REPORT ON TROUBLED FAMILIES - JULY 2012
You may have caught the reports at the weekend about
the woman who is saying that problem families are having too many children. Her
solution: “The mothers need to think carefully next time”.
I dare say I’m not the only Carer who thinks
capping these families is a good idea. Severely
incapable mothers need to stop having children. But does anybody really believe we can solve the problem by asking the mothers to think?
I don't. But even in my anonymity, I'm too sensitive to the awaiting backlash to pin up my views, as, I suspect is the author of the report. I'll pussyfoot, and say that I believe the time has come for a debate about intervention.
LOUISE CASEY
 |
| LOUISE CASEY |
The woman who has drawn up the report, Louis Casey, doesn't usually
mince her words. In fact she’s famous for telling it like it is: “If
No 10 says bloody 'evidence-based policy' to me one more time I'll deck
them," she joked. "... and probably get unemployed."
The
Guardian said “Those who know Casey said her speech had been intended to be
ironic and was in character”
She became:
Deputy director of Shelter in
1992.
Head of the Rough Sleepers' Unit (RSU) in 1999.
Director of the
national Anti-Social Behaviour Unit (ASBU) in 2003.
Head of the Respect Task Force in 2005.
Victims' Commissioner of the United Kingdom in March 2010, a role from which
she resigned in October 2011.
Head of The Troubled
Families Programme 2012
HER REPORT ON "TROUBLED FAMILIES"
Obviously this is an issue that affects every
Foster Carer more deeply than most of the rest of the population – although it’s
worth knowing that the 150,000 troubled families in the UK are costing the
country £9 billion a year.
The report looks at 16 case studies: real live “families”
whose identities have been changed. Louise thanks them graciously for their
openness.
I suspect that she has gone for the most extreme
examples, as those probably harbour more insight, but give it a quick look yourself: almost every family reads like the average case we have to deal with.
"Phil" is the most interesting to me, 9 children with another on the way, he and his partner both with learning difficulties.
I’ll put the link to the report here, I’d be
interested in your thoughts.
I won't spoil it by pre-empting the causes of the families' troubles. If you're a carer reading it you'll just keep nodding your head, and muttering "yeah, yeah,yeah".
One or two titbits to be going on with:
“Children in care or leaving
care have repeatedly been shown to be at higher
risk of teenage pregnancy.
One survey showed that a quarter of care leavers
had a child by the age of
sixteen and nearly half were mothers within eighteen
to twenty four months after
leaving care”
“Many of the families we
interviewed had large numbers of children. 8 families
(half of those we
interviewed) had four or more children – whereas in the
general population it is
unusual to have four or more (only 4% of the
population do so).”
“Many were in and out of care from early
childhood. It is difficult to disentangle
which problems resulted from
what happened at home and the impact of time
in care. In addition, there
was always an ongoing relationship or contact with
the family. Sometimes, this
was positive – but more than often it was not.”
“And even if there were
serious enough problems identified for a child to be
removed from their parents,
few talked of being offered any professional help
to come to terms with what
had been occurring. Stella identified how she had
carried problems from her
childhood into adulthood, and what would have
helped:
“The only problem with
children’s homes, that I didn’t see back then that I see
now, was that I had no help
with the abuse, I had no help with nothing. No
counsellor or nothing, I was
just left to deal with my life. Because there’s this
thing that people seem to
think that once a child is taken away from abuse,
they are okay. They are not,
it sticks with them. And they grow into adulthood
with all this going
on.”
The Secret Foster Carer
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