Cinderella law is not the answer

Over recent months we have seen the development of the idea that the laws regarding child abuse, and specifically neglect, are outdated and that we need to change our thinking to address the concept of ‘emotional cruelty’. In essence, a law that makes it an offence to deliberately cause harm to children in respect of the “impairment of physical, intellectual, social, emotional or behavioural development,” as noted by Mark Williams MP.

This is supported by Conservative MP Rob Buckland, who said: “You can look at a range of behaviours, from ignoring a child’s presence and failing to stimulate a child, right through to acts of terrorising a child where the child is frightened to disclose what is happening to them. Isolating them, belittling them, rejecting them, corrupting them,
as well, into criminal or anti-social behaviour.”

However, there are at least two central issues: first, do we need to change the law; and, second, if we did, is it possible to police it fairly?

Good enough

According to the deputy prime minister, such a change is probably not required. His ‘unease’ relates to the idea that the courts can intervene in deciding whether parents have been ‘good enough’ in providing adequate care and kindness in respect of emotional development.

Certainly, the family courts have been involved in deciding if parents are good enough, but normally there is ‘physical evidence’ of wrong-doing, including neglect. However, this proposal, the so-called ‘Cinderella law’, seeks to move the state into punishing and criminalising those it deems ‘inadequate’ in a category of behaviour that one might argue is extremely subjective in its determination, and the most difficult and complex to assess.

I am concerned with the practicalities of how, and who, adequately assesses the concept of emotional abuse.

Many of the behaviours cited above by Buckland will be seen in children requiring the support of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) due to conduct disorders and oppositional defiant disorders, which may or may not be exacerbated by conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For others, the child’s withdrawal, self-isolation and apparent fear may be wrongly attributed to ‘parenting’ as opposed to depression.

Indeed, various estimates have suggested that 20 per cent of students with depression also demonstrate anger management and behaviour control difficulties, which may be associated with this same pattern of withdrawal, potentially leading to a misdiagnosis.

In addition, could the difficulties cited by Buckland be a product of parenting by a mother with post-partum depression?

Quality assessment

It is easy to list a range of behaviours but, as any experienced clinician will be able to state, there are many causes of such behaviour in children, and not all are a product of child neglect and emotional abuse; whereas they can be due to abuse, one also needs to be open to considering all the possibilities.

This brings us on to how we assess the parenting and the support available to the courts, especially as family courts are having access to outside experts restricted; assuming that all such cases of child abuse begin within the family courts, as one might argue they should.

The quality of the assessment is central, but all too often the need to reduce costs has the effect of distorting the assessment. Indeed, a colleague who works as a health visitor told me that many so-called ‘routine duties’ have been taken over by healthcare assistants, who undoubtedly do a fine job, but as she told me, ‘weighing a baby’ is about more than ‘weighing a baby’; it is also about assessing the baby’s physical structure, the mother’s well-being, and the bond between mother and child. Health visitors are professionally trained to conduct such assessments and to pick up the early warning signs, healthcare assistants are not.

In schools, a senior manager told me how their member of staff with ‘liaison’ duties for children with social service involvement misattributed signs of poverty with the signs of neglect and abuse. The manager prevented the family being referred just because they were dirty and unkempt. As Carol Sellers in her book ‘Risk Assessment in People with Learning Disabilities’ (BPS Blackwell, 2002) suggests, little harm comes to children just because they are dirty.

The recent Family Justice Reforms (FJR) reinforce the concern, allied to the substantial reduction in access to appropriate experts created by the Legal Aid Agencies’ (LAA) desire to ‘save money’.

Mark Solon, managing director of legal training company Bond Solon, wrote in April 2014: “With the reducing numbers of experts being instructed, the focus of instructing parties will now turn to those who are professionally qualified in both their given field and in the separate discipline of performing the expert witness’ role.”

However, older and more experienced experts faced with the 20 per cent cut in fees in April 2013 and a further 20 per cent cut in December of the same year, plus an allied reduction in the number of hours that can be spent on addressing a case, have simply stopped offering their services.

This is made even more worrying when one considers that the FJR did not address the idea
of ‘what makes a practitioner in a chosen field,
an expert?’

My daughters are at that time of life when they are learning to drive. However, does passing their test and having the appropriate licence mean they are skilled and experienced drivers? The FJR did not address explicitly the idea that qualifying alone was not enough to work as an expert. Hence, we are losing our most experienced experts and replacing them with others who are often within the early parts of their careers, lacking the range and depth of experience required by
the courts to address this particularly complex area of work.

Adversarial system

However, added to all this, emotional abuse had been an issue for family courts, but now it is being suggested that we move into the criminal jurisdiction and the adversarial system of justice. These courts do not have the same timetables and the same rules and restrictions. However, will the LAA permit experts, such as they are, to assess the whole family unit, as opposed to their current practice, the assessment of an individual?

Understanding the relationships and the individual psychological states of the members of a family would be crucial in understanding the allegations placed before the court. I addressed a case in 2007 where the father was initially seen as the ‘perpetrator’ of the emotional abuse inflicted onto his four children, only to discover via the assessment that the central cause was the mother and her parents.

To this day, the father continues to have access to the children, whereas the mother and her parents have none. This was all managed within the current legislation. Protecting these children did not require the law to change, only the ability of the courts to access an expert with a range and depth of experience and providing them with the time to complete a thorough piece of work.

However, of equal concern, such a law could see an innocent parent separated from their family for more than a year until their case was resolved, damaging relationships and the family structure.
Assessing emotional abuse is by far and away the most complex area within the field of child abuse and with the rhetoric surrounding the Cinderella Law, potentially the most dangerous to the family. SJ

Graham Rogers is a consultant psychologist ?www.grahamrogers.org.uk