1. Both your front page lead yesterday: Landmark ruling ends secrecy of family law
and your leader: Shine a Lightwelcome the decision by the President of the
Family Division to require courts to publish judgements about children in the
public care system. I too welcome this reform and am pleased that, in the very
small minority of cases where children might be taken into care
inappropriately, the deliberations and determination of the courts will be
open to greater scrutiny. But, and this is a far greater problem, I hope this new
openness will reveal the reality of child abuse and neglect and help the public
better to understand why children do, sometimes,need to be removed from
their parents.
There remains a frequently expressed belief that local authorities remove
children too often and that, as a consequence, we now have record numbers
of children in care. It’s simply not true. We have seen a modest rise in the use
of care in England since the death of Peter Connolly but even after that
increase the number of children in care is still a third lower than the number
thirty years ago. It would be nice to pretend that the quality of parenting in
England has increased so markedly during this period that we no longer need
to remove children from neglect and abuse in the same numbers. Sadly, that
is not the explanation.
The reality is that for the last couple of decades, we have been reluctant to
respond effectively to child neglect. There have been a number of reasons for
this. Sometimes it is the belief on the part of some social workers that, in the
spirit of the Human Rights Act, we have to balance the interests of children
with the interests of parents. And sometimes we have avoided taking children
into care because of the notion that care is likely to make things worse (on the
contrary, it’s likely to make things better).
The main reason however has been a well intentioned but misconceived
optimism on the part of social work professionalsin the capacity of neglectful
parents to improve their parenting capacity.This means that intervention in
removing a child, if it comes at all, often comes too late. Extended neglect
causes long term damage to children, revealing itself in difficult behaviour
and condemning such children to a life ricocheting between foster
placements.
That is not to say that parents should not be given a second or even a third
chance to demonstrate that they can care properly for their children, just not a
fourth or fifth. But those chances continue even after a child reaches the
relative safety of public care. The same over optimism about parents being
willing or able to care for children, encourages us to return children home
from carewhere, tragically, two thirds are neglected once again within two
years.
So, I want openness in the Family Courts to allow the reporting of neglect and
abuse cases. When that happens I am confident that the press and the public
will understand that, far from being cavalier whenseeking to take children

2. away from neglectful and abusive parents, local authorities are,
overwhelmingly, right to do so.