In 2014, journalist Alison O’Reilly broke a story about a mother and children’s home in Tuam, Ireland, which had stored the remains of 796 children on its grounds.

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home ran from 1925 to 1961, and was part of a wider policy to ‘re-home’ children born to unmarried mothers, who were considered by the state to be unable to care for their children.

The story was reported around the world.

Six years later, on July 27th, another story involving more than 1,000 children who had died, this time at Sean Ross Abbey Mother and Baby Home in Roscrea, Ireland, was published.

Alison talks to the Voice of the Child about the growing number of children who passed away in these homes, and how she came to break the story about the Tuam baby deaths.

We discuss whether the mass deaths could be classified as genocide, as more information emerges about how the children died.

She also outlines what she thinks of Ireland’s care system today, why adoption and foster care policies need to change, and why she feels the voice of the child is still not at the heart of social work.

You can listen to the podcast here. 

Useful Links:

• Alison’s book about one mother’s experience of giving up her sons to the Tuam mother and baby home
• “Stay With Me” Exhibition 
• Vatican backs campaign for reburial of Tuam babies’ remains
• Sean Ross Abbey child deaths ‘even worse than Tuam’

What happens to a child when one of his or her parents goes to prison, and what is life like for that child?

With more and more parents scared that local authorities will take their children into care if they ask for help, mothers and fathers who face a custodial sentence are unlikely to reach out for support. The stigma of a parent in prison is also a powerful deterrent to reaching out.

Despite this obvious gap in support, the government still has no system in place to identify and protect these children.

In this podcast, we hear from children who have, or have had parents in prison, and the ways this has affected their mental health, including one child who was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after police routinely raided his home.

Sarah Burrows, the founder of award winning charity Children Heard and Seen, explains the often frightening and lonely experiences of these children, and why more needs to be done to support them.

You can listen to the Voice of the Child here.

Image of Sarah courtesy of the Big Issue.

Useful Links:

Children Heard and Seen Impact Report

Human Rights and the Government’s response to COVID-19: children whose mothers are in prison

BBC Woman’s Hour interview with Sarah Burrows

Changemakers: Sarah Burrows ensures prisoners’ kids are heard and seen

 

TRANSCRIPT

1 (12s):
Hi and welcome to the Voice of the Child. 310,000 children in England and Wales have a parent in prison. And before the coronavirus pandemic, 10,000 visits to prison were made every week by these children to see a parent. But information about these children is so limited that when their mother or father goes to prison, there’s no system in place to make sure they’re safe. They just fall through the cracks. Sarah burrows is the founder of award-winning charity, Children Heard and Seen, which gives a voice to children with parents in prison and aims to offset the impact parental imprisonment can have on children, which can lead to family break down poor mental health and offending.

1 (49s):
Sarah has received the government’s prestigious Points of Light award for her work. And in 2019, her charity received the Queen’s award for its services. Sarah, why did you decide to start Children Heard and Seen?

0 (1m 1s):
I started Children Heard and Seen, because I was really concerned, to find out there wasn’t any provision for children who have parents in prison. And I was working in the youth offending service in Oxfordshire as a pre-court prevention manager. So looking at children and people who were entering the criminal justice system for the first time, and I was quite surprised to see how many of those children had a parent in prison and made an assumption that there would be a support service out there for them and had a look around and realized that there wasn’t anything actually for them, that was basically community.

0 (1m 36s):
So decided to set something up because I was particularly alarmed about 65% of boys with a parent in prison going on to offend I’m thinking, well, it’s quite a stark figure and actually let’s do something about it. Since starting the charity, although obviously the offending is quite important, it’s much more about the shame, stigma and the loneliness that these children experience and the secrecy around having a parent in prison.

1 (2m 8s):
What’s life like for children from the moment one of their parents gets taken into custody through the trial process and beyond?

0 (2m 16s):
So every child, it’s really different. So if a child is actually living in a home of the parent who was arrested or happened to be staying with them, that has happened in quite a few cases, they often witnessed the arrest and that actually has been quite traumatic for children. If they aren’t in the home with a parent, they obviously still have the trauma of the parents suddenly not being around. Sometimes children are told that they’ve gone away, they’ve gone on holiday.

0 (2m 49s):
So children don’t actually know, but they have a sense there’s something wrong. And then they can actually find out in the school playground that their parent is in prison or the, they can be with the parent who is no longer with a partner and have their own feelings about the ex partner having been arrested and the child is having to navigate those feelings.

1 (3m 8s):
How else does the experience affect children? Obviously there are going to be, as you say, a variety of different kinds of experiences, but what do they see day to day as they’re going through that process with their parents?

0 (3m 20s):
I think it’s much more about the isolation and shame and loneliness that the children feel. I mean, we’re currently providing online support and as it’s the end of term we’ve being going out to different schools, seeing if children would like support and we get comments that we don’t have children like that in our school. And to say something that we haven’t got children like that actually sort of reinforces that view of why children must be struggling.

0 (3m 51s):
I’m sure that they do have children with a parent in prison and in school, you know, it’s estimated from the quest data that is 312,000 children a year do, but it’s a, it’s an attitude. And so I think children, it just reinforces that bit of coping with the loss of the parent, or they could have been the victim of the parent’s offending themselves, or their parent could have been the victim of offending. Or they could be missing the parent, this is a host of different things, but it’s that isolation and not being able to, to talk about it.

0 (4m 23s):
And we all know that it’s much better to be able to talk about things. If you have experienced traumatic things happening to you. Also one of the, one of the challenges and difficulties that children experience is if other people know about the parent’s offending, then they can suffer greatly. So one of the things that we would like as an organization not to happen is the person who has committed the offense and who who’s facing the sentence, or who has been sentenced’s address to be published because that is obviously identifying where children are living.

0 (4m 58s):
And we have had children that have been very badly beaten up at school. We have had children who’ve had faeces through their letter box and we have had children that have witnessed their other parent being assaulted all for the other parent’s offending as if in some way that, that the family is responsible for that parent, offending.

1 (5m 22s):
That’s all incredibly traumatic. In terms of alert systems or processes within either the justice system or the social care system, are there any kind of indicators for child welfare professionals when a child’s parent goes into custody?

0 (5m 39s):
There isn’t any, there isn’t any national, no national databases about who these children might be. There’s no system set up about having a parent in prison. For instance, with the school submissions entering the school, you’re asked if your child’s on the child protection register, or if you’re part of the military, but there’s nothing in terms of children whose parents are in prison. And so children, schools obviously don’t routinely ask. So they wouldn’t know. And there isn’t anything through the courts for finding out who these children might be.

0 (6m 11s):
So children slip through the net.

1 (6m 13s):
So there’s no process which actually triggers as soon as a child’s parent goes into prison?

0 (6m 17s):
No, there’s none at all. And in fact, we’re quite a small charity. And yet I think our provision is probably the largest in the country for children, with their parents in prison, based in the community. And it’s really, really small.

1 (6m 30s):
How many children are you currently supporting through the charity?

0 (6m 35s):
Currently we’re supporting about 200 children, that has increased by about 50 since lockdown because we very quickly put all our support services online. Prior to lockdown, we were offering children, one-to-one mentoring, a mentor, volunteer mentors with the child for a year to 18 months, different group work, provision and programs, and also one-to-one support with a specialist worker. So when lockdown happened we put our services very quickly online.

0 (7m 9s):
We did a second hand laptop collection with a volunteer who kindly wiped all the laptops, we got all the children connected. So we could then provide online support. Our spin off us has been that obviously we don’t need to just stay in our geographical areas and have children from different parts of the country and the parent or grandparent caring for them, accessing our support.

1 (7m 35s):
Have you ever come across any cases where a child has been left without anyone at all to care for them because there’s no alert process or system in place to identify these children?

0 (7m 44s):
We have had cases where the parent didn’t expect to have a custodial sentence. And so therefore hadn’t made provision for the child to be picked up from school.

1 (7m 55s):
And what happened to that child?

0 (7m 57s):
She found her friends at school and asked if she could keep her daughter.

1 (8m 2s):
Why are children just not being identified when a parent goes to prison? Why is there no support system in place for them on a national scale?

0 (8m 10s):
I guess that it, it doesn’t fit into a government department, children, the parents in prison. So there isn’t a particular department that would, that would be capturing this data to find out and parents will be very reluctant to disclose as well. They would be concerned that in some way that social care might get involved and remove their children. And there isn’t, there isn’t an incentive for families to disclose that they have a parent or partner in prison at school. You know, if the events I talked about, you know, of being bullied, being assaulted, why would children and their families identify unless there’s some provisional support, why would they anyway,

1 (8m 53s):
Is there a balance that could be struck to ensure that that support

0 (8m 56s):
Is provided without making families feel like they’re being targeted or threatened in any way? Yeah, definitely. I do think it’d be really good in terms of trying with school admissions and being seen as a group that actually needs support and being given support. So I think, but it has to come with identification. It has to come with the support. The Joint Committee on human rights, published a report on the 29th of June, examining the effects of COVID-19 on children and their ability to see their mothers in prison during the outbreak.

0 (9m 31s):
I think it was just focusing on mothers, this particular report, and Children Heard and Seen engaged in this report. What did you share with the Committee and what were the main findings of that report? We were asked if any children wanted to talk about the impact and the effect of having their mother in prison. And so two families gave evidence as audios. One of the families had five children and they found it two of the children, gave evidence.

0 (10m 2s):
There was six, six year olds in the eight year old. And it did take a few days to do because they found it so painful and they, they miss their mother so much, their mother was coming out on resettlement. So she was coming out five days out of every 14 days. So they were seeing her and obviously it was lockdown, they weren’t seeing her. So it was really important to get their views across and to be heard. And then the other family that we spoke to, it was a baby of one.

0 (10m 33s):
And obviously he’s pre-verbal. So the impact of not being able to have the visits. What did the children who were able to speak and express their thoughts, say to the Committee? It’s much more around the pain that they were experiencing about missing them greatly and wanting their mother around. I think after the Committee met, they then gave their recommendations. And what was really interesting in their recommendations was that one of the things was that it should be mandatory to ask all women entering prison, whether they have dependent children and what their ages are, it would be great to actually have it as mandatory to ask men and women entering whether they have dependent children and focusing on the children and seeing what support could be offered.

0 (11m 18s):
You also collected the thoughts of some of these children, which you very kindly shared with the program. So this is what the children had to say about having a parent in prison and what life is like for them in their own words:

2 (11m 29s):
I was asleep in my bed and eight police officers bust into his house at nighttime. I was absolutely terrified. I am too scared to sleep in my own bed at night. So I sleep in with my mom. I don’t like the dark anymore because I am scared of people bursting into the house and shouting. Someone came up to me in school and said that there’s a rumour running around that your dad is in prison. And I cried and I wasn’t ready for everyone to know. Everyone assumes that we all visit, but we don’t.

2 (11m 59s):
I find it really difficult because I am not allowed to see my dad. He is in prison for hurting my sister, the prison won’t let me see my dad. And this makes me really angry. I used to spend time with my dad when I got angry and now I don’t have him to talk to. I feel angry all the time and I can’t concentrate at school and I keep getting excluded. When we visit, we aren’t given enough time. It’s a really intimidating experience. It can end with no 10 minute warning when you just have to get up and leave.

2 (12m 31s):
Is it fair that we should be punished by losing a visit, even though our parents haven’t acted good by not seeing them. Before Children Heard and Seen, there was no support for us as a family about dad going to prison. Support would have been very helpful for my mum as she has to look after all of us. It wasn’t fair that my dad was moved to a prison that was really far away. I’ve only visited three times over the whole year. The rule that should be changed. If people in prison have children, they should be moved as close as possible.

2 (13m 2s):
So it’s easy for the children to have contact. If my dad was closer then I’d be able to see him more often. My house has been raided multiple times. This has really impacted me and I feel really unsafe in my own home. I have now been diagnosed with PTSD.

0 (13m 21s):
Some of these experiences are very vivid and quite frightening, but it’s wonderful that Children Heard and Seen are able to offer children support. And they’re clearly very happy to have found you. How were those clips produced? We attended a children’s voice conference at New Oxfordshire safeguarding board just before lockdown and the conference was giving children a voice. And obviously the children decided what they would like to talk about at the conference. And the, the children all put their experiences together as quotes and then other children at the conference stood up and presented the other children’s voices.

0 (13m 59s):
So we could give anonymity, but they were all real experiences that the children have had experienced. The last audio clip, featured a child talking about an experience which led to the child in that particular experience, getting PTSD. Do you think that that is perhaps a, a hidden issue within children in this context, and are there more children, do you think who are suffering from PTSD as a result of what’s happening and the lack of support available? Yes. I think going back to PTSD children have been diagnosed with it, particularly for ones that have witnessed the arrest in the home.

0 (14m 37s):
And it’s that for them is very frightening. Also children who have witnessed severe domestic violence from their parent towards their mother and resulting in arrest and needing to keep that secret. So we had one little boy whose father had knocked his mother out. So she was unconscious, and he served a prison sentence, but did not want to say to school at school, what the offense was.

0 (15m 12s):
So he was telling his friends that his father was in for murder and school were appalled that he could do this. And couldn’t actually see that the child was doing it because to actually talk about his father having done that to his mother was too painful for him.

1 (15m 30s):
Do you think that there’s a lack of awareness generally around how these children are affected by one of their parents going into prison?

0 (15m 37s):
Definitely. I think there’s so many different things that happen with the, with the children and, and what they, what they experienced. And it is that bit about what just, just being so isolated of the, of that experience of having a parent in prison, you know, for the ones that go and visit they’re being searched, the waiting, going in, do they say to people at school they’ve gone to see that parent in prison? Do they not? You know, just yeah, they’re just the general bit that families, when they visit, they’re not near, you know, there could be anywhere in the country.

0 (16m 15s):
I think at one stage in Oxfordshire when we were supporting about 150 children at that time, they were in 41 different prisons across the country. You know, people make assumptions that it’s sort of the local prison. That’s where the families go to, but obviously they’re, they’re going everywhere. There’s different categories. It depends on what’s available. So, you know, families have a long way to travel as well.

1 (16m 39s):
In one of the audio clips that we just listened to, one of the children says that she can’t see her dad or she, or he can’t see their dad and that one of the reasons for that is because he is in prison for hurting their sister. And there’s obviously a very complex bond there in terms of a little person or a child just wanting to be with their parent, despite something they’ve done, which may potentially have been traumatic for them, or put a strain on that bond. I think that highlights the complexity of family ties and why we perhaps need to be a little bit more careful about how we handle those ties during a process like this.

1 (17m 17s):
What kind of changes would you like to see to make sure that children are not unnecessarily removed or those ties are not unnecessarily severed or damaged during a process like this?

0 (17m 27s):
I think it has to be individual support for the families and looking at the complexities and what is going on in the family and it needs to be support for the family and, and looking at what the relationships are. And is it looking at it from the child’s perspective, much more than is done currently really is. Does it benefit the child to see the parent instead of does it benefit the parents? There’s a lot of about there’s a lot, you know, particularly from Lord Farmer’s review that it reduces the offending of the,sorry, it reduces the re-offending of the parents.

0 (18m 5s):
But what about from the family’s perspective? How important is it for the children to see their parents? There shouldn’t ever be pressure on the children to feel that they need to see the parent. They’re not a tool for that parent’s re offending it’s it’s what is right for that child and relationships that have ended between couples and the child is with another partner that we have. We’ve had situations where the father is in for an offense, and it was a previous domestic violent relationship.

0 (18m 39s):
And then he’s trying to use the child as a tool to, to get at the mother. Every family is different and everything needs to be looked at, but without support, how can it be looked at?

1 (18m 52s):
COVID-19 is obviously having an impact on children with a parent in prison because of limits on visitation. What’s that like for, for children at the moment, how has that process gone, and have they been able to have some kind of meaningful contact during the last three months?

0 (19m 7s):
One of the difficulties of supporting children whose parents are in, you know, many different prisons across the country is how different it is for each child. So some have phones in their cells and they can speak to the child frequently and often, and they do. Some have calls once a week. Some have had video calls though. They’re only once a month and there’s a limit on numbers. So then families larger families have had to make decision which child could be left out and which, which children can be part of it.

0 (19m 45s):
It’s been really difficult for video calls because obviously they freeze if, if, if anybody moves. So for young children, they’re impossible. So there’s not been any consistency for anybody, for any, for any of the children. And obviously children have been sharing experiences and some have been able to have much more contact, although obviously not to be able to, to have gone to the prison, but they have actually had more content and some have had very little.

1 (20m 18s):
You were just saying that the video freezes, if somebody moves on the call,

0 (20m 22s):
Why is that? I think it’s a security. So it has to be that who is registered to be on that call. And when moves, it sets an alert.

1 (20m 34s):
That must be incredibly difficult if you’re having contact with small children who are a little bit fidgety or babies who have no awareness of, or very limited awareness of body control.

0 (20m 45s):
Yeah. Really, really difficult for families for that. Yeah. Just talked about, you know, that, that really looking forward to seeing somebody and then the frustration because it freezes and the time goes, and then it stops. The hardest one has been the nig family that had to couldn’t have two of the children doing the video calls because of the number of children in the house. And it meant that they had to wait for another month. That was really hard.

1 (21m 13s):
Some of the children have also talked to you about feeling like they’re being punished, if they’ve had contact removed or restricted, because a parent has perhaps not followed the code of conduct in prison or behaved badly within prison. How do you feel about that removal of contact in that context?

0 (21m 32s):
That one I just think should, I think the children should be a priority and there should be other ways of a prisoner being punished for whatever he’s done. Is is a punishment for the child, not to be able to see the parent, if they’ve lost that privilege, there must be other ways of losing privileges to enable the child to still see the parent. It is really important for some children to see the parent to know they’re safe.

0 (22m 1s):
They watch lots of things in television, They have this view of what it might look like, and it doesn’t look like it. And they just need reassurance that they, the parent is safe and well, and to be able to go and see the child, I’m sorry to go and see the parent and to lose that as a privilege. It just seems so unfair that we’re not thinking as a society about the children at all.

1 (22m 25s):
Children Heard and Seen has already done an enormous amounts for children who have a parent in prison, but what’s next for the charity?

0 (22m 34s):
I really hope that it isn’t too long until the children, there are more children that are identified, supported across the country, that there is a government department that takes responsibility for identifying children of them to be able to access support. And for ourselves, I hope we just continue to be able to support as many families which would like us to.

There are currently over 800 children in prison in the UK, with at least half coming from the care system. While incidents of physical restraint and self harm in youth detention centres have risen significantly, black children and children from other ethnic minorities continue to be disproportionately represented within prison settings.

Inside a system which favours compliance over care, children as young as five are prescribed Ritalin, and permanently excluded from school.

Award winning charity Safe Ground talks about life in prison for children, why the new lockdown rules for youth centres amount to child abuse, and how a brave group of boys are disrupting the youth justice system to make things better.

Safe Ground’s Executive Director Charlotte Weinberg talks with the Voice of the Child about the systemic racism inside youth justice, and the paradox which allows the state to physically restrain children while banning violence in the family home.

Callie Davidson, Safe Ground’s Programmes Coordinator, discusses the charity’s work, and why she believes prison is no place for a child.

You can listen to the podcast here. 

Useful Links:

Young people in custody

Youth Justice Statistics 2018/19

Pupil exclusions

TRANSCRIPT

1 (12s):
Hi and welcome to the Voice of the Child. Nearly 22,000 children were cautioned or sentenced from 2018 to 2019. And the average custodial sentence these children receive has risen sharply from 11 to 18 months. At the same time, incidents of physical restraint and self harm at youth detention centers have also shot up with more than 6,000 restraint cases and 1,800 cases of self harm recorded last year alone. Award-winning charity Safe Ground works with children in prison, offering them support and access to education, as well as creating alternative solutions to conventional forms of punishment like detention and school exclusions.

1 (49s):
Charlotte Weinberg has been Safe Ground’s executive director since 2010. She has 30 years’ experience within youth and community work. And she’s also the chair of the Center for Crime and Justice Studies. Callie Davidson is Safe Ground’s program coordinator. She holds a BA in drama and has worked with young people doing drama and improvisation. Charlotte, the current stats that the government have released say that there are around 859 children in prison, but there’s been a staggering 60,200 arrests of children in the last year.

1 (1m 20s):
What do these figures say to you?

2 (1m 22s):
I say, I’m not very good at maths, but they say there’s something like 61,500 arrests that are leading to children that have not been sentenced or placed in the criminal justice system. So what do they get arrested for and why? Well, I’m pleased that those children are not being processed. Why are they being arrested then? Because if they’ve been arrested for things that don’t lead to a sentence, or maybe they’ve been sentenced to something in the community, I don’t know what there is for children in the community.

2 (1m 56s):
If I’m honest, I don’t know what that would look like.

1 (1m 59s):
And the figure of 859 young people in youth custody. That figure is for the year ending March, 2019. Does that concern you at all?

2 (2m 9s):
It concerns me massively. I think it is currently slightly less than that. At Safe Ground we don’t believe any children should be in prison for any reason. There must be alternative ways of looking after children who commit serious and violent and sexualized crime, because it is not an appropriate response. So to think we’ve got 859 children, young people in prison currently under COVID. Yeah, it concerns me hugely. It concerns the organization.

2 (2m 40s):
And I think it should concern anyone who hears about that statistic and more people should be hearing about it and having conversations about it. What are their children there for, or what’s happening to them? How are they getting looked after? Where do they go at the end of this sentence, what’s happened to them before their sentence? Who are they? Who are their families? What services are they receiving?

1 (3m 3s):
Callie. We know that some of these children are as young as 10 and, and the criminal age of responsibility enables children as young as 10 to be tried for various offenses. What do you think about the current criminal age of responsibility in the UK?

3 (3m 19s):
Well, I mean, I was, Charlie said we don’t need that. I’m going to say we don’t believe that any children should be in prison. So obviously I, I think to be, to be trying a 10 year old or someone as young as 10 with, as, as the age of criminal responsibility seems mad to me like, like, like you said, the children, they’re not necessarily matured enough to be able to understand the repercussions of what’s going on for them. And what’s happening as a result of possibly multiple factors that are weighing in on their lives.

