children,” Westerman said.

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Emerging concerns about the impact of the scheme on the social care sector have also been raised by social workers who believe that Deliveroo drivers are not equipped to detect child abuse or respond appropriately in a potentially abusive environment.

Ed Nixon, co-founder and Chair of Every Child Leaving Care Matters said safeguarding should rest with local authorities.

“This role falls to Local Authorities and Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards until the new arrangements facilitated by The Children and Social Work Act come into force. I am also concerned that the trainer in this case does not have lead or any statutory responsibility for protecting the welfare of children,” Nixon observed.

Reacting to the training scheme on social media, one mother said, “What about SEND parents? Our children often have a meltdown for no apparent reason, and sound like they are being hurt, when in fact they are hurting themselves. This could be dangerous.”

A comment by a second social media user said,”This is becoming a police state,” and another person wrote, “Getting people to spy on others and report them, sounds like something the Nazis did, very worrying.”

Some social media users also felt that domestic violence victims would find the intrusion intimidating, while others said the initiative would put them off using Deliveroo in the future.

Westerman said the NSPCC was also open to working with other services who may want to engage with the training.

“We recognise that Deliveroo drivers are just one of a number of people that would be visiting properties, and could be the eyes and ears for their community,” she said.

Westerman said the free training, which anyone can access, was not funded by the government and did not involve targets or quotas. Data about the drivers registering for the course would be collated, but information about Deliveroo drivers calling the NSPCC’s helpline, and details about those calls which are usually bound by confidentiality laws, would not be recorded unless the driver chose to reveal their identity.

*A spokesperson for Deliveroo contacted this site on July 20 to say Deliveroo drivers were CRB checked.

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Natasha

Former Home Secretary Sajid Javidhas announced that he will lead a “No Holds Barred” think tank on child sexual abuse at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), but that will mean treading a fine line between cultural pressure points and universal truths that lie at the heart of abuse.

Javid’s think tank on child sexual abuse – do we really need another – was announced in The Telegraph on 30 May, and included an account of what the exercise would involve, as well as some not-so subtle soundbites blaming lockdown for child abuse ahead of schools reopening in full the following day.

Among the list of items Javid’s think tank hopes to look at, is how gang-based exploitation within UK Pakistani communities evolved, and why, as he puts it, “a disproportionate number of people are from Asian heritage, particularly Pakistani heritage.”

Mr Javid is himself from Pakistan, so it makes sense for the government to wheel him out to spearhead this think tank. It’s harder to rail against someone calling out their own culture, even if you suspect that person may not actually think they are from that culture at all.

In danger of going down the Priti Patel rabbit hole – she was widely ridiculed for her tough stance on immigration, despite her own parents being immigrants – Javid has a fine line to tread if he wants to produce a report worth reading.

Having grown up around a lot of different communities, I had the privilege of being exposed to Pakistani culture. Like any community-based culture, it is warm, embracing and places a heavy emphasis on family and protecting your own.

But like all cultures, Pakistani customs, many of which are rooted in ‘popular Islam’, are not always so warm, and include ill-informed practices which label other cultural groups within Pakistan and non-Muslim demographics, as undesirable, and inferior.

The concept of religious superiority, exalting your own and pushing away the unfamiliar, can be seen in almost every monotheistic religion we have, from Catholicism to Judaism. It would not be right to suggest that Islam is alone in its self exaltation, but it would not be wrong to assume this way of thinking plays a part in child sexual abuse, either.

It is now well understood that the majority of child victims in places like Rotherham were young, white girls, and that Pakistani men have been disproportionately involved in developing the grooming gangs that exploited them.

A 2013 study by the Child Exploitation and Online Police Command (CEOP), found that 50% of offenders who targeted vulnerable children, like the girls in Rotherham, involved all-Asian groups, while 21% were white and the remaining 17% involved multi-ethnic groups.

Break down the data further, and CEOP figures tell us that 75% of recorded group abusers, who targeted victims based on their vulnerability, are Asian, despite Asians making up only 7.5% of the UK’s population.

In a culture where sexual expression is limited out of deference to a higher power, and your own children are considered sacred, men who want to exploit children will inevitably look outside of their immediate communities to carry out these crimes.

