https://bylinetimes.com/2024/08/07/neurodiverse-mother-and-daughter-sue-birmingham-council/Neurodiverse Mother and Daughter Sue Birmingham Council for ‘Wrongful’ Separation
They claim the council was negligent in pursuing a care order and breached their human rights
Natasha Phillips
7 August 2024
An autistic mother and daughter are suing Birmingham City Council for separating them during child protection proceedings claiming that the council was negligent in pursuing a care order, did not understand neurodiversity, and had breached their human right to family life. The child, who was born in 2016, was taken into care when she was seven weeks old, after her mother had asked the local authority for support. Byline Times learned of her story through the Family Court Reporting Pilot which allows accredited journalists access to court hearings that have historically been held in private. No details that can lead to the parties involved being identified can be reported. The mother, who was subjected to intimate partner violence by the child’s father resulting in an indefinite restraining order and criminal conviction against him, contacted the council because she felt anxious about being a first time mother. She expressed fears about whether her autism might make parenting more challenging and whether the abuse she suffered by the father might affect the way she felt about their daughter. Local authority staff claimed the mother was mentally unwell and had a borderline personality disorder, and applied for a care order. The child, who is now eight, was initially placed in foster care for more than 20 months and then given to her paternal grandmother to be looked after. The care proceedings for the child concluded in 2018 and the child was returned to her mother. “Because I was taken from momma at the age of seven-weeks-old, I feel that whenever momma goes out to the shops or something she will not come back,” the young girl told Byline Times. “I don’t think the courts make decisions that are the best for children. Social services did not provide me with a life story while I was in foster care, so I don’t even know my first word.”
Several court filings, which this newspaper has seen, are critical of the local authority’s actions, with one judge concluding that the mother “had been deprived of the opportunity to demonstrate her ability to care [for her daughter]” and that both mother and child were now “seeking damages from the local authority”.
The details of the claim against Birmingham City Council, which have been shared with Byline Times, allege that the mother and daughter suffered psychological harm as a result of the care order and that the council had prevented the child from forming a secure attachment to her mother. The filing also alleges that the council failed to provide opportunities for the mother to breastfeed and restricted their ability to bond. The claim goes on to allege that the council’s removal of the child was not in her “best interests and was a disproportionate and draconian response to the difficulties experienced by [the mother],” and “failed to appreciate that [the mother] had not been provided with adequate intervention and specialist support”. The council is also accused of providing “contact arrangements that were initially chaotic and denied any contact”.
The young girl has since been diagnosed with an attachment disorder and is waiting for an assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The UK’s Care Crisis
The United Nations has become increasingly concerned by the numbers of children being placed into care in the UK. Observations produced by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2023 urged the UK to take a child rights-focused approach to children’s social care and ensure children’s voices were heard in care proceedings. It also pushed for the UK to reduce the number of child removals and to do so through “early intervention and preventative services”. Government figures show there were 83,840 children in care at the end of March 2023, equivalent to one child in every 140. Children with Special Educational Needs (SEND) appear to be disproportionally represented. Research produced in 2020 by UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health found that 80% of children in England who were in care between the ages of five and 16 received support for SEND, which includes children with a diagnosis of autism. Established research estimates that one in five people in the UK are neurodiverse. Neurodiversity refers to the different and natural ways in which people’s brains process the world around them. It can refer to the learning and processing differences found in children and adults, including autism, ADHD and SEND. Details about the case against Birmingham City Council emerged in documents produced for a separate but related set of proceedings in the family courts about the girl’s contact arrangements with her paternal family which began in 2019. The child began to complain in 2022 about a contact order which had been put in place and an application was filed by the mother to vary it. The arrangements broke down in part because the father failed to write letters to his daughter as required by the order, and to read letters she had written to him. The paternal grandmother also made comments during contact which upset the child, including repeated remarks about her autism “not being real” and being constantly asked to keep secrets from the mother. The mother was accused of trying to turn the child against the father and paternal grandmother and as a result engaging in parental alienation. The final hearing for the family court case was held in August in the Birmingham Family Court. The child’s father did not attend and had a Qualified Legal Representative acting on his behalf. Qualified Legal Representatives’ are appointed by the court to ensure cross-examinations of vulnerable witnesses such as victims of domestic violence are not carried out by the perpetrators of the abuse. The mother attended the hearing with her barrister and solicitor, while the paternal grandmother attended with her Qualified Legal Representative. In her application to vary the contact order, the mother said her daughter’s health had deteriorated significantly since the order was made and alleged that the contact arrangements between her daughter and her paternal family, which were produced by the Cafcass support service, had not been mindful of her daughter’s needs as an autistic person and did not take into account her daughter’s wishes and feelings. They included wanting to be able to decide when to see her father and paternal grandmother. The mother added that her experience of intimate partner violence with the father had also been ignored by the Cafcass officer. The child tried to tell the Cafcass officer on several occasions that she was not comfortable with the arrangements and eventually became distraught and suffered volatile meltdowns. Responding to a Cafcass feedback form which asked what the child thought about Cafcass’s engagement with her she said, “I got so angry that I chewed [the letter], ripped it and stamped on it. Your questions were silly and nothing about contact. You didn’t even ask me what my wishes and feelings are.”