3 (3m 54s):
That makes sense.

1 (3m 55s):
The latest data that we’ve also received from the government tells us that black children are disproportionately represented inside the youth justice system. And we know that from March, 2006, to March, 2019, the percentage of young people in custody who are black has more than doubled from 12.5% to 27.8%. Charlotte, why do you think that is?

2 (4m 18s):
Oh, I think it’s because structural racism underpins our entire criminal justice system, our education, housing and welfare provision. So it’s inevitable that that level of disproportionality is going to manifest in the final destination of the criminal justice system. And can I just add one thing to Callie’s answer about the age of responsibility? I agree with everything Callie said, and in my limited experience of working in the criminal justice system since about 2009, and having worked with children and families involved in the criminal justice system, since about the mid nineties, I have yet to meet staff in a secure children’s secure training center or secure children center who have a 10 year old in their establishment.

2 (5m 18s):
That’s not to say that doesn’t happen, but I think it’s rare. So the fact that that 10 remains the age of responsibility seems not only outrageously inappropriate, but totally anomalous. I’m sure there will be lots of people who can now give us lots of cases of 10 year olds that have actually been held in secure settings. I personally haven’t come across it. So I wonder what the, what the reason for holding onto that is because other countries and other states have managed to raise their rights and responsibilities.

2 (5m 53s):
They age used to be higher and it was lowered after a very specific occurrence. Why was it lowered? It was lowered because of the murder of Jamie Bulger and the children who committed that offense were 10 at the time.

1 (6m 6s):
Going back for a moment to black children within the youth justice system. What the data effectively tells us is that black children are four times more likely than white children to be arrested. How do we address systemic racism within the youth justice system?

2 (6m 22s):
Well, I think that’s a great question, Natasha. And if anyone could answer that, they’d be doing a lot of podcasts. I think in order to address systemic racism in the criminal justice system, we need to be able to address systemic racism. The criminal justice system is racist because it is born out of a wider system, a set of institutions that’s are fundamentally racist because they are born out of a set of thinking and frameworks that categorize and hold a hierarchy of people’s value and worth that is tiered and black people and black women sit at the bottom of those tiers.

2 (7m 5s):
It is therefore inevitable that the criminal justice system will be harsher more punitive against black women and then black men and brown people as we go up the hierarchy, as it is established, that is how structural racism is bound to operate. And every institution and system will inherit those fundamentally racist understandings.

1 (7m 34s):
We also saw from the data that more than 6,000 cases of physical restraint at youth detention centers were recorded last year, is this a technique that is sometimes necessary, and when carried out properly can be done humanely or does it cause longterm damage to children, and is it a procedure you feel should be banned?

2 (7m 51s):
When I hear any of these questions immediately, I think of how the people who work in these institutions might answer them. And I think about those people, many of whom I have met and, you know, I’ve met some lovely people that work in secure detention centers. I work with a lot of people that I like and admire who are trained in controlling restraint. Do I think there are ways to control them with restraint safely? I’ve been told many times by people who work in those settings that yes, and that it is often necessary and useful, and that yes, it is possible to control and restrain children safely.

2 (8m 34s):
As someone who has chosen actively to not work in those settings Partly because I couldn’t bear to do that, I struggle with the notion. Do I understand that children who are suffering extreme and complex trauma may sometimes behave in extremely difficult, often violent, unpredictable ways that can be dangerous? Totally. I totally believe and understand that. I think using control and restraint is an institutionalized response, that’s just sanctioned and protected by organizations and institutions.

2 (9m 13s):
I think when families experienced violence from their children and used violence in response that’s questionable. Families aren’t allowed to use violence against their children, no matter how they’re justifying, but the state and our institutions and our organizations are able to use control and restraint to not say violence against children who demonstrate complex behavior. I find it confusing. And if I find it confusing, I think it must be confusing for children.

1 (9m 42s):
Do you ever get any feedback from children who have had experience of physical restraint and whether or not it’s actually made the complex trauma they may already be suffering, worse?

2 (9m 52s):
I mean, in my experience, children don’t talk in those terms, what children and young people would say about restraint is it didn’t matter. He, they didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t that bad. You know, it’s been done so many times. It doesn’t even matter anymore. They know what’s coming, they wind them up so that they make them do it. You know, children who experienced complex trauma and are suffering, the experience of abuse, assault, attack and are hyper vigilant being controlled and restrained by adults, Isn’t something that gets talked about in terms of trauma.

2 (10m 27s):
It’s something that gets talked about in terms of bravado and children find ways to dismiss and minimize and look for their own experiences, particularly those that are unbearable or difficult to cope with your manager or those that they think are going to be belittled or dismissed. So it is rare to have an opportunity to sit and talk with children and young people who’ve experienced restraint in a therapeutic manner or in a way in which those children are enabled or feel safe enough or willing enough in a relationship to talk about. Actually it was petrifying.

2 (10m 58s):
I didn’t know if I was going to survive. I’ve heard about children and young people that have died by being held in these holes. I’m really scared. I don’t like being threatened by someone who’s physically larger than me, or by having two staff come in my room and hold me down. I find it really difficult to talk about. That is a rare conversation, in my limited experience.

1 (11m 23s):
In spite of these enormous challenges, some of the boys you’ve been working with inside the youth justice system have been able to disrupt the prison sector with a really innovative plan to change the way children’s detention centers look and work. Tell us more about these amazing boys and their initiative.

2 (11m 38s):
So these amazing boys were to be fair, eight children who four of them still are held in a secure children’s center, were invited to take part in a research projects with us. They were broken into groups of four. So we worked with four in the morning and four in the afternoon. They didn’t really know what was going on before they met us and staff just asked them if they would like to come and meet us and talk to us.

2 (12m 8s):
So we designed a creative storytelling based format to take the boys through a process of critical thinking, really around the design of a new secure unit, for children in the West Midlands. And we were commissioned to do this work by a senior policy advisor for the area. So we took the boys through the details of the work that policy makers were thinking of building a new secure unit.

2 (12m 38s):
And they wanted to hear from children who might represent children that would be held in a secure unit as to what that should look like and what it meant for children who are looked after by the state’s children in care to be held in a secure setting, as opposed to children that are processed by the criminal justice system. And we wanted the boys to think with us about whether either of those children should be held in a secure unit.

2 (13m 11s):
And what’s, it meant if they should be held together. So children who are in care because of welfare concerns and children who are in custody, because they’ve been sentenced by the courts. So the boys were asked to engage in quite sophisticated piece of thinking about, well, what’s the difference between these children and is it okay for children in care to be put effectively in a place that is predominantly used to keep children in custody?

2 (13m 41s):
So the boys created a character. They took him through a fictional process that they designed, and they were asked at various points in his story, what should happen to him. And some really interesting things came out of that research. The boys believed, and they were talking about a child. They were talking about a boy under, around their own age, 15, 16, a boy under 18, boys that were sentenced by the court Were bad and deserved punishment where, what they described as the welfare kid was a victim.

2 (14m 24s):
And he should be looked after because he’d probably not had a great childhood. So they in their heads were already splitting the idea of a victim and a perpetrator, and that a child could be one or the other. And that a child that is a victim is worthy of and deserves care and compassion and concern. And shouldn’t be in a secure unit, whereas a child who has committed a crime has violated the rules, been bad made decisions and deserves punishment.

2 (15m 1s):
These children were 15, 16. I think one of them was 14. So we found that really powerful. We wrote a very brief report of the process for the policymaker who had commissioned the work and on reading it, it, he was really struck by this idea that children were making themselves responsible for a situation and a set of circumstances that that meant they were in prison aged 15.

2 (15m 43s):
And as a result of reading the boys thinking decided that actually the idea for a secure, a new secure center in the West Midlands probably wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore. And he’s rethinking the whole design of that service. So with his permission, we sent the report and told the boys that they had had that kind of impact at that level. Four of the boys are no longer in the establishment. Great. Four of the boys are still there and we know that they have received a copy of the report, and we’re hoping to be able to get some feedback from them and talk to them about the report.

2 (16m 22s):
And now this this podcast. We wanted to be able to involve some of them in the podcast, but we just didn’t have the time or the resources, but we will be keeping them up to date with the fact that they’ve had such a massive impact.

1 (16m 35s):
It’s brilliant that they’ve been able to disrupt the system in that way, but it’s also heartbreaking that as you say, they’ve felt they’ve had to carry a burden, which isn’t of their own making. And we also know that a large number of children from the care system find themselves inside the youth justice system. So there is a connection there. Charlotte, did the boys ever offer you any feedback about their own experiences inside prison?

2 (16m 60s):
They did. We weren’t there to talk about that, but it was inevitable because during the course of the process and the characters that they created, the boys, made allusion to their own experience and in some of the conversations were quite free in sharing with us, the fact that they had been in multiple placements, they had been in care previous to coming into prison. And they had been in different custodial settings. I think, I think the statistic for children in custodial settings is that around 50% of them have been in care.

2 (17m 38s):
60% of children in custodial settings have been in the care of the States. Children are removed from their domestic environment for welfare reasons. And yet 50% of the children that have been removed for welfare reasons are in a custodial setting that is hard to understand, you know, when they say, could you explain it to an alien that landed from another planet?

2 (18m 10s):
I find it really difficult to make that make sense. Children can’t be looked after at home. So we place them in an environment that is designed for punishment. That’s not to suggest that some children don’t commit crimes, they do, but it is also to question, what is happening for a child that commits the crime. If the boys don’t mind you speaking on their behalf and they don’t mind you sharing this information, what did they say to you about prison and how it affected them?

2 (18m 43s):
Some of the boys in particular process talks about their holiday camp experience and the fact that they could differentiate between which were the best places to be in, which were the worst places to be. So on a superficial level, some of the boys talk freely about the fact that, you know, their current placement is really positive and really good. And it’s great that they’re there often that’s in comparison to other places they have been. It is unusual. Like I said earlier for boys and children to sit and talk about the gravity and depravity of the situation that they’re in, because children tend to try and find, particularly with people they don’t know very well Ways of describing circumstances and situations that are bearable.

2 (19m 30s):
That makes sense. It’s a protective mechanism, spending time and building relationships with children that are in circumstances and situations that are unbearable means that sometimes you do get an insight into the huge impact that just regardless of the conditions of a particular environment, the moving around and knowing that you’re not stable, not secure, not attached to a family or an environment or a group of people, it’s totally unnatural, rightly or wrongly, but in the culture of the United Kingdom It’s just not natural that you see different people every day coming in and out of what’s supposed to be your home.

2 (20m 17s):
You know, these are false environments. It’s unnatural that you grow up in a house with 20, 30, 10 other children and adults in every room all the time. These things, no matter how benign they might be at their best, how pleasant they might be, are not natural. They are unusual. And they are either at the behest of the court or of the State. So something children know they are in a system, they are a case.

2 (20m 50s):
They have a file, they have a worker and they have a process to go through that, differentiates them from their peers who don’t have that. So I think the boys often talk quite positively about their experience. Having said that in another institution where we did a piece of work, it was very clear that there was absolutely nothing positive about where they were. And they were desperate to get out what was going on for them. It was not positive in any way, shape or form. The experience was totally coloured, flavored, informed by a lack of trust and a lack of faith in the system that held them.

2 (21m 30s):
And from spending a while in that environment, I could totally understand what that was based on.

1 (21m 36s):
Callie, I’ve seen a project on your website called Man Up. What did that project involve?

3 (21m 42s):
So Man Up is a program that we have run in the past and continue to run. It’s an ongoing program. It is a three day group work program that we work with young men and adult men to consider the sort of pressures and expectations that come along with the identity of being a man. Obviously some of these can kind of exacerbate behaviors, which can be harmful and negative.

3 (22m 13s):
So the participants are supported to look at the stereotypes that are associated with being a man. It’s not, it’s not therapy, but it’s therapeutic based work where we work. We work through with the participants to kind of understand the concept of masculinity and identity.

1 (22m 37s):
It’s more succinct. When you were doing that project or when you were doing that project with, with young men and boys specifically, what do they say to you most about their sense of identity in today’s world?

2 (22m 49s):
Boys don’t often say my sense of identity in today’s world is X. The work that we do that I think Callie really brilliantly described, creates an environment and opportunity for boys and men because we run it with adults as well to think about the cultural and social norms they are expected to fulfill. So they might talk about for them, the importance of being able to provide for their families or having a car.

2 (23m 20s):
I’m trying to think about, you know, the boys, particularly the younger boys and young adults that we’ve worked with, money, material possessions, and kind of provision are really important boys. We’ll talk about that quite a lot. And they will also talk about the importance of their having a very clearly defined heterosexual relationship with a particular type of woman who will fulfill their own needs and wants and desires.

2 (23m 55s):
So they could express their understandings and their masculinity through the work in terms of what they think is important. And at the beginning of the program, which is only three days, often, that will be expressed in terms of what’s important externally. So how they’re going to be judged by other people, the money, the cars, the job, the woman, the kids, the trainers, the whatever it might be.

2 (24m 25s):
And through the course of the work often, what starts to happen is that boys will start to think and talk about their integrity, their maturity, their emotional availability, their understanding of their role in relationships. It’s not always a fairy tale and it’s far from a happy ending. Very often boys will start the program saying, you know, if my woman goes out, my girl goes out without me knowing, Oh, we had one, I think it was a group was talking about if their girlfriend smoked, she would have to stop smoking.

2 (24m 60s):
And I mean, on the one hand, that’s not an unreasonable request. Who wants to be going out with a smoker? But when it was flipped and the boys were asked, well fine, are you going to give up smoking as well? That was totally out of the question. And a lot of those attitudes didn’t necessarily change during the course of the three days, we were able to have conversations very explicitly with the boys about, so what is that what’s going on there that you’re allowed to change her, but you don’t have to change?

2 (25m 31s):
And what do you think that is about? And the program deals with issues of power and control and authority and anger and relationships with yourself and other people. So boys get into quite a kind of high level conversation with themselves and each other about where they are, where they position themselves in terms of those power dynamics. And I think one of the most beautiful and moving and very difficult, I’m getting upset when I think about it, manifestations of that was when we ran the program in a, in a custodial setting with a group of young men all under, the oldest was 17.

2 (26m 12s):
Many of whom were facing sentences that were longer than their life so far. And we had spent a couple of days probably doing, some of this really difficult and challenging work and the boys found it really difficult to focus. They’re hypervigilant. They’re looking out of the windows constantly. They’re aware of who’s around, they’re waiting for bells to go. They’re finding it difficult to be sitting down in a space they’re and on their feet and kind of literally bouncing around, but they were engaging in and doing the work.

2 (26m 44s):
And I think it was probably during the second day, a lot of really difficult stuff had been talked about and had to come up in the group. And at one point, one of the boys were sat on a chair and about five of them were standing around him and his hair. So whilst talking about hugely violent and difficult experiences, they were showing each other care and attention and affection and looking after each other and physical intimacy in one of the only ways that they were able to do it, which was by grooming each other.

2 (27m 25s):
And it was really, really, really poignant. And like I say, it still moves me now

0 (27m 30s):
<inaudible>

2 (27m 31s):
Because those boys, which have never asked for a cuddle or been able to just hug each other, but they stood around each other and spent time on that boy’s head. And maybe that’s just my interpretation of it. And I’m being sentimental. And I’m an old woman who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but it was a very powerful image that has stayed with me because to me it had enormous meaning.

1 (27m 55s):
It sounds incredibly powerful and also very beautiful. In terms of the prison system, as it is at the moment, especially with the current restrictions that have been imposed because of coronavirus, the landscape within the youth justice system has changed extraordinarily. And a lot of people inside that sector are concerned about the, the current restrictions in place. Can you talk to us a little bit about what those restrictions are and how they’ve affected children in prison?

2 (28m 22s):
So for everyone in a custodial setting, since March, COVID has required an institutional response that has been on the one hand extreme in that complete lockdown has been undertaken. Whilst that’s understandable, clearly it has enormous implications. So 23 and a half hours in a cell is not unusual across the custodial estate at the moment.

2 (28m 58s):
So for many establishments, many adult establishments that is changing, that hasn’t been necessarily the same in every establishment. And I’m sure there will be people who listen to this, who can argue and point out different instances. And I totally accept that. I don’t hold myself up as an expert, but across this, they full locked down has been the institutional response to preventing what could have been a huge outbreak of COVID in obviously conditions in which proximity is difficult to manage for children that has been the same.

2 (29m 37s):
And there’s a statutory instrument that has been passed, which has amended the and regulations for secure training centers that now means children can be held in their cells for up to 22 and a half hours a day. Now, while that’s been passed, as we’re coming to the end of lockdown, I have to admit I’m not actually because when adult prisons are starting to lift and ease their lockdown regulations, it seems that the secure training sentences are tightening and harshening theirs, I’m not clear as to why that is, but there has been quite an outcry about the fact that children are facing reduced access to education, reduced access to visits, reduce time outside there.

2 (30m 18s):
So even to be with each other in the dining hall or community areas. And so the impact for children, as you can imagine is effectively being held in solitary confinement, children don’t share cells. So on your own, someone at the beginning of quarantine said, if people really believe that they understand what it’s like being in prison, because the country’s gone into lockdown, they should actually, if they want to get a sense of what it is, like lock themselves in their bathroom for 23 hours, that’s the only way you can get anywhere close that.

2 (30m 58s):
Of course it won’t be anywhere close because you’re in your house and you can unlock it. But I think his point was that’s, that’s a closer analogy than just having your front door locked. So for children to be effectively in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, for months at a time with no physical visits with their families with often patchy letter delivery, with limited access to phone calls and no virtual visits then, I think for anyone to really seriously close their eyes and try and imagine what that is like would be difficult.

1 (31m 34s):
We also know that under the amendments, those restrictions have been extended to March, 2022, which is very different to other settings where regulations will be eased by this coming September. Callie, why do you think that that extension is so wide within the youth justice system?

2 (31m 55s):
I personally can’t think of a reason why it needs to be other than the fact that it gets that it would get the government time to establish slow easing. Charlie might do want to jump in. Yeah, I think Callie’s point is reasonable. Maybe there are plans to figure out how to safely bring children back out of lockdown. There’s another question, however, which has to do with, I would suggest that it’s contentious, you know, and like I say, I have no personalized issue with individual staff who work in establishments.

2 (32m 35s):
There were a lot of well meaning caring, individuals who work in, however, in any establishment, there are part rules and regimes that are designed to run on who can, and can’t mingle with whom, we’re talking about children and young people being kept apart from each other because of the dangers that the institution understands through their mixing. So because of affiliations because of previous antagonisms,because of unspent conflict, children and young people have to be what is commonly referred to as kept apart.

2 (33m 10s):
So the regime will run on the basis that X children are going across the courtyard at this time. So why children must not be anywhere near or available during that period, not to design an entire regime on who can and can’t be in which geographical location, when is extremely complicated. It means that everyone’s movement is even more restricted than it is by virtue of the fact that you’re in custody. So we already know there are, I think you said 870 or children, young people who present.

2 (33m 44s):
Natasha, of those 870 young people, Many are increasingly, although youth justice figures have gone down the numbers of young black men in prison have gone up, they’re serving longer sentences. The youth, estate has long been known amongst custodian settings, as one of the more difficult areas to work in. Lots of staff prefer working with adults because it’s calmer. Young people tend to cause more alarms have more fights. So there’s a certain attitude and understanding around what it means to work with young people, which I’m not agreeing when I’m saying that exists.

2 (34m 22s):
So there’s already a kind of environment in which young people are housed on the basis that they’re a bit troubled, and they tend to kickoff and tend to be naughty and difficult, staff know that it’s going to be difficult. And now they’re increasingly serving long sentences. They happen to be black. Maybe they’ve been sentenced for violent offenses or they’re part of organized crime. They’ve been involved in drugs. You know, all the kind of curiosities and concerns that staff might have get to be played out.

2 (34m 52s):
Often young people and children that are in custodial settings may have come from care, 50% of them do, may or may not have already had experience of significant and severe disappointment from adults. And certainly from services and organizations like schools, where there may have been excluded. It is a hotbed for conflict and resentment, distrust, and a dislike of authority and inappropriate use of authority.

2 (35m 25s):
So to keep children locked up for 22 and half hours a day, if you wanted to be kind of looking at this from the worst case scenario, you could say also offers institutions and opportunities to kind of figure out how they’re going to cope with the potential for extremely challenging environments. Now that young people have been in solitary confinement for four months, how are they going to cope with kids coming out of that? Not feeling safe, knowing that everyone’s scared and the virus hasn’t gone away knowing that they haven’t seen their loved ones.

2 (36m 0s):
It might not. And not knowing when they are knowing that they haven’t had the education. And if they were on the path to get back into education, that’s been scuppered now, when are they going to get to do their exams? They already getting behind. They’re going to be even more behind. The environment that that must be festering and fostering. Again, it’s difficult to think about. So I wonder for whose benefit those restrictions had been made, because it’s difficult to understand how they’re for the benefit of the young people.

1 (36m 28s):
One of the things this conversation is really highlighting and bringing home is that children in prison are connected to all sorts of other issues. And there are elements that are so interconnected with one another, they really can’t be ignored. From children in care finding themselves inside the youth justice system to school exclusions and how that affects children, who then may find themselves inside the youth justice system. And I know that school exclusions is a particular area that you focus on. We’ve seen from the latest government report that there have been 7,900 occasions of children being permanently excluded in 2017 to 2018.

1 (37m 6s):
And that’s the equivalent of about 42 children a day being expelled. We also know that there’s been a rise in knife crime amongst the youth demographic. How do all those things interconnect Callie and, and what are your feelings about those issues?

3 (37m 22s):
Well, so I think in all programs, we have a, we have a policy that we don’t exclude anyone. So if, if a participant wants to leave off their back and we’ve had a discussion about that and that there are reasons for that, that’s one, and we don’t ask anyone to leave. And that’s because we want to foster an environment where we can show the participants in the programs that we do have the faith in their abilities that they, they do hold.

3 (37m 53s):
And often participants in our programs will have been excluded or have experience of being excluded from other programs or other educational settings. And I think to exclude children from programs or from schools kind of gives out the message that if they exhibit behavior that is difficult to manage, that we won’t bother at all. And that I don’t think that’s the way forward. I think, I think, I think children can only aspire to the levels that the adults in their lives set for them.

