Category Archives: rants

Kirstie gets a telephone call from the social

I had a call earlier. Did I want to do a TV interview about Kirstie Allsopp and child protection? Er…on the Sunday afternoon of the August bank holiday weekend? To be quite honest, no. I’ve not got my face on and I’m in the middle of prepping for a trial, which involves some actual child protection issues (such is the traditional August bank holiday weekend activity for us lawyers – though we did have a barbecue like a normal family yesterday).

I’d vaguely noted it on the radio as I snoozed before getting up, briefly raising an eyebrow at the fact that a social worker making a telephone call to a parent had made the national news, and then briefly raised the other one at the insistence of the LA involved that they take EVERY child protection referral VERY SERIOUSLY (their statement was read as if in CAPS), before rolling over and continuing my snooze. I wasn’t wild about going on tv to talk about such a non-story. Those who wish to read about the non-story may do so here (or elsewhere).

But every time I open up social media for a bit of light relief from the grimness of my prep, there it is. Someone outraged at the treatment of Kirstie by ridiculous social workers, someone ridiculing Kirstie for her outrageously risky parenting, someone else making a point about class and entitlement. So I guess, it is a story after all.

May I introduce a soupçon of legal insight to this ‘conversation’?

Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 (not the Children’s Act, if you care). It applies to all local authorities in England and Wales, and all children living in their area. Even those whose parents are loaded, or celebrities or both.

Here it is – you can read it in full on the legislation.gov.uk website. But the key bits are:

Where a local authority [social services] are informed that a child who lives…in their area have reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives…in their area is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm, the authority shall make, or cause to be made, such enquiries as they consider necessary to enable them to decide whether they should take any action to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare.

So, if a genuinely concerned person with legitimate worry, or a busybody, or a keyboard warrior or a malicious person calls social services and says ‘hey social services, I think this child is at risk because x’, that triggers a statutory process. Social services can’t just ignore it unless it is immediately and clearly obvious that there is no reasonable cause to suspect the child is likely to suffer harm. They have to check it out. For the avoidance of doubt, the identity or status of the parent is not a good reason to decide to ignore a child protection referral.

One assumes from her reported response that Kirstie has not had the pleasure of a call from social services before. Lucky her. Where a referral is made about a family who is not known to social services a telephone call is an entirely predictable and proportionate response. ‘Let’s check this out’ say social services. A simple telephone call is often enough to satisfy them that there is in fact no reasonable cause to believe there is a risk of significant harm to the child, and that will be that, Particularly so if the parent is able and willing to explain the context that might not be apparent from the referral.

From the responses online its clear that some people hold the view that it is OBVIOUS Kirstie is guilty of BAD PARENTING. However it is also clear that others think it is OBVIOUS that she has done nothing wrong. Some (and I’m probably in this camp because i’m a lawyer and a parent of two very different teenagers), would say IT DEPENDS on the specifics (the child, the travel arrangements, the safeguards etc).

Even if you disagree with me on that, it is clear that there are a range of reasonable views about allowing a 15 year old to travel abroad without a parent. Which is probably why social services didn’t feel able to simply write off the referral without at least making a quick telephone call. That call from ‘the social’ is genuinely a very frightening experience for a vulnerable parent without Kirstie’s background, resources and platform. Kirstie reportedly felt sick when she got the call, but I doubt very much social services will be swooping in to remove her now 16 year old, safely returned young person to a place of safety, as often happens in the sorts of cases I see day in day out (and which I dare say her own local authority will be prioritising). If Kirstie felt sick, imagine how parents with real problems feel?

It’s not clear from the material I’ve read whether social services were satisfied that they should ‘NFA’ the referral as a result of that telephone call, but I’d expect them to be considering things like the age of the young person (he was almost 16 when he went and 16 just after return), his maturity, who was travelling with him (a 16 y/o companion), what arrangements were in place (funding, back up plans, accommodation, ground rules), and – given that he is now back and 16, whether or not any purpose could possibly be served by further involvement with the family.

How one sensibly exercises parental responsibility to keep a young person safe, whilst also fostering independence is a tricky balancing act – different parents will make different decisions based on how risk averse they are and their knowledge of their child.