The same cannot be said of the white, male population in the UK.

The CEOP study found that 100% of men with a long-standing paedophilic interest who abuse children in the UK are white. These men also act in groups (paedophile rings), though they tend to be smaller than groups formed by Asian men, typically acting in pairs rather than groups of four.

However, the study doesn’t factor in organisations like the Paedophile Information Exchange, whose members were both male, and female, and most likely predominantly white.

Some statistics suggest that overall, the vast majority of child sex offenders in England and Wales are white males, who made up 98% of all defendants in 2015-16. White men also represented 85% of convicted child sex offenders and 86% of the general population in 2011.

So what could Sajid Javid’s report have to offer, on a subject already being handled by the nation’s child abuse inquiry, and a phenomenon that we know involves more than just culture and religious belief?

A progressive report, which sets idiosyncrasies within Pakistani culture, and other cultures too, against those universal truths about child sexual abuse, might make it an exercise worth undertaking.

Pakistani men who are inclined towards child sexual abuse may have an approach which differs from other groups, but the underlying motivations are no different to those held by all other child sexual abusers.

Understanding that cultural norms are not the incentive but the excuse to carry out abuse should be at the heart of Javid’s report.

And while we don’t hesitate to question the Catholic Church about how its vow of celibacy emboldens priests to abuse children or its confessional protects sexual predators, identifying cultural and religious practices which further abuse has to be done thoughtfully and with the acknowledgment that child abuse crosses every border and every boundary we know.

There is something else. If Javid plans to use this report to feed our Pakistani population to the far right in order to further his political career inside a very white, elitist, British government, the backlash would be significant. The British, already divided by a pandemic, police brutality and Brexit, won’t be able to take much more.

Javid’s inquiry will look at grooming gangs and online child sexual abuse. Another report, which Javid commissioned in 2018 into the “characteristics and contexts” of gangs abusing children which argued that ignoring issues such as ethnicity is more likely to fuel racist movements, is set to be published later this year.

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Natasha

Legislation has been passed in New York which raises the bar for entries into the state’s Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR). The amendment makes it harder for social services to place parents on the register without sufficient evidence.

The amendment, which was placed inside New York’s 2020 budget bill, raises the legal threshold for determining that someone maltreated a child, reduces the length of time before records of neglect are sealed, and provides additional protections for accused parents before employers can access their records.

The legislation has been called the most significant reform of New York’s child welfare laws in over a decade, and includes four key amendments:

Raising the standard of evidence required to indicate a case in the SCR from “some credible evidence” to “a fair preponderance of evidence”;
Parents will no longer be required to file a claim to clear their records once family courts dismiss allegations;
Parents challenging their records now have the opportunity to show that the allegations are not relevant to working with children and;
Neglect records will be automatically sealed after eight years.

The register has been widely criticised by reformers in New York for failing to differentiate between different kinds of abuse. Campaigners also say that while it is very easy to be placed on the register, it is notoriously difficult to be removed from the record, even when a child is no longer at risk.

Another criticism levelled at the register by legal advocates and child welfare organisations is that it does not distinguish between charges of abuse and of neglect, and ignores underlying causes of involuntary neglect (an inability to provide basic care to a child through no fault of the parents).

Many of the neglect charges currently cited on the register relate to poverty, such as inadequate housing or leaving children unattended when no childcare options were available.

Chris Gottlieb, co-director of the Family Defense Clinic at the NYU School of Law, says the state has a low burden of proof in these kinds of cases, which makes it much easier for parents to find themselves on the register.

As a result of this low threshold, at least 47,000 people are placed on the register each year. According to Gottlieb, the vast majority of these cases involve allegations of neglect, most of which are poverty related.

And less than 14% percent of cases involve abuse allegations. Gottlieb also notes extreme racial disproportionality in who is placed on the register, with black parents 2.6 times more likely to have an indicated report than white parents.

The new legislation asks the state to seal the records of parents accused of neglect (not abuse) after eight years. Currently, parents with records in the register are barred from working in a variety of sectors, including daycare.

A push inside the state to place parents in employment could be the driving force behind the bill.

