No wonder more babies are being taken into care – today’s cultural climate makes that horribly inevitable
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Version 0 of 1. What could be worse than spending your life rolling a boulder up a hill each day, only to have it roll back down again each day? Actually, completing a pregnancy each year, only to have your baby taken from you each year, sounds considerably worse. But new research into newborn care orders confirms that one British woman has given birth 16 times to babies who have been removed from her. Here is horror at its most mundane. Here is the term “self-destructive cycle” made flesh. The worst thing? There can be absolutely no doubt, surely, that the woman locked into this compulsive cycle is not fit to be a mother. To care for children you have to rearrange your life. But there is no rearranging going on here. The same mistake is repeated, again and again and again, with the same abject result. This is the stuff of nightmares. The case of this particular mother of 16 is the most extreme of those highlighted in new research from the University of Lancaster. But it is not uncommon for women who lose their baby to a care order to become pregnant again quickly, and to lose a baby again. The research interviewed 72 women, and found that on average they had four children who had been taken into care. Related: Are we failing parents whose children are taken into care? It’s the most vicious of circles. The removal of the child makes the desire to have another irresistible, while at the same time the emotional damage from losing the child makes competent motherhood all the less likely. The huge shock is that these women – many of them very young – have no statutory right to help or support after their baby has been taken from them. One small charity, Pause, has been set up to try to tackle the problem, which otherwise has been given scant attention until now. Ken Loach did make a film in 1994, Ladybird, Ladybird, which told the story of a mother in an abusive relationship, who had six children taken from her, one of them at birth. It was sympathetic to the plight of women who lost babies to the care system, and the woman in the film – which was based on a true story – did eventually have two babies with a new, supportive partner, that they kept. But it seems that since then, things have got much worse, not much better. The research analysed family court records, and found that there has been a huge rise in the number of newborn babies taken into care in England in recent years. In 2008, 802 babies were taken into care. In 2013, it was 2,018. Between 2007 and 2014, a total of 13,248 babies were taken into care. The researchers say there is no clear, particular reason that explains the “disproportionate” increase. But it’s hard to resist the idea that a lot of it is simply down to cultural climate. A lot of things have happened which might have contributed to such a situation developing. The high-profile case of “Baby P”, who was killed by abuse and neglect in his home in August 2007, not only made it clear that it was very difficult to protect a child within a home, but also that the public didn’t have much sympathy for social workers who had tried and failed to do that ultra-hard task. More generally, there has been a growing awareness that even without deliberate abuse, simple neglect is extremely damaging to a child’s psychological development. Until recently, it was considered best to keep a child in her home environment as long as she wasn’t in physical danger. Attitudes have hardened as research has uncovered the damage caused by neglect alone. Further, there has been governmental pressure for some time now, due to the parlous life chances of young people emerging from the care system, for adoption to be pursued with more enthusiasm. In the past, people who wanted to adopt babies, not older children, were often seen as a bit sentimental, picky or selfish. But the truth is that adopting abused or neglected children is hard. Adoptions of older children do sometimes break down, damaging a troubled kid even further. And all that was in the air even before austerity became the order of the day. Cuts to the public sector have impacted worst on mothers and children, decimating both programmes such as Sure Start, which supported children, and the social fund, which supported their parents. Help for women experiencing domestic violence is literally shrivelling away, with many organisations being forced to cut staff or even close. Family Rights Group has already warned that children are at greater risk of being taken into care as funding to support people experiencing domestic violence dwindles. The worst thing about all this, in a way, is that it’s logical. Children with poor life chances are being taken from risky situations at the earliest possible time. The likelihood of them being able to thrive in a stable environment is therefore increased. It’s all very practical. The only problem is that it’s a moral outrage. Can this be what we want? A society in which things are made as tough as possible for the poor and vulnerable, all the better to take their babies from them, in the full knowledge that there are likely to be more babies where that one came from? It sounds like a ghastly vision of dystopia. But this is Britain, now. |