https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/family-parenting/article-15221239/sons-social-services-adoption-unfit-mothers-Angela-Frazer-Wicks.htmlMy beloved sons were removed by social services and put up for adoption. But read my story before you judge 'unfit' mothers like me, says Angela Frazer-Wicks
By HELEN CARROLL FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Published: 01:08, 24 October 2025 | Updated: 09:47, 24 October 2025
Angela Frazer-Wicks will never forget the sunny July day she strapped her two little boys into a stranger's car and waved goodbye acutely, heartbreakingly aware that she was unlikely ever to see them again. A social worker was driving them away to be adopted, after Angela, then 29, had been deemed an 'unfit' mother. As the car carrying her sons, then five and 14 months, pulled away, Angela's knees buckled and she fell to the ground. 'The last words I said to my sons, through the car window, were 'Mammy loves you and I'll write really soon'. Then they were gone,' recalls Angela.
'The pain was so intense, I honestly don't know how I ever stood back up. I stayed in bed for days, wishing I was dead.'
This is a story that is very rarely told. While parents who adopt children who have been removed from birth families have been known to speak out, mothers who lose their offspring in this way rarely do. Perhaps understandably, as these extreme measures are shrouded in shame, and sympathy is scant. It is assumed that if your children are taken off you, you must be at worst violent or abusive, at best feckless. No one imagines you might be a victim of circumstances yourself. At the same time, social workers must put the child's best interests first. We have all heard of the tragic cases where children died at the hands of the parents who were wrongly deemed fit to keep them. So why would Angela wish to stick her head above the parapet to speak about this controversial topic?
She says she has chosen to share her story in National Adoption Week to help raise awareness that not all mothers like her are 'abusive monsters' and how crucial post-adoption support is. 'Most people, just as I once did, believe that all birth mothers must have done something hideously bad for our children to be taken away from us,' she says.
'I'm as sickened as anyone by the tragic tales of children being subjected to the most awful things at the hands of parents because social workers haven't stepped in. But, when they do, it's not always because of abuse or severe neglect. 'I hope that my experience illustrates how very complicated the stories of those of us who find ourselves in this deeply sad situation can be.'
After all, Angela's current life couldn't be more different to the situation she found herself in when her sons were taken away. Now 50, she is a respectable married mother to a daughter, 14, living in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. And, perhaps most surprisingly, she is now in regular contact with her elder son an unexpected outcome she describes as 'something that brings me more joy than I'd ever hoped possible'.
Indeed, such is the dramatic turnaround that in 2023 Angela was awarded an MBE for services to children and families, recognising her work with child welfare charity the Family Rights Group. Rewind two decades to 2004, when Angela lost her sons, Jonathon and Joseph, and it was a different story. Back then she was in an abusive relationship with the father of her younger son, who had coerced her into taking heroin a drug he himself was addicted to after insisting it would ease her ongoing pain after her caesarean scar burst following the birth of her elder boy. While Angela never hurt her sons and says they were always fed and clean, she was warned that if she couldn't keep her violent partner out of her children's lives, they would be taken into care. 'I understand they were worried about my sons, knowing how violent my partner was and that we were both dependent on drugs, but what I needed was support to get away from him, to get off drugs and with raising my children,' says Angela.
'The mistake they made was in seeing me as the problem the person my children needed taking away from not, with the right help, someone who could be part of the solution.'
As the council house they lived in was in her partner's name and she was not permitted to change the locks, even once a restraining order was put in place, she was unable to keep him away. 'I know there is very little sympathy for birth parents like me, but having your children taken away is the hardest and most painful thing any mother could experience,' says Angela, who has now been clean for almost 20 years.
'I would have given anything to be able to raise my sons myself, but I just didn't have the means, or support, to keep them safe.'
