These figures should send a chill down the spine of anyone who values basic human dignity: in England in 2013, 2,018 newborn babies were taken from their mothers and put into the care of the state. This represents a huge hike from five years earlier, in 2008, when 802 newborns were taken into care. To put it another way: in 2008, 0.1 percent of newborns were taken into the care system, while in 2013 it was 0.3 percent.
What’s going on? Education secretary Nicky Moran says the figures, released today by researchers at Lancaster University, are ‘worrying’. She means it’s worrying that so many mums are so rubbish at parenting that their kids are being put at risk.
Actually, what’s really worrying about these figures — not just worrying, in fact, but terrifying — is that they speak to a dangerous cult of zealotry in social-worker ranks, to a growing disdain among the agents of the state for the integrity of families and the mother-newborn bond.
There are two ways we can interpret this massive increase in newborns being taken into care. The first is to think that there are more crap mothers around today than there were five years ago. This strikes me as highly unlikely. What could possibly explain such a sudden and severe downturn in mothering that an extra 1,216 mewling babes had to be snatched from their mums in 2013 compared with 2008?
Some are suggesting that recessionary trends may have contributed to the alarming rise in newborns being taken by the state. That is, hard-up parents, stressed out and pressed for cash, and maybe hitting the bottle, are not really fit to care for their newborns. That would make the whole thing even worse, suggesting we’re taking babies from the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society.
I think there’s a second explanation for the massive rise in newborn removal between 2008 and 2013 that is more convincing: that the state, especially its social-worker wing, has become more distrustful of parents, more disdainful of the sovereignty of the family, and more willing to take children away from their parents. It isn’t that mothering skills have gone downhill but that the state thirst for assuming authority over erratic or chaotic families has shot up, with some really damaging consequences.
Of course there are cases where children must be taken away from their parents: when they’re being violently or sexually abused, for example, or if they’ve been abandoned. But in recent years, the state and the child-protection industry have expanded the definition of abuse and neglect to cover more and more areas of family life. It’s no longer only wicked parents who are regarded with suspicion — so are naff or disorganised parents. Proposals to outlaw ‘emotional neglect’ in the home would cover not only violence but also harsh discipline, forgetfulness about providing meals, and loads of other bad things that probably every parent has done at some point.
At the same time, the child-abuse panic of the past 30 years, which has sky-rocketed in the past five years of post-Savile insanity, has generated wild, unfounded claims that, in the words of the former deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz, ‘There isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited’. The end result of this febrile, authoritarian climate is intensified meddling by the state, which now thinks little of rupturing even the bond between mother and newborn if any risk whatsoever is detected.
This culture of suspicion is dangerous for two reasons. First because, as we saw in Cleveland and Orkney and other cases in recent decades, when social-workers become gripped by an interventionist zeal, entirely innocent families can be destroyed. And secondly because if the state is treating pretty much every parent as an object of suspicion, then it is more likely that it will miss those mercifully still rare cases of severe parental violence or neglect.
But the bottom line is this: a country that has become cavalier about severing that most sacred bond between a newborn and its mother — yes, even if the mother is immature or stupid or on drugs — has lost the moral plot.
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