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Disabled children, child protection systems and the
Children Act 1989.
Jenny Morris
(Penultimate version of an article published in Child Abuse Review, Vol 8: 91-108 (1999).
Previous research, summarised by Westcott and Cross (1996), and work by those such as Marchant and Page (1992) and Kennedy (1996), suggested that disabled children are particularly vulnerable to abuse but that a number of factors get in the way of protecting disabled children from abuse. Recent research, commissioned by The Who Cares? Trust, confirms that current child protection systems are not addressing the particular needs of disabled children (Morris, 1998a, 1998b).
The research looked at the implementation of the Children Act 1989 as it applies to disabled children across three local authority areas - a London Borough, a County Council and a City Council. The project also visited with 30 disabled young people who had spent most of their childhood away from home, and used a variety of research methods to ascertain their experiences and opinions. This article discusses the findings relating to the operation of child protection systems within the case study areas and the
young people's experiences of abuse, also drawing on experiences of 10 young disabled people included in an earlier piece of work (Morris, 1995). The findings relating to the implementation of Children Act regulations concerning short-term and long-term placements are also summarised.
Social services departments have very little statistical information about their child protection work with disabled children While there was a recognition within each of the case study areas that disabled children are probably more vulnerable to abuse than non-disabled children, they were yet treated as largely invisible within the child protection systems. This is particularly illustrated by the lack of information about how many disabled children were on the Child Protection Registers. The Department of Health does not require social services departments to record 'disability' - i.e. impairment (or race or gender), and none of the case study areas recorded how many children were disabled when they collated child protection statistics.
City and London Borough had made some attempts to record information about the numbers of disabled children subject to child protection investigations but in each case the information was incomplete and of limited use. Ironically, only County - which does not formally attempt to
She also stated that 'over the last couple of years the data which has been recorded at one point in time has not been the same at another point in time. This has been due to a number of changes in the systems we operate.' The Debriefing Sheet also requested that it be recorded where a child had a Statement of Special Educational Need as a result of learning difficulty. However, although this would have enabled an identification of children with learning difficulties who were the subject of child protection investigations, the Senior Administrative Officer said that this information 'is not recorded any longer'.
When she looked at what information was available she found that a total of 9 disabled children had been put on the Child Protection Register over a period of two and a half years. She said 'I have to admit the figures are quite surprising...[and] I feel that this is probably not a very real indicator.' There were at that point in time only 2 disabled children on the Child Protection Register out of a total of 217 children.
In City, the Children with Disabilities Team will take child protection referrals for children with 'severe and profound disabilities'. Children who have 'mild to moderate' impairments will be referred to the appropriate Area Team. During 1996/7 there was a total of 69 child protection referrals to
City's Children with Disabilities Team; 20 Child Protection Conferences were held and 12 children were placed on the Child Protection Register. However, this is the only source of information about disabled children subject to child protection investigations. Other disabled children who do not come within the Children with Disabilities Team's eligibility criteria will have been referred to Area Teams and there is no way of identifying them within City's information system on child protection.
From information available from one case study area, it would appear that disabled children are much more likely to experience abuse than non-disabled children As mentioned above, County Council had no system for recording whether a child subject to child protection investigation was disabled. Nevertheless, the Principal Officer for Children and Families was able to provide a list of children on the Child Protection Register who were known by the social work teams to have a physical/sensory impairment and/or learning difficulty. It was then possible to compare disabled and nondisabled children on the Child Protection Register and this analysis is presented in Table 1.
Table 1: Nondisabled and disabled children on the Child Protection
one local authority area at one specific point in time; and they do not reflect a generally agreed definition of physical or sensory impairment, or learning difficulty but rather each social worker's own understanding of the terms. A more detailed look at the recording of whether a child was disabled or not found that one Area Team reported larger numbers than other Area Teams. It was felt that this Team recorded children with mild to moderate learning difficulties as disabled, whereas the other Teams only recorded those who had significant learning and/or physical/sensory impairments. Depending on the definition of disability used, therefore, these figures could be seen as an over-estimate of the numbers of disabled children on the Child Protection Register, or an under-estimate.
A straightforward interpretation of the data presented in Table 1 indicates that disabled boys are over four times more likely than non-disabled boys to be placed on the Child Protection Register in County, while disabled girls are almost seven times more likely than non-disabled girls. Another way of looking at it is that, while disabled children only make up 2% of the population aged 0-17 in County, they account for 10% of the children on the Child Protection Register.