It was three years before she turned her life around with the help of a drug rehabilitation programme and following the organisation After Adoption putting her in contact with the Family Rights Group. And, while feeling 'eternally grateful' to her sons' adoptive parents for the 'wonderful' childhoods they had, she dearly wishes she had been able to achieve that before she lost the chance to raise them. Like many who find themselves in such intensely fraught situations, Angela had a troubled upbringing. Growing up in the North East, her father, now dead, was physically abusive, beating her with a belt and slippers throughout her childhood. She left home aged 19 and had little further contact with her parents. When she became pregnant at 23 in 1998, the father chose not to be in her son's life. The birth of her first son ended in a C-section and, a few days later, back home alone with baby Jonathon, the scar split. 'My insides basically came out of the wound, and I had to pick them up in my dressing gown and phone for an ambulance,' Angela says. 'I was rushed to hospital where the doctors saved my life.'
Traumatised and in a great deal of pain, Angela contacted her local authority to ask if any help could be provided before her return home. She was assigned a family support worker, a woman called Christine, who she credits with helping her turn her life around. With Christine's help, she found a nursery place for Jonathon, enrolled on a law course at a local college and worked full-time as a paralegal. While paying rent to a private landlord, Angela also managed to save money towards a deposit on a house. However, when Jonathon was 19 months old, Angela met a man who seemed 'kind and charming', but who turned out to be anything but. 'He showed me a lot of concern and compassion that I'd not experienced in relationships before,' she says. 'He made me laugh and was lovely with my son.'
But when, a few weeks later, she agreed he could move in with her, his kindness quickly turned into coercive control. 'He always had to know where I was, who I was talking to and accused me of having affairs with people at work,' she recalls. 'Within a few months of him moving in, everything fell apart. Out of the blue I received an eviction notice and discovered that he'd been stealing the rent money, pretending to pay it and then forging the rent book. He'd also stolen my house deposit. Trying to repay the rent, I didn't have enough money to put my son into nursery, which meant I couldn't get to work, so within a matter of weeks I lost my job, my home, my car. Everything.'
It was then that Angela discovered her partner who died in 2013 was a heroin addict who had relapsed and spent her money on drugs. He had also been stealing the codeine tablets she was taking for abdominal pain from the caesarean. Apologetic, he promised to find them somewhere else to live securing a council house, in his name and that, once they were settled, he would go to rehab. It was then that Angela succumbed to taking illegal drugs. When her codeine ran out her GP refused to prescribe more as she was already on the maximum dose. Her partner convinced her that 'a little bit of heroin' would help. I was in so much pain it was difficult to function,' Angela recalls. 'So I decided to smoke a tiny bit of heroin, thinking it was just until I could get my prescription filled. But that's not the way that heroin works and, before I knew it, I was completely dependent. The hardest thing of all to bear was how badly I'd let my son down.'
Desperate to turn her life around, Angela contacted social services in the hope of reconnecting with Christine. But by then the council no longer employed family support workers and she was assigned a social worker, who urged her to come off the drugs without offering help to do so. Living in fear of her violent partner while trying, unsuccessfully, to manage her own withdrawal from heroin, Angela had a breakdown. It was while she was in hospital that Jonathon, then three, was first put in temporary foster care. Shortly after returning home, Angela discovered she was pregnant with her second child. Initially, not wanting a baby, her partner walked out. The pregnancy meant she was moved up the list for drug rehabilitation, and she was able to get completely clean with a methadone withdrawal programme in her second trimester. Four weeks before the baby was due, Jonathon was finally allowed to go back home, a joyous moment for Angela. However, shortly before the birth her partner also returned, apologising and claiming the prospect of fatherhood had scared him, because his dad had deserted him when he was a baby. After Joseph's birth, things deteriorated exponentially. When Joseph was six weeks old, Angela went into septic shock after it was found some of the placenta had remained in her uterus. Doctors managed to save her life, only for her partner to throw her down the stairs, fracturing her ribs and breaking her thumb. She went to court to get a non-molestation order so he would be arrested if he went near her or the children. But the same day, social workers turned up at the door bearing the news that her children were now on the 'at risk register', because she had failed to protect them from seeing her being assaulted. She was then 'forced' to sign an agreement that should she allow her now former partner near them, the children would be removed immediately. Over the next four weeks, her ex would regularly let himself into the house: 'I'd wake in the middle of the night, and he'd be standing over me, saying 'Give me money, or I'm going to tell them I've been here and you'll lose the kids'.'
