Editors: Karen Broadhurst, Lancaster University, Emily Keddell, University of Otago Aoteroea New Zealand, Linda Cusworth, Lancaster University, Lucy Griffiths, Swansea University, Claire Mason, Lancaster University.

https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/born-into-care

Register here for the book launch which is 10^th of June online 5pm - 6.30pm

Introduction

Across hospitals in the UK, Australia, the US, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and parts of Europe, new-born babies are being separated at birth from their mothers, fathers and wider extended families because of child protection concerns. For the first time, this new edited collection brings together contributors from a number of international contexts to spotlight the legal, procedural and ethical questions that concern this practice. Drawing on synergies and common recommendations across the collection, the book sets out a transformation agenda, and serves as an important counter-balance to the mainstream literature which tends to be narrowly concerned with questions of permanency.

Rates of infant entry into care have risen in several high-income countries over recent decades. At the same time, public awareness of what happens inside family justice systems remains limited. In sharing research evidence and critical debate from a number of international contexts, this collection confronts some uncomfortable truths about current practices of removal at birth which are concentrated in the most marginalised communities - as an international trend.

The collection challenges readers - whether policymakers, social workers, lawyers, health professionals, or members of the public to engage with a range of critical questions about the separation of babies from their mothers shortly after birth. Whilst firmly endorsing the need to protect the youngest children in society, the book pursues alternative solutions to removal of babies at birth, grounded in services that are preventative in ethos and close to lived experience.

Anticipating Harm in marginalised communities

Most people assume child protection intervention only happens after serious abuse or neglect. But the reality described in a number of chapters in Born Into Care is far more complicated. Many removals at birth are based not on actual harm, but on anticipated harm - predictions about what professionals believe might happen in the future. This can mean that parents can lose their baby before they have had a chance to demonstrate how they would care for their new family member.

And the families most likely to face this intervention?

• Women living in poverty
• Mothers experiencing domestic abuse
• Families struggling with housing insecurity
• Parents with mental health difficulties
• Minoritised populations, including indigenous communities
• Mothers with previous involvement in the family court system
• Parents with learning difficulties or disabilities or mental health needs

The wider social, economic and political context of baby removals.

The book argues that the removal of babies at birth does not happen in a vacuum. These practices are shaped by wider systems of inequality, austerity, contemporary coloniality and racism, and chronic underinvestment in support services. Moreover, where support services are available, they are not always offered in the form that parents want – service design is insufficiently led by the communities needing help and support. Instead of fostering collective capital in communities and facilitating durable peer support and advocacy – families may instead undergo:

• repeated risk assessments
• psychological evaluations
• drug testing
• parenting observations
• court scrutiny
• supervised contact

Parents wait years for therapeutic support which all too often fails to materialise.

Learning from Indigenous advocates and scholars

Divided into three parts, the final section of this collection focuses on the urgent issue of infant removal in Indigenous communities. Researchers from Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand show how the removal of babies today cannot be separated from the history of colonial child removal policies. Indigenous women continue to experience disproportionate surveillance during pregnancy and childbirth. In some regions, unborn babies are effectively flagged to child protection agencies before birth. The authors argue these practices reproduce historical patterns of harm for Indigenous families. However, much can be learned from resistance in Indigenous communities to Western individualised individual-case based child protection responses and offer responses which offer far more effective solutions based on:

• family preservation
• cultural safety
• collective care
• kinship networks
• self-determination

The collection strives to move beyond bureaucratic and highly individualised child protection practices – and instead endorses approaches to family support and restoration that strengthen rather than separate families. International dialogue helps to move beyond a mono-cultural lens, surfacing solutions which lie beyond the boundaries of the individual nation state.

Systems Under Pressure

The book does not present frontline social workers as willing accomplices to practices that protect infants at the expense of the legal and procedural rights of parents. In fact, contributors firmly recognise that practitioners themselves are working inside overstretched systems with shrinking resources and growing demand. All too often, the ethical aspirations of practitioners are completely compromised by the erosion of our social safety nets. Social workers, lawyers and judges are often expected to make life-changing decisions under impossible conditions:

• limited time and impossible performance demands
• incomplete information
• overloaded caseloads
• scarce support services
• pressure to avoid risk at all costs

The result is a system where emergency intervention can become the default response which risks riding rough-shod over the rights of parents, wider kin and communities.

Setting out an international agenda for change

What makes Born Into Care especially powerful is that it does not stop at critique. Our contributors outline practice alternatives already emerging or implemented in a number of different international contexts.

1. Therapeutic support, which is provided separately from a child protection function

2. Universal advocacy for parents involved in child protection systems to ensure a far better balance of power

3. A protected post-partum period of six weeks, with far greater use of parent (mother) and baby co-placements

4. Greater challenge from the family courts regarding help provided in pregnancy to prevent care proceedings at birth

5. Stronger focus on restoration of babies to parents care, following a period of separation

6. Far greater inclusion of families and communities in the design and delivery of services

The book repeatedly argues that prevention costs less, financially and emotionally, than removing children at crisis point. Separation at birth has such devastating consequences on maternal mental health, that permanent separation is far more likely to follow.

What does child protection really mean?

At its heart, Born Into Care asks society to rethink what protection really means.

The editors argue that many removals at birth are not simply individual tragedies, they are evidence of a broader failure of our social safety nets.

A wealthy society that cannot support mothers, fathers and kin networks before crisis emerges may ultimately be relying too heavily on child removal to compensate for the absence of effective social care provision.

The final chapter of this collection integrates learning across the collection, sets out an international transformation agenda, and ultimately insists that another future is possible which would see far fewer babies entering care at birth.

Overall, Born Into Care calls for a more humane, equitable, and supportive approach to child protection at birth - one that balances infant safety with the rights, dignity, and needs of families.

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