3 (38m 24s):
And if we’re kind of setting a level of, well, if you kind of bypass this level of behavior, then we won’t bother anymore. Why, why would anyone want to persevere? So I can kind of understand how these children feel if, if they’re to be excluded based, based on their behavior. And then I, I mean, Charlie will be able to say more on this, but I think in terms of knife crime and exclusion, when, when children are excluded, that means that they, they have, they don’t, they, you know, school is how many hours a day, nine hours a day or something that they’ve got a lot more time to fail.

3 (39m 1s):
And it’s obviously far less structured and constructive time than it would be if they were in an educational setting. So I think children tend to be excluded because of that behavior. And really, the children who are excluded because of that behavior are probably the children who need support the most. And like you say, everything’s, you know, children in the criminal justice system everything’s really interwoven. So yeah. They might be in care. Well, they might be, they might come from a sort of difficult family background or setting or dealing with with really tricky context and they’re the children that schools abandon when, when, when they’re excluded really, they’re the ones who need the support the most.

3 (39m 43s):
Charlie, you might want to add to that. Yeah. I mean, all of the above, I think the Timpson review, I think it came out last year, found that African Caribbean heritage, gypsy,

2 (39m 60s):
Roma traveler children were three to four times more likely to be excluded from schools, three to four times more likely to be excluded and bear in mind that these are children who already experience racism on a day to day basis, a racist environment, but essentially bullying not only from their peers, but also from teachers and who have experienced stereotyping daily, if not instantaneously and who have the experience of a curriculum that totally either excludes them or again, stereotypes their entire history.

2 (40m 43s):
Those children are three to four times more likely to then be excluded from a system that already excludes them, think about what we’re doing and what we’re saying. By the way, I mean the state. So exclusion is a brilliant way of individualizing,when in fact, it is a structural problem. It locates the problem in a child, and it says to them, you are naughty.

2 (41m 13s):
You’re so naughty that the rest of us who are not naughty, cannot cope with you. You are so naughty that you are destructing an environment in which we wish to learn. This environment is not pleasurable with you in it. So we will take you out of it. And then we can get back to having a nice time. You are the problem off you go, and you sort yourself out, sit on the naughty step, go to the headmaster’s office, go into CBT or take Ritalin or whatever it is that we intended to do. You go with your problem and you sort yourself out, you find an individual way to deal with your individual problem and leave the rest of us alone, because it’s too much for us we’re all fine.

2 (41m 53s):
I’ve known five year old boys who have been put on Ritalin. You go and sort yourself out and we’ll crack on without you. Thanks very much, ciao, goodbye. To individualize what are actually structural issues, whether they’re violence or abuse or ignorance, the fact that an entire educational curriculum or entire nation state doesn’t cover colonial history or slavery in any meaningful way, that’s exclusion. Those children were already excluded to then throw them out of the door, literally and tell them to go and find a way to make themselves better.

2 (42m 31s):
What is that? If a family did that to a child, the child would be removed from them, but we have institutions doing that to children, who have a duty of care.

4 (42m 45s):
Okay,

2 (42m 46s):
They’re saying these children are too difficult for them to cope with and then they’re being put on Ritalin. So actually the problem is what ADHD or something. Why are adults unable to cope with children and why are children being punished for that?

1 (43m 3s):
Well, Safe Ground is trying to address a lot of those issues with the work that it does. And it is amazing work. What future child focused projects do you have in the works?

2 (43m 12s):
Thanks Natasha. So, I mean, we really love kids at Safe Ground. The staff team are hugely creative. And I think the creative work that we do feeds our energy. So we often make a bit of a rod for ourselves because every day about three people come in and pitch an idea. So it’s tricky to keep track and then put into practice everything that we want to. However, at the moment we have an idea that I don’t want to say too much about because it’s very early days, but an idea for some development of what to do with exactly the issues we’ve been talking around around how the curriculum, which is actually is exclusive and how formal education fails to teach children, either facts about history in a kind of 360 degree manner.

2 (44m 3s):
To give children a full picture of the world, the globe, and what happened, where, when, why, who was involved, but also critical thinking skills. It doesn’t, the facts are less important. You can read facts that you totally disagree with. As long as you understand that you disagree with them. And as long as you can make a cogent argument as to why, why you agree, why you disagree? What do you think about that? So I think for us development of the work is going to be around understanding children and young people and continuing to help adults understand what in the system what’s happening.

2 (44m 43s):
Who’s doing what to whom, why, how to, what effect, where am I in that? And what does it mean? Callie, I think that’s a reasonable summary I gave, yeah. Do you want to add anything? Is there anything else I’ve missed out that you can think of?

3 (44m 59s):
I mean, in terms of young people, I’d say that that’s the kind of key thing we’ve been thinking about, you know, help with that. We’re also obviously looking at how we can adapt to working during the lockdown in prisons, during COVID-19 that’s kind of with the adult state, although I imagine not exclusively. Yeah. Yeah. And also, we’re working with, we’re kind of one step removed or two steps removed working with, with children of parents in prison.

2 (45m 33s):
Natasha, can I go backwards for one minute? Of course you can. I’m really sorry to do this, but I think I’ve got really exercised. And I think it’s also important in terms of school exclusion, just to think about the fact that 1 in 10 young black men has been stopped and searched with no result in London. So we’re throwing children out of school and expelling and excluding young people in a context where they’ve been stopped and searched at massive disproportionate rates to their white peers, very often for no good reason other than the police being suspicious.

2 (46m 16s):
And I think what Callie was saying about school exclusions, you know, the propensity for children that are out of school to be available and present to manipulation abuse, grooming by older peers and adults, that’s what a duty of care is for that’s what safeguarding is about. That’s why institutions have a duty of care to children to protect them and keep them safe from grooming, manipulation, abuse by older peers and adults.

2 (46m 50s):
So the fact that we on the one hand exclude children from our institutions and then punish them for having been exploited again, thinking about the alien I’m trying to explain the system to, I’m getting a little bit lost, to be honest, it’s very, very difficult to make it make sense.

For our eighteenth podcast, the Voice of the Child speaks with Dr Thomas Waterfield about a new nationwide study he is leading with Public Health England, looking at how children’s immune systems respond to COVID-19.

Dr Waterfield is a paediatric emergency medicine physician and clinical lecturer at the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

The project, which has recruited over 1,000 children, or Covid Warriors, from around the UK to take part in the study, aims to unlock clues about how children’s bodies process the virus and crucially, how long any detected immunity from the disease in children lasts.

Dr Waterfield explains how children were selected for the study, and offers some surprising new findings about how children are managing infection, his concerns around domestic abuse and neglect during lockdown and what he would like his next study to focus on in the quest to understand how COVID-19 affects kids.

You can listen to the podcast here. 

Many thanks to Dr Waterfield for taking part in the series.

Transcript

1 (12s):
Hi and welcome to the Voice of the Child. More than a quadrillion quadrillion viruses exist on earth today. And while they can be rather picky about who and what they infect, the novel coronavirus has caught the world’s attention for being highly infectious and deadly. As the race to find out more about the virus and how it has affected adults around the world begins, children have been largely ignored in the research despite alarming findings, which confirm they’re are also susceptible to infection, and in some cases, at risk of developing life-threatening symptoms.

1 (42s):
Dr. Thomas Waterfield, a paediatric emergency medicine, physician and clinical lecturer at the school of medicine, dentistry and biomedical sciences at Queens university in Belfast is leading a team which together with Public Health England has just begun new and pioneering research to try to find out how COVID-19 is affecting children across the UK. The study aims to measure antibodies in children, to see if the researchers can find any clues about ways in which the virus affects young people and how their bodies are responding to the infection. Dr.

1 (1m 12s):
Waterfield, this is really exciting new research, which will hopefully help us understand COVID-19 and children much better. How did you get involved in this project? And what’s the research going to explore?

2 (1m 24s):
So we spent our time between research, teaching and clinical practice and moved from research to full time clinical practice, which was fine. And then essentially within a week we got phone calls from some colleagues across the country saying, you know, there was interest in looking at COVID and looking at transmission and I said I would be willing to help with the study so this happened very quickly, within a week.

2 (1m 55s):
So I went back to half clinical. So I work in and A&E at a children’s hospital in Belfast and went back to half research as well, and it was strange in terms of research, as we normally spend ages planning. It, it can feel really frustrating going through all the different iterations of the plan and then getting everyone together and building a team. Whereas this, it was, it was just crazy in terms of, from kind of concept to ethical approval was a, was 10 days, which is just unbelievable.

2 (2m 26s):
So the ethics committees, which were set up for COVID studies only, so people were, we had an ethics review at, I think it was eight o’clock at night and it was, it was just sorted and then reached out to contacts from other projects in different parts of the country. And again, the response was incredible. Just, yes, we’ll do it. We can do it, let’s get it done. And then even in terms of funding, you know, what would take months, took a few weeks. So it’s been, it’s been interesting in terms of what you can do when everyone’s, you know, behind one goal to get to get these projects done.

2 (3m 5s):
And the other side of it is it’s, it’s very tiring because you have to be reactive to things in real time and changing and, and amending and improving rather than getting a little piece ready, but it’s been good fun and it’s been hard work. I don’t think I’ll ever get to experience this kind of research again, ever

1 (3m 28s):
In that very short period of time. You’ve also managed to gather over 1,000 children to take part in this study, which I read on your press release on the university website. How did you choose those children?

2 (3m 40s):
So that’s, this was tough. So we wanted to, like part of it was looking at transmission, so we would need to have a reasonable number of people that were exposed to the, to the the virus and although it feels like we’ve had an awful lot of it, it’s still not wide spread within the population. The prevalence is still quite low. So we have the healthcare workers that we thought, they’d be more exposed. We would be able to collect data more quickly. And then the other side of that was to be quite, quite pragmatic.

2 (4m 12s):
So again, we’re asking these children to have a blood test, it’s quite unpleasant. It’s not something they would choose to do normally. And we would usually spend time with them with things like play specialists. You know, we would get them ready for the clinic. And we would also spend time with the parents going through the consent, but with social distance we couldn’t bring them up repeatedly to have face to face chats about the study. We couldn’t use the play specialists.

2 (4m 41s):
So by using healthcare workers, they understood what was involved in the blood tests, the procedures, they could communicate that with the children, which just made some of the day to day less boring and made the design of the study easier. So we went, we went with healthcare workers and even with that, we were concerned that people wouldn’t sign up, that they wouldn’t want to take part. And actually we were overwhelmed with interest. So even in Belfast, we had to run an additional day cause we had people that were disappointed that they couldn’t take spots.

2 (5m 16s):
The same thing happened in Glasgow. The same thing happened in London, the same thing’s currently happening in, you know, Manchester, where there were more willing volunteers. And there are actually spaces in the trial.

1 (5m 27s):
You’re calling the children who are taking part in the trial COVID warriors. Have you had any feedback from the kids that you’ve been interacting with for the study?

2 (5m 35s):
So we’ve got a colleague of mine who is writing up a participant study in kind of public involvement and overwhelmingly they, they were getting messages that they wanted to contribute. That was a big part of that. So it was that they wanted to contribute, wanted to do something. They wanted to do something to help. So that, was quite nice, especially the older children. You see, you know, the young people, if you want to call them that, it’s kind of quite an altruistic thing, they want to come and do something positive.

2 (6m 4s):
I think the other thing here is that also, you know, their parents are working in health care and things are settling a bit now, but there was a lot of anxiety early on, you know, even my, you know, children, you know, asked me, well, you’re going to the hospital now, you know, are you going to be okay and then you come back and you know, say to the kids you can’t touch me, I’m going to, I’m going to change all my clothes and wash everything, and then I’ll come and see you. And so I think them being children of health care workers as well, they probably feel a little bit more the risks and maybe a little bit more aware of what was going on and wanted to do that better in terms of the actual blood tests.

2 (6m 42s):
We’ve only used very experienced paediatric staff. So we’re very clear that early on, they have to be able to have experience in phlebotomy and children. And what we found is actually outside the hospital setting, when they’re sick as well healthy children coming in, we’ve made channels. It’s gone really well and we’ve, but we’ve only had in Belfast kind of one or two children where we couldn’t, you know, for whatever reason get a blood sample. And most of them went very well, and I wouldn’t say they enjoyed it, enjoyment’s not the right word, but I think they were pleased that they took part and we’ve got good numbers coming back this weekend for the second clinic.

1 (7m 23s):
You’re also working within A&E in paediatric units. And I’m assuming from what you’ve just told me that you are coming into contact with children who have been infected with the virus. What’s that been like for you and for the children in the wards?

2 (7m 35s):
It’s been very strange. There was a lot of theory on a lot of uncertainty a week with the hospital being completely redesigned. So with outpatients and routine operations canceled, our department took a much bigger footprint. So we spread ourselves across patients, and we split them into areas where you have the children that are thought to be at higher risk of infection, and then the children who are thought to be at a lower risk and try and manage that.

2 (8m 7s):
And we split our staff across the two sites and as time has gone on, and we’re seeing kind of the children on children and how they have been affected certainly compared to adults. And I think people will start to relax. And actually then what started to happen is the other side of it is that our anxiety was growing in terms of wanting outpatient unites to re-open. We want schools to reopen. We’re getting worried about our children that are not getting to get outpatient clinics or coming in late with, with health problems because they’ve been too scared to attend.

2 (8m 39s):
So it’s been a strange journey, from, the redesigning of the service, starting to accept the children. And then moving on to actually the biggest worry for children as we can’t go back to school, we can’t get that routine going on. Meaning there’s lots of safeguarding worries. We’re not seeing children who may be suffering abuse. There’s less opportunities to catch that and intervene. We’re also seeing lots of problems with anxiety, mental health, you know,.

2 (9m 12s):
So actually the biggest risk for the children is that we’re not able to provide their normal services.

1 (9m 20s):
The current data that we have, as you said, suggests that children are at less risk of being infected with the virus. Do you think that is a result of their physiology or is that perhaps something to do with the context in which they’ve been provided perhaps with an additional layer of shielding within the context of their community and their way of life and their routine?

2 (9m 40s):
In terms of COVID-19 and children there are underlying reasons which relate to the illness itself. They definitely have a milder illness. There’s no, there’s no doubt about that. Young children essentially have almost no illness. And the reason for that I really still don’t know but people have ideas, but we don’t really know why. So even if they get the infection, they’re not seeing the symptoms. And certainly even the early data from us, is that about a third of children have no symptoms despite having developed antibodies, which means they must have been exposed at some point in terms of being exposed to the virus.

2 (10m 19s):
I think children overall have been shielded. I think that’s the right way to describe them. Not maybe intentionally. So some of it’s intentional, but the children, you know, how shops are saying, please don’t bring your children to the shop. And you know, so we’re not taking children to shops. We’re not, they’re not going inside anyone else’s houses and only just recently starting to be able to go outside a little bit more and enjoy some fresh air, but most children have been at home, essentially not interacting. So then the only people that are going out and mixing are parents, so parents are bringing it home and passing infection on, but children have had almost no kind of role in the spread of the infection so far.

1 (10m 58s):
Your study is going to be looking at children within the ages of two to 16. Is there a reason why a very small children and babies and teenagers between the ages of 17 to 18 have been excluded from the study.

3 (11m 11s):
It’s more to do with an, the amount of blood that you need to take. Once you’re over two, the phlebotomy becomes easier as a procedure, it’s less traumatic. So it’s a bit of a trade off for saying that we can’t use, or it’s very difficult for us to use play specialists, limited opportunities to conduct with face to face, you know, discussions everything’s over the telephone. We just come in and have a blood test and leave. So from a pragmatic point of view, we’d be taking a significant amount of you know, blood from very, very young children and then also without having some of those other measures in place.

3 (11m 44s):
So it was kind of a pragmatic thing to set it up to 16, it’s just a debate about where paediatrics stops and starts and finishes. And then some of the things around consent. So most of that kind of falls on the governance, legal side of things, rather than from a medical point of view. That makes sense. A lot of trials that look at prevalence will often include some children, but they rarely can include the younger age group. So yeah, two to 16,

2 (12m 15s):
It’s kind of pragmatic. I mean, in an ideal world, you’d just have every single, you’d just include everyone, children, adults, and you know, the entire family unit.

1 (12m 24s):
Your study is going to look at antibodies within children and whether or not those give you any indication as to how the virus has impacted children. And this is probably a very silly question, but can children actually fight off a virus with preexisting antibodies from a previous unrelated infection to COVID-19 or do you have to have had exposure to a very specific infection to then develop antibodies for that infection?

2 (12m 51s):
So there are other Coronaviruses. We have our own kind of Northern Irish Coronavirus, that is unique to us here. So we wouldn’t expect that to be the best way. It doesn’t generate much immediate data. If you, if you have one of the other clone of viruses, you make up antibodies for a few months and there is almost very little immune response. So I don’t think they would offer you any kind of protection against the current virus. And what we don’t know is actually, if, if you’re exposed to the virus, which I think is kind of your question, and if you’re asymptomatic, do you develop antibodies or do you need to be sick to show an amount of antibodies?

2 (13m 30s):
Well, certainly from the early data we’re getting, it looks like you can be completely asymptomatic and have antibodies. So we know about a third of the children have had antibody response with no history of any illness. So you don’t necessarily need to be sick to develop antibodies.

3 (13m 45s):
The kind of million pound question is, you know, do those antibodies confirm immunity, and we don’t know. So, the antibody tests at the minute are directed mostly at the nuclear

2 (13m 56s):
Capsid, which is useful in telling if you’ve been exposed, but not necessarily indicative of immunity. There are some tests being developed and finalized looking at the spike proteins, which certainly kind of previous SARS viruses, the spike protein antibodies were the ones that were associated with immunity. So it would be reasonable. It would be a reasonable assumption, guess, that if you have antibodies that you would expect some form of immunity, but we don’t know how long it lasts and how good it is, you know, and how that would affect you of your disease progression.

2 (14m 33s):
So again, if you’re an animal, you know, you’ve been that you’ve got some antibodies, does that mean that you won’t get it in future? And when if got it would it be milder and also how long does those antibodies last three, four months, like other coronaviruses or do they last a bit longer?

1 (14m 49s):
I was just wondering whether you could fight off a new virus with existing antibodies or preexisting antibodies inside your system, which you develop from a completely unrelated. Yeah,

2 (15m 2s):
Yeah, no, I don’t think, I don’t think there’s any evidence that that’s, that’s possible with the, with this, sort of virus. I know things like BCG vaccination and certain things that might modulate your immune response to make you able to maybe have a less severe illness are being looked into, but I’m not aware of anything that would suggest if you had a previous form of coronavirus or other viral illness, that you have antibodies that are protective in some way,

1 (15m 28s):
With all of the children taking part in the study have they all been asymptomatic, if they have been exposed to the virus and potentially infected with it?

2 (15m 35s):
So two thirds of the children so far have had symptoms. So will we ask about illness, episodes and history, and then kind of marry that up with some of the results and children’s symptoms and none, none of them were admitted to hospital. None of them required, you know, anything beyond kind of self care at home. And the main symptoms were temperature, lethargy, some mild, gastrointestinal upset. So not seeing people coming in with children rarely come in with a cough, even if they’re symptomatic, but from what we’ve seen from early data that was coming through not in this study, which is interesting.

1 (16m 13s):
So going to the science for a moment, how are you going to be using the scientific tools available to you, to isolate the antibodies and extract the information that you need from them?

2 (16m 23s):
So the antibody tests that we are using are actually commercially available so we’re working in partnership with Public Health England, and also Public Health in Northern Ireland, but a public health thing that you go on that is actually publishing all of the data in terms of the test accuracy. So we’re using at the moment, the Rush and Abbott tests which we see in the media have both been confirmed they’re both immunoglobulin G so that’s an antibody response that presents kind of more of a longterm memory.

2 (16m 57s):
So your body usually makes a temporary response, which involves M immunoglobulins initially, and then the G ones are associated with longer term immediate memory, the downside for those that it takes about two weeks to develop them. So if you’re infected within two weeks of being tested, you may actually go on and have antibodies, but they’re not detectable yet. So if you have either the Abbott or the Rush and test positive for the immunoglobulin G they’re very specific, which means you, you will have had that of infection and was certainly announced as a genuine, the downside of these tests is a small number.

2 (17m 38s):
So kind of one or two in 10, potentially test negative. And, and actually are just in the process of developing antibodies that aren’t detectable yet. And we do see that with some of the results coming through that are borderline and you suspect how that has to look for it and properly, because it’s just coming through in real time, but those children may have had symptoms for the last two weeks, which is why their response hasn’t, maybe isn’t meeting the special for detection, but, but there’s evidence that there’s probably would be another week or two, which is why we’re following them up a repeated.

2 (18m 10s):
We’re seeing them more than once. So a lot of other studies only bring the children in for one point prevalence. Whereas by doing this, we can see as antibodies develop, and also how do we assist for.

1 (18m 23s):
And you’ve chosen two points to, to revisit the, well one point revisitation and one initial consultation with kids, why not three or four?

2 (18m 33s):
So we’ve moved on at the baseline to do a first appointment, two months and six months we may do more, so it’s partly about funding. So at the moment, as I kind of alluded to with the restructuring of services and goodwill, there’s a lot of interesting activity around this, but as normal research resumes, as services resume, we would have to look for significant ongoing funding. So I, there may well be follow-up studies from this. So I would like to, for example, all the children that test positive and then follow them up for another two years would be what would be my ideal with repeated appointments to see how long the antibody response persists for, and also do they develop any COVID-19 during the interval period.

2 (19m 19s):
So all of these things, unfortunately it sometimes come down to governance, you know, ethics and, and money

1 (19m 29s):
Beyond detection of antibodies within children what else are you hoping to discover from the research?

2 (19m 37s):
So certainly some more information around transmission it’s, if you can understand the transmission and how likely someone is to spread it within the close contacts, it can help and predict things at schools. So for example, if the data that we’ve collected and you’ve already alluded to the kind of a lockdown that the children have been in, we can be pretty sure that if a parent’s symptoms was first, they have a swab test positive, which we’re recording all of this data. And then their children develop antibodies that, that infection has passed from the parent t the child, not the other way, which is an opportunity just because we conducted this during the kind of lockdowns.

