The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Pause for thought
angela Neustatter meets mothers who have had multiple children taken into care and reports on the project attempting to help them
One organisation is looking to break the vicious cycle that has seen 20,000 babies removed from their mothers in seven years.
Lea is making a memory box for her three daughters, Louisa, seven, Jasmine, four, and Mary, two. Her face lights up as she describes putting in photos of the girls when they were little, letters to t hem, trinkets a nd bit s of jeweller y she thinks they would like. ‘It may be a suitcase by the time they grow up,’ she smiles.
In fact there is not much to smile about. Lea will never be par t of her daughters’ growing up. All three have been taken away from her now. Her face sinks into sadness. ‘I have been judged an unfit parent for all my t hree g irls. But I miss t hem so ver y much every day.’
Lea, 33, is one of thousands of women in the UK with multiple children – as many as si x, 10, and in one case 17 – who have been removed by the state, some at birth. Visits from children’s ser vices are seared in their memories, as are attempts to hide the chaos with which they live, the marks of domestic v iolence, sig ns of dr ug a nd alcohol misuse, or the beaten-down passivity resulting from emotional abuse by partners. There is anguish as children are taken, and at court hearings when mothers are told they cannot give their young the care they need to thrive.
Julie, 24, has had four children taken away. Two were fathered by men who said they cared but they would not or could not be adequate parents. The ot her fat hers wanted not hing to do with their babies. Julie’s last partner, Brian, who used controlling anger and threats to cut her off from her friends, put it starkly: ‘That dirty thing in your arms is coming between us.’
It is hard to imagine the agony of getting pregnant over and over again and having child after child taken into care, the traumatised long ing that never fades, yet these women are far more likely to be condemned as feckless and irresponsible than to elicit sympathy.
Now, however, the Department for Education is giving approximately £6.5 million to an organisation called Pause, to part fund its nationwide programme. This offers psychological, practical and emotional suppor t to such women in the hope they may break out of their chaotic, destructive lifestyles. At a time when welfare is being cut elsewhere, some may question why women who do nothing to prevent the births of children they cannot keep should be a priority. The answer is that the Pause scheme is a proven success.
This summer, a repor t by Opcit UCLAN (the University of Central Lancashire) will show the effectiveness of a series of Pause pilot schemes around the country, and that the programme can potent ia lly save t he tax payer a considerable amount of money. Over the next six months, with the help of the Department for Education funding, the scheme will be set up in nine new areas.
Opcit UCLAN has estimated how many pregnancies women who have undertaken the programme potentially avoided. Pause helps women avoid getting preg nant by using reliable long- term cont raception, with the aim of enabling them to focus on themselves. Based on their histories, the 125 surveyed avoided 36.8 pregnancies during the 18 months they had a Pause practitioner, at a cost of about £20,200 per woman. The alternative – taking that number of children into care – would have been more than £50,000 per child annually.
Pause is not part of social services, which the women tend to see as working against them. It is the brainchild of Sophie Humphreys, a former head of child protection in Hackney, who says she found herself ‘removing baby after baby from the sa me women year after yea r, a nd seei ng no change in their circumstances from the last time. One of the women, from whom I had removed two babies, has now had nine removed. This could not be ignored any longer. More and more children were going into care each year at huge financial and emotional cost, causing the women, the children and those around them deep trauma.’
She and co-founder Georgina Perry realised that what the women needed was a break from their often complex and chaotic lives, in which they could be helped to reflect, and shown how t hey could change patter ns and take cont rol. Humphreys a nd Per r y bel ieve d t hat ‘ t he s e
‘Almost without exception, these women themselves are victims of abusive, neglectful parenting and traumatic experiences’
women needed a change from the g uilt, sense of hopelessness and punitive judgement that shaped their days. They needed to be offered an intense, somewhat “parental” relationship with someone who would be there for them whatever happened, and would not give up on them at the first hurdle, as so many services do.’
Pause was g iven f unding by Hackney Council a nd ot her loca l aut hor it ies t hat recognised the possible benefit. Its success brought in the new Department for Educat ion f und i ng for t he scheme to spread further around the countr y. It has, so far, helped 163 women, who between them had had 504 children removed.
So how does it work? Rebecca Lampard, who along with Maggie Boreham is one of Lea’s Pause practitioners, explains that the org a ni s at ion receive s i nfor mat ion t hat identifies the women most likely to keep getting pregnant from social services and other agencies that come into contact with them. It then offers help. (Ver y occasionally, people find out about Pause and refer themselves.) Lampard goes on, ‘Lea was uncertain at first, but once she agreed we started talking about her life, and how she might like to change it. A star ting point was to help her deal with the profound feelings of grief and loss. Other agencies tend to overlook the fact that these women have had to g ive up dreams they have had of motherhood being a time of joy and love.’ As with Lea, she says, ‘The women usua lly feel so depressed a nd hopeless t hat t hey don’t believe they have control over their actions; they do not consider consequences.’
It does not help, says Mandy Greening, of Pause in Hull, when there is a high level of poverty and deprivation. ‘Almost without exception, these women themselves are victims of abusive, violent, neglect f ul pa rent i ng a nd traumatic experiences. Their emotional needs are not met in childhood and there are no healthy examples of how to live constructively.’
