Or should that be, ‘Martin Narey, quite contrary’?
Martin Narey is Chief Executive of Barnardo’s and no stranger to controversy. He has been intelligent, brave and outspoken in a completely reasonable way about a range of social issues from prisons and penal reform through to children and their parents. Today he is reported as having called for more children of inadequate parents to be taken into care at birth in order to prevent them being damaged beyond repair in “families that can’t be fixed”. He is a brave man to suggest this because he knows his view will be seen as paternalistic and ‘judgmental’ (he called it ‘illiberal heresy’) and he will call down upon his own head the indignant wrath of social liberals who assume that such a policy would be upsetting. Here is what he said:
If you can take a baby very young and get them quickly into a permanent adoptive home, then we know that is where we have success. That’s a view that is seen as a heresy among social services, where the thinking is that if someone, a parent, has failed, they deserve another chance. My own view is that we just need to take more children into care if we really want to put the interests of the child first.
We can’t keep trying to fix families that are completely broken. It sounds terrible, but I think we try too hard with birth parents. I have seen children sent back to homes that I certainly wouldn’t have sent them back to. I have been extremely surprised at decisions taken. If we really cared about the interests of the child, we would take children away as babies and put them into permanent adoptive families, where we know they will have the best possible outcome.
Narey has touched a raw nerve here. One response, from Philippa Stroud of the Centre for Social Justice caught my attention for what it assumed about fathers:
We need far more early intervention to try to stop this disintegration of the family we are seeing, but we would like to see more working with these families. What we recommend is the model of the mother and baby going into care, filling that hole and giving the whole family a chance.
Is it simply assumed now that such dysfunctional families no longer have a resident, involved male in the home or in the equation? I just ask the question, but I fear the answer.
As Jenni Murray has observed in an article in today’s Observer, simple or simplistic approaches to rescuing damaged children (such as exclusion from school) won’t help either damaged children or the society they themselves go on to damage. In a culture dominated by claims to ‘rights’, we are not very good at working out how competing rights are to be prioritised or regulated. Does the parent’s right to have or raise a child outweigh society’s judgment that such a right has lower priority than that of the child deemed to be being damaged? It is a hard question and anyone who offers a simple answer should immediately be dismissed; easy answers usually come from people who have no experience of the reality of such dilemmas.
I am not sure that the care system is the best place for damaged (or potentially damaged) children; but leaving them to poor parents who cannot cope (possibly who themselves have been damaged by their own upbringing) is not an answer. Nor is parading them on tabloid front pages with headlines such as ‘Hell Boys’ or ‘Little Savages’.
This week sees the celebration in the Anglican calendar of the birth of the Virgin Mary. Actually we know nothing about this particular event and a lot of Anglicans will wonder why we are celebrating it in the first place. But it might make some of us reflect on the fact that she grew into a teenager who got pregnant in a suspicious society, nearly got dumped by her (probably older) fiance, gave birth to a son who grew up to be disobedient (look at what he did when he was 12) and neglect his responsibilities to his widowed mother when he went walkabout at the age of 30 – before getting executed for sedition by a society that knew all about ‘order’ and sorting out the ‘dysfunctionals’.
Mary herself sang a ‘heretical’ song on hearing that she would give birth to one who would turn the political and economic orthodoxies on their head. So, if Martin Narey is being quite contrary, then he is in good company.
Nick Baines's Blog 
September 6, 2009 at 11:36 am
I agree with you that there are no simple answers here. Apparently if your child is a pound over weight these days then the parents get a letter from the school. We are becoming more and more like property rather than like individuals. Machines that are built on an assembly line with identical parts do not even function in identical ways, there are always little quirks and idiosyncrasies that make them different in small ways.
We are here to suffer the human condition, which is by no means a perfect one, part of this condition is to have to suffer the onrush of Divine Grace. Martin Narey has been blessed in his life, but it does sound as though he has had it too easy and he should stay away from the kitchen, I think, it is obviously too hot in here for him.