Widely supported by child welfare bodies and child care agencies inside the state, the register’s heightened threshold will allow more people into work, boosting the state’s production and relieving it of costly financial burdens associated with supporting vulnerable families.

The concern that the amendment could see abused children fall through the new threshold, and allow inappropriate individuals to work in child welfare roles has been raised by opponents of the new legislation.

This site welcomes the increased threshold but remains concerned as to how social services inside New York will be ensuring that voluntary neglect and involuntary neglect cases are separated.

The amendments are due to come into force on January 1, 2022.

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Natasha

The first ever national study has confirmed that mothers who make complaints of child abuse against a father in court are more likely to lose contact rights with their children.

The research also found that this risk doubled when a father made a counter-claim of parental alienation, leading the researchers to conclude that “alienation trumps abuse”.

The data revealed the following:

When fathers alleged mothers were engaged in alienation, regardless of any abuse claims, they took contact rights away from her 44% of the time;
When the genders were reversed, and fathers started out with custody of the children, courts removed children from fathers and placed them with mothers only 28% of the time;
Even when the father’s abuse was proven in court, mothers who had alleged that abuse still lost custody in 13 % of the cases;
By contrast, fathers lost custody only 4% of the time when a mother’s abuse was proved in court;
Overall, fathers were much more likely than mothers to win contact disputes when claiming alienation.

The US study was produced by Professor Joan Meier, a nationally recognised expert in the US on domestic violence, and Sean Dickson, and is the second piece of research they have published on this topic.

A pilot version of the study was published in 2017 and found that family courts only believed a mother’s claim of a child’s sexual abuse 1 out of 51 times (approximately 2%) when the accused father alleged parental alienation.

The investigation went on to discover that in cases where alienation is not mentioned, family courts only believed mothers’ claims about child sexual abuse 15% of the time.

The final study, published in January 2020, and funded by the US Justice Department, revealed that alienation’s impact was gender-specific, and that fathers alleging mothers were abusive were not similarly undermined when mothers cross-claimed alienation.

However in non-abuse cases, the data held that alienation had a more gender-neutral impact.

The research incorporated published court opinions available online between 2005 and 2014, and used those judgments to create a data set of 4,388 custody (child contact) cases.

The team classified the cases into different types of abuse allegations by either parent:

Domestic violence against the mother,
Child sexual abuse, and;
Child physical abuse.

The study also included allegations that one parent was trying to alienate the child from the other parent.

As in their pilot study, Meier and her research team found that only 1 out of every 51 cases in which a mother reported child sexual abuse by the father was believed, when the father claimed parental alienation.

Another recent study in Canada made strikingly similar findings.

Many thanks to Kelly Williamson, who tweeted the new research.

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Natasha

A 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.

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Natasha

The House of Commons is hosting a debate on Operation Augusta, a police and social services investigation into child sexual exploitation in South Manchester, which was launched in response to the death of a 15 year old girl, Victoria Agoglia.

The debate, which was raised by Graham Stringer MP, takes place today in the House of Commons from 9.30am – 11am.

Victoria had been in the care of Manchester City Council when she died in 2003, after being injected with heroin by a 50 year old man, in his home.

Police and social services were aware that Victoria was being targeted by sexual predators. Victoria had also told social workers and police that she was being injected with heroin.

After calls for a review into how the police and social services handled the case, a report into her death was published on January 14, 2020.

The damning report found that the coroner at her inquest had, “significantly” underplayed the coercive control Victoria had been subjected to in relation to the sexual exploitation she had suffered. It also confirmed that while authorities knew Victoria was being sexually exploited, the child protection procedures available were not implemented to protect her.

The report also noted that detectives working on Operation Augusta had “built up a compelling picture of the systematic exploitation of looked after children in the care system in the city of Manchester”.

The debate can now be read in the Hansard, which you can access here.

Links:

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Natasha

The government’s acting Children’s Minister, Michelle Donelan, made a dramatic U-turn on Wednesday over a policy pushing adoptions for children in care after this site published a post explaining the proposal was illegal.

Donelan had asked all councils in a letter sent on January 16, to prioritise adoptions in every child protection case, and to ignore court judgments which approved alternative forms of care.

