I began to find the process wearing. I would watch a parent stand in the witness box and swear to a statement in a file that they often could not independently read, as they poured out their good intentions. Hope, I learned, even when manifested in miniature, is potent. I watched it survive up until the point when the magistrates filed into the courtroom and read out swathes of the social worker’s report regurgitated as their judgment. I understood why: it took considerable courage to question a social worker’s or a guardian’s recommendation. They were, after all, the ones who had access beyond the parental promises of change. They had come to know what daily life within this family really looked like, and had found it untenable. Even so, I began to think it near cruelty to say to a mother and father, as some did, that if they skipped and jumped through the hoops set out for them then all would be well. In reality, by the time they reached court, there was often little they could do or promise that might sway a social worker’s or guardian’s opinion. I also knew, from a confession which haunted the teller, that the pressure upon magistrates to grant the local authority its application can be overwhelming. Even in a case where they might consider there is a prospect of hope, a legal advisor interrupting their deliberations to ask, with exasperation, what could be taking so long – this case is a no-brainer – would ensure a seal upon the order before the day was out.
But I was troubled by how often a local authority was prepared to spend money on experts to prove a mother couldn’t parent, rather than on helping her learn how to do so, and by how often a guardian would simply turn and agree with them.11 I began to learn that it took something greater than bravery to overcome the fear of leaving a child with a parent who may cause them harm. Few, understandably, felt able to take this risk.
The occupants of the high rise flats in which Maggie lived were often transient, although a small number of them had lived there all their lives. Maggie was one of them. She had grown up there with her mother, Shelly, through a childhood marked by turmoil and danger. There were spells of time with her grandmother, Pauline, who lived with her partner, Tommy, in her own flat a few floors down. Sometimes Maggie went to foster carers – a respite, a chance for Shelly to get her life together. On occasion, Shelly did. But then the social workers would stop coming, and her slide back into chaos seemed faster every time.
Maggie was ten when she told the social workers knocking on her mother’s door that she refused to go with them again. That she would not leave Shelly by herself. That she would run away, again and again, until they gave up. Shelly was her mother. She was her mum. Nothing was stronger than Maggie’s knowledge and understanding of what this word meant. When she was born her infant brain had, by instinct and design, sought out the smells and sounds and sight of her mother above everyone else. The shouting and fighting and broken glass to which she had listened, as she lay deceptively impassive in her cot, were absorbed by her brain, defining its pathways and, in turn, her future. Maggie had learned how to read her mother’s face, the smell in the air, the frequencies that flowed off her as though she were a satellite. She had learned she must not confuse these changing signals: that she must anticipate when she would be hugged, or shouted at, or hit. Her mother had unknowingly trained her daughter’s nervous system to cope with the shattering terror of living with her. To Maggie, this was her normal.
There were other children – Maggie’s brothers and sisters – but when they left the flat they did not come back. Maggie decided upon her own rules about social workers: they smiled and said they were there to help you, then they took your babies. When she turned twelve another of her new siblings was removed, but this one seemed to break Shelly in a way the others had not. Maggie watched her mother escape into a pretend world on the cold, bright screen of her laptop until, one day, saying she had found true love with a faceless stranger, Shelly took Maggie to her grandmother’s flat in the middle of the night and banged on the door. Maggie, holding the shopping bags of clothes Shelly had packed for her, knew by her mother’s energy, humming and fizzing, not to say anything. She watched her walk away. She would not see her again for seven years.
When Shelly came back, Maggie was nineteen. Pauline and Tommy tried to stop Maggie being won over by Shelly’s promises of a new life, a fresh start, but could not do so. Maggie was an adult now. And even if she had been a child, they had no parental responsibility for her – a legal power granted to a mother even if her actions defy the meaning of the words.12 All they could do was stay nearby and try to help. So it was that, after a time, the men who came to visit Shelly in the middle of the night, shouting and brawling and drinking, began to notice Maggie. It was Pauline who first saw the strain of her granddaughter’s stomach on her tiny frame and realized, with a lurching sadness, that it was all about to begin again.
Three years later, a social worker called Andrea knocked on the door of the flat Maggie still shared with Shelly. She was there because Maggie, she had been told, was pregnant again. The last time she had seen Maggie was over two years ago, in court. A panel of magistrates had agreed with Andrea that this young girl had barely been parented herself; how could she possibly parent anyone else? Maggie’s first baby, placed in foster care since her birth, had failed to bond with her mother. If she was not asleep during the short permitted visits, then she would often fail to recognize Maggie and would cry when she picked her up. Maggie began to hate the contact sessions and started to miss them to avoid the humiliation of her tiny daughter’s rejection. There had been one last visit – a final goodbye – at which Maggie was under firm instructions not to weep or frighten her child by holding her too tight or against her will. And then she was gone.