Lea describes growing up with an alcoholic mother ‘who told me she could only stand me when she was d r unk’, a nd a stepfat her who wanted her out of the house. Eventually, Lea went to live with a loving grandmother, but when she died Lea, in her teens, was left bereft and homeless. It was then that her mental-health problems began, leading in time to a breakdown.
Out of a desperate desire for someone to care, the women with whom Pause works have frequently taken up with unsatisfactory men. So it was for Lea, who talks of partners who were violent and controlling. She lived in a series of unhyg ienic rooms. She was persuaded to tr y crack cocaine and heroin by the father of her last child, and acknowledges, ‘I can see I was not able to give my girls the lives they needed, but getting pregnant had seemed an answer to how empty I felt.’
Pause often helps women see a role for themselves in their children’s lives. The memory box is one ex a mple; writ i ng a let ter –as is often
allowed – once a year is another. They imagine their children may find them when they are 18.
It is also important to give the women a sense that they belong in a bigger world, and do things they never imagined, says Lampard, who has worked with Lea for eight months. ‘Early on, Lea and I went to the Tate, as she loved art as a child, and she has now enrolled on an art course. She is interested in photography, so we go out together and she takes photographs.’
Lea, who now lives in accommodation for people with mental-health problems, says these days she feels ‘a lot more confident in myself than I did, and I have goals. I want to train to do clerical work and carry on with my art. I am doing some volunteering and I’d like to do peer-support work for other women like me.’ She hesitates. ‘I don’t think I will go backwards. Pause has done a lot for me.’
Lampard smiles. ‘Lea is blossoming. I’m so proud of her. It is heart-warming.’
Susie, 22, had only had one child who was taken into care when she was selected for a new Pause pilot scheme intended to catch women early and prevent them having successive children removed. She was seen as vulnerable and ver y likely to go on gett ing preg nant.
During childhood she had been abused by her stepfather, and left home. The father of her child was delighted by the idea of a baby at first, but the child was born very premature, with a severe disability. Her partner became ever more demanding and threatening. ‘I wanted to concentrate on trying to keep my son so I split from hi m,’ Susie says. She ret ur ned to t he home where her abusive stepfather still lived. Social ser vices decided the child must go into care. Susie battled against this, but says, ‘Social services didn’t listen to me, didn’t give me a chance, and they have everything on their side. My boy was taken aged 18 months.’ She found her ‘only comfort’ in smoking cannabis, drinking vodka and taking paracetamol.
The women with whom Pause works must have had one or more children removed, and not have any children in their care at the time. The first few times Susie’s Pause practitioner, Amanda Naylor, made contact, Susie shut the door on her. Naylor laughs. ‘I wasn’t going to be put off that easily. I lef t postcards and little drawings with messages asking if Susie would have coffee with me.’ That was 18 months ago.
Naylor worked as a pre-bir th social worker before finding out about Pause and joining the organisation. ‘I was doing more and more assessments,’ she explains, ‘and I always had to put the needs of the child first, but it was depressing seeing the distress of the woman and not being able to of fer comfor t. How could I? I was t he one responsible for their children being taken.’
Susie gives a comical grimace when she recalls first meeting Naylor. ‘She was stalking me, but I got curious and met her.’
‘It wasn’t a straight run in the beginning,’ says Naylor. ‘Susie was emotionally ex hausted and flat. She wouldn’t take her medication and slept chaotically. I st a r ted by trying to understand Susie, letting her sound off and say how things felt for her. Then we would talk about what she had said. Slowly, Susie began to look at choices she had made and see how far what went wrong was the consequence of her actions, but without feeling judged. Next we needed to build some dreams, hopes, goals.’
Susie began doing a lot of cooking with Naylor. This has led her to do a Level 2 NVQ in catering, and she plans to work as a caterer. Equally important ly, having neglected her healt h for years, Susie was persuaded to see a doctor regularly. She has begun working out. She has learnt about personal hygiene. She also goes to Pause g roups, meeting other women and making friends.
Of a ll t he t hings Naylor has done, helping ‘I can see I was not able to give my girls the lives they needed, but getting pregnant had seemed an answer to how empty I felt’ Susie get a permanent flat where she can ‘shut the door and feel safe’ is the most valued. So the two go out window shopping and choose things Susie would like to get for her home when she has some money. She has already painted the walls.
‘Susie has worked so hard,’ Naylor says. ‘From having no aspirations, she has a clear vision of what she wants to achieve and the belief that she has a place in the kind of world she had always seen as excluding her. We are at the end of our time together, but I will keep in touch with Susie and I feel confident she can do well now.’
Susie nods. ‘Every day is a new stepping stone with a new target.’
Mandy Greening celebrates ‘seeing women who can scarcely walk through the door alone, their heads hang ing, when we f irst see them, ending t heir t ime so different ly. They appear heads held high, with improved healthcare and hyg iene. And those who think they may want children in future are clear it needs to be planned not haphazard.’
Lea echoes that thought: ‘Next time it would have to be with someone who cares enough to want to marry me and can be a responsible father to his children.’