Replying to questions about how Cafcass approached her autism, she said, “I feel that you didn’t respect my disabilities. Your approach was not autism friendly.”
"You didn’t help me. You didn’t make a difference, you only made it worse" - The daughter on Cafcass
“I feel that as an institution, Cafcass are institutionally ableist. During care proceedings they refused to make any reasonable adjustments for me,” the mother told Byline Times.
The mother, who is currently on benefits and receiving legal aid for her cases, used her savings to commission an Independent Social Worker with experience of working with autistic families to produce a report on the current contact arrangements and make recommendations to vary it. The recommendations for contact, which were largely in line with the mother’s and daughter’s wishes, were approved by the judge at the hearing in August. “Had I not funded this report, I think the hearing would have probably gone down another child protection route,” the mother said.
The judge concluded at the final hearing in August that the arrangements for contact needed to be revised in line with the child’s needs and wishes, and made several changes including ensuring the young girl was not forced to have contact with her father and that he completed a drug rehabilitation work and a domestic abuse programme. “Autism per se does not mean that you can’t parent. In some ways, I think an autistic parent might argue they had a better insight into the needs of their autistic child, because they can share some of the experiences,” Frances Harris, a barrister at Harcourt Family Law who represented the mother at the final hearing, told Byline Times.
Justice System and Social Care Not Properly Trained on Autism
Legal professionals inside the child protection system are becoming increasingly aware that neurodivergent individuals, particularly autistic parents, face significant challenges in child protection proceedings and assessments about their capacity to parent. Alia Lewis, the co-founder of Family Law Advice for the Neurodivergent Community (FLANC) and a child care law solicitor at law firm Duncan Lewis, told Byline Times that the justice system and children’s social care did not provide adequate training on autism. “The biggest problem is that no-one inside the system has any specific training on autism or neurodivergence. If you don’t have the knowledge, then that means everything that you do in relation to a child is based on what you think you know rather than what you need to know," - Alia Lewis, co-founder of FLANC
She added that, “another problem” due to a lack of training amongst both areas within child protection and family justice, in terms of neurodivergence, is that “unless you really have a good understanding of the complex needs that arise with many of these children, it’s very difficult to know what assessments to ask for in court in order to be able to properly care for the child.”
FLANC’s website states that the advice service was set up to ensure “the neurodivergent community has equal access to justice by addressing barriers to participation in family proceedings and dispute resolution”.
Other issues which arise for autistic children and adults during family court cases stem from the set up of the court room. Bright lights, a lot of movement and long hearings can all be challenging for autistic people and can make participating in proceedings almost impossible. In his closing statement, District Judge Stephen Parker said it was important for anyone who was not autistic to try to understand this form of neurodiversity: “It’s very difficult to look at it from our own perspective because we are in our own little world whereby what we perceive as normal is normal, but that may not be others’ worldview.”
“You can see someone’s got COVID, sneezing, coughing, looking awful. But with neurological issues, be it depression or neurodiversity we may be able to see something is wrong, but we don’t feel it because we haven’t been through it ourself. But we need to understand so as to have empathy with it as it is a different worldview,” he added.
In a statement included in the filings for the hearing, the mother said: “I hope that there is much needed change within social services and the family courts, so that should [my daughter] ever decide to have her own children, she is able to do so without being misunderstood or seen as a deficit, simply because she is autistic. I would like the court to be aware that care proceedings were extremely traumatic for me. Neither [my daughter] or I have had any support or therapy in relation to our separation.”
Byline Times contacted the legal representatives of the father and paternal grandmother for comment but they did not respond. Birmingham City Council declined to comment.
This story was written as part of the Family Court Reporting Pilot which allows accredited journalists access to a range of family court hearings that have historically been held in private.
