Why do social services take away the children instead of the violent man?

Chaotic it’s because the law is still heavily focused on physical violence and because of the standard of proof meaning he said/she said is difficult to get to court.

Langcleg has it in a nutshell - it is society failure not the Mothers necessarily. Often the Mother would be trying to leave a) nowhere to go b) no money for food/bills/rental in some ways that is also endangering the child. Simple removal of the male would suffice.

Yeah the point was about multi agency working TBH.

Yes. Because, all too often, the choice is not between doing the right thing by your kids or doing the wrong thing by your kids. It's between which state agency to piss off and which to keep onside.

Funnelling more money in to benefits would also work. Surprisingly parents who are depressed, stressed and starving don't always make the best parenting choices. Who knew?

Yep. Reforming short term tenancies or providing more social housing would also help. Because it's one thing to leave knowing that you'll be broke, it's quite another to leave when you might have to change rented accommodation half a dozen times over the course of your children's school career, meaning their education is continually disrupted.

I don't know why someone posted that bullshit about violent men not being considered a danger to children - violent men are responsible for the vast majority of children on child protection plans.

Yeah the point was about multi agency working TBH. All well and good for SC to make it clear DA is child abuse and the father should be kept away but not much use to a woman who then finds herself in family court being criticised for ‘parental alienation’ because ‘families need fathers and how he treated you is nothing to do with how he treats the DC’

In fiscal terms, it would also be much cheaper. Looked after children have terrible outcomes and also cost a lot more money than prevention services, so it should always be a last resort.

Funnelling more money in to benefits would also work. Surprisingly parents who are depressed, stressed and starving don't always make the best parenting choices. Who knew?

A fiscal conservative can maintain the illusion of being a fiscal conservative if they're pro-slashing welfare, but pro-increasing the police/prison budget. It's bizarre to me that rather than give a family a few hundred extra quid a month, they'd rather see the state spend many times more in sorting out the consequences of a generation raised in poverty.

Many years ago I saw a man beating up his wife in the street. I reported it to the police (with the woman's encouragement), but the police spent half an hour trying to dissuade me from giving a statement because the couple were 'known to them'.

Apparently CCTV backed me up because the case went to court. It did not, however, result in a conviction. The police officer who was there as a witness said to me afterwards, "well that was a waste of time."

I sometimes wonder if the outcome would have been different if the woman had been middle class, educated, and mentally healthy. I also sometimes wonder if she's still alive.

It seems unreasonably difficult to convict men of domestic violence even when there's good evidence. I can understand why women have little faith in the system.

I’ve had some experience in this field and I can say that’s it’s so much more complicated than I ever imagined!

For a start what’s needed is a public health campaign to teach ordinary members of the public that non physical abuse is domestic abuse and is harmful to children. This is ime the biggest barrier to protecting children.

As well as the fact that the state effectively washes its hands of them when they are 16/18. Growing up in care often does condemn children to a life on the margins. Adoption offers better prospects but is effectively a way of shifting the problem to the adoptive parents who will either sink or swim. The glaring problem is that we live in a society that does not look after its members. That needs to change on a fundamental level.

The high proportion of prisoners who have been through the care system as children shows that this is far from true.

Not just prisons, either. Looked after children are orders of magnitude over-represented in prostitution, homelessness, functional illiteracy/innumeracy - pretty much every measure of marginalisation you can imagine.

No one should be locked up without being convicted of a crime.
Social services should be able to support the woman in getting a court order to remove the violent man from the home, provide evidence (the evidence they are using to have the children removed) and support the woman in the process. If the violent man breaks the court order then this should be taken seriously.

Women who are trying to protect their children by not allowing contact with a violent or abusive man should be backed up by the family court system.

Lang yes, UC makes me feel sick. It throws vulnerable women to the wolves. It allows the state to completely absolve itself of accountability and regresses us to the days before we even had the welfare state.

Princess yes, I agree with you there as well. We often see removal of the kids as making them safe. The high proportion of prisoners who have been through the care system as children shows that this is far from true. It exposes them to new harms and possibly greater harms than staying in a home with DV.

Christ, society is totally fucked isn't it?

So yes, there will be cases where the mother genuinely thinks she is doing what is best for the child.

I'm open to the possibility that there are cases where the mother doesn't just think that, but is correct in thinking it. Ie it's not only her honest belief but empirical fact.

None of which is to say that being a in a household where DV is perpetrated isn't harmful. It is. Just that there are other harms too, some of which come into play on separation.

But the stigma against single mums and the dominant idea that kids are always best off with 2 parents means that many mums will desperately try to cling onto bad relationships or try to find a 'replacement' if their relationship breaks down.

If you read all the stuff put out by Iain Duncan Smith's think tank, The Centre for Social Justice, it's very, very clear that Universal Credit was explicitly designed to "nudge" women into staying in relationships. No acknowledgement that many of those relationships would be abusive whatsoever. It is not an accident that UC is paid to the head of the household, not the woman, with all the vulnerability to abuse that entails.

The difficult ones are the ones where the mother might actually be making the decision that most benefits the child in deciding to stay, or at the very least have no other feasible option open to her. Where a woman might well make a different decision if she could actually be assured sufficient money to live on, secure alternative housing and a legal system that wasn't going to force her children to have contact with her abuser. There isn't necessarily much recognition of this.

Exactly. If we could only get more public awareness that this is actually the truth for some/many women, it would help so much.