2 (20m 14s):
And then we can start to record things like the attack rate. So we could, and we’ve got a paper that we’re just preparing, which is, which is going to report that we’ve submitted that for publication to The Lancet infectious diseases, which is reporting that attack rate. So by knowing that data and that attack rate data, we can, we can help with planning, measures things like opening to schools.

1 (20m 37s):
Are you also going to be looking at things like immunity?

2 (20m 40s):
In terms of whether they develop immunity and whether that persists more? Yeah, so that’s, so us, what we’re doing is we’re obviously doing the,

3 (20m 49s):
The immunoglobulin to the nuclear capsid for when we start doing the spike protein antibodies. And those are the positive, which we think will be system with immunity. You can then monitor those children, which we’re doing to see if they develop COVID-19 despite having these antibodies, which if it had a spike protein antibody and they don’t develop COVID-19, you know, during a prolonged period. So within six months, you can be fairly confident that that antibodies offered them some sort of immunity, but that’s why you need to follow them up. And it may be that we need to, we’ll continue to follow them up beyond the six months, depending on what the landscape is with the research funding and things going forward.

1 (21m 26s):
There’s been a new study, that’s come out and it’s suggesting that the virus could be a blood vessel virus, that it inflames blood vessels, and that children have been able to stave off the virus largely because they tend to have healthier blood vessels than we do as adults. Do you have any thoughts on that new study?

2 (21m 43s):
In terms of the paper in particular, so certainly there’s something to do with the ACE2 receptors in terms of how the virus affects individuals. And what’s interesting in children is that younger children probably don’t or do not express ACE2 receptors in the same way in the, within the respiratory epithelium. So one of the theories, which I, I think has got something in is that the younger children don’t express ACE2 to as much, which means they’re less likely to have, suddenly have serious disease.

2 (22m 16s):
And also do you remember how we talked about, how very few children are having a cough, and coming in with respiratory symptoms. It’s quite rare even amongst the symptomatic children. Yes. That’s probably to do with ACE2 to expression within the respiratory tract. So I think we’re not seeing the respiratory symptoms because they don’t express ACE2 to the same extent within the respiratory tract. A similar argument may exist for not expressing the receptors for the virus to actually infect the cells that are not going to get some severe disease.

2 (22m 47s):
So it’s probably multifactorial in terms of young children, who are like the Olympic athletes, incredibly fit, and the blood vessels are healthy and they can tolerate far more stress than physically than adults can. We see that when we’re training our doctors about, you have to be very careful, the child may look relatively well, but be sick. I also think there’s something around those ACE@ receptors, which keep coming up in different studies in terms of being a mechanism by which the virus is infecting and affecting cells.

2 (23m 18s):
So in that paper, it was looking at ACE2 and vascular and endothelial cells, and its affects. But I think it’s also probably has an impact in terms of the respiratory side, as well.

1 (23m 29s):
As you’ve been taking care of children within COVID wards, has anything jumped out at you?

2 (23m 34s):
Yes. That we don’t have any, so that the children just aren’t coming in, they’re not sick. And we are seeing some of the children with this post post COVID inflammatory Kawasaki’s type illness,

3 (23m 47s):
But we’re just not seeing severe acute illness and, and children, it’s just not, it’s, it’s remarkable how little effect the illness has on children. And that’s, again, the kind of bit from before, we were very worried, very fearful about what was coming and now actually the biggest harm to children is that they’re being kept at home. And, and, and the harm is coming through the greatest harm to children is the education they’re missing, the interaction with their health visitors, the interaction with the social services, and their ability to attend kind of routine paediatric hospital appointments.

3 (24m 28s):
That’s by far the biggest harm to children, the most.

1 (24m 31s):
We’re definitely seeing some concerning reports about children suffering mental health problems and distress from being locked away as they are. And as you say, there are concerning reports about rises and domestic violence, but going back for a moment to, to the virus itself, you mentioned that you had seen children who had developed Kawasaki disease, like symptoms, what’s that been like on the ward and how have children coped with that kind of disease?

3 (25m 2s):
Children are very resilient. They, I don’t

2 (25m 5s):
I think for them, in a strange way, they don’t, it’s no different to them than if they have Kawasaki. Kawasaki’s as a horrible illness to have, you know, in terms of it’s usually a miserable, prolonged admission, and then uncertainty about complications afterwards. So I think whether that Kawasaki’s illness was related to a post was triggered from COVID or triggered from something else that outcome for the children they face is very similar, I don’t think their actual patient journey changes all that much from that.

2 (25m 37s):
So it’s a horrible illness either away, whether it’s COVID related or, or they just have it through some other route.

1 (25m 50s):
Once this project is finished, what would you like to study next in relation to children and COVID-19?

2 (25m 56s):
Schools. So the schools. So I, I think this is a good template and a good model for how you conduct this study on a larger scale within schools. I think we need to be doing that, I think that we need to be going into schools and we need to quickly work out what the role of children is in the transmission of COVID-19 within schools. Because if we can show that perhaps it’s the ACE2 receptors, perhaps it’s some other factor, but if children are not sick, that’s useful because we can reassure parents to say, you know, you can send your children to school and they are going to be okay.

2 (26m 30s):
And then also we need to look to say what their role is. So what’s the attack rate from children to adults. And we don’t know that that’s unknown, so, you know, how safe are the teachers teaching in that class? Can they go and teach without, without fear there’s there’s, we’ve got to be careful as well, in terms of there is a lack of evidence that the children have much of a role in the transmission of the virus, for the lack of evidence isn’t evidence of a lack of effect. And what I mean by that is you kind of hit the nail on the head for me early on, where children have been shielded, essentially, they are not going to the shops and not going to go to schools and not mobilizing.

2 (27m 7s):
It can almost be seen as their own population, which is where this data is useful in terms of, I don’t think children have seen as much coronavirus as adults. I think early infections were probably centered around major transport centers and where adults traveling between areas. And so until we actually see them, the infection spreading between children we won’t really know what their role is. We all say the children don’t have a role. Actually, we just don’t have any evidence that they have a role, but we haven’t really, they haven’t returned to normal activities yet.

2 (27m 39s):
So until they’re back at school, we won’t really know for certain what’s happened.

For our seventeenth podcast, the Voice of the Child speaks with actor and youth ambassador Chris Wild about his experience of the care system as a child.

Chris, who has written a book about his experience, entitled “Damaged”, shares new details about the book, why he champions public figures like footballer Marcus Rashford, and his next project with BBC Newsnight which looks at how children inside Britain’s care system have coped during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Chris also discusses the phenomenon of “social abuse” inside the care system, and why children in care are often exposed to this kind of sanctioned abuse within the sector.

You can listen to the podcast here. 

Chris’s book is available on Amazon for £2.99 (Kindle) and £6.55 (paperback).

Many thanks to Chris for taking part in our Voice of the Child series.

A transcript for this podcast is added below. It can also be accessed on the PodScribe platform.

1 (12s):
Hi and welcome to the voice of the child. We often hear about children in the news, whether it’s a story telling us about migrant children being kept in cages at the US-Mexico border or a viral campaign to ensure children living in extreme poverty can have access to school meals vouchers during the holidays. But we very rarely get to hear how children themselves feel about events that have affected them directly. This is particularly true for children who have grown up inside the UK’s care system, like my guest, Chris Wild, who has written a book about his life and the lives of his friends inside Britain’s care homes.

1 (46s):
And the stories are heartbreaking. Chris, it’s lovely to have you on the program, your book damage describes your childhood in painful detail, how you ended up entering the care system, and what happened to you once you were there. What was the process of writing that book like for you?

2 (1m 3s):
Yeah, it was to be honest with you. When I first started writing it, I, I, I, it was written from a subconscious point of view. I didn’t know what I was writing. I didn’t know how I was going to write it, but as I started to put pen to paper, things started to come back to me, memories from a child, emotional memories, as you know, things, which I, I thought I’d forgotten about. So all these things started to come back to me surface, and then I started to put the pieces together.

2 (1m 35s):
And that’s how the book developed to be honest with you. I didn’t know what it was going to be at first. I didn’t know why I was writing the book. I didn’t know. It was a time in my life where there was a void. I had some complications at home. I didn’t want to go to see a therapist. I’ve done all that as a young person and it didn’t work for me. So I started to write. And as soon as I started to write and the book started to develop things, just start to evolve and everything started to make sense. Things I’d blocked out for many years.

2 (2m 5s):
I had kind of ignored that part of my life, I’d kind of shut it off completely. I just didn’t want to go there anymore. And it was like a psychological effect to me, it felt like a dream. It felt like it was a reality that didn’t exist. And even when I started to write, I had this kind of doubt in my mind, that while I was writing it was just a dream. But then as we start to investigate and go back over it, it hurt me, but it was real. And that’s, yeah, that’s how the book started.

1 (2m 34s):
There are a lot of very traumatic things that happen to you and to people that you know in the care system growing up. Do you feel that that blocking out was a defense mechanism for you in order to try to cope with what had happened?

2 (2m 48s):
Yeah. I mean, even now, you know, reading and, and meeting, you know, children’s psychologist and, and having, you know, a group of people around me who you use that, you know, and study that professionally for a living. Yeah. It’s a defense mechanism as such. I mean, you know, the brain and trauma works in so many strange and mysterious ways. I think for me it was, it was a defense mechanism, but also it was, it was something I also consciously blocked out.

2 (3m 23s):
So people took consciously block it out. And just to elaborate on that, it’s, it’s like, I, you know, I, I think I chose not to be that person. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. I didn’t want that part of my life to have happened. It was, you know, like I said, it was, it was, it was just some kind of, for me, it was just like a dream, a dream of consciousness and just didn’t want to know about it. And, you know, for the, for the last 20 years of my life, he was, it was something, again, I just didn’t want to have any connection to it whatsoever.

2 (3m 56s):
The past was the past for me. And that’s how I used to approach it. But then things happen in life. You grow up, I guess, and you start to come to terms with things and that’s when you start to, to unlock and take away that wall and realize, Oh yeah, you have a problem here. You, you are, you have been blocking this out for a reason. And that makes sense. And then all the answers start to surface. And that’s for me, the psychological process about that develops.

1 (4m 22s):
So your father passed away when you were just 11 and you find yourself in care in just one year, but how did you actually enter the care system? What was that process for you?

2 (4m 34s):
So that happened kind of really quickly when, when my dad died, it was, it was so sudden, and I didn’t really have any grieving process. I kind of rebelled. It was, it was so quick, but my mom moved on quick as well. She met somebody. She was only very young herself, but I gravitated towards other kids like me, or kind of fragmented young people at the time that there weren’t a lot of those young people, although their were, we just, obviously we didn’t know about them.

2 (5m 6s):
And I fragmented too. You know, I, I became fragmented myself and I gravitated towards these people. And I just started to trying to get attention. I guess that’s what you would call it. Breaking windows, shoplifting, just doing anything to get attention. I just wanted attention. I wanted to hurt my mom. If I’m honest with you. I, I don’t think I mentioned that in any part of the book, but that, that was the process I wanted to hurt my mom. I wanted to say, look, I’m so hurt here and you don’t see this, but I want to embarrass you. I want to hurt you.

2 (5m 37s):
And it escalated so much out of control, but obviously social services couldn’t ignore it anymore. I was in, I was in court three times a week. It was getting to that stage where there was conversations in the courtroom with solicitors saying, you know, I think the next stage for you was going to be a security unit because that’s, that’s where it was heading. So a children’s home was the first point of call and was the first option, you know, to see if that would work, to see if that gave myself, my mom, my family, my peers, some respite.

2 (6m 10s):
And that’s how it happened. It happened really quick within that space. But for me, it was just trivial, trivial things, breaking windows shoplifting, but that’s how it escalated. And that’s how I became known to local local authorities. Yeah. And I think I remember being in court and my mom just said, I can’t take him anymore. He can’t come back to the house.

2 (6m 41s):
And then the local magistrate at the time just said, well, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we could send him to a care home and see if that gives you respite. And that’s just how it happened. It was so quick, again, looking back. It was like a dream, you know, you just don’t think that part of my life is real, but it’s as real as real can be, I guess.

1 (7m 5s):
So, as you mentioned, you don’t say in the book that you were angry with your mother, but what you do do is detail the very difficult relationship that she subsequently found herself in with her new partner, who was your brother’s foster brother, your sorry, your father’s foster brother. And, and that, by all accounts, from what you say in the book was a very domestically abusive relationship and a relationship, which you were impacted by as well. And one of the things that I felt as I was reading the book and reading this particular excerpt from the book, was that a lot of the things that galvanized your stay within the care system or you entering the care system was this very volatile relationship, which ended up dominating your mother and making her unavailable to you, which in turn perhaps might have caused your anger.

1 (7m 53s):
Is that something that you perceive yourself from your own experience?

3 (7m 57s):
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, you know, it was the hatred I had for my mother. It was visceral at that time, you know,

2 (8m 6s):
What, what I witnessed to be honest,

3 (8m 9s):
What I could never understand and something that I still can’t comprehend as, as an adult, as a father and a husband. And although me, my mom got on very well, it’s just how my mom could allow that to happen, how she could, she could get involved with such a man for me, such an evil man who was completely different to my dad who was kind and gentle, and to put us through that and let him dominate her in a way that it had, you know, a, a long lasting effect on, on my childhood.

3 (8m 39s):
It, it took my childhood away. You know, I had the hatred I had for my mother was, it was, it was fueled by, I guess, love as well. I, you know, I loved her so much but I wanted to hate her because I blamed, I wanted blame her for my dad dying. I wanted, you know, I wanted her to be responsible for it. And that’s just how I kind of vented that frustration at the time.

1 (9m 4s):
You’re also very forgiving in the book. And you, you mitigate your mother’s actions by explaining that she was probably very vulnerable when she made that particular choice, the choice to enter into that relationship. And that perhaps that was why she found herself in a domestically abusive relationship. What do you think about that relationship, looking back now in terms of how it affected you?

3 (9m 28s):
Yeah. I mean, my biggest fear, my biggest fear has always been that I was becoming him. I wasn’t becoming my father. I wasn’t becoming a good person. I was becoming a paranoid jealous man. So that, that, that relationship with my mom and this man had in particular had a, you know, a massive effect on me. You know, he was violent. I had to, you know, I had to witness things, you know, I’d gone from having a father who was kind, we’d play football together.

3 (9m 58s):
He’d be loving. It’d be very, you know, he was, he was, he was an old school man where he would buy flowers for my mom every Friday and take her on dates every Friday or Saturday. I think that transition into somebody who just would hit her, would beat her, and now obviously looking back at that point in my life, you know, I, it’s difficult to explain and to articulate because it’s, so it’s such an, you know, an emotional memory for me but I don’t, you know, I don’t blame my mom anymore for that.

3 (10m 29s):
It wasn’t her fault. She was gaslighted. She was groomed as well. She was, she was, she was, she was kind of forced into that relationship. I don’t think she wanted it. She was, she was broken at the time. But seeing that and witnessing all those, you know, domestically violent scenes, what I did as a child, of course, it had an effect on me. It’s something which is always at the forefront of my mind. I’d never want to be that person. And it’s, you know, for many years of my life, when I first met my wife, I was always scared I was going to become that person.

1 (11m 1s):
So much of a child’s life is emotions-based. And in your book, you explain that you felt a lot of different emotions at various different stages of your childhood and your experience in care. And you’ve obviously just explained a range of emotions that you felt prior to entering care within your family unit. What emotions do you associate most with your time in care?

3 (11m 23s):
But you know, back then when I went into a care home, I wasn’t sad that I went into the care home. I was happy. It was, it was, it was kind of a memory for me, an emotion that was euphoric because I got away from something so violent, something so, so abusive and evil that going into a care home for me was my escapism. I wasn’t witnessing my mom being beaten more. I wasn’t witnessing, you know, her crying and screaming late at night. I wasn’t being intoxicated.

3 (11m 57s):
So going into that environment at first, for me, that was a, it was a happy, it was at first a happy memory. That’s how I recall the early stages of that process. It was, it was happy. It was, it was exciting. It was like, you know, all the other boys who I knew from the streets were all there. It was, you know, we had, there was nobody to tell us anything different. Nobody tell us what to do. We could do whatever we wanted to do. So that was the first initial feelings,and memory were sort of, you know, those relating to escapism.

1 (12m 31s):
And then as time went on, how did you feel about the care system? What emotions did it incite in you?

3 (12m 37s):
Yeah, it was a bit of a roller coaster. Cause at first, like, you know, everybody was really kind of generous and, you know, nice. And then you, you, you’ve got that flexibility to do what you want, but that soon changed. And you know, those, those emotions of, you know, those happy memories and those emotions soon kind of turned into fear, fear on different levels, fear of uncertainty, fear of the unpredictable. That’s how we changed. And it changed dramatically, as I said, in the book.

3 (13m 8s):
But my first encounter with that was when I was making toast and I didn’t butter my toast properly. And I, I back chatted to the, to the, the man who was running the house at the time, the master of the house. And he smacked me around a year. And that for me was, Oh, this, this is not a happy place. This is not fun anymore. There’s something serious here. And I could sense that kind of straight away. And that’s how you know, that kind of, it just changed the feelings of, of my experience straight away that day.

3 (13m 41s):
And from that day forth, then the rest of the time and in care, was filled with unpredictable fear. You just didn’t know what to expect day to day and the smell too, you know, for me, it always smelled like formaldehyde, like you were walking in the morgue because that’s how the atmosphere was. And it, it did have an effect on, you know, your, your emotions, and everybody in that place knew what was happening, everybody in that place was sad. Everybody in that place was scared.

3 (14m 13s):
And when I talk about fear, it wasn’t, you know, fear, fear, doesn’t show itself with people being erratic. It shows itself in silence. And that’s a different kind of fear, and I knew there was something sinister happening and that’s basically how it ended up. And that’s how it carried on.

1 (14m 38s):
In the book. You obviously give your friends names and people that you come across, who are your peers, but there are various characters who are, are not given names, but they are given a nicknames like The Boss, for example, who was the head of the care home at the time and The Bear who was his right hand woman helping with the care home. Was there a conscious choice for you to give these individuals names?

3 (15m 1s):
When we sat down with the publishers and their legal team, and we were talking about this, because legally I could, I could have mentioned their names, there was no problem naming them as they’d been convicted of their crimes. So it’s not like I would have been liable for saying things, which weren’t true. It was, I just didn’t want them in my book, it was a conscious choice. I didn’t want to give him a title. I wanted to call it Mr. Boss, and The Bear. I didn’t want him in the book. I didn’t want their names in the book for that reason. I just didn’t want to give them any kind of time or space in my life as they weren’t worthy of their names.

3 (15m 40s):
We mentioned that that was the whole conscious reason behind giving them that, that, you know, Mr. B and, and, and The Bear cause that’s how, when you’re a kid as well, you know, you, you, you relate people to certain things in your life, don’t you? And I always said Mr. B like Mr. Boss, the boss, man, Mr. Big. That’s how he came across. So that’s, you know, the nickname, we all gave him to be honest, when we, when we were young.

1 (16m 3s):
As a reader, it definitely felt as if they were given those names because they were inciting a certain type of emotion. And you, you mentioned feeling fear. The idea of a boss is a very dominant concept as, as is a bear, which is both towering, overbearing, and also quite frightening. And when you’re reading the book, you do get a sense that these individuals were not just frightening, but they were dangerous as well. And you mentioned in your book that there were girls as young as eight, that were being raped by carers inside the care home. And they were learning to stop feeling in order to survive, which is hugely detrimental to development.

1 (16m 37s):
Do you think the system as a whole invites children to stop feeling, and should professionals be looking at making changes through lenses like these?

2 (16m 46s):
Yeah. Once you go into the care setting, you know, people become imperturbable their, their, their, their feelings just disappear. They evaporate. A lot of it’s a defense mechanism, as you’ve said before, for that reason, you know, it’s, I guess it’s all to do with the atmosphere as well. They’re not happy places. The thing about the children’s home, they call them homes and then they’re not homes or their homes. You know, everybody refers well, depending on what kind of home you came from. But my or my, my, my initial home was a good place.

2 (17m 16s):
It was a happy place. So, you know, going into the care setting, it, it subconsciously and automatically demoralizes you, and it takes away any kind of hope and happiness you have in your body. And that’s how, even today it’s still demoralizing. The atmosphere is dull. It’s dark, it’s depressing. And you know, there is nothing joyous about a care home. There’s nothing homely about a care home. That’s one of the problems we have today. Yeah.

1 (17m 45s):
As well as describing your own experience of care, you also describe the experiences of several people in the care home as well, several young girls and boys, and there are particular stories which are really concerning. One of them is Susanna’s story. Tell us a little bit about Susanna and what happened to her.

2 (18m 4s):
Yeah, I mean, Susanna she’s when, when, when I was writing about her, you know, her story, she’s always been with me in my, in my heart and my soul from day one, her, you know, she, she just was born into an evil world. She was born into a world where there was never, ever going to be any chances or opportunities for her. She was born into a world without love. She was born into a world, without any compassion or care, even meeting her, you know, I gravitated towards her because although she was born into this dark void, she still, she had something special about her.

2 (18m 42s):
It was quite special. And she was, she was a very nice girl. She was very caring, loving, which she never had the opportunity to show people, you know, who she really was. Her fate was always going to be negative, I guess, because of, of the way she she’d been brought into this world, it’s difficult to talk about because, you know, I still feel very, very passionate about who she was and what happened to her. And I always feel now as an adult, maybe I could have saved her, I guess.

2 (19m 13s):
I don’t know, difficult.

1 (19m 15s):
The other troubling aspects too, to her story also involve references that you make in your book to drug tests and medical experiments that she underwent after attacking a key worker who had routinely raped her for a considerable period of time. She was then sent into a secure unit and she was accused of being crazy. This particular theme is concerning because we’ve seen other survivors of the care system talk about these kinds of experiments. For example, within homes like Kendall house.

1 (19m 46s):
Do you think that this was a particularly common phenomenon within care homes during that period? And we’re talking, I think the nineties at this point.

