Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Not the Answer for Policy say Child Welfare Experts

12 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by Natasha in child abuse, child welfare, Researching Reform, social work

A thought provoking post on the Social Policy blog questions whether Adverse Childhood Experiences-based policy is really serving the best interests of children.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) refer to child abuse and stress experienced within the home.

ACEs are often used to inform policy and social work practice particularly within child protection, but the authors of the post argue that the indicators used are volatile and completely ignore external factors like poverty and inequality.

Instead, ACEs have traditionally focused on the family and as a result policy has tended to target, and blame, parents who are often struggling with dynamics not of their own making.

The post also talks about the use of algorithmic-based decisions to try to decipher who is at risk and the inherent problems with a tick-box approach.

The piece, which was published in full this month on Cambridge University Press’s Social Policy and Society section , is a must read. The authors, Professor Sue White, Professor Rosalind Edwards, Professor David Wastell and Professor Val Gillies offer some very important thoughts, including ones like these:

“ACEs form a chaotic and unstable knowledge base. This leads to problems with the explanatory weight that can be placed on ACEs. For rigorous tracing of causal inputs through to effects, ACEs need to be a clearly defined set of experiences. But the various definitions of ACEs do not form a cohesive body of definitive evidence and measurement.

Rather they are a shifting range of possible abuses and dysfunctions with inconsistencies in claims about severity, timing and duration.

For instance, common family circumstances such as parents’ divorce or separation, whether amicable or occurring when a child is 7 months or 17 years old, are given the same ACE dose weighting as exposure to domestic violence.

This chaotic approach leads to a great deal of overclaiming, often with over extrapolations from small effect sizes. And there is no attention to the influence of subsequent ameliorating or exacerbating influences, such as extended family support networks or being subject to racism and hate crime.

Interventions, which are frequently franchised ‘slices’ of particular models, are predominantly directed at mothers as primary attachment figures for children – either as a cause of their children’s ACEs, or as a buffer against, and solution to them. The conditions under which mothers bring up their children are skated around.

ACEs form a poor body of evidence for family policy and decision-making about child protection. Coupled with the chronic lack of services and family support in the UK, it is unclear what purpose producing individual ACE scores serves save perhaps to warrant rationing decisions.”

You can follow the professors on Twitter: @RosEdwards2, @ProfSueWhite, @ValGillies and @ProfDaveWastell

“Working with families means collaborating with rather than controlling them.” – New Research

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform, social services, social work

≈ 7 Comments

Many social workers and their managers believe so strongly that an authoritarian approach to child protection is right that they not only feel comfortable trying to control families going through child welfare proceedings but also advocate strongly for such practices, according to research published by Dr David Wilkins, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Cardiff University, Assistant Director of CASCADE, and project lead at the What Works Centre which assists regulatory body Social Work England.

The paper argues for an inclusive form of social work, where families feel empowered and safe. Dr Wilkins explains, “Working in a participatory way with families means, at the least, seeking to collaborate with rather than control or unduly influence them.”

The research, which was published in 2017 in the British Journal of Social Work has been uploaded onto free research site Academia, and was co-produced with Charlotte Whittaker, the curriculum lead at social work training school The Frontline.

Charlotte is responsible for developing the teaching, learning and assessment of a practice model called motivational interviewing (MI), which Psychology Today describes as a practical, empathetic, short-term counselling method which helps people find the internal motivation they need to change their behaviour while taking into account how difficult it is to make life changes. It is this form of counselling that the research paper focuses on.

Dr Wilkins’ research highlights positive social work practices using MI which have made a difference to families’ lives while also pointing out the dangers of trying to control and coerce parents during child protection proceedings. The research also calls for ground-level reform within social work as well as structural reform to make sure that social workers can put children and families at the heart of their practice.

Parents reacted to the research on social media. One mother told Researching Reform:

“My Cafcass officer doesn’t collaborate on any level. She won’t even contact me directly. She does it through my solicitor costing me more money. Having been in a controlling relationship I definitely feel I have stepped straight into another with her.”

It’s incredibly important to point out that we don’t tolerate coercive behaviour in almost any other context – all we need to do is look at current legislation which prohibits people from using controlling behaviour in a relationship to get what they want from each other. We call that kind of conduct abusive because we know it damages adults, and children.

The paper is a must-read for anyone working with families in a child protection setting, and for families too who have either experienced the child welfare system or are going through it at the moment.

