Is Poverty Eroding Parental Rights in Britain? The Case of Child Protection in the Early Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In recent years, the UK has been subjected to much attention concerning a practice that has been dubbed “forced adoption”. An inquiry, launched by the European Parliament Directorate general for internal policies, focused on this question. Its object was to inquire to find out whether the UK was violating Article 8 of the European Convention on the right to family life, with regards to its policies on child adoption. Indeed, Britain is the European champion in terms of numbers of children placed for adoption each year, a majority of whom are subject to a non-consensual adoption, meaning they are forcibly taken into care without parental consent and subsequently freed for plenary adoption. The motive for removing children is that they have been harmed by their parents, or since the Children Act was passed in 1989, that they are likely to suffer harm in the future, whether physical, psychological or emotional. Recent evidence suggests that a majority of children who are forcibly removed from parental care come from a background of poverty. The UK might be described as implementing child protection policies that discriminate against the poor, which could suggest the British state is violating their right to family life.

This chapter argues that poverty per se should never constitute the basis for removing children from their parents and seeks to understand the British situation, in order to see how poverty is treated in relation to child welfare in Britain. It starts with examining the historical background of social care in the UK in order to make sense of the situation of adoption without consent, and focusing on the new definition of future harm and risk prevention linked to child protection. Further on, it explores the relationship between austerity and adoption, and examines the existence of a bias against poor parents. It concludes by a philosophical discussion on parental rights.

Our deepest thanks go to our colleague Stephanie Amar-Flood for her most valuable suggestions and remarks. We are also deeply indebted to Pierre Chassagnieux and Stephanie Thomas for their help, and for their documentary film, England’s Stolen Children, Dream Way Production, for France Television, 2016.