Yes, you are right of course. And it's really wrong to simply seek to blame the individual mother as a bad parent. We have a bad system. We have people living in abject poverty due to universal credit and other cuts. We have SS support and budgets being cut. So yes, there will be cases where the mother genuinely thinks she is doing what is best for the child.

I wonder if it would make a difference if we changed our narrative about kids always needing a father. The courts will often order contact where the father has been violent to the mum. So the message being sent is that he is still a good dad and that hitting your partner doesn't impact on your parenting, etc. In reality, kids only need dads when they are good dads. In my view, they are much better off having nothing to do with some waster who beats the crap out of his partner. But the stigma against single mums and the dominant idea that kids are always best off with 2 parents means that many mums will desperately try to cling onto bad relationships or try to find a 'replacement' if their relationship breaks down.

Generally, I agree with Offred.

The Children Act is a wonderful piece of legislation. It's easy for lay people - including quite young children - to understand. And it centres the child in everything. The law makes it clear that the child's needs come first, despite any possible collateral damage for other actors, including parents. And this is a good thing.

However, in patriarchal society where women are blamed because it's easy, mothers are disadvantaged by this.

We'll always have some families, including some mums, whose structures are so chaotic or damaging to children that those children will need removing. It's sad but it's life.

But - if we created a society that supported women better, we would have fewer of them. We need joined-up agency working rather than multi-agency mixed messages, which is what we have at the moment. Women are pushed from the pillar of one agency to the post of another. It's no wonder that it ends in disaster too often.

In fiscal terms, it would also be much cheaper. Looked after children have terrible outcomes and also cost a lot more money than prevention services, so it should always be a last resort.

Cross post there... yes I certainly think the post Baby P mindset has made a difference. I was working in the field at the time that all came out. More experienced care lawyers than me told me it was a bit of a pendulum, depending on whether society was more invested at the time in the narrative of SS leaving children to be abused by their parents or of SS taking children away wrongly.

No, indeed not. I have a bit of experience in this field too, from a legal side, though it's nearly a decade ago. The 'easy' cases are the ones like you describe with the mother at the courtroom door. Clearly that woman should be offered whatever support she needs to identify her situation as abuse and to leave it when she's ready to do so, but she obviously can't be forced and it would be a mistake to try. And her mindset, whoever's fault it is, would of course put her child at risk.

The difficult ones are the ones where the mother might actually be making the decision that most benefits the child in deciding to stay, or at the very least have no other feasible option open to her. Where a woman might well make a different decision if she could actually be assured sufficient money to live on, secure alternative housing and a legal system that wasn't going to force her children to have contact with her abuser. There isn't necessarily much recognition of this.

Princess (I love the name). Yes, you are of course right. The whole system needs changing and leaving needs to be a realistic thing. However, I have also seen cases where leaving was realistic and there was support but the woman in question still chose to stay because she could not bear to be parted from her partner (even if that meant losing her kids).

SS need to be careful as well given the outcry following Baby P. That was a classic case of failing to protect. No evidence that mum herself was abusing the baby, but she allowed her partner to do so and would not leave him. In that case the child died and I wonder whether even if more support had been offered to her, she would have left. It's not always a case of mothers being helpless victims who don't have the support to leave- sometimes they make a choice to put their own needs above those of their children.

Because women who choose abusive men invariably choose another abusive man and abusive step fathers are even more worrying for children than their own fathers.

I have also worked in this area and in my experience, this is not the default position and nor is it taken lightly. However, there are women who despite being given support and help to get away from the perpetrator, will still return. SS can refer women to refuge accommodation and a fresh start and will assist with obtaining non-molestation orders. However, in some cases, the woman will then secretly get in contact with the violent ex, sometimes even disclosing the secret refuge address (which has very very serious repercussions for other women and children living there).

I am sure it is often due to brainwashing and grinding down, but at the end of the day, sometimes a stark choice needs to be made between and adult and a vulnerable child who did not choose to be placed in this horrific situation. In my view, the child must always come first. I have seen a mother at the courtroom door with her barrister telling her that unless she agrees to leave her partner, her children will be taken off her. She still refused, claiming that they were in love and that SS were wrong about his violence. He had strangled her and broken her jaw in front of her 8-year old who had had to dial 999 (not for the first time). I have some sympathy (because these mothers have been let down from the start of their lives) but I can't see what else could be done here. SS had been involved for 2 years. She had received a lot of support but just flat out refused to leave her partner. Even where they were physically separated, she would get back in contact. What else could be done? How was she being an adequate parent?

The sad thing is that so many of these women also grew up with DV being inflicted on their own mothers. And unless the cycle is broken, the same thing will happen with their children- they will either become perpetrators or victims.

At the end of the day, SS cannot 'take away the violent' man if the woman in intent on finding him and bringing him back again.

It's not so much collusion as bare bones failure to protect. It's true of course that someone who isn't doing anything to prevent their children from being exposed to them experiencing DV is failing to protect. It's just that this doesn't take into account whether it would be realistically possible for the person (woman 99% of the time, let's be honest) to leave the abuser and make the children safer by doing so. This is particularly so when the abuser is the parent of the other child/ren and the mother wouldn't necessarily be able to prevent ongoing contact.

It also doesn't consider whether the child is likely to be objectively better off away from the parent/s, given the appalling job we do for looked after children, but then that's true of child protection generally.

Unfortunately some women do choose to stay with violent or otherwise abusive men. This doesn't change the fact that they are victims, but they do have some degree of choice, whereas the children don't have any choice.