By Ellen Marks, Director of Practice & Learning
The child safeguarding practice review into the death of baby Victoria Marten is explicit in its findings: to better protect children, we need to support their parents – even when they no longer have children in their care. It’s clear that support for parents should continue beyond the end of care proceedings, and honouring this recommendation from the review is critical if we want to keep children safe.
So why isn’t that support routinely available nationwide? This case raises some difficult but necessary questions about what needs to change if we want to break the cycles of repeat removals of children into care.
The review rightly emphasises how difficult it is for parents to trust professionals after a child has been removed from their care. Parents are often traumatised not only by the circumstances that led to the removal, but the removal process itself. Re-establishing enough trust for meaningful engagement with professionals is an enormous challenge.
At the same time, the review is clear that trauma does not negate parental responsibility. However complex the circumstances, parents still have a duty to keep their children safe and to work with those whose job it is to ensure this.
We know from the work we do at Pause that rebuilding this trust takes time. We have learned that with tenacity, care, and creativity, professionals can begin this process in the critical time period following care proceedings. Without receiving support at this difficult moment, the likelihood of the cycle repeating with another child is high. These efforts may not work for everyone, but for the 2,154 women who have completed the Pause core programme and their 6,650+ children, they did.
Across the country, Pause practitioners often see ‘non-engagement’ cited by other professionals as a reason to close cases, even by specialist mental health and domestic abuse services. The result is that some of the most vulnerable adults drift out of sight at the moment they need support the most.
The review also notes professionals’ confusion about the couple’s insular, co-dependent relationship. In our experience, this dynamic is far from unusual. Child removal can solidify unhealthy relationships, sometimes becoming the only place where parents feel understood in their grief. In cases where a child is placed with paternal relatives, maintaining a relationship with an abusive partner may be the only way a mother can maintain contact with her child. This reflects a wider and worrying gap in our understanding of domestic abuse and coercive control, despite domestic abuse being one of the most common contributing factors in care proceedings and child protection interventions.
The recognition of the need for multi-agency post-removal support plans is welcome, as is the acknowledgement that adult services must make up part of that plan. Questions remain about who would coordinate or lead this work.
The review also does not address the longstanding discrepancy between thresholds under the Children’s Act and the Care Act; we frequently see situations where parenting is deemed too risky for a child to remain in the parent’s care, yet the parent does not meet the threshold for adult support services. Consequently, parents fall through the gaps.
Many of Constance Marten’s reflections in the review echo what women who work with Pause tell us: being given what felt like ultimatums rather than genuine attempts to help; feeling pushed along an inevitable flow chart with one destination – removal; and developing a deep mistrust after difficult interactions with services.
We cannot know what difference, if any, post‑removal support might have made in the tragic case of Victoria Marten. But it is clear that Constance Marten’s negative experiences with services are not unique. We know that when support is provided consistently, relationally, and in a trauma-responsive manner, it can be transformative.