September 6, 2009 at 11:42 am
Jim, I don’t agree. I think he has had the courage to say that these decisions are fearsomely difficult, but that unpopular nettles need to be grasped. From experience, I know that working in the prison system or with a children’s society such as Barnardo’s exposes you to stuff most people never see/conceive and most commentators avoid.
I totally agree about the ‘onrush of divine grace’.
September 6, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I can imagine that working in the prison system will lead to the development of ideas. The duty of pastoral care should be to ease the suffering of people who are victims of a system that is rotten at the roots.
Render unto Caesar! but Ceasar has turned the whole world into his factory, don’t give him the last bit as well. Snatching kids away from damaged parents is a fantastic idea, but not if you intend to keep filling the cells with more damaged parents.
Who’s side are you on anyway?…and stop shaking hands in church!
September 6, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I’m obviously on the side of the illicit handshakers!
September 6, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Hah! It would be unfair to lump all of Caesar’s factories into the same category I suppose (not all of them are illicit hand shakers). Much good has come of the protestant work ethic, but this has more to do with God than Caesar (who washed his hands of the whole affair – illicitly, or was that customary for the Romans then?)
September 6, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I suspect that government policy and laissez-faire attitudes have undermined and diminished the importance of fathers in families.
My daughter is a paediatric nurse and it was 10 years or more ago that she told me they were beginning to see the “battered mother” syndrome; where mothers were bringing up sons alone and these boys having reached teenage years without an appropriate male role model had no idea how to behave.
Surely the nuclear family is one of the basic building blocks of a civilised society?
Anne.
September 6, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Thank you for this.
September 6, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Nick,
As one who spent 6 years in care as a child, with no option of foster or adoptive parents, I can only say that care must be the last option.
The issue of social responsibility of the whole of society taking it seriously is tied up in red tape and human rights. Even children have rights these days, which are often used against them, rather than for them.
I cannot conceive of a society which takes children away in such an arbitrary way, although, I am aware of many cases, which have received media attention in recent years under social services rules and practices, supported by Child Protection laws, which can penalise the innocent along with those with real problems.
The issues of so many damaged and dis-functional individuals and families is one which has grown in leaps and bounds in the last 30 years – the more affluent we become as a society, the wider the gap has grown. I cannot see any simple way out of the situation unless the whole culture of the country is completely turned around.
All we can hope to do as Christians is to pray and to work with and alongside Government and other agencies such as Barnado’s to try to effect changes by example and providing best practice in dealing with the situations as they arise.
September 6, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Ernest, thanks for this. It is so complicated, isn’t it, and people’s experiences on both sides of the equation can be persuasive. And, yet, somewhere in the mess someone has to make decisions, knowing that the consequences might be very costly for the children involved.
September 6, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Maybe the central question should be why is there such a growing population of underclass people who have little skills to function outside of substance abuse. We can implement a kid snatching – Gas the parents attitude of difficult decision making, but it’s not addressing the cause and effect situation is it? But I suspect this type of thinking will rock the applecart, and to get clear of the avalanche it would mean pulling one’s head out of the thick soil of exploitation and greed.
September 6, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I think that Martin Narey is right that taking a child from a very dicey situation and sorting out permanent adoption into a stable home, very early on when adoption is “easy”, can give that child an entirely different set of opportunities and reduce a lot of damage to that child. I wouldn’t like to be in the position of having to decide when that happens and when it is better for all concerned for a child to stay with a family which may be unable to cope or even downright abusive. My instinct would be to protect the child, too.
Along with Jim, I think that removing children from a bad situation, putting them in one that’s almost certainly going to be better, is not actually addressing the problem of what is going on in these families in the first place.
I like the idea of a mother and baby going into care together and perhaps both being shown love and compassion, though like you I worry about the lack of involvement of another parent. I also wonder about any siblings of the baby… the practical problems surrounding taking entire families into some sort of foster care seem huge and knotty.