The proposal was met with strong resistance by several key stakeholders inside the child welfare sector, including fostering agencies who were concerned that the policy would lead to a reduction in business.

Children’s charities and child welfare professionals with no vested interest in fostering or adoption also expressed concerns that the minister’s demand was out of touch with reality, and overly simplistic.

But on January 22, Donelan released a video statement through the Department of Education’s (DfE) Twitter feed, expressing a different view.

In the video, the acting Children’s Minister, who is filling in for Kemi Badenoch while she is on maternity leave, said that all forms of care should be considered, including kinship care.

Donelan also unveiled a new project in an answer she gave to a written question sent to the House of Commons on January 23, which asked what recent assessment the DfE had made on the effectiveness of contextual safeguarding.

Answering the query, Donelan announced that the government had been looking at this issue in a pilot to test “contextual safeguarding theory”. Contextual safeguarding examines the way councils respond to vulnerable children who may be being exploited outside of a family setting. She confirmed that the DfE had given Hackney Council up to £2 million to work on the project.

The pilot has been running since 2017, and focuses on phenomena like county lines exploitation and is led by Professor Michelle Lefevre at the University of Sussex, Dr Carlene Firmin from the UoB Contextual Safeguarding team, as well as Professor Gillian Ruch and Dr Kristie Hickle from the University of Sussex.

We need more people to open their homes to a vulnerable child, whether through adoption, fostering or kinship care. To get behind this, Children's Minister @michelledonelan visited @Coram in London to talk about adoption and is supporting @barnardos Fostering Week. 👇 pic.twitter.com/B6Zsr0exrX

— DfE (@educationgovuk) January 22, 2020

Natasha

A Welsh councillor being investigated over his handling of a child protection case has failed to offer evidence that he has child protection qualifications, after claiming he had been trained in the field.

Neil McEvoy contacted Researching Reform after reading a piece we wrote on a child protection case he had taken on, claiming that the report contained several factual inaccuracies.

This site offered to amend its original report upon Mr McEvoy furnishing the site with evidence.

Mr McEvoy told this site in a message exchange on Facebook that we were wrong in suggesting that he had no child protection training, and that he had not offered evidence of Welsh Women’s Aid encouraging women to breach court orders involving contact with fathers, or other women’s groups who he claimed had done the same.

He also said that he had not been removed from the party for bullying members as both this site and the BBC reported, but was expelled “for not discouraging people clapping me into a conference.”

Mr McEvoy did not send any evidence to this site about his claims in relation to Welsh Women’s Aid, or other women’s groups, and failed to offer any documentary evidence to confirm his alleged child protection qualifications.

We also asked McEvoy to explain his opposition to a Welsh Bill banning all forms of corporal punishment against children. McEvoy declined to comment.

While the site has received an expulsion letter written to Mr McEvoy by the Welsh Party Hearing Panel, the letter does not say that the Assembly Member was expelled for preventing people from clapping for him. There is no mention of clapping in the letter.

The letter says that McEvoy was expelled for “actions or statements, damaging or potentially damaging the public reputation of the party”, breaches of confidentiality and a series of tweets which Mr McEvoy posted after being found guilty of bullying by a disciplinary panel at the Local Government Ombudsman.

According to a report by the BBC in March 2018, the Welsh Party Panel also issued a statement about the councillor’s hearing, which said that the Panel “found him guilty of conduct in party meetings or against party members during party-organised events, or in correspondence dealing with party business, that was intimidating, harassing or that caused distress or disillusionment among party members and/or staff.”

The Assembly Member is now being investigated by the Standards & Ethics Committee at Cardiff Council, where he is a councillor, amid claims that he bullied care home staff while woking on a child protection case. McEvoy denies the allegations.

In 2011, Neil McEvoy accused Welsh Women’s Aid of “publicly funded child abuse”, claiming the group helped women break court orders involving fathers’ access to children, in a series of tweets he sent out on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

McEvoy apologised for his outburst shortly before he was suspended from the party saying:

“I apologise for any offence caused and accept I should have used less emotional language than the words I used.”

“I regret letting my emotional baggage of being a father who has experienced what, I believe, are the inadequacies of the family law system to guide my political actions.”

