- London Max 26C
- Friday, July 26
Family courts don’t take enough children into care
Ending secrecy will reveal the true extent of abuse and neglect
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It is good news for children that the family courts will no longer be cloaked in stifling secrecy. As The Times revealed yesterday, the presumption now will be to publish court judgments on whether children should be taken into care, or who should look after them and how.
The Times has long fought for this reform: greater openness and scrutiny will help parents to see justice in the very small minority of cases in which their children have wrongly been taken away by the authorities.
There is, however, an even stronger reason to support this transparency — I hope it will reveal the scale and reality of child abuse and neglect; and help to explain why more children must be removed from their parents.
There’s a common belief that local authorities are overzealous in taking children and that we now have record numbers of children in care. It’s simply not true.
There has been a modest rise since the death of Peter Connolly (Baby P) in 2007 but even then the number of children in care is a third lower than 30 years ago. It would be nice to pretend that parenting has improved so much during these years that we no longer need to remove so many children.
The reality is that for the past couple of decades we have been too reluctant to deal properly with neglect. There have been a number of reasons for this. Sometimes social workers believe that, in the spirit of the Human Rights Act, they have to balance the interests of children with the interests of parents. And sometimes we have avoided taking children into care because of the erroneous notion that it is likely to make things worse — yet a foster placement or even a children’s home is always better than neglect and abuse.
The main reason, however, has been the well intentioned but misconceived optimism of social workers that parents can improve. This means that intervention, if it comes at all, is often too late. This causes long-term damage to children and condemns them to a life ricocheting between foster homes, as they exhaust carers with behaviour born out of what they have suffered.
This is not to say that parents should not be given a second, even a third chance, just not a fourth or fifth. Those chances continue even after a child reaches the relative safety of care; too many are returned to their parents, even though two thirds of them are neglected once again within two years.
So I want openness in the family courts to allow the reporting of neglect and abuse cases. Then everyone will see that local authorities are far from being cavalier when they take children away from bad parents.
Sir Martin Narey is a former chief executive of Barnardo’s 2005-2010 and an adviser to the Education Secretary on children’s social care
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