Rights in care
The ‘child-rescue’ approach ignores the reality that the state is not a good parent and that life in care is too often hard and dangerous with poor outcomes for the children ‘rescued’.
Many of the issues experienced are long-term, entrenched problems with the most vulnerable children being failed by successive governments. Yet with numbers in care rising and with huge profit margins making our most vulnerable children a valuable commodity for some of the world’s wealthiest – including Qatar and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds – there is an urgent need for children and their families human rights to be respected and fulfilled.
There needs to be far fewer children coming into care, and much better support for those who must. The plight of children in care is part of the wider need for the government to respect and make real their legal obligations around rights, including ‘everyday’ rights. Rights to housing, to food, to health, to fair pay, to the right to strike….all of these rights are relevant in keeping children safely looked after by their parents.
“The sad indictment is that often the state would have children removed from its own care if we applied the same threshold as we do to families.”
Action For Children & NSPCC
Home Again: Understanding reunification practice in the children’s social care system in England (2022)
“Children are taken into care from their parents because we do not think they are safe or cared for well enough at home. But the evidence clearly shows that we fail to keep the most vulnerable children safe whilst they are in our care.”
The APPG for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults and the APPG for Looked After Children and Care Leaver
Report on Children Who Go Missing From Care (2012)
“The sad indictment is that often the state would have children removed from its own care if we applied the same threshold as we do to families.”
Action For Children & NSPCC
Home Again: Understanding reunification practice in the children’s social care system in England (2022)
Rights to family life
A child’s rights to family life do not end when the state needs to get involved in their care. Currently the care system does not respect this right as much as it should. There needs to be more focus on keeping children with families; on kinship care; on keeping siblings together; on keeping children geographically close to family and friends and on reuniting children with their families.
Practices which do not preserve these relationships directly damage children’s well-being. They also put children in danger by making them more vulnerable and significantly more likely to run away from placements.
“There should be the highest possible bar for removing a child from their family. If the best interests of the child are really what is paramount, we should explore family preservation, kinship care and legal guardianship in that order.”
“Families’ situations change and we need to be constantly asking the question as to whether a child should remain in care. This is especially true when we have children and young people for whom care clearly isn’t working.”
Action For Children & NSPCC
Home Again: Understanding reunification practice in the children’s social care system in England (2022)
“The European Convention on Human Rights 1998 and UK’s Children Act 1989 underpin the legal framework that when non-parental care is required, priority be given to non-residential care, especially with the child’s extended relatives and friends. Our research strongly supports the latter recommendation: Kinship care was associated with better adult outcomes than foster care, which in turn was related to better outcomes than residential care.”
Far from home
Putting children into care outside of their area impacts a number of their rights and is known to place children in danger, increasing the number of children going missing and increasing their vulnerability to gangs and sexual abuse.
In 2012 the government committed to tougher regulations to prevent children being moved out of area yet year on year this has increased, a problem which is growing because of the higher profit margins of locating children’s homes in the North West, where property is cheaper.
“Ministers are today announcing a `task and finish group’ to report urgently by September on tougher regulations and checks before any local authority can place a child outside their home borough.”
Tim Loughton, Former Children’s Minister
Press release: urgent reforms to protect children in residential care from sexual exploitation (2012)
“Both the number and proportion of children in the care system placed more than 20 miles away from home increased each year between 2012 and 2021.”
Become
#Gone Too Far report (2023)
Missing children
“Evidence suggests that distance from home, family and friends is a key factor for looked after children running away.”
Department for Education, UK Government
Statutory guidance on children who run away or go missing from home or care (2014)
“…the well-recognised pattern of children going missing from care when they are unhappy with their circumstances. They may do so for many reasons (including, simply, a wish to return to their families). In some cases they do so because they are seeking to avoid situations where they are at risk of sexual abuse or exploitation at (or in the vicinity of) their placements.”
“In 2020-21, 1 in 10 looked after children were reported missing…This is in comparison to 1 in 200 children in the UK being reported missing each year.”
“…children who go missing from care are being systematically failed – and placed in great danger – by the very systems and professionals who are there to protect them. This is unforgivable.”
The APPG for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults and the APPG for Looked After Children and Care Leaver
Report on Children Who Go Missing From Care (2012)
Not safe, not protected
Children in care face unacceptable levels of danger. They are at increased risk of sexual abuse, criminal exploitation and even of death. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found that there is no regulation of the approximately 35,000 workers whose main role is caring for children.