3 (19m 56s):
Yeah. I mean, even though after Damage came out, I had, I was inundated with messages from young girls, like Suzanne who, who had their own stories, very similar ones. I’d never known anything about, especially in Halifax, everywhere. They’d been, you know, they’d been drugged up, they’d woken up in different different parts of the country. Some, you know, a lot of girls went to bed and Halifax and woke up in Wales cause they’d been drugged up. And then obviously when they spoke against the system, they were automatically deemed as liars. And you know, and it was that dichotomy.

3 (20m 27s):
It was, it was, it was very common then because they could get away with it. You know, it’s different generations, but it’s still, you know, you, you wouldn’t get away with it now, but it must still be going on, but back then the, the system was so polluted that anything was possible. And that was common practice. That’s how it was, you know, and that kind of, when I started getting the messages from people, I was, I just couldn’t believe it. I just thought I’ve started something here.

3 (20m 59s):
I’ve got a huge responsibility to follow this up because you know, I had people contacting me who were in their fifties and had never, ever spoken about their experience, which is very similar to Susanna and one woman told me, I’m married with three kids, my husband doesn’t know about it, but I’m telling you now, because this has to stop. It happened to me. But then I know it’s happened to hundreds of my friends and that, you know, that’s how it was then it was, it was evil on a different level.

1 (21m 25s):
And is that what inspired you to campaign in this area?

3 (21m 30s):
What inspired me to campaign is once I didn’t, like I said, I didn’t know what was going to happen with the book. It didn’t know where it was going to go. To be honest, when I started writing it, it was for me, it wasn’t for anyone else. It was to kind of come to terms with the past, be a better husband, be a better father. I didn’t want to sit with a therapist and go through all them questions again, I’m just going to write, but the writing was therapeutic for me and it, the book developed and as the book developed, the stories developed and as the story developed so did my research and I found as I said at the beginning, all this for me was like a dream, but then it became a nightmare because I found out most of it was real.

3 (22m 7s):
That’s what inspired me to write it and you know, to do the work I do today is because I went back into the care sector as a professional. Now, when I went back into the care sector, I was shocked to see, not much hand changed. And that for me was when I said, right, this is going to happen. I’m writing this book, I’m putting my book out there, whatever happens, happens, but I will, I will voice my opinions. I will be vocal about this. And it’s something which will be a part of my life until the day I exit the world, I guess.

1 (22m 39s):
So you experienced the care system in the nineties and we’re now 2020. In your book, you explain that life on the streets in the nineties felt much safer than the care homes the government had created to protect children like you. Do you feel that that’s still the case for a lot of children in care in 2020, who are looking for a space where they can belong, whether they are protected, where they can feel safe?

2 (23m 3s):
Well, no, because today they’re not protected at all. Because I think even in the nineties, I say, you know, I felt safe on the streets because I feel that that was my survival. That was the things I knew. The care homes weren’t safe, even care homes today. They’re not a safe place because you know, it’s, it’s got to that stage where it’s just sort of dysfunctional on a different level, but you’ve you, unless you’ve seen it on all the different levels, you can’t really understand it or comprehend how this can happen.

2 (23m 37s):
You know, young people now, they are just abandoned. They’re forgotten. You know that’s an expansive question though. You know, people ask me all the time, why is the care system so messed up now? And there’s not a definitive answer for that. It’s just, the system is broken completely. Young people in the care sector are not valued. They’re not valued like kids who are living at home with parents who are going to school, you know, local authorities have a responsibility to, to be the corporate parent and look after the young people, but they don’t have a responsibility which is personal to them.

2 (24m 13s):
So, you know, for young people, you talk about careful places. You can, you know, if you, if you’re a young person, 14, 15 years old, going to a care home, you might be placed with a young person, you know, a sex offender who’s dangerous. So these places, the paradox of that, which I talk about in a book is that, you know, a care home is supposed to keep you safe yet you’re surrounded by danger. And that is the danger. It’s a corporate danger. It’s a dysfunctional danger, which is, is, you know, is being set up to make people fail. I guess.

1 (24m 43s):
Your book does mention a whole host of dangers from what children experience within the care homes, to the language that’s used, to the accommodation that they’re in, to the way they’re treated. One of the things that you also do is you talk a little bit about another girl who was in the care home with you called Claire. And although you never come out and say it, there is this definite feeling in the book whilst you’re reading it, that she was being abused by the chief care home worker. Is that something that did happen or is that just something that, that might have been a, my interpretation of the narrative in the book?

2 (25m 16s):
No, it did happen. I mean, he, he abused most of the young girls in there. If there was 10 young girls in there, he abused nine of them. And that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s how it was. That’s you know, and everybody who’s come forward now. And everybody who was in the care home, there’s been over 300 cases. And because of the book as well, they’ve relaunched investigations, it was called operation Scream back in the day. So they’ve relaunched that and approved the investigation now, because there were people who worked in the home whose names have popped up as well.

2 (25m 50s):
And people have come forward to say that they were abused, too.

1 (25m 53s):
Do you think that that kind of abuse is still going on today within care homes?

2 (25m 58s):
Not it’s, it’s a different kind of abuse. I mean, it does still happen. Don’t get me wrong, more so in the private sector, but not local authority care homes. The abuse, what happens today is called social abuse. It’s negligence. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s abuse where it’s emotional abuse, where, you know, staff members are not allowed to engage with young people. Staff members don’t really care about the young people. It’s just a job for them. Most of them are minimum wage. It’s, it’s not, it’s not, you know, it’s not a career per se, which people want to go that extra mile to do anything extra for these young people.

2 (26m 33s):
So that’s a different kind of abuse that put some people in a different emotional state of mind. It causes so many mental health problems, but as you know, making that comparison for when I was back in the care sector in the nineties, you know, there were no DBS checks. There were no social media, the whole place was rigged. You don’t get that as much nowadays, but again, you know, danger presents itself in different fashions. It’s invisible, it’s online. You know, it’s hard to make that comparison.

2 (27m 3s):
Would I say this care system is safer today? Yes. In many ways, but it’s still not, you know, doing what it’s supposed to do. We’re still not looking after young people. A lot of people are failing. And a lot of people, you know, it is, again, it’s not a home. I keep reiterating this. It’s not a home, is it for many people?

1 (27m 25s):
You’re doing an enormous amount of work as a youth ambassador to raise awareness around child welfare and child protection. And you’re very active on Twitter. And, and I’ve seen you tweet a few things about the recent development with Marcus Rashford, who was campaigning for free school meals and trying to get the government to perform a U-turn, which it eventually did on that, initially saying, no, we won’t be extending the free school meals scheme to children during the summer holidays. What’s your take on that particular campaign and the issues at the heart of, of that phenomenon?

2 (27m 57s):
I think it’s a revolution. I think ir is absolutely amazing, that this, this footballer has taken that stance to do it because you know, so many of us have been fighting for this and, and voicing our opinions for years. And everybody’s just been ignoring and not doing anything about it, but all of a sudden, you know, he’s making his stance and they’re doing something about it. It’s for me, I can’t, I get, I get vexed and frustrated thinking about, that we even have to have this debate. We even have to, it takes somebody like, you know, the footballer Marcus Rashford to, to have to do, you know, use his profile, his platform to get things in motion, you know, what, why, why are we even questioning or debating whether or not to feed children during the Summer holidays for people suffering from disadvantages, it should just be, you know, at the forefront, it should be a priority for our government.

2 (28m 46s):
And I hope that this human continues to help these people suffering from disadvantages, you know, in every way possible. For me, I was. So I was so elated and so excited when, when he’s, when I watched the news of the day and I saw, I fought finally, somebody, somebody, we can look up to, somebody who’s got a voice more powerful than all of ours put together. Somebody who can actually make the government u-turn. And when they finally did, it was amazing for me. I just thought, finally, this is the start of something big to come.

2 (29m 18s):
He’s not going to stop there. And I, and I hope he doesn’t. Yeah. Yeah.

1 (29m 22s):
We also saw a knock on effect on social media, within the child protection sector. There was a lot of response, a lot of engagement with that campaign and people saying, what about children in care? What about the current legislative framework, which has been reduced, eased within children’s care homes so that the various protections are no longer afforded to them during the pandemic. We still don’t know why that’s happened. The government still hasn’t given us a definitive answer on that, but I know that it’s something that you are working on. So tell us a little bit about Statutory Instrument 445 and why you’re involved in that particular campaign.

2 (29m 55s):
Well, I’m involved in it because when, once the lockdown started, I was inundated with people calling me saying, Oh, I’m trying to get through to my social worker. They’re not answering the phones. I haven’t been paid. I’m still, I don’t know what to do. So then when article 39, I saw them starting to get actively involved in this and say, you know, but in lockdown, young people in the care sector need that extra care because a, B and C. And I’ll just get into that a little bit, because what I was doing when I was volunteering, going around to care homes, making sure young people of 16 plus in particular who were living in, in some independent care, Oh, food and stuff.

2 (30m 32s):
I just went, hang on a minute. What’s going on here? They they’ve just been left, abandoned, they can’t get through. So I started to make a few phone calls to local authorities. I was getting through to automated answering machines, you know, then cause I’m in the trenches with these young people. I see it then, you know, day and night, what the inevitable outcome is when, when social services is, you know, they’re, they’re cut off from young people when they stop going to see them, which most of them, again, you know, this is what you have to understand in this country though.

2 (31m 4s):
Trying to simplify, Things like County line gangs. They’re not, it’s not like you’re watching Dickens. Like they’re people, you know, walking around, who are educated. We’re talking about a complex organization here. They watch the news every day. Some of them might even be involved in political parties. I don’t know, but there is a very complex organization. And as soon as they see loopholes in our system, they take full advantage of them, like in lockdown. You’re not reading this in the news, You’re not seeing this in the media everyday, but hundreds and hundreds of kids are going missing.

2 (31m 39s):
Hundreds of kids are committing suicide, hundreds of kids are starving because they’ve just been left. They’ve just been abandoned. And that comes because social workers should be there every couple of days or even every day, making contact with young people on Zoom. So what this does is you’re taking away that support system without even consulting professionals or people who like myself who work in this environment and making this decision based on what, and that’s what’s annoying and which is getting everybody into a state or, you know, a frustration and that is why we need to speak to these young people, to see, see the state they’re in.

2 (32m 20s):
They’re scared. They don’t know what their fate is. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They need you now more than ever, but if they’re not there, then other organizations, criminal organizations are stepping up and filling their shoes. And that’s, that’s, what’s going to going to happen. The inevitability of 2020 is that more people will go missing, more people will commit suicide. More young people will be involved in County lines and more young people will be exploited into sexual criminal organizations too.

1 (32m 48s):
What other projects are you working on at the moment to try to raise awareness?

2 (32m 52s):
Well, I’m involved with article 39 as well on the sidelines as such, but you know, I, I’ve set up on my own as well. So I’ve got a company called Phoenix Care and we’re giving advice to government officials I worked with, Anne Longfield, I liaise a lot with her and just campaigning. You know, where, you know, as an, as a, as a solo person, just going out there helping charities and I’m doing all I can. And again, you know, my, my tool is social media because that’s the only place where you can actually get messages to, you know, people in power, bureaucrats, politicians, you know, and that’s where we are at the moment.

2 (33m 30s):
I just want this lockdown to end. As soon as it ends, I want, you know, charity groups and other organizations to start having a package prepped for the aftermath, because we’re going to see an increase in mental health with young people. So many younger people will go missing. We’ve got to find these young people, get them back into a safe place. Support systems needs to be set up ASAP.

1 (33m 55s):
Children have become a focal point within the news. At the moment, we’re seeing a lot of stories about children, whether it’s in the context of care or whether it’s the context of trafficking. And we know that a lot of news outlets are producing programs, TV programs about these issues. Are you working on anything like that at the moment?

2 (34m 14s):
Yes. I, you know, I, I was actively involved with BBC Newsnight when they did their investigations into care, home kids and semi independent care homes. So I’m, I have been speaking to BBC Newsnight again, and we’re hoping to do something on this in the next few weeks, just to look at young kids in the care sector and see what they’re been going through from the lockdown. And COVID-19, and just looking at some of the, you know, the parallels of what and the ramifications of what that what’s installed for them, once the lockdown is over and what they expect.

2 (34m 51s):
I don’t see social services, local authorities going back to normal ever again. I don’t think we’re going to see social workers going around to properties anymore. I think those days are really gone, well for the next four months. So that’s going to put a lot of young people in precarious situations, and that’s kind of my focus at the moment. That’s what I’ll be talking about with the BBC Newsnight.

1 (35m 13s):
If you had a wishlist that you would present to the government to direct them, to make changes within the system, what would be in your wishlist?

2 (35m 21s):
My main priority, my, my wishlist would be to first of all, regulate semi independent care homes so that initially they would stop rogue businessmen setting up these houses, which most of them are just dilapidated, and local authorities putting these young in these houses where there’s no support. So even at 16, you know, think about it this way. 16 year olds who’ve got no family, no friends. They’re put in these houses abandoned, left, and these houses, again, they’re not regulated by Ofsted so that doesn’t give them any legal protection, as a 16 year old, who’s living at home with their mom and dad and gone to college, who get, get all that protection.

2 (35m 59s):
So that is a big thing for me, regulating semi independent care homes. Secondly, I would like to see more young people, 16 plus from these care settings, be offered university places. Cause a lot of them have the talent and the ability to, you know, to go far in life and just don’t get that opportunity. And then thirdly, my, you know, I want to see every care home kid be treated as equals and that’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of prevalent at the moment. And all the campaigns. And we start with the Me Too campaign, and then we’ve got the black lives matter.

2 (36m 30s):
And I always think, you know, one thing we’ve, which should also be included in these campaigns, is children’s lives matter too. Especially kids from care homes, they’re human beings after all aren’t they, you know, children and care children. And that for me is where we’re lacking here. The country lacks empathy and children in care are always left in the shadows, but they should be right there at the front, in the light.

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You can read the transcript for our latest podcast below:

1 (12s):
Hi and welcome back to the Voice of the Child. What happens In child custody or contact cases when a mother says a child is being abused by her partner, or she’s been subjected to domestic violence herself? And what happens when that partner then counters the allegations by saying that he is a victim of parental alienation? Professor Joan Meier has tried to answer those questions with America’s first ever nationwide study, and the controversial findings have been reported on by several media outlets, including the Washington Post and the New Yorker. Her research has also reignited the debate around gender stereotypes and significantly the effectiveness of child protection processes, which are meant to keep children safe.

1 (51s):
A professor of clinical law and the director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School, Professor Meier has received a number of national awards for improving legal responses to domestic violence and children in need. She was also a commentator for a PBS program called “Breaking the silence: children’s voices”, which looked at the impact of domestic violence on children and their mothers. Professor Meier your research attracted a significant response both in the US and the UK. What was the purpose of the study?

2 (1m 21s):
I decided to do this study because I had been working at DV Leap doing appellate work on behalf of survivors and protective parents who were trying to keep their children safe in custody cases and I was seeing a lot of disturbing things going on in the custody courts. And I had been doing trainings and scholarship and appeals on these issues and in particular, on parental alienation and it wasn’t changing anything. So I decided there was a real need for data. And as I embarked on this process of gathering data, I sort of thought to myself, you know, everything I know is anecdotal, it’s my own experience.

2 (1m 56s):
It’s definitely what I’m hearing from all over the country as well, but who knows, maybe we get all the bad cases and there’s plenty of good cases out there. And the data will tell us one way or the other. So the purpose was really to show wether as it seemed to US, um, Custody courts were really seeming to be biased against mothers who alleged abuse, uh, and that mothers were losing. Custody a great rates. Um, and that parental alienation crossclaims by the accused, a parent’s accused of abuse was a big part of the, the way that courts were denying.

2 (2m 32s):
These Abuse claims. That’s the goal, was to see whether that was accurate numerically and to do a very objective gathering of just observations. Here’s what the courts here’s, what’s being claimed. Here’s what the courts are saying. Here’s what the courts are doing numerically.

1 (2m 47s):
And how many judgments did you examine, over what period of time and which courts did they come from?

2 (2m 52s):
So the only way to get a national picture, which I was determined to do was to go online. And, um, in order to go in line, we use various search engines like Lexis and Westlaw and Google. And we spent a long time comparing, and we did a very long, quite complex search string in order to collect every case that was reported online, that involved Child Custody, possible Abuse claims, possible alienation claims. And that was pretty much all we, we screened out state cases child welfare cases we screened out same-sex cases only because we were trying to look at a gender analysis.

2 (3m 28s):
Um, we screened out some cases where parents were in prison. There was a number of things we screened at, but basically your paradigm of when Parent against the, had one heterosexual parenting against the other, uh, one of them, or both of them alleging abuse or alienation. So we ended up with 15,000 cases. I know that was your question. We ended up with 15,000 cases in our initial data set and our coders who were to law graduates spent about a year or half a year, triaging that number down too. What we ended up keeping in a dataset, which was 4,800 cases.

2 (4m 3s):
Um, and then they spent another year coding, all the cases again, objectively reading the opinions to code, who said, What who made what allegations, what did the court decide and what to do? Um, and it was complex because we coded many, many things, which we haven’t even finished analyzing all the things we coded. So it took a very long time. But, um, so far the analysis that I’m going to talk about today and that I’ve put in In in publications have been a very basic questions about when do courts believe a parent’s claims of abuse by the other parent?

2 (4m 35s):
And what do courts do in terms of switching Custody how often do they do that? And I should just say, when we’re thinking about numbers, the data set is a whole is large. It’s over 4,000, but for purposes of the analysis here is a much smaller analysis. It’s a little over 2,000 because, um, we are focused on cases where there was a custody, uh, a claim of abuse and we’re focused on cases where, um, a, there was a custody switched from one parent to the other, and anyone who’s read judicial opinions would probably know that they’re not the best at documenting the story of the cases.

2 (5m 9s):
So there were a lot of cases that are in our data set, where we couldn’t tell who started with the children. So we don’t factor those cases into our analysis of custody switches.

1 (5m 19s):
That’s still a, a lot of data and having read the reports. Um, a lot of that data is quite complex. So let’s start with the overarching view of that data.

2 (5m 31s):
Okay. So the data was very confirmatory of the anecdotal experiences that we had been having and in hearing about it, in fact, it was much stronger than I even I expected, um, what it showed, if you look at the broad picture of all the cases, where there were abuse claims by women against men, and I’ll get it to the reverse in a minute. But when you start with those claims, um, overall averaging out different types of abuse claims, which I’ll talk about also in a minute, courts only believe a little over a third of women’s allegations of abuse, 36%, that alone, When I shared that at one point in a meeting with a custody evaluator, she, she kept, she, she was like, wait, what?

2 (6m 12s):
She couldn’t believe that courts weren’t believing abuse, because there’s a very widespread belief out there in this society. And I think in the courts that all you have to do is allege abuse to get away with stuff. And on the contrary courts are very skeptical of women’s allegations of abuse. I’ll add to that, that, um, uh, what, what we did not expect in this data, but what was really stark is that courts are particularly skeptical of child abuse claims by mothers. They a, what we found in general was that courts believed 43% of mothers partner violence claims, but only 21 are about a fifth 21% of child physical abuse claims only a little less than that, 19% of child sexual abuse claims.

2 (6m 57s):
And then we found, we looked at mixed claims, mixed adult, mixed child abuse claims, and there were different percentages for that. But as a result of those very low rates, like one fifth, uh, rates of believing child abuse claims and it averages out and around a third, but it’s even lower than that for child abuse claims. So it’s very stark. And I think that information right there that courts are very reluctant, are very reticent to believe child abuse claims is a powerful information that everyone needs to know. both any parent who is going to be alleging child abuse, but especially a mother needs to know that, um, and any evaluator or a guardian ad litum or a judge should know, there seems to be a bias against a bleeding child abuse claims, as well as domestic violence claims, to some extent, unless you accept the theory that 80% of women reporting child abuse are lying, or are crazy.

2 (7m 53s):
If you don’t start from that belief. And we have a problem of a great deal of skepticism about women’s child abuse claims. And what happens when fathers alleged abuse? We’re flipping it over now. Um, so I have a comparison of father is not so much on the allegations of abuse. I’m sorry to say. I had a comparison of fathers when we get to losses of custody and I don’t know if you want me to leap into that yet, or, okay.

2 (8m 25s):
So Losses of custody, um, overall, uh, again, averaging all the different types of abuse, women lost custody about 28% of the time when they alleged abuse against a father and those rates were higher again, when they alleged child abuse, uh, over a third of the time when they alleged child abuse, um, fathers by comparison lost custody on average, only 12% of the time. Uh, a great difference for 28% of the time. And when they alleged child abuse, um, very little, uh, the numbers are small here because we’re looking only at, in cases where a father started with children, they’re in the court records.

2 (9m 2s):
That and father is alleged child abuse against a mother’s, which is a fairly small percentage, but we had six cases where they alleged child sexual abuse as a mother or, or the household of a mother. And they lost custody in two of those, which was about a third, uhm, which is similar to the mothers, but the mothers have a much more robust set of cases and then child physical abuse. They were 65 where they accused mother’s of physical abuse. They only lost custody of 11% of the time in those. Whereas the mother lost custody 34% of the time when they accused a father of child physical abuse.

2 (9m 35s):
So all of it. And then when a father accused a mother of domestic violence, interestingly, you would think, and I think our data do show the courts are a little more skeptical of men accusing women of a domestic violence, but they still only lost custody of 14% of the time compared to 22% for women who allege domestic violence. So it averages out at a much lower rate of custody loss. So What what that implies, umm, which is again, consistent with the stories we hear in the cases I’ve reviewed the many, many hundreds, probably thousands at this point of the cases I’ve reviewed his there’s a punitiveess There’s a hostility to women who raise abuse claims, which is less evoked by men raising Abuse claims.

1 (10m 17s):
You also looked at cases in which fathers made claims of parental alienation after mothers had made claims of abuse or domestic violence. What happened in those cases?

