Wednesday 29 June 2016

​The young mothers trapped in a cycle of having babies removed


The number of newborns taken away by family courts has increased 2.5 times in five years. 
Often cases involve the same vulnerable women, yet they get little help to break the pattern of 
repeated proceedings.
“August 2010. June 2011. June 2012. April 2014.” Chloe reels off the birthdays of her sons. All four babies were removed from her care by children’s services at birth or soon after.

Aged just 16 when she had her first child, Chloe*, now 22, had been in local authority care since she was 11. She cannot count how many times she was moved in foster placements. Her sons were all fathered by the same violent man; he tried to kill her on one occasion, and controlled her so effectively she found it impossible to envisage a life on her own. Distraught after her first child was removed at a few months old, Chloe went back to her boyfriend. 
The abuse restarted and she was trapped.
It’s a pattern repeated frequently. But the state is failing to acknowledge or help the vulnerable women who are repeatedly traumatised by the loss of a child, often at a very young age, says Prof Karen Broadhurst, of Lancaster University. Broadhurst has recently released the latest set of findings from her population profiling study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, that reveals the scale of women’s repeat involvement in public law care proceedings in England.
Analysis of cases involving 43,541 birth mothers and 85,452 children revealed that in five years the number of newborns removed increased two and a half times, from 802 babies in 2008 to 2,018 in 2013. And, in new information released to the Guardian, it showed that only one in 10 of those babies ever returned to its birth mother. This compares with all children in care proceedings, where about four in 10 end up in the care of the state.

So if a woman loses her baby at birth, the odds of being reunited are slim. 
If a mother is aged between 16 and 19 when she is first involved in care proceedings, 
she has a one in three chance of the state applying to remove a subsequent baby if she comes
 before the family court again
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