Whilst it’s not for me to prejudge the outcome of the referral, it does seem unlikely to go much further. Regardless of that however, I can’t really see any basis for the apparent criticism of the LA for simply making a call to find out how this particular decision was made (so far). s47 is there for very good reason. Sometimes – often in fact – children finally get protection because of a referral from a stranger. Sometimes the referral seems like something and nothing but it is one loose thread that, when pulled, unravels a whole tangle of issues. I’m not suggesting that is the case with Kirsty, but it is the reason why local authorities – rightly – have to do a bit of due diligence when a referral comes in.

Whether you would let your 15 year old go on this trip, it would, I think, be a tall order to suggest that a well planned trip undertaken by two reasonably mature and well resourced 15/16 y/os gave rise to the sort of risk of significant harm that justifies state interference above and beyond a telephone call.

However, I am confident that if I am wrong in my guess we will all be finding out soon enough (and then I’ll tell you what happens when the LA isn’t satisfied there are no reasonable grounds). I’m sure the now 16 year old son will be absolutely thrilled at all this fuss.

Anyway, it’s a shame, isn’t it, that we can’t get so much airtime focused on the real stories playing out in family courts every day, stories both about children who need protecting from their parents, and parents who need protecting from one another or from the overreach of the state.

And on that note I’m back to my real work for a bit of relief from the awfulness of social media.

X marks the spot?

It was the place where we all converged, at the centre of the social media map.

But it all seems to be crumbling now. I flirted with mastodon a little while ago. Nobody really had the energy for it and it was dull as ditchwater, with suffocating etiquette to learn. We hoped it would get better back on twitter (as I think it then still was). It didn’t. And this time it’s feels like a substantial exodus away from Elon world, many galvanised by their repulsion at the part X and those who use and control it, played in the misinformation and disorder.

For many lawyers it appears that the refusal to tackle misinformation and material inciting crime and disorder, means that X has become a positive threat to the rule of law. For some that means either that one must leave rather than support such a corrupting platform. For others it means they feel they need to stay to keep telling truth, correcting misinformation. This week has seen several posts from the elders of legal twitter about their decisions to leave X.

I feel both of those pulls. I don’t want to prop up X, which increasingly leaves me despairing. But nor do I want to abandon a space where voices that speak with reason, balance and from a place of knowledge are much needed.

Nor am I under any illusions that my staying or going will make any great difference to anything. I’m just one voice, and a pretty niche one at that. But those of us with a voice still have a choice to make.

I’m not sure yet what my ultimate choice will be. But I’m not prepared to flounce out in a rush. I’ve been on twitter for almost 16 years, for better or worse and somehow I’ve amassed 20,000 followers (poor deluded fools that they are). I enjoy the engagement, the ripostes, the challenge I get from those followers when I post. I don’t find those exchanges are drowned out by bots as others do. But in between those exchanges I am fed a diet of rubbish that is beyond depressing and makes me feel that it is futile to try and stop the rot, to try and use my voice to promote access to justice and public trust and confidence in our systems of law and order and dispute resolution, or even just to engage human to human at all. It is undoubtedly ever harder to stay, and less and less rewarding to do so than it has been in this past 15 years.

So, seeing that lots of those I enjoy engaging with are leaving, I have set up on Bluesky. I don’t want to be the left to turn the lights out on legal twitter. It seems nice, though I don’t know if nice is enough. I’ve found a lot of my legal twitter buddies relatively easily but worry it might be a bit clubby – it won’t be easy to replicate the much wider community I had on twitter.

Those of us who populated twitter at the outset, the first legal bloggers and tweeters, invested a lot of energy in demystifying and explaining the law and what lawyers do. We are not naive. We know it is an unending task, that most people don’t want to listen, many will wilfully misunderstand or misinterpret what we say in good faith, and that only a few will listen, absorb and appreciate the context we are trying to share.

I’ve been committed to public legal education (through twitter, through this blog, through The Transparency Project etc) for over 15 years, and I plan to carry on that task for as long as there is someone who wants to hear it. This is not the first time I’ve been thoroughly despondent, and wondered what the point was. Misinformation proliferates because its what people want to hear, because its easier to understand, to accept than the messy, nuanced truth. Its undoubtedly worse than it has ever been by some margin – it feels sometimes like people have lost the ability to discern fact from fiction, and have abandoned critical thinking.