It was an odd logic to send Andrea back to knock on Maggie’s door two years later, but one I would see in practice time and time again. It was true that Andrea knew the background of the case, that she had done the work and had a pre-existing relationship with Maggie. It was also true that this relationship was, by now, toxic. When Maggie showed Andrea into the flat that day and pointed to the changes she had made ready for this second baby now growing inside her, Andrea’s approach and tone seemed hauntingly familiar. Andrea said she was there to help, but Maggie feared her visit was only to gather evidence to use for the report that would, eventually, say that this baby should be removed as well.
The baby was born weeks after Andrea’s one visit to see Maggie’s home. As dawn broke, animal pain took over Maggie’s body and she thought for a moment that she might not survive it. But then came Aaron. Baby Aaron, blinking with eyes like the father he would never meet into the medical light. A few miles away, Andrea, hearing news of the birth from the hospital, printed off the pre-prepared form enabling her to issue the proceedings designed to take him away.
What happened next changed everything. The court form was sent off, but Andrea contacted a woman who agreed to take vulnerable mothers with new babies into her home. And so, unlike the last time, Maggie left the hospital with this baby in her arms. She did not return to her flat but by agreement took her baby to a semidetached house in a modest cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town, where she met the foster carer who would teach her how to be Aaron’s mother.13
A week after she arrived at the mother and baby placement, an Interim Care Order was granted by the magistrates’ court. This gave the local authority control of Aaron, albeit that he could stay in his placement with Maggie. Maggie did not fight it; she would do anything they asked if it meant she could keep her baby. The local authority then immediately began their parenting assessment. At the first meeting, when Aaron was ten days old, Maggie found herself surrounded by social workers and professionals, their titles, laminated on cords around their necks, confirming their power as they talked over her about her future. By the time Aaron was twelve weeks old, the local authority’s report was finished. Maggie was doing well in the mother and baby foster placement, it conceded. The foster mother had reported a good bond between Maggie and Aaron. But Maggie’s own childhood had been marked
by severe physical and emotional neglect and she had never learned how to parent. Her baby would be at potential risk of serious harm if placed in the community with his mother. She was compulsively compliant: she found it hard to stand up to dangerous individuals because, so often, these people were her only form of support and shelter. She could not see the threat Shelly posed, and although she had promised to cut off contact with her mother, no one believed she could. She would need a lot of help to be a parent, both physical and emotional. And, most importantly, Maggie herself had already conceded she could not parent when her first child was removed. Not her fault, of course: just history repeating itself. There was nothing to be done.
The first time I met Maggie was at her interim resolution hearing, some nine months after Aaron was born.14 The solicitor instructing me had represented her at every other hearing that had taken place in the magistrates’ court. There had been delays – putative fathers needing to be ruled out, hearings adjourned, expert reports ordered. A decision had been made that the issues had become too complex for the magistrates and the case needed to go before a judge. That was how Maggie came to find herself sitting alone, in the atrium of Medway County Court on a cold morning in January, waiting for me.
Medway County Court is an ugly red-brick building. It loomed ahead of me, depressing in the grey winter light, as I wheeled my case up the winding slope and over the grey concrete bridge towards its entrance. I was late. Snow had paralysed the trains leaving London and I was over-hot from running from the station wrapped in winter layers. Once inside the courthouse I looked for the other parties, but it was almost empty. With a rush of panic, I wondered if the hearing had started without me. Then I saw a girl sitting alone on one of the flip-up chairs in the waiting area, and knew she must be Maggie.
I signed in and at the same time checked which judge we were before. Judge Nicholas. I frowned. He had been a family district judge for many years, but had only recently moved into public law. Maggie’s case was to be, I discovered later that morning, his first care case. I had appeared before him many times. He could be a difficult judge, for no other reason than that he felt too many lawyers fell below his high standards of precision and preparation. I knew that the local authority’s failure to send through the documents they were supposed to have provided for the hearing would already have aggravated him.15 Their lateness was likely to tip him over the edge.
Eventually, in a hustle of coats, the local authority solicitor and her barrister, Pippa, arrived, with loud complaints of snow and gridlock on a journey that should have taken under half an hour. Shortly after them came the social worker, then the guardian’s solicitor with a message to say the guardian, Deborah, was ill. A cold. She was not going to make it.
Judge Nicholas strode into court and flung his fury across the desk. The two lever-arch files for the case, which he was supposed to have read for that morning’s hearing, had, he said, been sent through only yesterday and were now lost in the court office. Pippa, stumbling for an explanation, said that she had forgotten to prepare the required documents, then immediately regretted this confession when Judge Nicholas’s face turned puce. It was just not good enough, he said. He was going to adjourn the hearing and expected to see everyone back there again in two days’ time. He wanted the practice direction documents by the end of the day without excuse. Five minutes later we found ourselves outside court, admonished. I waved off Maggie and called my solicitor. ‘I think,’ I said, kicking brown wet mush off the wheels of my case, ‘that Judge Nicholas is actually going to be quite good at this.’
Maggie and I were again the first to arrive at court two days later, the other parties turning up just as the hearing was due to begin. Deborah, the guardian, was still unwell and was not, in spite of the judge’s wrath, at court. Pippa handed out copies of the ‘Case Summary and Chronology’ she had emailed two days earlier. They were inelegantly done: every order made in the case so far had simply been cut and pasted in its entirety and I flinched at what the judge would say.
