Taken and forgotten: how vulnerable mothers are failed by the UK justice system

Young women face repeated child removals, a lack of support, and impossible odds to keep their families together, reports Scarlet Hannington. CW: Contains reference to domestic abuse and self-harm.

Chelsie* gave birth to her first daughter at 20 years old, and was instantly filled with love. A few days later, she stood outside the hospital doors watching as a social worker bundled her newborn child into a car, and drove away. She cried for days. On a maternity ward a little over a year later in late 2022, surrounded by fellow mothers with cooing family members, Chelsie anxiously waited again. This time, for her second daughter to be removed from her care.

First-time mums under the age of 25 are more than twice as likely as older women to be involved in care proceedings (court cases involving the local authority and social services when a child is thought to be at risk of significant harm), but this jumps to five times as likely for women under 20. The younger the mother is, the higher the risk of repeat proceedings, with three-quarters following the start of a new pregnancy.

In the year to March 2024, 83,630 children were looked after by local authorities across England, a 0.5% fall since last year and the first fall in 16 years. But women who do experience child removal often have intersecting unmet needs, including domestic abuse, homelessness, mental health, and substance misuse, according to a recent report by Agenda Alliance, a non-profit working towards ending harm against women and girls.

Photo by Jenna Norman on Unsplash

“There’s a stigma that only monsters get their children taken away, but that’s not the case at all”, says Diane Davies, a qualified social worker who up until recently worked at PAC-UK, an organisation supporting adopted children and birth parents post-adoption.

After 14 years of government austerity measures, trauma-informed wrap-around support services are practically non-existent. Perhaps most concerningly, support is a postcode lottery. One of the few, Pause, a national charity working with women to reduce the risk of repeat child removal, only operates across 25 of 317 local authorities in England. And, the further East or North of England you get, the fewer locally developed services there are. Out of the mere 35 local authority services across England offering support specifically with child removal, only one is in the North East. What’s more, it doesn’t accept referrals from mothers who are pregnant, ruling out hordes of parents experiencing repeat proceedings. The consequences for families are undeniable - despite only 28 per cent of the child population living in these areas, the North has the highest care rates in England, at 36 per cent.

“There’s a regional gulf”, says Cathy Ashley, Chief Executive of Family Rights Group, a charity helping parents whose children are in need, at risk or are in the care system. “A newborn baby is three times more likely to be subjected to care proceedings in the North East than in London, which is a huge injustice to the baby, parents and family”.

Findings from the Care Crisis Review in 2018 – that deprivation, poverty and financial pressures impact both families and the system itself – are still relevant today. But “it's not that there isn’t severe poverty and deprivation in London, it’s just in a different context, where clearly there are more opportunities often available that aren’t there in the North East, for example. And the infrastructure is more robust”, Ashley explains.

The Lead contacted the government to ask if there are any plans to address the regional disparities in child removal and support, but didn’t receive a response.

Vulnerable women abandoned by the system

Chelsie, who is 23 years old and lives in Bolton, Manchester, was first referred to Children’s Services in 2020. This was standard procedure - she was 19 and just found out she was pregnant while staying in a domestic abuse refuge. Initial social worker plans changed, and it was decided Chelsie would undertake a residential rehabilitation programme for substance misuse while her daughter, Marie, would be in a foster care placement as a newborn.

Under the Children and Families Act (2014), if parents implement changes in a brief six-month period before care proceedings are completed and before courts decide whether a child should be placed in care or under local council supervision, they can regain custody. Chelsie was on track. “I was clean at this point, and then I went to rehab. I did pretty much everything they were asking me to do”, she says. But as Marie was turning six months old, Charlie reconnected with her abusive ex-partner, and social services started pushing for adoption.

Chelsie’s response to domestic abuse isn’t unusual. According to Refuge, the largest specialist domestic abuse organisation in the UK, it takes an average of seven attempts before a woman leaves domestic abuse for good. “I was honest with them, but there was no support,” says Chelsie. “It was just like, ‘Right, you've messed up’, she says. “My solicitor said, ‘You don't really have a leg to stand on’”. In 2021, when Chelsie was 10 weeks pregnant with her second child, Jade, a court hearing granted social services permission to start looking for permanent adoptive parents for Marie. Chelsie recalls that as she was still reeling from the decision, a social worker approached her to say “You’re so young, you can have children in the future”. The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS), which independently advises family courts on what’s safe and in children’s best interests, published its Domestic Abuse Practice Pathway for professionals this year, aiming to enhance support. Despite the document being commissioned in response to a Ministry of Justice report that found the family justice system did not effectively protect victims of domestic abuse, there are currently no plans to open previous family court cases involving domestic abuse in light of the new guidance.

