The number of children put on to local authority care plans because their parents have been accused of emotional abuse has soared over the past decade, research has found, amid warnings that some families are being broken up without justification.

Analysis of national care statistics shows that the use of “emotional abuse” as a reason for starting a child protection plan has increased by 164% since 2007-8.

In 2016-2017, over 14,000 more children started on protection plans because of emotional abuse than was the case nine years ago, while 600 more children started on protection plans as a result of findings of sexual abuse, and 750 more because of physical abuse.

Andy Bilson, emeritus professor of social work at the University of Central Lancashire, who compiled the statistics, said the chance of a parent being found to have emotionally abused their child depended on where they lived. “There’s a postcode lottery which means children in some areas of the country are at much higher risk of being taken into care for emotional abuse than they are if they live somewhere else,” he said.

The use of “risk of emotional harm” as a reason for applying to a court for a care order before any harm has happened has become increasingly contentious as care numbers have risen.

“Many parents who have been subject to child protection investigations say that emotional harm is just social workers trying to look into crystal balls, and children shouldn’t be taken away when parents haven’t actually done them any harm,” said Sarah Phillimore, a family barrister who acts for parents, children and local authorities in care cases. “Others say however that we can’t just leave children in dangerous situations until they suffer actual harm and they need to be removed once the level of risk is serious.”

Phillimore is convening a conference on risk of emotional abuse at which Bilson’s research will be discussed on Saturday. Supported by The Transparency Project, a charity that aims to make family law clearer for people who end up in court, the conference will explore whether “risk of emotional harm” can be justified as a reason for the state to intervene so drastically in family life.

Bilson said the issue was particularly acute in some areas. In 60 English local authorities, the rate at which parents were found to have emotionally harmed their child – or were said to pose a risk – more than tripled in the six years to 2017. In these local authorities there was a larger increase in children going into care than in areas where there was a smaller rise or a fall in findings of emotional abuse.

Bilson’s analysis found that the councils with the highest increases in findings of emotional harm were Hackney, Hampshire, Sefton, Wirral and Wolverhampton.

“It’s unlikely that these differences stem from different rates of emotional abuse in the communities covered,” he said. “The differences in intervention rates suggest differences in culture and practice. I think what you’ve got in those 60 local authorities is a big move to rescue children from parents. And I don’t think that they necessarily all need rescuing.”

Phillimore said removing children on the basis of future risk of emotional harm often caused parents serious anxiety. “We can understand why. Emotional harm, unlike physical harm, is not often capable of quick or easy identification, and there can often be problems in deciding when it is serious enough to justify state intervention. The problem is made worse when we are trying to work out future risks,” she said.

Not only is the rise in child protection investigations costing children’s social care huge sums of money – more than half the country’s spend on services for children goes on the 73,000 who are looked after by the state – but Bilson said many families were suffering without reason.

“There were nearly 120,000 investigations last year in England that didn’t lead to a child protection plan, so there’s a lot of collateral damage going on here,” he said. “It’s not just that we’ve had more findings of emotional abuse, it’s that we’ve had a huge increase in investigations that don’t lead to any child protection concerns.”

Source: The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/14/number-of-children-in-care-for-emotional-abuse-soars