He added, “I particularly regret that the tweeting of comments – originally made 18 months ago – on this sensitive day have allowed the matter to become more about me than the issue itself.”

Natasha

A Welsh politician who was expelled from Plaid Cymru in 2017 for bullying and harassing party members has taken on a child protection case.

Neil McEvoy made headlines in 2011 for accusing Welsh Women’s Aid of “publicly funded child abuse”, claiming the group helped women break court orders involving fathers’ access to children, in a series of tweets he sent out on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. McEvoy has so far not produced any evidence to justify the claim.

McEvoy apologised for his outburst shortly before he was suspended from the party saying:

“I apologise for any offence caused and accept I should have used less emotional language than the words I used.”

“I regret letting my emotional baggage of being a father who has experienced what, I believe, are the inadequacies of the family law system to guide my political actions.”

He added, “I particularly regret that the tweeting of comments – originally made 18 months ago – on this sensitive day have allowed the matter to become more about me than the issue itself.”

McEvoy also opposed the Welsh Government’s “Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill, which makes all forms of corporal punishment against children illegal. The politician’s tweet opposing the bill has since been deleted from Twitter.

Now McEvoy, who is running as an independent councillor for Cardiff West, has raised concerns about a child who may have been abused in a care home.

McEvoy, who does not have a background in child protection, tried to engage with the care home and the police, leading to contact between the child and their parents being stopped.

Complaints that the councillor had tried to “ambush” a therapy session involving the child, and had bullied staff responsible for the child were then raised.

McEvoy said that he had been invited to attend the meeting by the child and their parents.

Additional complaints suggested that the Assembly Member had been too ‘demanding’ in the way in which he had approached the care home, and had called the police to request a welfare check on the child.

McEvoy is now being investigated by the Standards & Ethics Committee at Cardiff Council, where he is a councillor, over breaches of the council’s code of conduct.

After the investigation was announced, McEvoy called out his council’s Committee in a series of Facebook posts, calling it “not fit for purpose”, and a Kangaroo Court.

Despite the red flags in this case, which include the social work staff stopping contact between the child and their parents apparently out of spite, and cancelling the therapy session because the father intended to record the meeting, which is allowed, these developments have now been overshadowed by McEvoy’s disciplinary hearing.

Many thanks to Nicky for alerting us to this case.

UPDATE 8 January, 2020: Neil McEvoy contacted this site after reading our post and asked us to amend the piece on the ground that it was factually incorrect.

Among the factual inaccuracies we understand McEvoy has pointed to, are the views that he does not have any child protection qualifications, that he was unable to provide evidence of the allegations he made against Welsh Women’s Aid and that he was expelled from Plaid Cymru for bullying and harassing members of the party during a meeting.

Mr McEvoy told this site in a message exchange that he has child protection training, that he has evidence of Welsh Women’s Aid encouraging women to breach court orders involving contact with non-violent and non-abusive fathers, and knew of other women’s groups who had done the same, and that he was expelled from the party for not preventing members from cheering for him as he entered a meeting.

We are giving Mr McEvoy the right of reply, which is the fair thing to do, and have asked him to provide the following evidence to allow us to review the piece and make any changes required:

Evidence that Mr McEvoy has child protection training
Evidence of the allegations he has made against Welsh Women’s Aid and other Women’s groups he claims are enabling mothers to breach court orders against innocent fathers
A copy of his expulsion letter, in full
An answer to our question in correspondence over why he chose to oppose the Welsh Bill banning corporal punishment of children

Mr McEvoy has confirmed that he will send this evidence and responses to our questions, tomorrow.

We have decided to remove our view about Mr McEvoy’s political agenda in this post as the above issues have become magnified in our correspondence with Neil and are far more important than our own views about his assistance in these cases.

Finally, for added transparency, we are including the links to all the content we accessed to write this article, which confirms the various facts we have included in the piece, as well as additional information about Mr McEvoy.

NME

Researching Reform

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Welsh Councillor Who Claimed To Have Child Protection Qualifications Fails To Offer Proof

Politician Expelled From The Welsh Party Takes Up Child Protection Case

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