PAR Magazine Issue 3
Too many infants in care? Too little support to parents?
Life Without Maggie
A personal experience of having a child removed:
Words hurt. Especially when they come from the people holding the balance of your child’s future in the palm of their hands. The process of having a child removed throws you into a swirling storm. Your role as a parent is, in all but name, stripped from you. Lawyers, social workers, panellists – these are all voices which carry a tremendous amount of weight and which you need to hear with intense focus and clarity. It’s utterly daunting and confusing.
You’re blown about in so many different directions that, at times, you don’t know which way is up and which way to turn.Click here to read the full story of how parent advocacy makes a difference.
Too many infants in care? Too little support to parents?
The World Health Organisation long ago spoke a truth – ‘If a community values its children it must cherish their parents’.A recent report on children in care in Scotland draws attention to the serious problem of the removal of infants from their parents either at birth or soon thereafter. Most reports on children in care concentrate on the implications for the child and rightly so. We think the findings of the report tell us something further - that more needs to be done to support parents to raise their own children where ever possible. Click here to read the full story and find out why.
Legal News
Catriona Grant looks at interesting cases and up and coming changes in the law in Scotland regarding children and their families. Please be aware before reading this article that there are references to domestic abuse and rape. This case is about the distress of one child causing all contact to stop with a parent but letterbox contact going ahead for another child.Read this month's Legal news here.
Challenging the Over-Representation of Care Experienced Women in Prison
By Claire Fitzpatrick and Katie Hunter
This International Women’s Day we choose to challenge the over-representation of care-experienced women in prisons across the country. Despite popular perceptions continuing to link care experience with troublesome behaviour, just 1% of children enter care because of ‘socially unacceptable behaviour’[1]. However, women who have been in care as children (for example, in foster care or children’s homes) have long been over-represented in the criminal justice system. Whilst only 1% of the general population have been in care, estimates suggest that this is the case for 31% of adult females in custody[2]. This figure is very likely to be an underestimate because of the difficulties in identifying past care experience amongst those in prison[3].