Police said that without evidence there was no proof he'd broken the non-molestation order. In desperation, Angela pleaded with staff at her local social services offices to find her and the children somewhere to live where he wouldn't find them. Instead, the following day a social worker and two police officers turned up at the door and announced that her children were being taken into care because, in admitting that her ex had been in the house, she had 'failed to protect' them from him and broken the terms of the order she had signed. That day in 2004 was the last time Angela's sons were under her roof. She spent the next year attending access visits and undergoing a psychological assessment in an attempt to get them back. But when a psychologist's report stated she would need a minimum of 18 months instead of the required 12 months of therapy to be 'in a position to parent', she was told her children would be adopted. 'I was utterly devastated,' she says. 'I became severely depressed. Stopped answering the phone, stopped going to contact meetings, because seeing my sons was too painful, and not one person checked on me.'
Angela went on to attempt suicide and was offered a place in a women's refuge, which she accepted. Angela was eventually convinced to give written permission for the adoption as she no longer had the strength or support to continue fighting. Over the next few months, she began attending contact sessions again. 'I wanted to make some precious memories with them in the time we had left,' she says.
'Those meetings, in soulless access centres, were incredibly bittersweet. As the final one approached, in the July, all I could think was: 'How can I tell my five-year-old son that we'll soon have to say goodbye?' But I needn't have worried because he took me by the hand and said, 'Mam, you'd better sit down, I've got some bad news for you. Not next week, but the week after is the last time you're ever going to see either of us again. Are you going to be OK on your own?'
Angela becomes tearful at the memory. Despite the crippling loss and grief, by the end of 2005 Angela had completed a methadone programme and was free of drugs. She moved away from the North East to Norfolk, where she met her husband Paul, 43, head of technical in a food production company. Still, she thought about her sons every day, all the more so after having her daughter. Desperate to avoid any investigations following her daughter's birth, Angela contacted social services while pregnant. Following an assessment, social workers confirmed they had no child protection concerns. In the early years she'd had 'letterbox contact' with her sons, annual letters with photographs. However, that stopped when her eldest reached his teenage years and his adoptive mother wrote explaining that they were moving to Australia and he was struggling with the thought of maintaining the connection. Angela insists that her priority was respecting her sons' wishes and doing whatever was in their interests. Then, out of the blue, in December 2020 she received an email from her old local authority saying Jonathon, by then 22, would like to hear from her and passing on an email address. 'I sent a message saying, 'I'm absolutely over the moon to be in touch, but there's no pressure' and got an instant reply, 'Hi, Mum. This has been a long time coming, hasn't it?' I couldn't believe he was back in my life, and calling me Mum,' says Angela, smiling, with glistening eyes.
They have stayed in regular contact since, and last October Jonathon came to visit, with his wife. 'Exactly 20 years, three months and 14 days after hugging him goodbye, I hugged him hello again,' says Angela.
'There just aren't words to describe how wonderful that moment was for me. I'd never dared dream it would happen. 'It felt like the most natural thing in the world.'
As well as rejoicing at having Jonathon back in her life, she was touched by the bond that developed between her son and daughter, who had heard so much about her brothers. Joseph has not had the same desire to reconnect with Angela, a decision she respects, wanting him to do whatever feels right. Angela tries to be compassionate with her younger self. 'Although it makes me sad, I can't turn back the clock and there's little point in thinking about all the years I didn't have with my sons. If things had been different, I'm unlikely to have met my husband and my daughter wouldn't exist. Likewise, I couldn't have given them the wonderful life they've had with their adoptive parents, and I'd never want to take that away from any of them.'
Jonathon and Joseph's names have been changed
For more information and support visit the Family Rights Group child welfare charity (frg.org.uk) or PAC-UK at pac-uk.org
For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see samaritans.org for details