The research is also an important reminder that coercion never resolves an issue as families are never fully on board with an idea they haven’t engaged with or feel any agency towards. It traps families inside a cycle which sees them return to the child protection system over and over again.

This kind of control also creates a deep and lasting mistrust of social workers and the sector.

The research makes several interesting observations about social work practice:

“Participatory principles such as collaboration, empathy and the right to self-determination are embedded in many of the codes of ethics that underpin professional social work practice (BASW, 2012; Levin andWeiss-Gal, 2009). Unsurprisingly, almost all the workers we spoke to believed they embodied these principles in their work (or said they aspired to even if they were not always able to achieve them). And yet our analysis of observed practice suggests that many workers find it hard to acknowledge parents’ feelings, to respect their choices or to draw on their expertise. In discussion with these workers, we found that, whilst they could explain what principles such as collaboration and empathy meant in theory, they found it more challenging to describe how they might be shown in practice.”

Dr Wilkins is part of a growing group of social workers who believe that working collaboratively with families is essential to excellent social work practice and that the system is there to serve families and children. Researching Reform agrees with this view.

You can follow David over on Twitter at @David82Wilkins.

Government Plan To Keep Children Out of Care Fails to Target Inadequate Councils

15 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, social services, social work

≈ 6 Comments

The government has launched a project which aims to keep children out of the care system. The £84 million initiative will target councils with the highest numbers of children in care across the country, but will not include bids from failing councils.

The project comes at a time when the child protection sector is seeing unprecedented levels of children in care.

Up to twenty councils will receive a share of the £84m set aside for the “Strengthening Families, Protecting Children” project over a period of five years. The project offers three programmes designed to improve the safety and stability of vulnerable children and to reduce the need for families to access services. Selected councils will implement one of the three featured programmes.

Three ‘early adopters’ have already been chosen to test the project and will begin implementing the programmes in the Spring. The selected councils are Darlington, Cambridgeshire and Middlesbrough.

Only councils with an Ofsted rating of ‘requires improvement to be good’ can make bids for the funding and take part in the project, making the project’s aims questionable. The current ratings offered by Ofsted are Oustanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate.

The What Works Centre for children’s social care will evaluate the success of the project sometime after 2024, but as the project will not be allowing councils with an inadequate rating to join the programme, arguably councils in most need of the support, it is unclear what use the evaluation will be in assessing the viability of the programmes in the project.

The Department for Education’s press release offers more detail on the programmes being offered:

Leeds Family Valued: working with the whole family unit and any support network to encourage long term changes at home that keep children safe, working with families rather than imposing measures on them. Independent evaluation of the project’s impact on the target population shows that between 2011 and 2017, Leeds reduced the number of children on children’s services Protection Plans by nearly 50% (974 in 2011 down to 515 in 2017).
Hertfordshire Family Safeguarding: creates teams consisting of mental health practitioners, domestic abuse workers, probation officers and children’s social workers to strengthen the bond between couples, support fathers and male partners to prevent violent behaviour. Evaluation shows this resulted in a 39% reduction in the number of days children spent in care, for cases allocated to the safeguarding team, a 53% drop in in hospital admissions for adults in that family, and a 66% reduction in contact with the police.
North Yorkshire No Wrong Door: creates ‘hubs’ where young people at risk of going into care get targeted support to cope with the multiple issues they face, including lack of accommodation or contact with the police. Independent evaluation showed the programme saw a 38% fall in arrests of individuals involved during the first 18 months of the programme and a 57% reduction in A&E visits.

The launch of the project coincides with the Children Act 1989’s thirtieth anniversary.

The press release can be read here.

The criteria for entry onto the project can be found here.

Ofsted’s Local Authority Children’s Social Care reports can be accessed here.

Many thanks to Michele Simmons for alerting us to this project.

Social Workers Spying On Families Are Breaking The Law

22 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, social work

≈ 20 Comments

Social workers in the UK are breaking the law as they spy on families through Facebook, The Times reports this morning. Social work professionals are also setting up fake social media accounts to spy on parents and children.

A study carried out by researchers at Lancaster University found that social workers were failing to adhere to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The Law allows government investigators including social workers to view a citizen’s social media accounts once, but thereafter requires the actor to get permission for repeat viewing or continued surveillance.

The Times explains that the social workers observed in the study did not seek out this permission. The researchers concluded that the behaviour showed an “apparent lack of awareness or conscious disregard of Ripa”.

Describing one of the recorded incidents from the research, The Times said:

“At one meeting, discussing a mother who was deemed a high risk to her baby, a social worker asked a colleague: “Do you spy on Facebook?”