2 (10m 27s):
Okay. So that switches me back to a slightly different subset of the study. We did, so for the most important part of what we were looking at was that comparison of what happens in alienation cases and how does that compare to the non alienation cases? So, um, if you look at the belief of abuse claims, what we found was that when mothers alleged abuse, but there was no cross claim of alienation, um, they were believed 45% of the time, if you just looked at domestic violence, but when alienation was crossed, claimed that dropped to 37%, you see a much more stark drop when you look at child abuse.

2 (11m 3s):
So without an alienation cross-claim women were believed 29% of the time about child physical, but with a cross claim of alienation, they went down to 18% and child sexual abuse is where you see the most stark and the most really stunning impact, uh, parental alienation, but also the stunning degree of skepticism by courts they’re are already very skeptical in a non alienation cases. They only believe women 15% of the time when there’s no alienation cross claim, but when there was an alienation cross claim, they believed women 2%, which represented one case.

2 (11m 36s):
So one out of 51 cases where mothers claimed there was sexual abuse of the child at the father’s house, and a father responded with an alienation claim, courts only accepted the sexual abuse once, that’s really stunning a finding. So it it’s, it does indicate with, again, our anecdotal reports that, um, parental alienation is a very powerful in reducing courts, willingness to believe abuse that it’s very linked. That claim is very linked with a disbelief in abuse claims.

2 (12m 8s):
And that’s very important in, in a larger field of family law and family law practice, because many people who teach and train and write about parental alienation are very insistent that it’s not about abuse, is not about disproving abuse, it’s a much broader problem. And I understand that the theory is much broader, but what this research shows is that its power is particularly great when used against women accusing fathers of abuse.

2 (12m 39s):
And that’s not surprising because the whole theory of parental alienation syndrome was first invented as a way of refuting child sexual abuse. So you’re seeing exactly that here, even though everyone is now arguing, that what the courts are doing is not parental alienation syndrome is parental alienation. What they’re actually doing is identical to what PAS called for which is to disbelief child, sexual abuse, and other child abuse claims.

1 (13m 2s):
There are lots of very interesting observations in the research. And one of those, is that in non abuse cases the data found that alienation allegations had a more gender neutral impact. Why do you think that was the case?

2 (13m 13s):
Right. So in the cases where a mother was not claiming abuse, but a father was still calling her an alienator or vice versa, we found, we did find a relative equity in outcomes. Now we don’t know if they were the correct outcomes, but, but the, the numerically, it was very close outcomes in terms of what happened in terms of belief and in terms of custody losses. Um, and my, my thinking on that is very consistent with what I just said, which is that alienation is seen as a particular weapon and is used as a particular weapon against mothers’ claims of abuse.

2 (13m 49s):
But when you get into alienation, without that particular target of attack by the alienation claim, courts are able to be more gender neutral in their assessment of it. And they’re able to just look at what does each parent doing are not doing that might undermine the other parent. Um, whereas in the abuse claims, everyone gets crystallized kind of magnetized around the abuse claim as a sign of alienation. And, um, so you see more gender neutrality or equity potentially in the non abuse alienation cases.

1 (14m 20s):
The research clearly highlights a skepticism by family law professionals, towards mothers who claim abuse. Where do you think that skepticism comes from?

2 (14m 29s):
Mmm, it is. That’s a very good question. I think the best way I can answer it honestly, is to invoke the “Me Too” movement. If you think back to what that movement was about or is about until we had that movement, it was normative to reject women’s claims of sexual abuse or sexual assault on the job, it was just, you could dismiss it. You could say she’s a liar. You could say she’s pathological, or you could say a, you know, nobody else has ever said such a thing.

2 (14m 59s):
You could just silence her. And, um, in myriad ways by punishing and silencing people to make the cost too great for coming out well, that’s kind of what’s going on in families and in family court still because we have not had a Me Too movement that attaches to families and family court, although we need it. And this data and in the larger protective parent movement is really trying to bring that. I think there’s a very long history of denying women’s allegations and violence by men, against women and children. If you go back, you know, a hundred or more years, you’re looking at a time when violence in a family is simply not ever acknowledged or recognized or admitted.

2 (15m 36s):
Rape was seen as, you know, virtually impossible to prove because it was virtually impossible to get corroboration and a woman’s accusation could never be believed on its own. Um, child sexual abuse has always been that way in terms of how we respond to it. It’s and it’s because it’s shocking and horrific and people really deeply do not want to believe it. So I think we have a long history of silencing the realities of male violence against women and particularly, and I guess children and the family.

2 (16m 8s):
And we haven’t come to terms with it yet. We’ve begun to in the larger world with the Me Too movement, we haven’t come to terms with it in the family of course setting or in families in general. And so you have this very polarized field where part of the field of family law professionals often feel like women are lying. And I think that’s just, maybe they they’ve met with a lot of men who were falsely accused and claim to be falsely accused. And they find these men sympathetic. And there are many, many things I I’ve spoken to women, uh, who, who act as the guardian ad litem to them who, you know, purport to be very objective, but the minute you send them a case, they start shredding and deconstructing what’s wrong with a mother.

2 (16m 46s):
And I think that’s a very common instinct that it’s easy to throw claims or accusations at women about what they’ve done wrong or why they’re not credible. There’s a myriad ways to call women not credible. It’s harder to attack men’s credibility and that’s a longstanding social issue. It’s not, you know, there’s, there’s not one particular problem. The other thing I’ll add to the family court scenario is that there’s a lot of money being made off of denying women’s claims of abuse, um, getting parental alienation assessments, getting treatment for supposed parental alienation and what they call reunification treatment.

2 (17m 18s):
There’s enormous money being made. I think frankly, if the money went away, if there was some way to make this all, I would like to see all of this rolled into the court and only handled by salaried professionals who didn’t gain by what they concluded. Um, I think we would see a more honest and objective assessment. I think there’s a lot of stake in finding alienation some of the professionals and most of them I think are very honestly doing the best they can and believe what they’re saying, what they’re doing and believe they’re helping families when they do it.

2 (17m 50s):
Um, but they don’t understand abuse they don’t necessarily really want to understand abuse of the way those of us who work in the abuse field, understand abuse and there’s just an ingrown skepticism. But, um, some of them, I think, know what they’re doing and are doing it intentionally. There are certainly loud and, um, very active people in the field who are notorious for being somewhat bullying in a way that they write in the way that they speak in the way that they deal in court. And that kind of fits what we know about the denial of abuse.

2 (18m 21s):
There’s a lot of bullying that goes on in that process.

1 (18m 25s):
One of the things that I kept thinking about when I was reading the research was that these decisions were being made by a very specific person. And they were the judges. Did you look at the gender of the judges whilst you were doing your research to see whether there was any correlation between the gender of the judges and the decisions being made?

2 (18m 43s):
That’s a great question. I get it almost every time I’ve interviewed it on. Unfortunately we were not able to look at the gender of the judges because I’m, we were looking at published opinions and they say, so and so comma J, so you don’t get a first name and you can’t tell the gender. And umm, so we couldn’t, we couldn’t measure that at all. I will tell you anecdotally that I have seen as many harsh skeptical female judges as male judges. I don’t see much difference in gender, frankly. And I’ve seen some wonderful leaders in the field who are trying to help children, who are male.

2 (19m 17s):
So I, I don’t know how far we can go with that. I think, I think a better way to look at it is, I mean, when we talk about racism among police forces, we often acknowledge that many of these officers are African American, and there’s a culture, there’s a culture of disbelieving women. There’s a culture of protecting men’s rights in family court. Women are a part of the culture too. Um, or they’re pressured to be part of the culture. They had the judges who’ve left the court and I’ve talked about the pressure on them to not believe women and to protect men’s rights.

2 (19m 49s):
Um, it, I don’t think it’s the individual so much, that’s the overarching sense of what’s right. And what’s right, is to protect fathers rights in the family courts

1 (19m 59s):
And, and that ideology is being carried out by women as well as men. Exactly. And why do you think women are willing to perpetuate that ideology?

2 (20m 11s):
Um, I think many women for potentially very legitimate reasons feel that men have, have not been treated fairly in courts and in the law and when it comes to parenting rights. Um, I think historically there was a truth to that. Certainly women had a maternal presumption long ago. Uh, that’s been gone for a very long time and um, doesn’t seem to be operative anymore at all. Um, but there is a belief that men have never been given, given their due as fathers. That’s one thing. The other one is that I’ve, and I’ve written about this in other articles a long ago.

2 (20m 45s):
There’s a really strong desire across society and within the courts to see more fathering in families. And so when men stand up and say, I want to be a father courts want to reward that very much. And there’s a real sense of that. You’re, you’re a good father, merely for asking for, for equal parenting time. And there’s a real resistance to believing that you might be asking for the wrong reasons because you want to abuse or because it’s an extension of your abuse. So I think there’s a real desire to protect fathers and fathering and to maximize fathering.

2 (21m 17s):
And some of that is, you know, very sympathetic to, even though it’s doing damage potentially. Some of that I think is, um, gender biased probably. Um, but who knows.

1 (21m 30s):
Your research obviously focuses on cases in the United States, but it’s had a phenomenal response here. Um, by way of an example, I published you research on my website and within minutes it went viral. I think on one platform it’s been shared over 3,000 times and the engagement, uh, with the research was significant. There were a lot of mothers who’d gone through the family courts in the United Kingdom who felt that the experiences outlined in the research really resonated with them, but there was also comment and engagement from fathers.

1 (22m 0s):
Who’d gone through the court process in the UK for various different types of hearings. Um, and one father posed a question and he said, well, surely all this research does is confirm that in this particular context, women are less honest than men. Do you think that there is room for that view within your research?

2 (22m 20s):
My research leaves that wide open, anyone can take that view. My research does not refute that view. The only way to refute that view is to look at, um, outside research into the veracity of women’s allegations of abuse. And there isn’t a lot, but there is actually surprising. There is more than I would have expected and particularly looking at child abuse and child sexual abuse, past research before parental alienation became a thing and found that women’s claims of child sexual abuse were likely credible, definitely good faith in the vast majority of the time, but likely credible in 50 to 75% at a time.

2 (22m 57s):
So, you know, half to two thirds of the time outside evaluators who were not overly gullible and who are fairly conservative as evaluators, were finding that these allegations were credible at least, um, a a very, you know, half to more, uh, more than that, uh, of the time. And what you see in this study is courts are believing it only 15% of the time. And when alienation is claimed once out of 51 cases, there is no way that that is reflecting truth. There is no way. And the other way to know is to talk to and interview the mother’s about or Even look at things like our appellate briefs, DV Leap’s, appellate briefs, where we detail the evidence of abuse that the court is choosing to reject.

2 (23m 40s):
I’ve had case after case where there’s multiple layers of corroboration of child sexual abuse. You had a kid acting out sexually. The police are being called against, um, a, an eight year old because she’s making, she’s being sexual with her classmates. Um, that’s, that’s not a sign of, of coaching. That’s a kid acting out. Kids do that kind of acting out most often if they’re sexually abused, not for many other reasons. And then this kid had hallucinations and then, and you know, uh, three out of four evaluators, uh, who had expertise in child sexual abuse thought that, um, there was a good chance she had been sexually abused.

2 (24m 16s):
They never say for sure, but nonetheless the court chose not to believe it and to believe, uh, a psychobabble theory about enmeshment in the alienation and whatever, and, um, chose not to listen to the expertise that was presented at trial on dissociation and how children respond when they’re forced to be with an abuser. The courts are choosing not to believe what’s right in front of their face in many of these cases. And if you get into the weeds of the facts and the evidence and the information, I think it becomes harder to just airily declare that these courts are all doing it right.

2 (24m 48s):
And all these women are lying, but yes, you can make the argument in this study does not refute that

1 (24m 54s):
There are lots of themes that emerge from the research, including human bias. Are you concerned that genuine allegations of child abuse are being ignored or overlooked because of judicial bias?

2 (25m 5s):
Absolutely, but it’s, it’s not judicial bias alone. It’s judicial bias, which has been encouraged and led by other professionals who are neutral court appointees like guardians ad litem or whatever you call them in the UK. Um, or, um, custody evaluators. Um, sometimes the parenting coordinators, there’s a whole stable of psychologists, usually sometimes lawyers and other people who get appointed supposedly to advocate for the child or the best interest of the child. And they are misleading courts into denying abuse and myriad studies of evaluators in the U S and also I believe across the pond have found that these evaluators don’t know enough about abuse and are quick to dismiss it for based on misconceptions and myths about what, uh, you know, how abuse looks and sounds when it happens.

2 (25m 54s):
Um, a lot of the talk about alienation that’s used to deny Abuse describe the behaviors that are commonly found in abuse families. And then they described them as evidence of alienation. So there’s been a whole co-opting of what we know about abuse under the rubric have alienation and they slap the label on, in the course go, Oh, okay. The courts don’t know better often. So I, you know, with regard to bias, I think there is some among the judges. I think there’s probably more however, among these professionals who are making money off of this.

2 (26m 25s):
Um, and that’s not the only reason they believe what they’re doing, obviously. Um, and there’s a lot of bias and I think a lot of judges are being misled and there was a great podcast I’ll point, your listeners too. And that was done by, um, Reveal and it’s called bitter custody. And in one case it has a story about, uh, children who were sent to a reunification program and cut off from their preferred parent who in that case was a father. And they’re in the interview with these children now that they’re older and the judge is interviewed afterward and he says, Oh my, I don’t think we know what’s going on in these programs.

2 (26m 59s):
Maybe we should take a closer look, and that’s my paraphrase. He says something else, but the gist of it, is I had no idea. And that’s what I think is happening with judges. They have no idea, they’re being told by these psychologists, these are good programs and they should send the children in there. They don’t know what’s actually happening. And now that children are ageing out enough to be able to talk publicly about what happened to them there and that’s posing a bit of a problem for some of the programs, but it hasn’t really filtered up to the judges yet. So unfortunately, family court as a place where it, a lot of junk science and invalid assertions, psychological and sociological, psychosocial assertions about treatment, about diagnosis, about labels are made and of courts don’t know better.

2 (27m 42s):
They don’t know it’s unreliable. Now I will say going beyond that, that when they have an expert on staff telling them it’s unreliable, they often refuse to accept that. So there is some bias going on there too, but I don’t think it’s necessarily mostly bias on the part of the judges. I think there’s a lot of misleading going on.

1 (28m 1s):
On the point of bias. We’re seeing a phenomenon in the UK, which has been going on for quite some time now where mothers who speak to that legal representatives about domestic violence they are experiencing, are often told or advised not to mention it to the judge at all, because it will lead to them losing custody of their children, or in England, we call it contact and not having that contact with their child. And in some cases being permanently separated from their children. This is obviously something that’s happening here in the UK, and it’s been happening for some time. Do you see similar advice being given to women in the U S and what do you think of this practice?

2 (28m 36s):
That’s a very difficult question. Obviously, my study confirms that this is happening in the courts. Women are losing custody, which to us is they may or may not lose all contact, but losing the care of their children is, is very, very significant. Um, and they’re losing it the most when they alleged child abuse and there’s a cross claim of alienation. So it’s happening whether the advice is being given about domestic violence. I don’t think so. However, I do think it’s beginning to be given around child abuse claims. Um, it’s clear from this data, the courts are less reactive and punitive about domestic violence claims.

2 (29m 9s):
They also don’t give them that much weight, so it’s less risky for women, but it also doesn’t help them as much as one might hope with regard to safe custody. Um, but child abuse claims are very risky for women. I can’t say I know it’s happening a lot, but I have heard of cases here and there, where lawyers have said, it’s too risky. You may lose your children. And I’m at a point, people used to ask me this, like 10 years ago, they would say, would you advise clients not to bring it up? And I would say, I don’t really know. It would depend on the evidence. Well, now with this data, I would advise parents not to bring up child, women not to bring up child sexual abuse, unless there is, you know, eye witness evidence, or, you know, maybe a past conviction of the abuser.

2 (29m 54s):
If all they have is a child’s report and it’s going to be sort of a battle of the experts, and he’s probably going to claim it alienation, don’t bring it up because it’s your ticket to losing custody at this point, I would say. Child physical abuse is less clear, but it still seems pretty high risk, but child sexual abuse as the one where I think I would have to say that I would actually give that advice and say, here’s what we know empirically your odds are of losing custody. In fact, I can give the odds here, hold on. Sorry. I don’t, I don’t have the answer on that particular data point, but I have the odds earlier when it’s not involving alienation, um, mothers have 2.5 times the odds of losing custody when they’re alleging both physical and sexual abuse, then when they allow a child sexual abuse alone, for starters, So that mixture is really bad.

2 (30m 45s):
Um, mothers who alleged child abuse by father are at a one in four risk of losing custody to the alleged abuser. So it raises your risks,

1 (30m 58s):
But what do women then do if they’re genuinely concerned about their child, but they’re being told not to mention it in court. How can they protect their children in those cases?

2 (31m 7s):
I’m sorry to say that the courts are making it very, very difficult, if not impossible to protect children in these cases. And that’s, you know, I have a client, I had a consult client recently, who I said, these are the data. This is what will happen if you don’t win. And your odds of not winning are very, very high. And she said to me, I can’t not fight for my children’s safety. And I said, I hear you. I respect that. I just need you to know, you know, the risk you’re taking and you’re taking that risk with your eyes open. You know, some women feel like that, that they have to act from their heart.

2 (31m 40s):
Other women look at the risks and say, I have to act pragmatically here. If, if my children are going to be even worse off than they would be, if I don’t bring it up, I better not bring it up. Even though I can’t, it means I can’t protect them completely and protecting them a little bit from what would happen if I do bring it up. And it’s a terrible, terrible, um, a rock and a hard place for mothers who, who love their children it’s is unconscionable that we’re doing this to mothers and children.

1 (32m 9s):
I think there are very few cases worse, I think, than having to decide how you’re going to protect your child in those sorts of circumstances

2 (32m 17s):
Or how you’re going to have to let them not be protected. Exactly.Yeah.

1 (32m 22s):
Now you’ve been looking at these issues for more than 15 years and a PBS program. You took part in about the impact of domestic violence on children and mothers specifically sparked heavy criticism when it ad in 2005, particularly from fathers and fathers rights groups, which led to the PBS ombudsman at the time, Michael Gettler stepping in and making a judgment call on the documentary a, which wasn’t a very favorable, calling it a flawed presentation that diminished the impact and usefulness of the examination of a real issue by what Did indeed come across as a one-sided advocacy program.

1 (32m 53s):
How do you feel about Gettler’s comments on the documentary, 15 years on?

2 (32m 58s):
It was a very powerful documentary in particular because it was called, um, “Breaking the silence: children’s voice”s, and it focused on children. It had interviews with children and feeling of children, one in particular I’ll never forget, who is whispering from her father’s house on the phone to her mother “get me out of here”. And when you see that you realize what mothers are being put through on what children are being put through in these cases, although, you know, you can write it off and say, that was one case where these were four cases in this particular show.

2 (33m 28s):
So here’s what I think about that. It wasn’t presented to be a neutral study like mine is, it was presented to, to give a perspective of what was being done to some children in some cases, and those things were being done to those children in those cases. And, um, you could liken it to a story about the Holocaust interviewing survivors of the concentration camps and saying, well, you didn’t interview any of the Nazis. You didn’t interview the guards. Is this a fair depiction? It’s a fair depiction of what the survivors experienced.

2 (33m 59s):
There are some things that, you know, interviewing the other side, you’re just going to get denial and obfuscation. Um, you can do that and pretend to be balanced in doing that. Or you can just say, um, uh, atrocities are atrocities and here I’m describing some. How representative they are remains to be seen. So I don’t think there was anything wrong with the documentary. I think the fathers’ rights outcry was to be expected. I think PBS in the ombudsman were more shocked than they should have been, but I think most of the world doesn’t understand how vocal and aggressive fathers rights organizations are, and how much they seek to, And often inflicting pain, um, those who work with, um, victims and advocate for victims.

2 (34m 47s):
And so they’re very well organized. They’re very powerful sometimes. And they threaten to sue all over the place and they had the resources to do it. Unlike most battered women who are completely out of money and don’t have the resources to sue the bad evaluators, et cetera. So, um, so they have a lot of, a lot of, um, intimidation power. And so, yeah, so the ombudsman stepped up and did his critique, which I don’t listen to a whole lot more than the fathers’ rights people listen to my listen to that, that documentary.

2 (35m 16s):
Um, what they did ultimately was a, another show on the demand of a fathers’ rights people. And I was supposed to be kind of the other side, but it was really, it was more like a family court story of how we try to be balanced and fair. And it didn’t, it just whitewashed everything. It didn’t really go in either direction. Um, it wasn’t, I don’t even think it got much attention, ultimately. Your research

1 (35m 38s):
Raises a lot of concerns around the way these cases are handled. What can child protection professionals do to ensure that children are the priority and these kinds of cases and parents are not unjustly punished for trying to protect their children. I think child protection professionals

2 (35m 53s):
Absolutely need to shed the idea of parental alienation is what’s happening. When mothers allege child abuse, they need to just get rid of that. There is no science behind that. And even the current experts in alienation say, that’s not what it’s about. I have yet to see any of them say it’s being misused in that way to deny true abuse, but they’re, they’re moving slowly in a direction, some of them I think, and they say, it’s really not about child abuse claims. You have to evaluate child abuse on it’s on its face. So everybody family, of course, and child welfare professionals need to be taking the question of alienation, friendly parents in measurement, any of those labels out while they assess abuse and they need to assess abuse based on expertise about abuse not based on this kind of ideology that says women lie all the time and that the women are able to convince their children to not only report false things, but to emote false things and to hallucinate false things.

2 (36m 52s):
And to remember false things, all of that stuff is been fabricated. There’s not much science behind it, if any, and yet, and the whole system is relying on this notion that is so often false. Um, we need real experts in sexual abuse and only experts in sexual abuse, assessing sexual abuse. Um, and I think we need real experts in family violence and domestic violence assessing all other abuse claims because child welfare professionals in particular have been very slow to understand how adult domestic violence radiates through the family and victimizes children inherently as well as often physically as well.

