Barnardo’s claim that the number of children needing foster care has risen by 44% during the pandemic is not correct, fact-checking charity Full Fact has confirmed.

The claim was reported by several media outlets after journalists took the figure from a press release provided by the children’s charity.

The statement said that Barnardo’s had seen “a 44% increase in the number of referrals to its fostering services between 1 March and 23 April this year in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, compared to the same period in 2019.”

However, not all referrals end with a child being taken into foster care, and some of the children being referred are already inside the system and are being taken from one foster placement to another, which can happen when placements break down. (Which they do, all too often).

Full Fact does an excellent job of explaining how the fostering process works and why the statement is misleading, in its post about the claim.

The organisation tries to get information from Barnardo’s about the way the charity worded its statement, but is only able to get general comment about the way the fostering industry works.

Full Fact also asks for comment from the Local Government Association on the numbers of children who actually need fostering services during the pandemic, but the response they receive is also vague.

Full Fact asks Councillor Judith Blake, Chair of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board about the number of children with fostering needs.

“Councils continue to do an excellent job ensuring that children have access to support despite the difficulties experienced during the coronavirus pandemic,” she says.

“Councils have been encouraging applicants from people of all backgrounds who are interested in fostering and adoption, and will continue to support those who are able to provide a stable home for children in care,” She adds.

Statements which claim that services or levels of abuse have risen because of an increase in referrals have become common and can be described as a phenomenon because of their continued use within organisations’ press releases and their reproduction in the media.

Journalists who are not familiar with the child protection sector continue to print these statements, which are in effect a lobbying tac-tic by charities and local government bodies to try to validate their services. It is vitally important that journalists working on these issues understand the implications of printing statements which claim rises in ‘need’.

Previous claims, also reproduced hundreds of times by media outlets, include the statement that child abuse in the UK has risen dramatically during various periods, when in fact the prevalence of child abuse has remained static.

As with Barnardo’s claim that fostering need had risen by 44% during the pandemic, claims about sharp increases in child abuse refer to a rise in referrals, rather than a ‘real’ or confirmed rise in abuse.

You can read Full Fact’s report here, which was written by Abbas Panjwani.

Foster care adversely affects children in both the short term and the long term, new research from Sweden confirms.

Written by Christian Munthe, a bioethics professor at Gothenburg University, and eight additional researchers, the paper also calls on social care organisations around the world to systematically collect data about the effects and side effects of out-of-home placements for children.

The paper pulls together a substantial amount of research from Europe (including England) and the United States, in order to try to take a long term view of foster care and its impact on children.

The conclusions the researchers come to in the paper are damning.

Overall, 28 publications about 18 interventions, including 5,357 children, were identified, but only three interventions were sufficiently evidence-based.

Alarmingly, they also found that not one study had assessed the tools used for foster parent selection, or had evaluated pre-service programs related to outcomes.

They also discovered that hardly any study concluded that young adults who had grown up in foster care had better outcomes when compared to peers raised in ‘adverse’ birth family environments. 

Of those studies attempting to establish causal effects, the long-term developmental effects of out-of-home care seemed to be neutral at best. 

Analysis of foster care and its effect on children is severely limited, so it’s no surprise that the researchers chose to highlight the need to address this lack of evidence in their paper.

The study looked at four central questions:

1. Are there instruments for foster parent selection that promote the children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
2. Are there pre-service training programs targeting foster parents that promote children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
3. Are there interventions targeting foster children and foster parents that promote children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
4. Does foster care intervention in general promote children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
5. What ethical challenges arise due to the state of the evidence base with regard to the Questions 1–4?

You can read the paper here. 

A study by the Centre of Excellence in Child Trauma (CoECT) has concluded that hundreds of children are being taken to see their biological parents by unwilling foster carers who say that contact is damaging the children and should be stopped.

The survey follows a backlash by carers who want to see a total ban on contact with biological parents.

According to the survey, which received 1,125 responses from parents who have adopted, fostered, or cared for children, 53 percent of carers polled “had to take” their child to see a biological parent.

A further 85% of parents believed it should be illegal for biological parents to be guaranteed contact time. (We are not sure what “guaranteed” means in this context).

There are several concerns with this study (which does not seem to be available on the CoEct site).

The survey calls biological parents who have lost their children to the care system “abusive parents”, without defining what abusive means, and fails to make any distinction between children living in homes where the parents are struggling with poverty, subjected to domestic violence or experiencing direct emotional and physical harm.

It’s a shoddy survey. And it gets worse.

Sarah Naish, who is the CEO and founder of CoECT, a former social worker and a parent of five adopted siblings compared all biological parents to rapists in an interview with The Telegraph today:

“You would not expect to meet your rapist once a month for a cup of tea, so why do we force children to keep seeing their abusers?

“Looking at the poll alone, this is evidence that over 500 children have been marched back to visit their abusers, which is an absolute disgrace. From the stories I hear on a daily basis this is the tip of the iceberg and something needs to be done.