The colleague answered: “Oh, yeah, I’m a big fan of Facebook stalking and [our manager] always comes in when I’m looking at it, she thinks I’m on Facebook all the time. I’ve got a fake Facebook account and I have to be very careful with the families that I don’t reveal something I’ve seen on Facebook.”

The Times reports that four months later the children were removed from the family and that the social worker involved had checked Facebook on the morning the children were taken to “gauge” how the mother was feeling.

The findings have concerned the researchers who have identified legal concerns through the study: social workers are clearly breaking the law to spy on families.

The practice of spying on families through social media has been around for at least two years and may be aggravated by judges who are unfamiliar with legislation like RIPA. In 2017 this site wrote about a judge who gave social workers the green light to search for families through Facebook.

Justice Holman took the view that it was appropriate for child welfare professionals to use the social media platform to track down missing parents – but did not offer any information about RIPA or the need to contact police in the first instance, who are tasked with locating missing persons. Social workers do not have a duty in law to track missing members of the public.

Researching Reform also shared research from America which offered alarming insight into how social workers were using the internet to spy on families with no regard for the law. The report concluded that while social workers found the internet useful for work, they were unclear about how it should be used in a child welfare setting.

Other concerning observations from the report show a real and urgent need to address the profession’s behaviour around investigating families:

Over half of the workers (58%) reported that searching for a client on Facebook out of curiosity was acceptable in some situations and 43% reported that they had done this.
Over half of workers (53%) stated that it was acceptable in some situations to search for a client on Facebook that the agency would like to locate, such as a missing parent and about half (49%) had done this.
61% of the child welfare workers stated that it was acceptable in some situations to search for a client on a site like Facebook when the information might give insight into client risk factors and close to half (46%) had done this.
About 65% of the child welfare workers reported that it was acceptable in some situations to search for a client on a site like Facebook when conducting a child welfare investigation or assessment and about a third had done this.

After Researching Reform called on the then President of the Family Division Sir James Munby to issue guidelines for social workers in the UK, guidance was published in September 2017 by the social care ombudsman. The guidance is a step in the right direction but remains incomplete.

Exactly one year later in 2018, online magazine Community Care published a survey asking social workers if they thought spying on families through social media platforms was legal. The outcome of the survey is not known.

UK Family Courts Are Harming Children’s and Parent’s Mental Health

22 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by Natasha in Family Law, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 49 Comments

Complaints by families that their mental health is being badly affected by the way Britain’s family courts handle child protection and divorce proceedings are growing.

A rising number of service users on social media sites are reporting heightened levels of anxiety, depression and symptoms similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Some parents are also being diagnosed by counsellors and psychiatrists with mental health conditions including PTSD, which have come about during the Family Court’s handling of their cases.

Failures by councils, lawyers and police to properly investigate abuse and organise support early on are also causing concern. A new law suit filed against a UK council makes several allegations about the local authority’s handling of a public family law case, including failings around providing the applicant parent with proper psychiatric support.

The parent, who was a victim of domestic violence, was also not made aware of their right to obtain occupation and non-molestation orders, leaving them vulnerable to further harm.

The claim says the parent’s mental health was further aggravated by poor social work assessments filled with dangerous inaccuracies, and a psychiatrist’s report which was based on too brief a session to be able to come to any meaningful conclusions about the parent’s suitability to take care of their child.

The system’s less than robust framework and highly variable professional standards across the country are particularly dangerous in light of the serious nature of child protection cases.

One vulnerable mother who saw a psychologist after her mental health deteriorated during a child protection investigation was noted to have been re-traumatised by the process.

The psychologist stated in their report that the damage could have stemmed from forced therapy sessions and prolonged trauma associated with lengthy social work investigations which took place over a period of several years.

Not all families feel they can seek external help when child protection proceedings affect their mental health. Some parents are choosing not to reach out for support when they feel overwhelmed, claiming that the culture inside the system blocks families from being pro-active and protecting their health.

Several domestic abuse survivors have told this site that when they started to feel mild symptoms of depression as a result of controlling behaviour by a partner, they became fearful that councils would use the request for support as an excuse to remove their children from them and place their child with the abusive parent.

The perceived threat of removal in these cases is leaving a significant number of vulnerable parents without the mental health support they need and crucially, allowing their symptoms to get worse over time.

One mother told this site, “I don’t dare to seek help, as SS [social services] may use my mild depression and anxiety caused by coercive control as a reason to take my child and give him to my abuser.”