But… if we don’t make the law and legal process accessible, understandable, relatable, to those who are willing and able to understand, we really cannot complain when people turn away from law and the rule of law and start making up their own rules, their own truth.

Anyway, like most lawyers, I’m in danger of disappearing up my own wazoo. Social media for me is also as much about pictures of cats and videos of pratfalls, about seeing the beauty and small moments in other peoples lives that they care to share, and about learning from others (especially non-lawyers) – as it is about promulgating the ‘special’ knowledge of the lawyer (ahem).

So on I shall go with my intoxicating infusion of crochet and law related content, boring and irritating lawyers and non-lawyers in equal measure. I plan to keep a foot in both camps at the moment, probably for the foreseeable future. We’ll see how things evolves, and what platform best matches the triad of reasons I do social media – to connect about law, to connect with lawyers and to keep connected with the real world and life outside the legal bubble. Who knows, I may even do a little bit more real life and a little less social media…

Looked After – A Childhood in Care

It’s been a while since I’ve managed a book review. Because I’m always too absorbed in the job.

I bought this book a couple of months ago, having read a review somewhere, and have been carrying it around in my backpack ever since. Unopened, naturally. There is always something more important.

Last Saturday was spent travelling to our holiday location in France. On Sunday I sat under a palm tree and read this book in one sitting. I wept all the way through. That possibly tells you something about how much I needed a holiday, but it tells you more about the power of this book. We do this job because we care about the children at the heart of the system. but we sometimes (often) become disconnected from the reality. Partly to cope, and partly because for most of us in the job our lived experience is nothing like the experience of a child in care (care experienced lawyers are few and far between).

Whilst we need our protective shell to survive, sometimes its important to reconnect with the reality.

What struck me most about this account of Ashley John-Baptiste’s childhood, was that his narrative was filled with well intentioned adults trying to do right by him, but somehow (with one or two exceptions) they failed either to really connect with his world or to make change for him. Compared with some of the horror stories we see and read about, Ashley endured comparatively few placement moves – each one of those moves in a different way contributed to a breaking of his trust in the adults who were in control of his life – to a lawyer like me, used to seeing chronologies showing children bouncing from placement to placement, becoming more and more dysregulated and disengaged, it would be easy to think ‘actually, he got off comparatively lightly’. Which on one level is true – on paper, few moves, relatively long lasting placements, limited overt complaint from the child. And yet. This book tells us that even this comparative stability for a child in foster care is really not good enough. Ashley learned to suppress his wishes and feelings, in order to avoid another move, to survive. And nobody seemed to notice, head down, tick, tick go the boxes. But a child isn’t a box to be ticked. And there is a sense (which I think the book occasionally acknowledges) that some of the adults did see more, and did go above and beyond box ticking, even if they struggled to bring Ashley along with them or to explain the whats and whys to him.

For all the things that adults got wrong for Ashley though, a few key actions made all the difference to him, ultimately getting him back in education, keeping him more or less on the straight and narrow and facilitating his escape to university. It’s clear that Ashley himself is the one that deserves the most credit for persevering and achieving the success and happiness that he now has, where many others would simply have foundered or spiralled.

Ashley John-Baptiste’s account of his life as a child in foster care reminded me of some important lessons I had forgotten, about the little things that make a difference to kids who can’t be with their parents. But it also made me think about a whole load of things that had never occurred to me before – the unintentional messages, the inadvertent but lasting impact of things said, done or not said and not done by the grown ups. The sense of never really belonging or being loved.  The sense of voicelessness and powerlessness – the realisation that nobody listens, so you might as well just say what they expect or want you to say.

The need to get by rather than to demand or expect better. None of these are things we can say we didn’t know about – we know, intellectually. But once you read this book your theoretical, extrapolated knowledge will come off the page, and you will begin to understand what a childhood in care really means. Now the trick is to hold on to that thought when I’m back in front of my desk, but to do so without crying all over the next social work chronology you read.

Great book, Ashley. Recommended.