— Yes
Renuka Jeyarajah-Dent
Director of operations at Coram, a children’s charity

It is not surprising that our society tends to shy away from taking children from their biological families. However, where there is clear, solid evidence of abuse or neglect, we need to be much more willing to remove them from danger. I also believe that in many cases we should be attempting to do this at a much earlier stage in these children’s lives.

Children who are adopted into loving families can have very positive, happy lives and this is especially true when they are adopted at a young age. Later adoptions can also work but it is much more difficult to get a good outcome for children who enter the care system when they are older.

By then they have often suffered the effects of abuse and neglect, which can mean that they do not believe in themselves or that anyone can really care for them. They are often isolated and tend to behave badly or do poorly at school because learning requires the security that makes it OK to risk failure by trying new things.

There are children in the system at the moment who should have been taken into care earlier because the evidence for this is there, but that is not to say this is straightforward. Taking a child away from parents is emotionally draining, especially when the alternatives also have risks. Making such decisions requires the skills of a variety of people working together. The right interventions to try to help parents cope and quick input make sure that the child gets the care and support needed even when parents are not coping.

Parenting itself is complex and can be difficult. People need support to help them to do it better; there is evidence that this support can work. There is no doubt that a child is better with its family of origin as long as the care they provide is not only practical but also warm and appreciative of the child. It is this warmth that is so tied to positive outcomes – to be loved helps us to go on to love.

But we must acknowledge that there is a small but significant number of parents about whom there is considerable evidence of risk to the child. This evidence – or information that may alert a professional to its presence – is often contained in information about the success of past interventions. Good professional assessments require collection of the right information, analysis, case planning and review and then prompt decision-making.

For children to remain with their parents, the risks of removal need to be finely balanced with the possible dangers of remaining, and any change required of the parent has to be fast enough to cope with what the child’s development demands.

It is also important that, as a society, we recognise how incredibly vulnerable these children are and how it feels to be without a person who cares enough to fight for you – something that most children take for granted. We owe these children the care they deserve, and they deserve the best.

— No
John Hemming
Chairman of Justice for Families

I do not believe that more children should be taken to care. As it is, very often the wrong children are in care; increasing the numbers would simply make this worse. Instead, we need to give more attention to the care decisions taken.

The heart of the problem is that some children are taken into care for ludicrous reasons. I do not think two boys aged 17 and 15 should be in care because they refuse to talk to their mother, as happened in Essex. I do not think that a local authority should attempt to remove a 7-year-old from his mother in Ireland and place him in foster care in Devon because she once was a victim of domestic violence. I do not think children should be put in care because their mother talks to them in a manner that may undermine their self-esteem.

These children are being taken into care for ridiculous reasons and thus clogging up the system, while others, who are at very real risk of serious harm, are left to be hurt or even die because of budgetary constraints. The quality control on the care system that looks at why decisions are made is handled by the family courts. It fails badly.

If we look at the statistics, we can get an overall picture of what happens in family courts. Local authorities in England applied for 8,173 care orders in 2007; of these, only 21 were refused. In other words, the judgment of risk made by social workers was deemed to be so good that they were refused by the judge in only 0.27 per cent of cases. More importantly, in 93 per cent of cases the judge merely rubber-stamped the proposals from the local authority.

Compare these figures with those from the criminal courts. In 2007, 87,553 defendants were sent for trial. About 59,000 pleaded guilty; of the 28,391 who pleaded not guilty, 17,184 were acquitted and only 11,207 were convicted – an acquittal rate of 61 per cent, which is 20 per cent of all cases.

Defenders of the system will say that the standard of proof in criminal proceedings is higher than that in family proceedings. This is true. More evidence is needed in criminal proceedings but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) goes ahead anyway.

So, if the CPS loses 20 per cent of the time, why do local authorities lose only 0.27 per cent of the time? Is it that the judgment of the social workers is so good compared with the CPS that they are invariably right? I very much doubt it.

Despite the recent changes to open up family courts, they are still machines for miscarriages of justice. People who work in the care system believe that it is so reliable that it very rarely goes wrong. My experience, and that of many families across the country, is that exactly the opposite is true.

We will not get the care system to operate properly until the family justice system provides an effective and transparent challenge to the requests made by council social workers. Until we do that, placing more children into care will make matters worse for families and for the children themselves.

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