07/04/2022
Police Oracle
Work with offenders on a new report from AVA
AVA (“Against Violence & Abuse”) is a leading UK charity committed to ending gender based violence and abuse. They have just published a new report “Staying Mum” based on peer research with mothers who have survived domestic abuse & child removal.
AVA recruited seven women with lived experience of domestic abuse and child removal to support the Staying Mum project as peer researchers who conducted 26 interviews with women who had experienced these two traumatic experiences.
Experiences
Mothers talked about how the coercive, controlling and violent abuse they encountered disrupted their parenting and ended up with their children being removed by social services. Often, the abuse continued after they had separated or divorced from perpetrators, continuing to have an impact on them and their children. Tragically, children were typically the direct targets of domestic and sexual abuse themselves, both before and after being removed from their mothers. This obviously affected their safety and, in some cases their behaviour, making it even harder for their mothers to parent effectively. Mothers found the removal of their children incredibly traumatic and led them to question their own identity and left them with feelings of shame, self-blame and failure, typically compounded by judgement from families, friends and community.
One of the key findings of the report were that mothers were most commonly judged to be unfit parents on the grounds of their mental health and that allegations of abuse, neglect and poor parenting made and accepted during family court proceedings contrasted greatly with mothers’ own experience of domestic abuse and motherhood. All too often these allegations aligned with their perpetrator’s narrative of events.
The majority of mothers said that their children had been ordered to live with the perpetrator or a member of the perpetrator’s family either temporarily or permanently after they were removed from their mother’s care. They frequently felt their socio-economic status affected their treatment by professionals, particularly where their partner was wealthier or better-connected than them.
Some mothers told the researchers that they felt their mental health problems, often invented by the perpetrator, were used to discriminate against them. This was also the case for women with autism spectrum disorders and learning disabilities.
Black and minoritised mothers, Muslim mothers and those from migrant backgrounds also spoke of how they experienced racism and cultural stereotyping from both perpetrators and professionals.
It is hard to exaggerate the impact on these mothers or having their children removed. They talked of lasting feelings of fear, guilt, shame and humiliation, as well as exhaustion, powerlessness and anger. Many mothers felt that their mental health deteriorated sharply after their children were removed.
Views of professionals
The researchers found system-wide lack of knowledge about domestic abuse and trauma across social services and family court professionals which led to poor decision-making and missed opportunities to reduce harm for mothers and children. Mothers felt that those professionals with a poor understanding of domestic abuse were at risk of being manipulated and drawn into colluding with perpetrators.
Mothers found that the family court system was used as a platform by perpetrators to silence, humiliate, isolate and financially abuse survivors, including through the use of court orders restricting their ability to speak about domestic and sexual abuse and further limiting contact with their children.
Mothers felt that perpetrators, family courts and social services were all against them, aligned in creating and maintaining a persistent narrative that they were unfit or abusive parents.
Critically. in light of their experiences, many mothers reported that they wished they had never told anyone about the domestic abuse or attempted to leave their partner.
Recommendations
The mothers who participated n this research called for better training and support to prevent the removal of children from survivors of domestic abuse wherever possible, including:
They also called for support to navigate the family court system and for radical changes to that system, which they experienced as being biased against mothers and pro-contact for fathers regardless of circumstance.
Mothers also called for the overhaul of social services, which they understood as actively working to remove children from survivors of domestic abuse.