Surely we need to examine wider issues of inclusion and caring in society, poverty and sharing, how we treat those we might perceive as different or thick or “common” or mad, how we can support one another and help one another long before a family situation gets to the point where whisking a child away to start over seems like the only hope for that child. Putting children in foster care is only a very small piece of the picture. Support and help children because they are people, support and help parents because they are people, beloved children of God all of them. But my generalizations do not address the specific problems of how to respond when we have failed to do that.
Your comparison with Mary is a powerful one.
September 6, 2009 at 11:19 pm
I have some sympathy for Martin Narey’s point of view, having seen a relative in Canada dealing with the child protection system there. She was a foster carer and knew of cases where women had child after child taken away after being born drug-addicted, despite being provided with lots of help in the form of rehab placements etc. These children typically had several years of foster care whilst the mother appealed against adoption orders before finally being released for adoption. Every change of foster and finally adoptive parents is a new trauma in a baby’s life. If open adoption was available, the small percentage of mothers who beat their addictions, or did whatever else was necessary to turn their lives around, would be able to have a relationship with their children when they were no longer dangerous to them.
I certainly don’t want to go back to the era when “illegitimate” babies were practically harvested for infertile married couples – especially as I ended up in a dangerously violent setting myself as a result of that sixties philanthropy. Yet I despair that even when social workers are apparently aware that there are grave parenting deficiencies, children still sometimes stay there until they get killed, or occasionally attack others.
I don’t think it’s helpful to posit this in terms of a dysfunctional “underclass” and an opposite set of functional “nice middle class” parents. The way children are treated in Britain leaves a lot to be desired generally. We are in some ways lurching from one extreme to another, over-correcting from judgemental attitudes of the past, and repressive and authoritarian schooling and social systems which made it impossible for children in difficulties to be heard.
September 6, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Joan, thanks for a thoughtful response. You are absolutely right about the ‘class’ assumptions and the constant ‘corrective’reflexes. I find the complexity of this one really worrying as it will take generations to sort some of this stuff out.
September 7, 2009 at 11:34 am
In defence of the Virgin Mary, she may have had some statistical indicators against her, but plainly – as the sports managers might put it- “The boy done good!”
September 7, 2009 at 10:23 pm
On a serious note, as a child protection lawyer I have seen many cases where a parent has lost children and yet sucessfully parented a later child. Some met a new partner, some overcame addiction, some matured, some found a supportive Church, friend or therapist. Prediction is hard and unreliable. I recently kept a family together against much professional scepticism where Mum had learning difficulty and Dad mental illness. He had been lapsing on his medication which nobody knew until a retired 80 year old solicitor was introduced through the local church and his daily visit after early communion was all it took to inject routine self confidence and motivation to put the theory into practice.
Unlike most areas of law, which deal with fixed historic facts, family law ” “reads” the past and tries to predict the future. It is no more reliable than many other forms of punditry. Often those of us with experience are willing to trust our judgements and take a ” calculated risk” . No one ever gets criticized for ultra caution but then the vulnerable benign such as I refer to above get abused by the system. A young social worker would not have had the confidence to argue for making such a decision. The family life of the learning disabled ( easy targets) often depends on the luck of the draw
as to which professionals get allocated; its horrible to think that anguish can be determined by luck of the draw but that is often how it is. Sadly with budget cuts its the experienced who are being driven out of practice.
September 8, 2009 at 8:52 am
Martin,
It is heartening, at least to me, to read that families can change.
I wonder whether the sort of community support you describe is something that can be legislated or designed on paper. My life has been greatly improved by the influence of people who took the time and care to establish a relationship with me and act as mentors and friends to me through some difficult times, and passing that on and supporting others where I can is certainly something I try to do. Do you think there is a way to encourage more of this sort of thing?
September 8, 2009 at 9:04 am
It is one of the peculiar dichotomies of the post-modern age that we can all think what we like -BUT the state always knows best. we are sleepwalking into the state controlling everything. As a counsellor I have worked with families torn apart by the state ripping away parents (usually the father) from the children. It can be devastating and is often done on such an arbitrary basis. There is a real risk that we will see a society when children aren’t ours at all but indoctrinated members of the state.