“If you want to leave, leave. But leave your child.”

By the time Tasha, from Wigan, Northwest England, was 20 years old, all three of her children had been removed from her care.

Tasha gave birth to her first daughter, Emily, at age 16. Two weeks later, she remembers noticing a small friction mark as she “scooped [Emily] up in a towel after Thursday night bathtime”. Although the mark was later found to be accidental in court, it set care proceedings in motion and led to Tasha undergoing five and a half months of constant monitoring ordered by a judge. Sat with six-month-old Emily asleep on her chest in one of the 19 Mother and Baby Units across England and Wales, she was then told by her social worker she was “young of age” and “that was the issue”. Emily was going to be adopted.

Shortly after, when Tasha was 18 years old, her son, Daniel, was born. He was placed for adoption almost a year later. Then, at 20 years old, Tasha was only given 24 hours with her last child, Moya, legally in her care. “That hurts me the most”, she says of the adoption when Moya was three months old. “Social workers had raised no concerns before the birth, but when I was having two-hour supervised contact sessions with her while she was in foster care, they said they couldn’t trust what my parenting would be like long term”. Instead of a fresh start, each new pregnancy came with scrutiny.

To Davies, Tasha’s case isn’t surprising as “social workers are strapped for time and resources and have to make snap decisions about immediate safety…if they’re reading your file before they even meet you, and they have to, they’ve often made their mind up about you already”.

Repeat care proceedings and jumping through endless hoops to little avail pushes many parents to breaking point. In 2020, what was supposed to be 12 weeks of Tasha and her second child, Daniel, living in a foster placement to determine her parental fitness, turned into seven months. The foster carer had recently finished training and this was their first placement. Tension grew, and Tasha felt isolated after the foster carer berated her and called her “immature”.

“It got to a point where I was ringing Samaritans every night just to chat to someone because I felt suicidal. I rang the social worker crying my eyes out, asking her to move my placement. And all I got back was,'If you want to leave, leave. But, leave your child’”, she says.

Calling for more support, research funded by Nuffield Family Justice Observatory found mothers were seven times more likely to die within the eight years following care proceedings than peers of the same age.

Severely depressed, having self-harmed, and wanting the best for Daniel, Tasha told the foster carer she needed to get herself “on track for her son”. After singing him a nursery rhyme, brushing his teeth, and putting him to bed, she packed a bag. Daniel was placed for adoption following a court hearing in 2021. “They put in court documentation that I abandoned him”, Tasha says, remembering the daily routines her and Daniel shared: what breakfast would look like. His tiny fists mashing spaghetti hoops into the suction bowl she’d bought him to encourage independent eating. Which songs he loved the most.

Tasha, now 23, believes if her first child hadn’t been adopted, all three of her children would still be in her care. “You’re not judged for who you are now, but who you were years ago”, she says.

At 34 weeks and three social workers into her second pregnancy, Chelsie’s new social worker informed her the plan had changed to taking Jade to a foster placement after birth. The decision, they said, was down to lack of housing (Chelsie was still in a residential rehab), and not completing psychiatric assessment recommendations.

“They said I needed to do EMDR, but that they wouldn't pay for it because it might not work”, Chelsie says. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) treatment is a form of psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not provided on the NHS, and the average cost in the UK is £70-£120 per session.

“I just broke down because I was like, ‘I don't know what else I can do’”, Chelsie says. “You can’t actually process the trauma of having a child taken and then keep yourself together to prove that you're fit enough to be a mum”.

Davies, Chelsie’s Service Counsellor at the time, thinks social workers ran out of time and couldn’t complete a pre-birth assessment to determine any safeguarding concerns, leaving foster care the only option. When she questioned local authorities on why one wasn’t carried out, she was told: “they don’t do them”. The Lead reached out to Bolton Council for comment but didn’t receive a response.

Taking a more risk-averse approach after missing steps is common for social workers dealing with high caseloads and turnovers, according to Ashley, and applies to more than pre-birth assessments. “What we’re seeing, particularly in the North, is either a Family Group Conference isn’t offered or it’s offered very late into the pregnancy, and then once the child is born the local authority panics and ends up issuing care proceedings, which have long term consequences for the baby and their parents”, she says.

A Family Group Conference is a meeting where family members, friends, and professionals work together to develop a plan for a child and allows for the possibility for kinship care, where the birth parent’s support network care for the child temporarily or permanently.