Judge Nicholas fumed at the documents the local authority had sent through but knew that we had to get on with the hearing. The purpose of an interim resolution hearing is to try, as far as possible, to resolve outstanding issues by agreement. If all works well, a final hearing can be averted. No, Pippa said. The local authority was making no changes to its plan, nor offering any concessions or alternative suggestions. It wished to place the baby with a foster carer as soon as possible; too much time had already passed. The social worker was already twin-tracking – looking for adoptive parents who might take Aaron when the court sealed the order they expected it to make.16 Judge Nicholas turned to the guardian’s solicitor, standing alone at the end of the bench. Yes, she said in response to his question, Deborah was in complete agreement with the local authority. Judge Nicholas looked at the solicitor long enough to see her flush, then turned to me. Yes, I confirmed, the mother still very much contested the application.
The judge turned to Pippa. ‘And the author of the psychological report – she is, I presume, warned to attend the final hearing and give evidence?’ he asked. I looked at him with curiosity. Dr Dymphna was a clinical psychologist who had assessed Maggie many months before my involvement, at the request of all the parties. Her report had been filed and thereafter little had been said of it. Barely any mention was made of her findings in the social worker’s evidence and, when I had read her report, I understood why. Dr Dymphna had been highly critical of the local authority’s failure to help Maggie above and beyond securing her a mother-and-baby foster placement. This was a mother damned by her heritage, she had said, but until Maggie’s ability to change was tested there was no way of knowing whether she could break from her past and mould her own future. There was every indication that she might be able to do so, given her demonstrated abilities so far, albeit that they were acquired only recently and in the cocoon of her placement. But there were several areas of therapy and practical help which the local authority should try before they could say for certain that the risk of leaving the baby in Maggie’s care was too great, or that the case was as hopeless as they considered it.
‘Yes,’ Pippa confirmed, ‘the expert has been warned to attend on the first day.’
‘Good, good,’ replied the judge, nodding slowly. He looked, for a moment, as if he were absorbed in a plan. ‘I would like her called first, please. Right then.’ He snapped the file shut in front of him. ‘Then there is nothing for it: we must have our final hearing.’ And with that he stood, causing the rest of us to start to our feet, and marched out of his door at the back of court.
The final hearing began two weeks later. I sat in court with Maggie behind me as Dr Dymphna stood in the witness box and swore her oath. She wore a boxy navy suit and round, black-framed glasses. Like many of the experts I cross-examine, she had the lightly contemptuous air of someone convinced of their superior intellect. Her answers to the questions that followed were clipped, peppered with the jargon of psychological theory, but delivered in a way that made it sound as though she was entirely uninterested in the actual outcome. I wondered if this was deliberate: nonchalance designed to add objectivity and, therefore, weight.
She spoke of Maggie without warmth or affection. Maggie’s reading and writing ability was that of a child’s, she said, but she did not suffer the kind of cognitive dysfunction the social worker had initially suspected. Quite the opposite, in fact. Maggie excelled in some areas, indicating a higher than average aptitude for understanding new problems if they were explained to her well. There had been a number of assumptions made by the local authority and an anticipation of failure, with heavy reliance on the removal of the previous child, but without subjecting Maggie to any real test. Dr Dymphna found that Maggie was open, compliant, able to cooperate. She had managed to work as well as she was able with a social worker she greatly mistrusted. Maggie was able to form long and sustained attachments, and was able to prioritize her son if she was given clear guidelines on ho
w to do so. Dr Dymphna could not, she concluded, comment on whether Maggie was able to shift her ability to think objectively about risk, because she had not been assessed while living alone in the community. The psychologist paused, as though she hoped everyone was listening. Shortly after she delivered her report, she said, there had been a meeting with all the professionals at which she had set out all the work that could be done with Maggie. And, to be plain, if the local authority had done it, she would now be able to tell the court whether or not Maggie presented a sufficient risk to justify her baby’s removal. As no such work had been done, she was unable to give the court a determined view.
Direct criticism of social workers, or criticism of a local authority’s approach, is most often confined to the comment columns, misleading tabloid articles and vitriolic websites, and, occasionally, the appeal courts. The bite-back to accusations of failure is often political: it was not their fault – they are underfunded, services have been cut, they are poorly paid and overworked. This is, of course, true, but does not explain why some local authorities do what others do not, or succeed where others fail, despite the same challenges and budget.17 In reality, those who choose to do difficult jobs for modest remuneration do so for a multitude of complex reasons. Among them, almost always, is a desire to do good, to make things better, to help. This desire does not always equate to ability. But some feel the boast of a good heart and the right intentions should excuse poor performance, and I wondered whether it was this which lay behind the expressions on the faces of social workers I cross-examined in court who objected to such scrutiny, as though their title alone were proof of their rightness.
In Your Defence Page 13