“This should be regarded as one of the biggest scandals that still exists in the British legal system today. The legal view that contact with parents is beneficial to a child’s welfare becomes absolutely ridiculous when that parent is the one that abused them.

“The parents I speak to dedicate their entire beings to try and heal the children they have to care for, only for them to be the adult that has to march their child back to the person that abused them.

“The government needs to take action on this and ban parents that have abused their children from having contact with them.”

Naish is also the founder of the National Association of Therapeutic Parenting, which offers paid for courses, workshops and training for carers.

It is also not clear from the survey whether the respondents were all pooled from Ms. Naish’s association.

And the survey itself is not new, having been announced initially in August, where the alleged findings from this survey seemed to focus not on a ban on contact with biological parents but an effort to get the government to offer more therapeutic support, like the courses Ms. Naish offers, for carers.

While it may be inconvenient for foster carers to have to facilitate contact with biological parents, it is being recognised as an important element in a cared-for child’s life, as a growing body of research tells us very clearly that many of these children don’t want to lose that connection and that the loss of it can lead to children suffering emotional and psychological harm throughout their adult lives.

In situations where a child genuinely doesn’t want to see a parent at a particular time, or during a particular period in their childhoods, that should be respected, but that should not include a complete lack of engagement from the foster carers with the biological parents. That connection must be kept alive for the child, throughout their childhood, even if it is done behind the scenes.

For those few children who have parents that are violent, or unable to engage with them without causing them harm, contact is clearly not a good idea, but the vast majority of child protection cases don’t involve extreme violence or emotional harm.

As of March 2018, there are 55,200 children living with foster families. The alleged ‘hundreds’ of children meeting with their biological parents is a small percentage compared to this figure.

The latest figures which include all forms of care, put the number of looked after children at 75,420. It’s a stat that has continued to rise over the last thirty years, without any explanation for the increase being offered by child protection professionals.

The piece by The Telegraph is inflammatory and we would advise that parents who have children in care and are feeling emotional at this time, not read it. For those who feel comfortable doing so, the sensationalist piece can be read here.

We reached out to CoECT on Twitter and via email to ask for a copy of the survey. We did not receive a response.

UPDATE

We received an email from CoECT on 10th October about our request for access to their survey. This is all they offered:

Hi Natasha,

Many thanks for your email Please see the survey results below.

Abusive contact

Are you looking after, or have you looked after, a child who was forced to have contact with a parent or other adult who had abused them?
53% YES
47% NO
Do you think it should be illegal for parents who have been abusive to their children to still be guaranteed contact time?
85% YES
15% NO

New research has emerged which confirms that women who have their children removed from them and placed into foster care, are more likely to commit suicide than mothers whose children are not fostered.

An article in The Conversation written by Elizabeth Wall-Wieler, a PhD student at the University of Manitoba, Canada, highlights key research which shows an increased mortality rate for mothers who lose their children to the care system.

Wall-Wieler explains that while mothers whose children are taken into care sometimes have underlying health conditions, the studies take those pre-existing conditions into account, meaning that the data is directly linked to the impact of losing a child to the care system.

The first study, published in December 2017 in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, was co-produced by Wall-Wieler, and examines suicide attempts and suicide completions among mothers whose children were placed in care. The researchers discovered that suicide rates among these women was almost three times higher and the death rate almost four times higher than those mothers whose children had not gone into foster care.

More research co-produced by Wall-Wieler and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, in March 2018, found that mothers whose children were placed in care were almost five times more likely to die from avoidable causes such as unintentional injury and suicide, and almost three times more like to die from unavoidable causes, including car accidents and heart disease.

A third study, published in the British Medical Journal’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, in October 2017, shows that when a mother loses her child to the care system, her physical and mental health become significantly worse.

While the above research does not address the impact the care system has on fathers, it’s likely that this data will emerge in time.

The research, which applies to both the US and UK child protection sectors, highlights the importance of thinking about the effects the care system has on parents and the need to address the current policy and legislation around foster care and adoption. Wall-Wieler recommends more support services for grieving parents, and while this is an important point for parents who have already lost children to care, it does not address the underlying realities of children’s social care today, which is not fit for purpose.

It is also a timely reminder that policies which seek to wrench children away from parents rather than offer families support wherever possible, is both misguided and dangerous. President of the Family Division, Andrew McFarlane, horrified the British public last week when he suggested that care orders should be made while children were still in the womb. The family court process is deeply traumatic, and orders seeking future removal of children who are currently unborn would without a doubt lead to more mothers committing suicide, and taking their unborn children with them.

Setting aside the legal problems pre-birth care orders create, which McFar-Gone (our new name for him), should really be familiar with, the research is a sobering reminder for our senior judges that moving away from more holistic solutions could lead to many more deaths inside the family justice system.

Many thanks to Susan for sharing this article with us.

Chart Source: Fostering in England 2016 to 2017