This is the fifth blog of our Care Review Case for Change series. In this blog we focus on our fourth recommendation to the Care Review: Trauma-informed support. You can read all our recommendations to the Care Review here: Pause’s key messages and recommendations for The Care Review – Pause – Creating Space for Change.
In our conversations with women and professionals, one of the most common themes was (and is) the need for trauma-informed support for everyone involved in the care system: birth parents, children and caring families.
Although we included trauma-informed support as a separate recommendation within our recommendations for change, it is woven through all our recommendations and is at the heart of every Pause Practice.
Women working with Pause often fall all through the gaps in services for various reasons, such as missing out on early support and not meeting thresholds for mental health services. They experience a profound sense of loss and grief and will need to confront past traumas and contributing factors, such as domestic abuse, drug and alcohol dependency, homelessness, experience of growing up in care and criminal justice involvement.
The Pause Programme itself is a trauma-informed, relationship-based support programme. The independent evaluation of Pause clearly makes the argument for trauma-informed support for women who have experienced the removal of children from their care and theorises the impact of this support on their children as well.
The benefits reported through the evaluation indicate scope to explore extension of the [Pause] model as follows:
- The findings provide convincing moral and fiscal arguments for the further national development of trauma-informed relationship-based support for women who have had a child removed, to prevent risk of recurrence (especially for young women) following the first removal of a child.
- Given heightened risk of child removal for care-experienced women who become pregnant at a young age, and the sharpened ethical duty of the state as their corporate parent (and ‘corporate grandparent’ to their child(ren)), there is a particularly strong argument for the extension of this kind of support for young women who are looked after or care leavers.
- Finally, while not tested through the evaluation, it can also be hypothesised that similarly resourced and designed work would have preventive value for intervention with women involved with child protection services before the removal of a child into public care.
The need for trauma-informed support for everyone involved in the care system – birth parents, children and caring families – is the common thread throughout our key messages and recommendations to the Care Review. We believe that by following a trauma-informed model of support, the care system can better understand the needs of women who have experienced the removal of a child from her care and offer her the support she needs to stop it from happening more than once.
You can read our recommendations to the Care Review in full here: Pause’s key messages and recommendations for The Care Review – Pause – Creating Space for Change
If you have any questions or would like any more information, get in touch with us via communications@pause.org.uk
You can also find out more about the Care Review on Twitter @ReviewCSC