16 and 17-year-old young people can be placed in unregulated placements and in so-called ‘supported’ accommodation which is not required to provide care. The #KeepCaringto18 campaign, which aims to ensure all looked-after children receive care as part of their placement.
“…those who lived in a care home were nearly four times as likely to have experienced child sexual abuse…Children in residential care are at a heightened risk of being sexually exploited.”
“As a traumatised 16-year-old, I ended up in an unregulated hostel among adults known to police. The first thing any resident ever said to me was, ‘If you want any green [drugs], you know where I am.”
Rebekah Pierre, Care Experienced Social Worker,
Community Care: Open letter to social worker (2022)
“The figure of 33% of such children having contact with the youth justice system is far higher than previous estimates. It is a terrible indictment of the failure of local authorities to parent and support children in their care. If birth parents were told there was a one-third chance their children would end up in the youth justice system, they would do whatever it took to stop this happening.”
David Graham, the national director of the Care Leavers’ Association
The Guardian: Childhood in care raises risk of entering English youth justice system eightfold (2023)
Death
Child deaths in the general population are 7 per 100,000 or 33.1 if neonatal deaths are included. In the most deprived areas this combined figure is 42 per 100,000. These figures will include children in care, however looking at children in care as a group it is clear that they die at a significantly higher rate.
“….400 “looked after” under-18s died in regulated care placements between 2011 and 2021 — a figure that amounts to 130 deaths per 100,000 children in care.”
Right to be heard
Children’s right to be heard, and to have a say in decisions about what happens to them is not sufficiently respected in the care system.
“There are only limited routes by which children in care can compel a local authority to take a different approach to their care from one that it proposes. The legal position of children in care should be improved, so that they can be empowered to challenge aspects of local authority decision-making for themselves.”
“Young people living in residential care may feel that they have little control or say over aspects of their lives. Whereas a young person in a family home might have the opportunity and ability to challenge their parents about issues such as school choice, or rules about going out in the evenings, who they can and cannot see and who they can have relationships with, young people in care may feel less able to test, discuss and bend rules.”
“….local authorities reported that many teenagers were expressing an intention to ‘vote with their feet’, returning home regardless of the suitability of their placement, and despite their care plan. Consequently, children’s services teams were focusing resources on intensive support to give reunifications the greatest chance of success, rather than continuing to fund costly (often unsuitable) placements.”
Action For Children & NSPCC
Home Again: Understanding reunification practice in the children’s social care system in England (2022)
“Within larger, impersonal settings, there is the pervasive threat that children’s individual needs, talents and personalities, as well as their wishes and feelings, will not be known or appreciated; and that the interests of the wider organisation will prevail.”
Ongoing life problems
Long-term outcomes for those brought up in care are poor. This further highlights the extent to which the state is failing children it removes from parental care but also that our society fails the most vulnerable. Compliance with the human rights the UK government has committed to would address these problems.
Homelessness
Youth homelessness has reached unprecedented levels in the UK and care experienced young people make up a disproportionately high number of homeless. Not only do we need to directly address this by supporting families to care for their children and by giving greater support to those children and young people who are put in care but we need the right to housing respected. The right to housing is a bedrock right, enabling the building of positive lives. We need the government to address and resolve the entirely solvable issue of insufficient social housing and sky rocketing private rentals.
“If one in four young adults found themselves homeless once they turned 18, with 14% sleeping rough, we’d be asking where the hell their families were. But these figures are the reality for young care-leavers.”
“Care experienced young people are one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society disproportionately affected by homelessness and its knock on effects which can last a lifetime…”
“Care leavers are given priority for social housing but we only get so many units per year. In 2016 we got 18 flats and we’ve been told the number will go down drastically this year and we have over 300 care leavers now. It’s a real problem.”
Local authority practitioner quoted
CentrePoint: From care to where? Care leavers’ access to accommodation (2017)
premature death and poor health
Research by UCL used Census data to track the impacts of being in care throughout life. The report found that those who had spent time in care were almost twice as likely to die prematurely, with figures showing care experienced adults had died at a rate 62% higher than those who had been cared for by parents and that many also suffered poorer health.
“Unlike children in parental care, people with a history of non-parental care were most likely to die prematurely from “Unnatural causes”. This category includes causes such as suicide, drug overdoses, alcoholism, car accidents, and assaults.”
Professor Amanda Sacker quoted
UCL blog: “We are failing those who spent their childhood in care”, says landmark report (2021)
“What was particularly shocking about our findings, is how much worse the issue of early death has become, especially since much of it was largely preventable due to unintended injury and behaviour linked to mental health difficulties.”