Abstract
Building on the findings from the national study of mothers in recurrent care proceedings in England, this paper proposes that the concepts of complex trauma and epistemic trust may help explain parents’ difficulties in engaging with child protection services. With the aim of advancing theoretical knowledge, qualitative data drawn from interviews with 72 women who have experienced repeat care proceedings are revisited, with a focus on women’s developmental histories and accounts of engagement with professionals, to probe the issue of service engagement. The article starts with a succinct review of the literature on parental non-engagement in child protection, highlighting strengths and potential limitations of current knowledge. This is followed by an introduction to the theoretical concepts of complex trauma and epistemic trust, outlining how these concepts provide an alternative framing of the reasons why parents may resist, or are reluctant to engage with, professionals. Drawing on women’s first-person accounts, we argue that high levels of maltreatment and adversity in women’s own childhoods shape adult relationships, particularly in relation to vulnerability to harm in adult lives but also mistrust of professional help. Extracts from women’s first-person accounts, chosen for their typicality against the core themes derived from the data, indicate that acts of resistance or rejection of professional help can be seen as adaptive—given women’s childhoods and relationship histories. The authors conclude that parents’ social histories need to be afforded far closer attention in child protection practice, if preventative services are to reach those with histories of developmental trauma.
Highlights
In 2017, the findings from a national study of mothers in recurrent care proceedings in England was published [1]
We demonstrated how the concepts of complex trauma and epistemic trust help to challenge traditional perceptions of parental non-engagement in child protection services
Drawing on empirical data from a large-scale study of women in recurrent care proceedings we argue that to engage meaningfully with mothers in the context of child protection concerns, professionals must be equipped with the skills and aptitude to consider how a mother’s own childhood adversity has affected her ability to relate to professionals
Summary
In 2017, the findings from a national study of mothers in recurrent care proceedings in England was published [1]. The authors reported broad findings from the case file and qualitative interview component of this study, which have provided insights into the experiences of mothers who appear as respondents in successive sets of care proceedings. Prompted by continued national and international interest in the challenges of engaging parents effectively in preventative services to break a cycle of repeat involvement in the family courts [1,2,3,4], in this article we revisit birth mothers’ first-person accounts with the aim of offering new insights that help explain why parents may not readily engage. Drawing on the literature on complex trauma [5,6,7], we focus on women’s accounts of the childhood antecedents, which may set in motion mistrust of professionals and, broader complications in adult interpersonal relationships
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