Link between childhood in care and mums who have babies removed by the courts

A study has found a high number of women, who repeatedly appear before the family courts and lose many children into public care or adoption because of child protection concerns, have been in care themselves. 40% of the mothers had been in foster care or children's homes with a further 14% living in private or informal relationships away from their parents. A team of researchers, led by Professor Karen Broadhurst at Lancaster University and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, have uncovered women's very troubled childhoods. Although some children can do very well in foster care, for these women, public care did not offer the kind of stable and protective relationships they needed. Instead 50% moved from one foster placement to another and 39% spent a period in a children's home. The research team read court records relating to a representative sample of 354 mums who, at the time of the study, had appeared in a total history of 851 first and repeat sets of care proceedings issued by 52 local authorities in England. In addition, they used population records, relating to approximately 65,000 women, to provide an up-dated picture of the size of this population of women and interviewed 72 women across 7 local authorities.