Reducing recurrent care proceedings: initial evidence from new interventions

Abstract

The English family justice system faces a crisis of recurrence. As many as one in four birth mothers involved in public law care proceedings in English family courts are likely to reappear in a subsequent set of proceedings within seven years. These mothers are involved in up to one-third of total care applications, as they are -by definition -linked to more than one child . Few birth mothers experiencing the removal of a child to care are offered any follow-up support, despite often facing multiple challenges including poverty, addiction, domestic violence and mental health problems. Since 2011, however, a number of new services have been established to begin to address their unmet needs. This article summarises the findings of the first academic-led evaluation of two of these initiatives. Presenting evidence from a mixed-methods evaluative study, it concludes that the new services were able to foster relationships that 'worked' in reducing recurrent proceedings. None of the women engaging with the services went on to experience what could be described as a 'rapid repeat pregnancy' within the evaluation window. Just as significantly, a number of clients reported some improvement in their psychological functioning, and the practitioners involved reported positively on their experience of delivering and managing innovative services. The article closes with a discussion of the challenges of evaluating personalised, strengths based interventions and the possibilities of evidencing empowerment in these cases.

Evaluating integrative services in edge-of-care work

“…The issue of integrity in responding to self-report measures in a context in which mothers feel they are under intense scrutiny will need further investigation as it has a significant impact on the extent to which similar evaluations in social care can make use of self-report measures when families are subject to child protection proceedings. There were similar issues with self-report measures in two other social care intervention evaluation studies within the region (Granville, 2016;Cox et al, 2017).…”

“…of PIMHAP families (28/55) might have stayed together; whereas 47/55 families actually stayed together, giving an added benefit to 19 families. It has been estimated that care proceedings cost a minimum of £50,000 per case (Cox et al, 2017), which would suggest that PIMHAP may have helped to save £950,000. Offsetting this against £600,000 service running costs means an overall saving of around £350,000.…”

“…Established safeguarding services have often been reactive in nature and have often focused on meeting a child's needs once they have entered care proceedings rather than on more preventive measures (Munro, 2011). New preventive initiatives have been inspired by high profile social care serious reviews (Board, 2009;Laming, 2003), efforts to reduce the high number of LAC in England (DfE, 2015) and new measures to help parents break destructive cycles of recurrent care proceedings now estimated to account for up to a quarter of all public law care proceedings in England and Wales (Broadhurst et al, 2015;Cox et al, 2017;Pause, 2015).…”

“…New Family Drug and Alcohol Court services have pioneered new ways to lower child safeguarding risks by tackling parental substance misuse (Harwin, Alrouh, Ryan & Tunnard, 2014). A number of interventions have developed nationally to work with women following the removal of children, in order to avoid future recurrent care proceedings, taking both an early intervention, pre-pregnancy approach and also targeting those most at risk of child removal (Cox et al, 2017;Pause 2015). A broader of range of evidence based interventions aimed at 'edge of care' families are identified in a recent literature review (Schradee-McMillan & Barlow, 2017), including those which like the current study are aimed at enhancing attachment relationships and reducing risk of abuse.…”

Experiences of social work intervention among mothers with perinatal mental health needs

“…Most worryingly, there were indications that social work intervention could intensify pressure on mothers’ mental health leading to escalating difficulties and increased likelihood of care proceedings. Other research (Cox et al, ; Schofield et al, ) has highlighted how little social work support is available to mothers following loss of custody and the long‐term consequences of such neglect can include repeated care proceedings (Broadhurst & Mason, ). New UK services such as PAUSE (McCracken et al, ), MPower and Positive Choices (Cox et al, ) aim to halt the cycle of recurrent care proceedings but the need for proceedings could perhaps be reduced by strengthening social work intervention for mothers with perinatal mental health problems.…”