Being wrongly accused of abuse and experiencing the wrongful removal of a child can also be hugely damaging to parents’ mental health. While investigations are important and the need to establish whether a child is being harmed or is in danger is not in dispute, the current processes and policies around these assessments are primitive and often amount to emotional abuse.

Parents are being routinely accused of domestic abuse without any tangible evidence, often only through hearsay and a social worker’s personal preference for a parent. One mother we spoke to who is currently undergoing a child protection investigation told us that social workers were initially unable to find a reason to remove her child but seemed determined to make a care order.

After months of acute bullying, which included forcing the mother to take her son to a pre-adoption medical examination, the social workers in her case changed tack and claimed that her oldest son who has Asperger’s was a danger to her younger child after her eldest experienced an episode.

The council then applied for an adoption order. The protracted ordeal left the vulnerable mother, who had previously managed her pre-existing mental health conditions successfully, feeling so mentally unstable that she had to start taking her anxiety medications regularly again. She told Researching Reform, “I do feel the courts and LA [Local Authority] make the parents in this process subhuman. At times, they are even abusive themselves.”

There are also serious concerns around social workers not being able to distinguish between pre-existing mental health conditions and court-process induced mental health illnesses.

That confusion is so embedded inside the system that parents now suspect social workers of using the onset of poor mental health during proceedings as a quick and cost-effective way of removing children from parents rather than offering support and assistance.

Parents are often left to deal with heightened mental illness on their own after child protection proceedings. Some parents never fully recover from the unforgiving and impersonal family court process, while some try to find ways to cope with the legacy of a legal system that has yet to modernise.

As one parent explained, “The trauma doesn’t go away, there are always triggers. But I’ll pull myself back, I always do.”

Government Holds Children’s Social Care Debate IN SECRET.

18 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by Natasha in Children, event, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 31 Comments

A government debate on children’s social care hosted by the Backbench Business Committee took place yesterday. In an unusual move, the Committee did not send out details about the public event before it was held in the House of Commons.

The debate which was sponsored by Tim Loughton MP and initially scheduled to take place in October, was quietly cancelled last year without notice after thousands of parents across the UK expressed interest in the discussion. Some families had set aside funds to travel down to the event, while others had arranged to take the day off work at personal expense to attend. Backbench Committee debates are open to the public. Families across the country reacted to the cancellation with disappointment, while some parents criticised the government for what they felt was a cowardly decision.

We asked Tim for a further update on the event in November, but did not receive a response. The children’s social care debate which took place on 17 January first came to this site’s attention this morning, after seeing a tweet by Labour MP, Emma Lewell-Buck which featured a video clip of her speaking at the event. Unlike the original discussion set to take place in October, the debate held yesterday afternoon did not feature in any of the Backbench Committee’s email updates.

The committee also failed to provide timely and detailed information about the event through its own dedicated page on the Parliament website, choosing this time round to publish only the bare minimum on a sub-page of a Research Briefings section within the site just two days before the event. The page does not offer any information on the time-slot for the debate, who is hosting it, where it will be held in the Commons or when a transcript of the discussion might be available. The only information offered is a summary report on children’s social care.

The debate was opened by Tim Loughton MP and started at around 3pm. Discussions went on for two hours, ending at 5pm. MPs who took part included Parliamentary Under Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, Emma Lewell-Buck, Alex Burghart, Karen Lee, Lyn Brown, Vicky Ford, Laura Smith, Mohammad Yasin and Luke Pollard. You can watch the discussion on Parliament TV.

The transcript of the debate is also available in Hansard.

Many thanks to Michael Roberts for sharing the link to the debate on Parliament TV.

Government Announces £45 Million In Funding To Recruit More Children’s Social Workers

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by Natasha in Children, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 5 Comments

The government announced this morning that it will be boosting the number of children’s social workers in the UK through a £45 million initiative which will aim to train up around 900 social workers by 2021.

The funding was secured by just one social work charity. Frontline, whose patrons include Labour MP Lord Adonis, and former Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit Camilla Cavendish, secured the multimillion-pound grant to recruit and train would-be children and family social workers. The grant was awarded after Frontline produced its own research suggesting that 44% of adults aged 18 – 34 were considering a change of career this year. The research also claims that a quarter of millennials (25%) would prioritise purpose over pay.

Education Secretary Damian Hinds says the recruitment drive will produce better social workers able to deliver a service that will do children justice, though it is unclear how funding alone might achieve better social work practice across the country.