By the time Jade was returned to Chelsie’s care, adoptive parents still hadn’t been found for Marie. Both Jade and Marie had been placed with the same foster family, and although Chelsie had a strong case to appeal Marie’s adoption order, she feared trying would risk losing both her daughters all over again.

While adopted children statistically fare better across social determinants than children in residential or foster care, they still spend an average of 15 months in care before being adopted, and the impact of losing their birth families and familiar surroundings is often life long and profound. In 2023, 23 per cent of adopted 16 to 25-year-olds weren’t in education, employment, or training, which is almost double the national average. These outcomes worsen if children have been in residential care too. Young care leavers are five times more likely to be homeless, and care-experienced adults are 70 per cent more likely to die up to 42 years after entering care, compared to non-care leavers.

Children in the care system are also more likely to experience poor mental health and have other needs as a result of trauma or neurodivergence. According to Adoption UK’s annual survey of adopters and adoptees, the number of adoptive families facing severe challenges or crises increased to 38 per cent, with three-quarters reporting it was a continuous struggle to get support from statutory services for their adopted child – the highest figures yet.

Left behind

Earlier this month a new report from a group founded by the most senior Family Court judge in England, Sir Andrew McFarlane, called for a reform of the adoption system. Most notably, the report recommends face-to-face contact (where safe) in place of ‘letterbox’ contact, which currently allows birth parents an annual letter from their child, but has no legal basis. There’s hope across support services the report will influence family court adoption hearings throughout England and Wales.

“An adopted child is a shared child, and for too long everyone’s been worried about upsetting prospective adoptive parents”, Davies says. “What about the birth parents left behind?”.

Chelsie hasn’t ever been with both her daughters at the same time, aside from a contact session during Christmas, 2022. Whenever her big sister is mentioned, Jade points to a photograph that hangs pride of place in their home.

Latest figures from the Children’s Commissioner for England show that around 20,000 children are separated from their siblings when placed in care, sometimes split between different local authorities or types of care - like Marie and Jade, now back with her mum - and often lose contact entirely.

“It’s going to be a difficult conversation when they grow up and ask why I got to keep her little sister, but not [Marie]”, Chelsie says. She worries that Marie will feel like she didn’t fight to keep her, and the impact separating the siblings will have. “They really loved each other. [Marie] was obsessed with her little sister and I’ve got lots of photos of them doing things together. But now, at so young, they’ve suddenly disappeared out of each other’s lives”.

While moving beyond archaic contact practices is a step forward, it remedies little for people who want to have children again after having a child removed. Is it enough to give a marginally less devastating ending to something that could have been avoided with the right support?

The answer for Tasha is: it’s not. “I've got a good, what, call it, 60 years left of my life,” she says with a sad laugh. “And I'm sat here going, ‘I don't even want to try and be a mum again’. Once you've made a mistake, it's so hard to prove yourself to others that you're not going to make it again”.

Changes needed

Organisations and groups concerned with the long-term impacts of child removal say an ambitious reform of Children’s Social Care is long overdue.

Welcoming the government’s recent announcement to prioritise early intervention, Family Rights Group is campaigning for it to be mandatory that local authorities offer parents, and parents to be, a Family Group Conference in instances of child protection concerns. Hoping to get recognition and support for kinship care included in the Children’s Well-being Bill, this will mean children are more likely to stay with people they know and trust while maintaining a relationship with their parents, who in the meantime can get support to ensure they can parent effectively. Currently, fewer children in care are being raised by relatives and friends in England compared with international standards, and other UK nations. While not perfect, particularly in instances of domestic abuse, kinship care can offer a less traumatic alternative, reducing the long-term effects and risk of repeat child removals.

There’s also more that can be done to address regional inequalities and inconsistency within practices. The risk of child removal is “affected by the level of deprivation in an area, whether there are local services to support parents pre- and post-birth and the approach of the local authority and family court”, says Lisa Harker, Director of Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. If local authorities adopt “effective relational practices tailored to different communities and circumstances”, that risk can be reduced, according to Ashley.

Where there are repeat proceedings, Harker would like to see the government “commit to funding recurrent care services across the country, to avoid the unnecessary trauma and significant cost of repeat proceedings”.

Ashley is conscious of support being maintained after care proceedings too.“If parents are required to get psychiatric support in order to have custody, there should be a legal duty to still be entitled to that support, even if their child is adopted. That’s not currently the case, and then they’re dealing with the trauma of losing their child on top of it all”, she says.

“Families should have a real chance to stay together, and these are clear steps the government can take”.

*All names have been changed to protect anonymity.