2 (37m 27s):
Um, I think child welfare professionals have been very slow to understand coercive control, which is a huge part of what we know about domestic violence and domestic violence perpetrators. Um, and often you don’t have smoking guns and major injuries and broken bones, but you may have a lifetime of terror and existence of terror that comes from the coercive control of this perpetrator and child welfare professionals need to recognize that because that has profound implications for child safety both in the moment and after separation because the, and it’s usually the men, but the perpetrators who utilize coercive control are the most dangerous for not only adult victims, but for children, First of all, and second of all children are much more at risk after their parents separate than when they’re there, they’re in a unified family, um, even if the perpetrator never laid a hand on the children after separation, anyone who has been battering, an adult or utilizing coercive of control is a much greater risk to children after separation.

2 (38m 27s):
These are things child welfare professionals need to know. They need to focus on risk, not just what happened and what can we prove happened. But what do we know about the dynamics in a family that pose risk? And I don’t see them doing that very much on this, over here, certainly. Um, I don’t know about over there.

1 (38m 44s):
I think we have the same concerns here in terms of getting up to date, progressive, sophisticated, evidence-based information. Uh, and I think in a lot of ways, our systems are quite similar. You’re going to be kept very busy over the next few weeks with your current research, but I wanted to ask you whether you had any other research projects, uh, that you’re thinking of carrying out. And if we can have a sneak peek?

2 (39m 9s):
Um, I have so many things I want to write. Some of them are empirical and some of them are not. I need to get this data out more widely than it has been so far. I need to educate the child abuse field. And I’m working on that, uh, with regard to this data and other things related things. Um, and I’m also trying to get out analysis and thinking and about why family courts are the way they are and how they can change and how we can change the laws to help them change. In terms of future research, I, um, have my eye on a incredible data set that is managed by the Center for Judicial Excellence based in California, which has, um, piggybacked on other people who had, who had begun many years ago to collect to track child homicides, uh, that were committed by a parent.

2 (39m 58s):
Um, usually in the context of separation or divorce, um, and the Center for Judicial Excellence has been doing an amazing job of collating and continuing to track these and to try to analyze how many of them could have been prevented in others. How many of them are cases where a court knew, um, a was warned that a child was at serious risk from this parent, usually the father, but not only there are some other cases in there too. Um, and they’ve already identified just based on media, about a hundred cases where these children did not have to be killed.

2 (40m 32s):
And of course it could’ve of protected them but wen unnoticed, but we haven’t been able, we haven’t had the resources to, um, analyze all 700 and some which they have in their data set now, or to more, more thoroughly analyze the hundred that they’ve flagged. Um, and we desperately need research funding for that work. And I’m, I’m in my new center at GW, I’m going to be looking into finding funding for that, whether I do it myself or I do that in tandem with the sensor itself and some researchers we bring in remains to be seen as I couldn’t do it hands on, I’d have to hire someone anyway, but we need reporters as well as potentially lawyers who have some time to do some digging into these case files and be able to demonstrate what courts knew and when they knew it and, and why they did or did not protect the child.

2 (41m 19s):
Um, so I’m hoping that that’s a new area of empirical research that we’ll find the support to do. And then there’s a lot of pieces of this data that we haven’t analyzed yet, like visitation, or even just looking at who ends up with custody without worrying, who started with custody. If we do that, we will be able to bring in a lot of the cases we had to screen out when we were looking at custody and reversals. Um, and that’s the data that I think we need to get out. Um, we need to look at visitation. We need to look at corroboration. We want to look at the child welfare agency cases and analyze what was happening in those.

2 (41m 51s):
We want to do a more specific analysis of the child sexual abuse cases to see if we can come up with some qualitative, as well as quantitative analytic, um, explanations of what’s happening in those cases. So, um, there’s a lot more to be done with this dataset, which is incredibly rich and complicated. And in the, the other thing I’ll say, if there are any US listeners to your podcasts, um, the data is all organized by state, and we very much hope that state researchers will download their set of cases. They can either use our coding, or they can recode along the lines that they want to, their cases.

2 (42m 26s):
In most States, it’s a manageable number, California. It’s an unmanageable number 500 plus I think cases, but, um, most States it’s much, much less than that and they, they can wrap their minds around and then they can do state based analysis and use those for law reform. So I hope that happens too. If you had just one sentiment that you were able to show with child protection professionals, what would you say to them? I would say know where you have expertise in where you don’t, if you don’t have genuine expertise in child sexual abuse, make sure you get someone who’s a true expert, meaning they have worked with children.

2 (43m 4s):
They have been able to identify true and false cases. Um, they can help you assess. Um, I would also say don’t, um, don’t use alienation or that kind of thinking to discredit allegations of child abuse and in particular, do not use the fact of custody or access litigation as a reason to discredit reports to child welfare, because it should be, I think, obvious that if a parent finds out the other parent is abusing the child, there is likely to be custody access litigation that does not mean it is false.

2 (43m 41s):
It does not mean it was fabricated for false litigation. On the contrary It means someone is trying to protect a child. And I hope I would say to child welfare, I hope you will go back to your initial mission and purpose, which is to protect children and stop buying into the idea that you’re protecting them by maintaining access with a parent they’re afraid of, and that they say has been hurtful to them.

 

 

For our sixteenth Voice of the Child podcast we speak with Professor Joan Meier about the first ever nationwide study in the US on child custody cases which feature allegations of abuse, domestic violence and parental alienation, and how those allegations affect mothers’ contact rights in court.

The study, led by Professor Meier, features controversial findings which suggest cultural and gender stereotypes inside the US family courts are placing children at risk of harm.

Meier is a Professor of Clinical Law and the Director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School, in Washington DC. She has received several national awards for excellence and leadership in improving the legal response to domestic violence.

In this interview, Professor Meier explains the findings from her research, raises concerns around “junk science” used in child cases, and calls for a Me Too Movement within the family courts to raise awareness about gender discrimination and the impact of gender bias on child protection.

She also offers us a sneak preview of her next project.

You can listen to the podcast here.

You can also read a transcript for the podcast here (for those who don’t want to use an external link, we are also adding the transcription below).

MORE INFORMATION

Professor Meier’s Research: Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations (Open Access)

PBS Documentary: Breaking The Silence: Children’s Stories

Reveal Podcast: Bitter Custody

 

TRANSCRIPT

1 (12s):
Hi and welcome back to the Voice of the Child. What happens In child custody or contact cases when a mother says a child is being abused by her partner, or she’s been subjected to domestic violence herself? And what happens when that partner then counters the allegations by saying that he is a victim of parental alienation? Professor Joan Meier has tried to answer those questions with America’s first ever nationwide study, and the controversial findings have been reported on by several media outlets, including the Washington Post and the New Yorker. Her research has also reignited the debate around gender stereotypes and significantly the effectiveness of child protection processes, which are meant to keep children safe.

1 (51s):
A professor of clinical law and the director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School, Professor Meier has received a number of national awards for improving legal responses to domestic violence and children in need. She was also a commentator for a PBS program called “Breaking the silence: children’s voices”, which looked at the impact of domestic violence on children and their mothers. Professor Meier your research attracted a significant response both in the US and the UK. What was the purpose of the study?

2 (1m 21s):
I decided to do this study because I had been working at DV Leap doing appellate work on behalf of survivors and protective parents who were trying to keep their children safe in custody cases and I was seeing a lot of disturbing things going on in the custody courts. And I had been doing trainings and scholarship and appeals on these issues and in particular, on parental alienation and it wasn’t changing anything. So I decided there was a real need for data. And as I embarked on this process of gathering data, I sort of thought to myself, you know, everything I know is anecdotal, it’s my own experience.

2 (1m 56s):
It’s definitely what I’m hearing from all over the country as well, but who knows, maybe we get all the bad cases and there’s plenty of good cases out there. And the data will tell us one way or the other. So the purpose was really to show wether as it seemed to US, um, Custody courts were really seeming to be biased against mothers who alleged abuse, uh, and that mothers were losing. Custody a great rates. Um, and that parental alienation crossclaims by the accused, a parent’s accused of abuse was a big part of the, the way that courts were denying.

2 (2m 32s):
These Abuse claims. That’s the goal, was to see whether that was accurate numerically and to do a very objective gathering of just observations. Here’s what the courts here’s, what’s being claimed. Here’s what the courts are saying. Here’s what the courts are doing numerically.

1 (2m 47s):
And how many judgments did you examine, over what period of time and which courts did they come from?

2 (2m 52s):
So the only way to get a national picture, which I was determined to do was to go online. And, um, in order to go in line, we use various search engines like Lexis and Westlaw and Google. And we spent a long time comparing, and we did a very long, quite complex search string in order to collect every case that was reported online, that involved Child Custody, possible Abuse claims, possible alienation claims. And that was pretty much all we, we screened out state cases child welfare cases we screened out same-sex cases only because we were trying to look at a gender analysis.

2 (3m 28s):
Um, we screened out some cases where parents were in prison. There was a number of things we screened at, but basically your paradigm of when Parent against the, had one heterosexual parenting against the other, uh, one of them, or both of them alleging abuse or alienation. So we ended up with 15,000 cases. I know that was your question. We ended up with 15,000 cases in our initial data set and our coders who were to law graduates spent about a year or half a year, triaging that number down too. What we ended up keeping in a dataset, which was 4,800 cases.

2 (4m 3s):
Um, and then they spent another year coding, all the cases again, objectively reading the opinions to code, who said, What who made what allegations, what did the court decide and what to do? Um, and it was complex because we coded many, many things, which we haven’t even finished analyzing all the things we coded. So it took a very long time. But, um, so far the analysis that I’m going to talk about today and that I’ve put in In in publications have been a very basic questions about when do courts believe a parent’s claims of abuse by the other parent?

2 (4m 35s):
And what do courts do in terms of switching Custody how often do they do that? And I should just say, when we’re thinking about numbers, the data set is a whole is large. It’s over 4,000, but for purposes of the analysis here is a much smaller analysis. It’s a little over 2,000 because, um, we are focused on cases where there was a custody, uh, a claim of abuse and we’re focused on cases where, um, a, there was a custody switched from one parent to the other, and anyone who’s read judicial opinions would probably know that they’re not the best at documenting the story of the cases.

2 (5m 9s):
So there were a lot of cases that are in our data set, where we couldn’t tell who started with the children. So we don’t factor those cases into our analysis of custody switches.

1 (5m 19s):
That’s still a, a lot of data and having read the reports. Um, a lot of that data is quite complex. So let’s start with the overarching view of that data.

2 (5m 31s):
Okay. So the data was very confirmatory of the anecdotal experiences that we had been having and in hearing about it, in fact, it was much stronger than I even I expected, um, what it showed, if you look at the broad picture of all the cases, where there were abuse claims by women against men, and I’ll get it to the reverse in a minute. But when you start with those claims, um, overall averaging out different types of abuse claims, which I’ll talk about also in a minute, courts only believe a little over a third of women’s allegations of abuse, 36%, that alone, When I shared that at one point in a meeting with a custody evaluator, she, she kept, she, she was like, wait, what?

2 (6m 12s):
She couldn’t believe that courts weren’t believing abuse, because there’s a very widespread belief out there in this society. And I think in the courts that all you have to do is allege abuse to get away with stuff. And on the contrary courts are very skeptical of women’s allegations of abuse. I’ll add to that, that, um, uh, what, what we did not expect in this data, but what was really stark is that courts are particularly skeptical of child abuse claims by mothers. They a, what we found in general was that courts believed 43% of mothers partner violence claims, but only 21 are about a fifth 21% of child physical abuse claims only a little less than that, 19% of child sexual abuse claims.

2 (6m 57s):
And then we found, we looked at mixed claims, mixed adult, mixed child abuse claims, and there were different percentages for that. But as a result of those very low rates, like one fifth, uh, rates of believing child abuse claims and it averages out and around a third, but it’s even lower than that for child abuse claims. So it’s very stark. And I think that information right there that courts are very reluctant, are very reticent to believe child abuse claims is a powerful information that everyone needs to know. both any parent who is going to be alleging child abuse, but especially a mother needs to know that, um, and any evaluator or a guardian ad litum or a judge should know, there seems to be a bias against a bleeding child abuse claims, as well as domestic violence claims, to some extent, unless you accept the theory that 80% of women reporting child abuse are lying, or are crazy.

2 (7m 53s):
If you don’t start from that belief. And we have a problem of a great deal of skepticism about women’s child abuse claims. And what happens when fathers alleged abuse? We’re flipping it over now. Um, so I have a comparison of father is not so much on the allegations of abuse. I’m sorry to say. I had a comparison of fathers when we get to losses of custody and I don’t know if you want me to leap into that yet, or, okay.

2 (8m 25s):
So Losses of custody, um, overall, uh, again, averaging all the different types of abuse, women lost custody about 28% of the time when they alleged abuse against a father and those rates were higher again, when they alleged child abuse, uh, over a third of the time when they alleged child abuse, um, fathers by comparison lost custody on average, only 12% of the time. Uh, a great difference for 28% of the time. And when they alleged child abuse, um, very little, uh, the numbers are small here because we’re looking only at, in cases where a father started with children, they’re in the court records.

2 (9m 2s):
That and father is alleged child abuse against a mother’s, which is a fairly small percentage, but we had six cases where they alleged child sexual abuse as a mother or, or the household of a mother. And they lost custody in two of those, which was about a third, uhm, which is similar to the mothers, but the mothers have a much more robust set of cases and then child physical abuse. They were 65 where they accused mother’s of physical abuse. They only lost custody of 11% of the time in those. Whereas the mother lost custody 34% of the time when they accused a father of child physical abuse.

2 (9m 35s):
So all of it. And then when a father accused a mother of domestic violence, interestingly, you would think, and I think our data do show the courts are a little more skeptical of men accusing women of a domestic violence, but they still only lost custody of 14% of the time compared to 22% for women who allege domestic violence. So it averages out at a much lower rate of custody loss. So What what that implies, umm, which is again, consistent with the stories we hear in the cases I’ve reviewed the many, many hundreds, probably thousands at this point of the cases I’ve reviewed his there’s a punitiveness There’s a hostility to women who raise abuse claims, which is less evoked by men raising Abuse claims.

1 (10m 17s):
You also looked at cases in which fathers made claims of parental alienation after mothers had made claims of abuse or domestic violence. What happened in those cases?

2 (10m 27s):
Okay. So that switches me back to a slightly different subset of the study. We did, so for the most important part of what we were looking at was that comparison of what happens in alienation cases and how does that compare to the non alienation cases? So, um, if you look at the belief of abuse claims, what we found was that when mothers alleged abuse, but there was no cross claim of alienation, um, they were believed 45% of the time, if you just looked at domestic violence, but when alienation was crossed, claimed that dropped to 37%, you see a much more stark drop when you look at child abuse.

2 (11m 3s):
So without an alienation cross-claim women were believed 29% of the time about child physical, but with a cross claim of alienation, they went down to 18% and child sexual abuse is where you see the most stark and the most really stunning impact, uh, parental alienation, but also the stunning degree of skepticism by courts they’re are already very skeptical in a non alienation cases. They only believe women 15% of the time when there’s no alienation cross claim, but when there was an alienation cross claim, they believed women 2%, which represented one case.

2 (11m 36s):
So one out of 51 cases where mothers claimed there was sexual abuse of the child at the father’s house, and a father responded with an alienation claim, courts only accepted the sexual abuse once, that’s really stunning a finding. So it it’s, it does indicate with, again, our anecdotal reports that, um, parental alienation is a very powerful in reducing courts, willingness to believe abuse that it’s very linked. That claim is very linked with a disbelief in abuse claims.

2 (12m 8s):
And that’s very important in, in a larger field of family law and family law practice, because many people who teach and train and write about parental alienation are very insistent that it’s not about abuse, is not about disproving abuse, it’s a much broader problem. And I understand that the theory is much broader, but what this research shows is that its power is particularly great when used against women accusing fathers of abuse.

2 (12m 39s):
And that’s not surprising because the whole theory of parental alienation syndrome was first invented as a way of refuting child sexual abuse. So you’re seeing exactly that here, even though everyone is now arguing, that what the courts are doing is not parental alienation syndrome is parental alienation. What they’re actually doing is identical to what PAS called for which is to disbelief child, sexual abuse, and other child abuse claims.

1 (13m 2s):
There are lots of very interesting observations in the research. And one of those, is that in non abuse cases the data found that alienation allegations had a more gender neutral impact. Why do you think that was the case?

2 (13m 13s):
Right. So in the cases where a mother was not claiming abuse, but a father was still calling her an alienator or vice versa, we found, we did find a relative equity in outcomes. Now we don’t know if they were the correct outcomes, but, but the, the numerically, it was very close outcomes in terms of what happened in terms of belief and in terms of custody losses. Um, and my, my thinking on that is very consistent with what I just said, which is that alienation is seen as a particular weapon and is used as a particular weapon against mothers’ claims of abuse.

2 (13m 49s):
But when you get into alienation, without that particular target of attack by the alienation claim, courts are able to be more gender neutral in their assessment of it. And they’re able to just look at what does each parent doing are not doing that might undermine the other parent. Um, whereas in the abuse claims, everyone gets crystallized kind of magnetized around the abuse claim as a sign of alienation. And, um, so you see more gender neutrality or equity potentially in the non abuse alienation cases.

1 (14m 20s):
The research clearly highlights a skepticism by family law professionals, towards mothers who claim abuse. Where do you think that skepticism comes from?

2 (14m 29s):
Mmm, it is. That’s a very good question. I think the best way I can answer it honestly, is to invoke the “Me Too” movement. If you think back to what that movement was about or is about until we had that movement, it was normative to reject women’s claims of sexual abuse or sexual assault on the job, it was just, you could dismiss it. You could say she’s a liar. You could say she’s pathological, or you could say a, you know, nobody else has ever said such a thing.

2 (14m 59s):
You could just silence her. And, um, in myriad ways by punishing and silencing people to make the cost too great for coming out well, that’s kind of what’s going on in families and in family court still because we have not had a Me Too movement that attaches to families and family court, although we need it. And this data and in the larger protective parent movement is really trying to bring that. I think there’s a very long history of denying women’s allegations and violence by men, against women and children. If you go back, you know, a hundred or more years, you’re looking at a time when violence in a family is simply not ever acknowledged or recognized or admitted.

2 (15m 36s):
Rape was seen as, you know, virtually impossible to prove because it was virtually impossible to get corroboration and a woman’s accusation could never be believed on its own. Um, child sexual abuse has always been that way in terms of how we respond to it. It’s and it’s because it’s shocking and horrific and people really deeply do not want to believe it. So I think we have a long history of silencing the realities of male violence against women and particularly, and I guess children and the family.

2 (16m 8s):
And we haven’t come to terms with it yet. We’ve begun to in the larger world with the Me Too movement, we haven’t come to terms with it in the family of course setting or in families in general. And so you have this very polarized field where part of the field of family law professionals often feel like women are lying. And I think that’s just, maybe they they’ve met with a lot of men who were falsely accused and claim to be falsely accused. And they find these men sympathetic. And there are many, many things I I’ve spoken to women, uh, who, who act as the guardian ad litem to them who, you know, purport to be very objective, but the minute you send them a case, they start shredding and deconstructing what’s wrong with a mother.

2 (16m 46s):
And I think that’s a very common instinct that it’s easy to throw claims or accusations at women about what they’ve done wrong or why they’re not credible. There’s a myriad ways to call women not credible. It’s harder to attack men’s credibility and that’s a longstanding social issue. It’s not, you know, there’s, there’s not one particular problem. The other thing I’ll add to the family court scenario is that there’s a lot of money being made off of denying women’s claims of abuse, um, getting parental alienation assessments, getting treatment for supposed parental alienation and what they call reunification treatment.

2 (17m 18s):
There’s enormous money being made. I think frankly, if the money went away, if there was some way to make this all, I would like to see all of this rolled into the court and only handled by salaried professionals who didn’t gain by what they concluded. Um, I think we would see a more honest and objective assessment. I think there’s a lot of stake in finding alienation some of the professionals and most of them I think are very honestly doing the best they can and believe what they’re saying, what they’re doing and believe they’re helping families when they do it.

2 (17m 50s):
Um, but they don’t understand abuse they don’t necessarily really want to understand abuse of the way those of us who work in the abuse field, understand abuse and there’s just an ingrown skepticism. But, um, some of them, I think, know what they’re doing and are doing it intentionally. There are certainly loud and, um, very active people in the field who are notorious for being somewhat bullying in a way that they write in the way that they speak in the way that they deal in court. And that kind of fits what we know about the denial of abuse.

2 (18m 21s):
There’s a lot of bullying that goes on in that process.

1 (18m 25s):
One of the things that I kept thinking about when I was reading the research was that these decisions were being made by a very specific person. And they were the judges. Did you look at the gender of the judges whilst you were doing your research to see whether there was any correlation between the gender of the judges and the decisions being made?

2 (18m 43s):
That’s a great question. I get it almost every time I’ve interviewed it on. Unfortunately we were not able to look at the gender of the judges because I’m, we were looking at published opinions and they say, so and so comma J, so you don’t get a first name and you can’t tell the gender. And umm, so we couldn’t, we couldn’t measure that at all. I will tell you anecdotally that I have seen as many harsh skeptical female judges as male judges. I don’t see much difference in gender, frankly. And I’ve seen some wonderful leaders in the field who are trying to help children, who are male.

2 (19m 17s):
So I, I don’t know how far we can go with that. I think, I think a better way to look at it is, I mean, when we talk about racism among police forces, we often acknowledge that many of these officers are African American, and there’s a culture, there’s a culture of disbelieving women. There’s a culture of protecting men’s rights in family court. Women are a part of the culture too. Um, or they’re pressured to be part of the culture. They had the judges who’ve left the court and I’ve talked about the pressure on them to not believe women and to protect men’s rights.

2 (19m 49s):
Um, it, I don’t think it’s the individual so much, that’s the overarching sense of what’s right. And what’s right, is to protect fathers rights in the family courts

1 (19m 59s):
And, and that ideology is being carried out by women as well as men. Exactly. And why do you think women are willing to perpetuate that ideology?

2 (20m 11s):
Um, I think many women for potentially very legitimate reasons feel that men have, have not been treated fairly in courts and in the law and when it comes to parenting rights. Um, I think historically there was a truth to that. Certainly women had a maternal presumption long ago. Uh, that’s been gone for a very long time and um, doesn’t seem to be operative anymore at all. Um, but there is a belief that men have never been given, given their due as fathers. That’s one thing. The other one is that I’ve, and I’ve written about this in other articles a long ago.