The Department for Education’s press release points out that Frontline is a ‘top graduate recruiter’ which has trained over 1,000 people through its programme since 2013, but as social work practice is not improving throughout the country, this raises serious questions about the charity’s ability to deliver professional social workers. There is also no evidence offered in the press release – or the charity’s website – to show that Frontline’s training programme is better than any other across the United Kingdom.

In the press release the Education Secretary offers the following comments:

“Social workers are heroes, often unsung, of our society – working on the frontline to offer care and support to some of the most vulnerable children and families in the country.

Children’s social care is only as good as the people who deliver it, which is why we want to recruit, retain and develop the best social workers, so they can continue to offer the much-needed lifeline to those who need it most.

That’s why the Government is supporting Frontline with £45 million to continue their work in attracting and training bright graduates and career changers, who aspire for a rewarding career as a social worker.”

Poll Offers Shocking Revelation On Why Parents Record Child Protection Meetings

06 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, social work

≈ 16 Comments

After this site revealed that law firms and councils coerced parents into signing illegal documents forcing them to give up their right to record child welfare meetings, a new poll asking parents why they choose to record offers a shock revelation.

The poll, created on Facebook yesterday, asked parents who were going through the family courts whether they had recorded a communication during their case, and if they had, what the reason was for making that recording. The poll initially offered the following five responses:

The professional seemed to have an agenda
I wanted to be able to read/listen/ see it again at my own pace
The professional had made errors in past reports/ communications
The professional was breaking the law
Other – please add your comment below

Facebook allows posters to add more options to its polls. A parent added the following sixth option to our poll, which went on to receive the most engagement:

[Social workers] were lying about what was said to fit into definitions for taking children – it was deliberate.

A total of 47 parents took the poll, with 43% of those who took part choosing the sixth answer – that social workers deliberately lied and misrepresented the truth to secure care orders. A further 31% of parents selected the first option, citing the need to record as a defensive measure to protect their families from child welfare professionals with an agenda unrelated to their children’s best interests. 10% felt that they needed to record to protect against future errors in reports and 9% recorded meetings to evidence law breaking. A minority, 7% left comments about their own experiences of recording and attempts by professionals at blocking them from making recordings.

One mother wrote under the poll:

“I didn’t ask to audio record, l just did it. I did then tell the social worker, who said l could not record her in my own home without her permission… She had previously fabricated so many malicious lies in her reports, but she turned all fake nicey-nicey overnight after that, even suddenly started calling me “sweetheart” 🤢 because she knew she was being recorded. She made me ill for a whole year before that, with all her lies and bullying and arrogant threats. Recording her, even against her wishes, turned things around for me.”

Public family court judgments confirming that social workers are fabricating evidence to place children in care are on the rise, but to date there have not been any civil or criminal prosecutions for these fabrications, which are illegal in most instances.

Very big thank you to Janie Doe for suggesting the production of this poll.

EXCLUSIVE: Child Protection Professionals Intimidating Parents Into Signing Illegal Undertakings

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform, social work

≈ 16 Comments

This site has learned that law firms and councils are unlawfully coercing parents into signing informal agreements which forbid families from recording child protection meetings.

Clauses in an agreement asking a parent not to record conversations or exchanges with child welfare professionals are illegal, and are sometimes referred to in family proceedings as unlawful undertakings. Domestic undertakings set out in agreements are very rarely enforceable, and parents are not under any obligation to sign them. If you have signed an agreement prepared by a local authority or lawyer asking you to set aside your legal right to record communications in child welfare proceedings, you can withdraw your consent at any time.

This site has seen a copy of an agreement drawn up by a council which clearly states that the parent named in the document may not record any phone calls or meetings within their home or the local authority’s offices. Sources have also confirmed that lawyers and social workers are telling parents that they are legally obliged to sign these agreements.

Researching Reform has spoken with several parents who have all been asked to sign agreements containing an undertaking that they will not record child protection meetings or any communications between them and professionals involved in their cases. An experienced McKenzie Friend told this site that the practice was widespread and growing, as parents seek to record their meetings in order to highlight professional misconduct, and factual inaccuracies within reports produced after meetings.

Recording child protection meetings and communications is allowed, and while asking professionals for permission to do this is considered polite, it is not compulsory. Parents and family members involved in child welfare proceedings may record meetings and exchanges without telling professionals they are doing so.

Many thanks to the parents and lay advisers who spoke with us about this development.

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