It is worrying that support for this approach is coming from a once Christian organisation, Barnardos. The Bible isn’t intended to give us hard and fast answers, Christians have to work out their own response to these difficult situations but I found that long term love and understanding, and not a little prayer, saw God’s grace revealed in families and reconciliation and a way forward achieved, not in every case but in many. How can this happen if we leap in too early?
September 9, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Song, I am pretty sure this cannot be legislated for in any direct sense, although I sense that if Government could support local churches/charities/initiatives it would be an improvement in the culture. I remind myself that the early poor law was organised through local parish committees. Dickens drew a bad picture of this and it may be that there were advantages and disadvantages. I know in the USA churches are very involved in volunteer services and that something like 90% of the meals cooked for the Katrina victims came not from the Federal, State, or Military agencies but the Southern Baptist Churches. That is a wonderful and impressive statistic, though I am always cautious about suggesting that one can transport other cultures’ answers easily. The local does have the advantage of being able to know what does the most good. I have seen in Texas supermarkets rolls of tear off tickets of $10 denomination that you can take and add to your shopping when paying and the Supermarket adds it to your bill and then makes a food donation to local charity. I like the idea of
the facility being offered at a relevant point rather than more remotely through Government agency. There is a drawback with localism in that you may get the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor dichotomy. I call to mind that the Prodigal Son was one of the “undeserving poor”
September 10, 2009 at 12:35 pm
It’s amazing what you learn on this blog. I was looking for another intellectual challenge, and now I’ve found out that children are “ours”. Who knew?! I’m going to write a program to trade them on the commodities markets. I think I can reuse some of that Grandmother_arbitrage algorithm I wrote last year.. maybe I’ll call it Project Wilberforce.
Nick, would the church like a percentage of the profits, since you helped me think of it?
September 10, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Martin,
Thanks for your reply to my question.
If people want to make financial contributions to local charities through church or through community organisations (religious or secular), there is little stopping them doing so now except lack of awareness… supermarket donation programmes like the one you describe are good and I would be happy to see them put into place, but I don’t think of large chain supermarkets as local and I wonder how much of the money donated at, say, Tesco would really make it back into the local community.
Some of my earlier comments on other posts regarding what constitutes “local” or “community” may have some bearing here. I have moved house seventeen times in twenty-nine years and lived in fifteen different neighbourhoods and while I hope to remain more settled now, it has been absolutely necessary for me to cultivate some non-local community in order to have any sort of continuity. Accordingly, much of my financial charitable contribution has been non-local in nature. I would also argue that global charities and initiatives can tackle problems that are not easily taken care of by local measures. Human trafficking comes to mind as one example. I don’t think we can focus purely on international issues and let the local council deal with local problems, but I think we ignore the vast interconnectedness of the world at our peril.
But donations through supermarkets to local food pantries or even just making a point of donating money to local community associations seems to me to run into another problem touched on in comments on this blog: that of turning everything into a financial equation. From what you write, I don’t think the family in your first example would have had much benefit from more money being spent on them. Quantifiable physical needs are not the only ones that leave people impoverished if they are not met… I am assuming that the retired solicitor in your example was not paid for his time. I am also well aware that no amount of money can force someone to care. Money can’t buy love.
I wonder whether some sort of mandatory or strongly-encouraged community service work, similar to some countries’ mandatory year of military service, would be useful. Would it encourage people to connect with those in need in compassionate and respectful ways, to recognise that we are all needy and all interconnected and come to know the joy of helping one another? Or would it be resented, would people think “Well, I’ve done my year, so I don’t have any obligation to help anyone now” and never make another contribution of money, time, energy or care?
I suspect the public outcry at the idea of such a measure would be enough to stop it happening. Maybe that’s good; maybe we can’t legislate love any more than we can buy it.
What else can we do to encourage each other to help one another? To spend our money, yes, but also our time and energy and care and, dare I say it, even our love on one another?
The only way I have learned to do this is by example, so I try to cultivate love for others, and I try to act with loving kindness. I try to spend my money, my time, my energy and my care in loving and generous ways. I fail often and keep trying anyway.
I’m open to other strategies if you have them.