2 (20m 45s):
There’s a really strong desire across society and within the courts to see more fathering in families. And so when men stand up and say, I want to be a father courts want to reward that very much. And there’s a real sense of that. You’re, you’re a good father, merely for asking for, for equal parenting time. And there’s a real resistance to believing that you might be asking for the wrong reasons because you want to abuse or because it’s an extension of your abuse. So I think there’s a real desire to protect fathers and fathering and to maximize fathering.

2 (21m 17s):
And some of that is, you know, very sympathetic to, even though it’s doing damage potentially. Some of that I think is, um, gender biased probably. Um, but who knows.

1 (21m 30s):
Your research obviously focuses on cases in the United States, but it’s had a phenomenal response here. Um, by way of an example, I published you research on my website and within minutes it went viral. I think on one platform it’s been shared over 3,000 times and the engagement, uh, with the research was significant. There were a lot of mothers who’d gone through the family courts in the United Kingdom who felt that the experiences outlined in the research really resonated with them, but there was also comment and engagement from fathers.

1 (22m 0s):
Who’d gone through the court process in the UK for various different types of hearings. Um, and one father posed a question and he said, well, surely all this research does is confirm that in this particular context, women are less honest than men. Do you think that there is room for that view within your research?

2 (22m 20s):
My research leaves that wide open, anyone can take that view. My research does not refute that view. The only way to refute that view is to look at, um, outside research into the veracity of women’s allegations of abuse. And there isn’t a lot, but there is actually surprising. There is more than I would have expected and particularly looking at child abuse and child sexual abuse, past research before parental alienation became a thing and found that women’s claims of child sexual abuse were likely credible, definitely good faith in the vast majority of the time, but likely credible in 50 to 75% at a time.

2 (22m 57s):
So, you know, half to two thirds of the time outside evaluators who were not overly gullible and who are fairly conservative as evaluators, were finding that these allegations were credible at least, um, a a very, you know, half to more, uh, more than that, uh, of the time. And what you see in this study is courts are believing it only 15% of the time. And when alienation is claimed once out of 51 cases, there is no way that that is reflecting truth. There is no way. And the other way to know is to talk to and interview the mother’s about or Even look at things like our appellate briefs, DV Leap’s, appellate briefs, where we detail the evidence of abuse that the court is choosing to reject.

2 (23m 40s):
I’ve had case after case where there’s multiple layers of corroboration of child sexual abuse. You had a kid acting out sexually. The police are being called against, um, a, an eight year old because she’s making, she’s being sexual with her classmates. Um, that’s, that’s not a sign of, of coaching. That’s a kid acting out. Kids do that kind of acting out most often if they’re sexually abused, not for many other reasons. And then this kid had hallucinations and then, and you know, uh, three out of four evaluators, uh, who had expertise in child sexual abuse thought that, um, there was a good chance she had been sexually abused.

2 (24m 16s):
They never say for sure, but nonetheless the court chose not to believe it and to believe, uh, a psychobabble theory about enmeshment in the alienation and whatever, and, um, chose not to listen to the expertise that was presented at trial on dissociation and how children respond when they’re forced to be with an abuser. The courts are choosing not to believe what’s right in front of their face in many of these cases. And if you get into the weeds of the facts and the evidence and the information, I think it becomes harder to just airily declare that these courts are all doing it right.

2 (24m 48s):
And all these women are lying, but yes, you can make the argument in this study does not refute that

1 (24m 54s):
There are lots of themes that emerge from the research, including human bias. Are you concerned that genuine allegations of child abuse are being ignored or overlooked because of judicial bias?

2 (25m 5s):
Absolutely, but it’s, it’s not judicial bias alone. It’s judicial bias, which has been encouraged and led by other professionals who are neutral court appointees like guardians ad litem or whatever you call them in the UK. Um, or, um, custody evaluators. Um, sometimes the parenting coordinators, there’s a whole stable of psychologists, usually sometimes lawyers and other people who get appointed supposedly to advocate for the child or the best interest of the child. And they are misleading courts into denying abuse and myriad studies of evaluators in the U S and also I believe across the pond have found that these evaluators don’t know enough about abuse and are quick to dismiss it for based on misconceptions and myths about what, uh, you know, how abuse looks and sounds when it happens.

2 (25m 54s):
Um, a lot of the talk about alienation that’s used to deny Abuse describe the behaviors that are commonly found in abuse families. And then they described them as evidence of alienation. So there’s been a whole co-opting of what we know about abuse under the rubric have alienation and they slap the label on, in the course go, Oh, okay. The courts don’t know better often. So I, you know, with regard to bias, I think there is some among the judges. I think there’s probably more however, among these professionals who are making money off of this.

2 (26m 25s):
Um, and that’s not the only reason they believe what they’re doing, obviously. Um, and there’s a lot of bias and I think a lot of judges are being misled and there was a great podcast I’ll point, your listeners too. And that was done by, um, Reveal and it’s called bitter custody. And in one case it has a story about, uh, children who were sent to a reunification program and cut off from their preferred parent who in that case was a father. And they’re in the interview with these children now that they’re older and the judge is interviewed afterward and he says, Oh my, I don’t think we know what’s going on in these programs.

2 (26m 59s):
Maybe we should take a closer look, and that’s my paraphrase. He says something else, but the gist of it, is I had no idea. And that’s what I think is happening with judges. They have no idea, they’re being told by these psychologists, these are good programs and they should send the children in there. They don’t know what’s actually happening. And now that children are ageing out enough to be able to talk publicly about what happened to them there and that’s posing a bit of a problem for some of the programs, but it hasn’t really filtered up to the judges yet. So unfortunately, family court as a place where it, a lot of junk science and invalid assertions, psychological and sociological, psychosocial assertions about treatment, about diagnosis, about labels are made and of courts don’t know better.

2 (27m 42s):
They don’t know it’s unreliable. Now I will say going beyond that, that when they have an expert on staff telling them it’s unreliable, they often refuse to accept that. So there is some bias going on there too, but I don’t think it’s necessarily mostly bias on the part of the judges. I think there’s a lot of misleading going on.

1 (28m 1s):
On the point of bias. We’re seeing a phenomenon in the UK, which has been going on for quite some time now where mothers who speak to that legal representatives about domestic violence they are experiencing, are often told or advised not to mention it to the judge at all, because it will lead to them losing custody of their children, or in England, we call it contact and not having that contact with their child. And in some cases being permanently separated from their children. This is obviously something that’s happening here in the UK, and it’s been happening for some time. Do you see similar advice being given to women in the U S and what do you think of this practice?

2 (28m 36s):
That’s a very difficult question. Obviously, my study confirms that this is happening in the courts. Women are losing custody, which to us is they may or may not lose all contact, but losing the care of their children is, is very, very significant. Um, and they’re losing it the most when they alleged child abuse and there’s a cross claim of alienation. So it’s happening whether the advice is being given about domestic violence. I don’t think so. However, I do think it’s beginning to be given around child abuse claims. Um, it’s clear from this data, the courts are less reactive and punitive about domestic violence claims.

2 (29m 9s):
They also don’t give them that much weight, so it’s less risky for women, but it also doesn’t help them as much as one might hope with regard to safe custody. Um, but child abuse claims are very risky for women. I can’t say I know it’s happening a lot, but I have heard of cases here and there, where lawyers have said, it’s too risky. You may lose your children. And I’m at a point, people used to ask me this, like 10 years ago, they would say, would you advise clients not to bring it up? And I would say, I don’t really know. It would depend on the evidence. Well, now with this data, I would advise parents not to bring up child, women not to bring up child sexual abuse, unless there is, you know, eye witness evidence, or, you know, maybe a past conviction of the abuser.

2 (29m 54s):
If all they have is a child’s report and it’s going to be sort of a battle of the experts, and he’s probably going to claim it alienation, don’t bring it up because it’s your ticket to losing custody at this point, I would say. Child physical abuse is less clear, but it still seems pretty high risk, but child sexual abuse as the one where I think I would have to say that I would actually give that advice and say, here’s what we know empirically your odds are of losing custody. In fact, I can give the odds here, hold on. Sorry. I don’t, I don’t have the answer on that particular data point, but I have the odds earlier when it’s not involving alienation, um, mothers have 2.5 times the odds of losing custody when they’re alleging both physical and sexual abuse, then when they allow a child sexual abuse alone, for starters, So that mixture is really bad.

2 (30m 45s):
Um, mothers who alleged child abuse by father are at a one in four risk of losing custody to the alleged abuser. So it raises your risks,

1 (30m 58s):
But what do women then do if they’re genuinely concerned about their child, but they’re being told not to mention it in court. How can they protect their children in those cases?

2 (31m 7s):
I’m sorry to say that the courts are making it very, very difficult, if not impossible to protect children in these cases. And that’s, you know, I have a client, I had a consult client recently, who I said, these are the data. This is what will happen if you don’t win. And your odds of not winning are very, very high. And she said to me, I can’t not fight for my children’s safety. And I said, I hear you. I respect that. I just need you to know, you know, the risk you’re taking and you’re taking that risk with your eyes open. You know, some women feel like that, that they have to act from their heart.

2 (31m 40s):
Other women look at the risks and say, I have to act pragmatically here. If, if my children are going to be even worse off than they would be, if I don’t bring it up, I better not bring it up. Even though I can’t, it means I can’t protect them completely and protecting them a little bit from what would happen if I do bring it up. And it’s a terrible, terrible, um, a rock and a hard place for mothers who, who love their children it’s is unconscionable that we’re doing this to mothers and children.

1 (32m 9s):
I think there are very few cases worse, I think, than having to decide how you’re going to protect your child in those sorts of circumstances

2 (32m 17s):
Or how you’re going to have to let them not be protected. Exactly.Yeah.

1 (32m 22s):
Now you’ve been looking at these issues for more than 15 years and a PBS program. You took part in about the impact of domestic violence on children and mothers specifically sparked heavy criticism when it ad in 2005, particularly from fathers and fathers rights groups, which led to the PBS ombudsman at the time, Michael Gettler stepping in and making a judgment call on the documentary a, which wasn’t a very favorable, calling it a flawed presentation that diminished the impact and usefulness of the examination of a real issue by what Did indeed come across as a one-sided advocacy program.

1 (32m 53s):
How do you feel about Gettler’s comments on the documentary, 15 years on?

2 (32m 58s):
It was a very powerful documentary in particular because it was called, um, “Breaking the silence: children’s voice”s, and it focused on children. It had interviews with children and feeling of children, one in particular I’ll never forget, who is whispering from her father’s house on the phone to her mother “get me out of here”. And when you see that you realize what mothers are being put through on what children are being put through in these cases, although, you know, you can write it off and say, that was one case where these were four cases in this particular show.

2 (33m 28s):
So here’s what I think about that. It wasn’t presented to be a neutral study like mine is, it was presented to, to give a perspective of what was being done to some children in some cases, and those things were being done to those children in those cases. And, um, you could liken it to a story about the Holocaust interviewing survivors of the concentration camps and saying, well, you didn’t interview any of the Nazis. You didn’t interview the guards. Is this a fair depiction? It’s a fair depiction of what the survivors experienced.

2 (33m 59s):
There are some things that, you know, interviewing the other side, you’re just going to get denial and obfuscation. Um, you can do that and pretend to be balanced in doing that. Or you can just say, um, uh, atrocities are atrocities and here I’m describing some. How representative they are remains to be seen. So I don’t think there was anything wrong with the documentary. I think the fathers’ rights outcry was to be expected. I think PBS in the ombudsman were more shocked than they should have been, but I think most of the world doesn’t understand how vocal and aggressive fathers rights organizations are, and how much they seek to, And often inflicting pain, um, those who work with, um, victims and advocate for victims.

2 (34m 47s):
And so they’re very well organized. They’re very powerful sometimes. And they threaten to sue all over the place and they had the resources to do it. Unlike most battered women who are completely out of money and don’t have the resources to sue the bad evaluators, et cetera. So, um, so they have a lot of, a lot of, um, intimidation power. And so, yeah, so the ombudsman stepped up and did his critique, which I don’t listen to a whole lot more than the fathers’ rights people listen to my listen to that, that documentary.

2 (35m 16s):
Um, what they did ultimately was a, another show on the demand of a fathers’ rights people. And I was supposed to be kind of the other side, but it was really, it was more like a family court story of how we try to be balanced and fair. And it didn’t, it just whitewashed everything. It didn’t really go in either direction. Um, it wasn’t, I don’t even think it got much attention, ultimately. Your research

1 (35m 38s):
Raises a lot of concerns around the way these cases are handled. What can child protection professionals do to ensure that children are the priority and these kinds of cases and parents are not unjustly punished for trying to protect their children. I think child protection professionals

2 (35m 53s):
Absolutely need to shed the idea of parental alienation is what’s happening. When mothers allege child abuse, they need to just get rid of that. There is no science behind that. And even the current experts in alienation say, that’s not what it’s about. I have yet to see any of them say it’s being misused in that way to deny true abuse, but they’re, they’re moving slowly in a direction, some of them I think, and they say, it’s really not about child abuse claims. You have to evaluate child abuse on it’s on its face. So everybody family, of course, and child welfare professionals need to be taking the question of alienation, friendly parents in measurement, any of those labels out while they assess abuse and they need to assess abuse based on expertise about abuse not based on this kind of ideology that says women lie all the time and that the women are able to convince their children to not only report false things, but to emote false things and to hallucinate false things.

2 (36m 52s):
And to remember false things, all of that stuff is been fabricated. There’s not much science behind it, if any, and yet, and the whole system is relying on this notion that is so often false. Um, we need real experts in sexual abuse and only experts in sexual abuse, assessing sexual abuse. Um, and I think we need real experts in family violence and domestic violence assessing all other abuse claims because child welfare professionals in particular have been very slow to understand how adult domestic violence radiates through the family and victimizes children inherently as well as often physically as well.

2 (37m 27s):
Um, I think child welfare professionals have been very slow to understand coercive control, which is a huge part of what we know about domestic violence and domestic violence perpetrators. Um, and often you don’t have smoking guns and major injuries and broken bones, but you may have a lifetime of terror and existence of terror that comes from the coercive control of this perpetrator and child welfare professionals need to recognize that because that has profound implications for child safety both in the moment and after separation because the, and it’s usually the men, but the perpetrators who utilize coercive control are the most dangerous for not only adult victims, but for children, First of all, and second of all children are much more at risk after their parents separate than when they’re there, they’re in a unified family, um, even if the perpetrator never laid a hand on the children after separation, anyone who has been battering, an adult or utilizing coercive of control is a much greater risk to children after separation.

2 (38m 27s):
These are things child welfare professionals need to know. They need to focus on risk, not just what happened and what can we prove happened. But what do we know about the dynamics in a family that pose risk? And I don’t see them doing that very much on this, over here, certainly. Um, I don’t know about over there.

1 (38m 44s):
I think we have the same concerns here in terms of getting up to date, progressive, sophisticated, evidence-based information. Uh, and I think in a lot of ways, our systems are quite similar. You’re going to be kept very busy over the next few weeks with your current research, but I wanted to ask you whether you had any other research projects, uh, that you’re thinking of carrying out. And if we can have a sneak peek?

2 (39m 9s):
Um, I have so many things I want to write. Some of them are empirical and some of them are not. I need to get this data out more widely than it has been so far. I need to educate the child abuse field. And I’m working on that, uh, with regard to this data and other things related things. Um, and I’m also trying to get out analysis and thinking and about why family courts are the way they are and how they can change and how we can change the laws to help them change. In terms of future research, I, um, have my eye on a incredible data set that is managed by the Center for Judicial Excellence based in California, which has, um, piggybacked on other people who had, who had begun many years ago to collect to track child homicides, uh, that were committed by a parent.

2 (39m 58s):
Um, usually in the context of separation or divorce, um, and the Center for Judicial Excellence has been doing an amazing job of collating and continuing to track these and to try to analyze how many of them could have been prevented in others. How many of them are cases where a court knew, um, a was warned that a child was at serious risk from this parent, usually the father, but not only there are some other cases in there too. Um, and they’ve already identified just based on media, about a hundred cases where these children did not have to be killed.

2 (40m 32s):
And of course it could’ve of protected them but wen unnoticed, but we haven’t been able, we haven’t had the resources to, um, analyze all 700 and some which they have in their data set now, or to more, more thoroughly analyze the hundred that they’ve flagged. Um, and we desperately need research funding for that work. And I’m, I’m in my new center at GW, I’m going to be looking into finding funding for that, whether I do it myself or I do that in tandem with the sensor itself and some researchers we bring in remains to be seen as I couldn’t do it hands on, I’d have to hire someone anyway, but we need reporters as well as potentially lawyers who have some time to do some digging into these case files and be able to demonstrate what courts knew and when they knew it and, and why they did or did not protect the child.

2 (41m 19s):
Um, so I’m hoping that that’s a new area of empirical research that we’ll find the support to do. And then there’s a lot of pieces of this data that we haven’t analyzed yet, like visitation, or even just looking at who ends up with custody without worrying, who started with custody. If we do that, we will be able to bring in a lot of the cases we had to screen out when we were looking at custody and reversals. Um, and that’s the data that I think we need to get out. Um, we need to look at visitation. We need to look at corroboration. We want to look at the child welfare agency cases and analyze what was happening in those.

2 (41m 51s):
We want to do a more specific analysis of the child sexual abuse cases to see if we can come up with some qualitative, as well as quantitative analytic, um, explanations of what’s happening in those cases. So, um, there’s a lot more to be done with this dataset, which is incredibly rich and complicated. And in the, the other thing I’ll say, if there are any US listeners to your podcasts, um, the data is all organized by state, and we very much hope that state researchers will download their set of cases. They can either use our coding, or they can recode along the lines that they want to, their cases.

2 (42m 26s):
In most States, it’s a manageable number, California. It’s an unmanageable number 500 plus I think cases, but, um, most States it’s much, much less than that and they, they can wrap their minds around and then they can do state based analysis and use those for law reform. So I hope that happens too. If you had just one sentiment that you were able to show with child protection professionals, what would you say to them? I would say know where you have expertise in where you don’t, if you don’t have genuine expertise in child sexual abuse, make sure you get someone who’s a true expert, meaning they have worked with children.

2 (43m 4s):
They have been able to identify true and false cases. Um, they can help you assess. Um, I would also say don’t, um, don’t use alienation or that kind of thinking to discredit allegations of child abuse and in particular, do not use the fact of custody or access litigation as a reason to discredit reports to child welfare, because it should be, I think, obvious that if a parent finds out the other parent is abusing the child, there is likely to be custody access litigation that does not mean it is false.

2 (43m 41s):
It does not mean it was fabricated for false litigation. On the contrary It means someone is trying to protect a child. And I hope I would say to child welfare, I hope you will go back to your initial mission and purpose, which is to protect children and stop buying into the idea that you’re protecting them by maintaining access with a parent they’re afraid of, and that they say has been hurtful to them.

For our fifteenth Voice of the Child podcast we look at how Fabricated Or Induced Illness allegations are investigated by child protection professionals and the impact of those investigations on parents who are innocent, and their children.

Taliah Drayak’s case was reported on by the BBC last year, after she was accused of harming her daughter. The charges against her were later dropped, but the experience has led her to campaign for changes in how child protection bodies diagnose Fabricated Or Induced Illness (FII), which is also sometimes called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. She talks about her experience, and how it affected her daughter.

Tracey Norton is a volunteer at Legal Action for Women, with a special interest in FII and what she believes is an alarming rise in medical child abuse allegations by councils across the country. Tracey explains that the increase may be due to local authority budget cuts providing a powerful incentive to shift costly support plans away from councils.

Both women are calling for an independent inquiry into FII and the surrounding child protection practices around the syndrome.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Many thanks to Taliah and Tracey, and to Professor Andy Bilson, who we consulted for this podcast.

The Voice of the Child is now available on iTunes.

Further Information

‘I was suspected of causing my child’s illness’ – Taliah’s Story

Fabricated or Induced Illness – Professor Bilson’s website

For debate: Forty years of fabricated or induced illness (FII): where next for paediatricians? Paper 2: Management of perplexing presentations including FII

Assessment and management of adults and children in cases of fabricated or
induced illness (FII) – Updated March 2020

For our fourteenth podcast, the Voice of the Child talks with Professor Andy Bilson about Britain’s child protection practices, why a toxic “rescue mentality” has led to the oppression of vulnerable children and families, and how a new network co-founded by Professor Bilson plans to place parents and children at the heart of social work.

In the podcast, Andy Bilson, an Emeritus professor of Social Work at the University of Central Lancashire and a former Chair of the Council of Europe and UNICEF’s Child Rights Observatory, talks about his new project, “The Parent, Family and Allies Network”, which promotes inclusive, humane and effective child protection practices. 

Professor Bilson, who is currently working on child welfare-focused research at the Department of Public Health and Primary care at Cambridge University, talks about the experiences of families in the child protection sector, concerns around the nationwide variations for the “risk of harm” threshold used to remove children and place them into care, and gives us a preview of not-yet published research he has produced on children removed at birth.

Many thanks to Professor Bilson for being a guest on the programme.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Useful Links

Adoption and child protection trends for children aged under five in England: Increasing investigations and hidden separation of children from their parents

Policies on bruises in pre-mobile children: Why we need improved standards for policymaking

Exploring outcomes for young people who have experienced out-of-home care

Care-leavers and their children placed for adoption

Interventions in Foster Family Care: A Systematic Review

 

For our thirteenth Voice of the Child podcast, we talk with a mother who has experienced three remote hearings during the Coronavirus lockdown, and her McKenzie Friend Anne Neale, who is also the spokesperson for Legal Action for Women.

In this episode, we look at how these hearings are conducted, the ethical and human rights concerns they raise, and we discuss the Nuffield Foundation’s newly published review on remote family court hearings.

Many thanks to the mother (who uses a pseudonym during the interview), and to Anne for taking part in this podcast.

You can listen to the Voice of the Child here. 

Further Reading:

Legal Action for Women’s Submission to the Nuffield Rapid Review

Nuffield Family Justice Observatory Rapid Consultation