Social services officers in County were surprised that so many children on
the Child Protection Register were identified as disabled, partly because there have been strong messages in recent years that abuse experienced by disabled children has been under-reported and often unrecognised. Nevertheless, this over-representation of disabled children amongst those within the child protection system (that is, whose experiences are recognised and reported) would seem to be borne out by previous research. Westcott and Cross analysed 8 studies which looked at the numbers of disabled children amongst children whose experiences of abuse had been recognised by professionals. In 7 of these studies, disabled children were found to be over-represented and in fact the levels of over-representation were all greater than that found in County in this research project (Westcott and Cross, 1996, p.38). Unfortunately, these studies were either American or Australian and we do not have similar research relating to child protection systems in Britain.
Another under-researched issue concerns the extent to which children who have been abused acquire physical/sensory/intellectual impairments as a result of the abuse, or whose existing impairments become more significant. Again, however, there was no data available within the case study areas which would have enabled an exploration of this issue.
on CP Register
Disabled children on CP 1 10 1. Register as % of total children on Register
Disabled children on CP 1.3 13 1. Register per '000 disabled children
It would appear that disabled children experience a different pattern of types of abuse in comparison with nondisabled children Table 3 illustrates that amongst the disabled children on the Child Protection Register in County, a higher proportion were registered under the categories of neglect and emotional abuse than was the case for nondisabled children. Fifty percent of disabled boys and 50% of disabled girls on the Register were registered under the two categories of neglect and emotional abuse, compared to 40% of nondisabled boys and 35% of nondisabled girls.
Table 3: Nondisabled and disabled children on the Child Protection
Register in County: by child abuse categories Percentages Category Boys Girls Non-disabled Disabled Non-disabled Disabled Neglect 22 44 19 22
Physical 33 19 30 6
Sexual 15 13 25 33
Emotional 18 6 16 28
More than one category 12 19 9 11
N = 158 16 158 18
This table also seems to show a different pattern of abuse experienced by disabled boys and disabled girls. Disabled boys were more likely to be recorded as experiencing neglect or physical abuse than disabled girls, and
of abuse.
Current child protection systems do not address the particular needs of disabled children. Across the case study areas, there was a general lack of attention paid to child protection issues and disabled children. While there were social services officers in each of the case study areas who firmly believed that this was an important issue, they were all struggling with the fact that current child protection systems do not address the particular needs of disabled children. A Principal Officer's report in City stated, for example, that 'Current child protection procedures appear to be insensitive to the needs of the disabled child'.
London Borough has a Joint Child Investigation Team (with the police) which takes on any cases which look as if they will result in a prosecution. According to the Children's Commissioning Manager 'there is very little understanding of disability issues in the Child Protection Team.' The social work teams deal with 'the less serious cases' but a number of social workers expressed the fear that disabled children's experiences of abuse were not being recognised or acted upon. Generally, there was a feeling within London Borough that further work needs to be done about child
abuse and disabled children.
Analysis of both case study material and that relating to the experiences of disabled young people included in the research and in earlier work (Morris,
- highlighted two particular issues concerning the protection of disabled children and young people experiencing abuse.
- Sometimes an experience of abuse is not recognised by social services workers and other professionals Two young women, whose 'life stories' are included in Gone Missing? , described experiences of abuse which were not recognised by the professionals involved in their lives. One was Suba, who had been rejected by her mother at birth and experienced emotional and physical abuse throughout her childhood She felt that she was sent away to boarding school for social, as well as for educational, reasons. As an adult she feels angry that the professionals who were in contact with her did not confront the abuse she experienced, but instead saw sending her away to school as a solution.
They knew I was in grave physical danger as a baby and they knew that things weren't right throughout my childhood but they
I can't remember why I first went into a children's home but later on it was because my mum couldn't cope. The home I first went to didn't have any other disabled children but the one I went to when I was 13 did. There were children with mental handicaps as well as physically handicapped.
I can remember being hit at my first home. That was bad because my dad used to hit me as well. I thought, well one place is as bad as another. He was horrid to my mum as well. I think they knew, social services, but I don't know what they did about it. My mum used to ask them to take me in.
I came here when I was 18. They had a meeting with my mum and dad and asked me about my future. I didn't know what was on the cards. They said, there's this new place we're opening up for young people. They turned out not to be so young. There's just me and this other girl, the others are older
- I think they all came from a home that had been closed down.
The abuse which Laura experienced can be named as:
- Physical abuse
- Operations to be made more normal
- Denial of communication
- Segregation and exclusion - which has continued into adulthood.
However, neither Laura nor any of the adults responsible for her welfare(who included a large number of health and social services professionals) identified her experience as abusive.
During the course of the research on the implementation of the Children Act across three local authority areas, some social workers expressed a concern about situations which, if it were a non-disabled child involved, would be clearly recognised as raising child protection concerns, but were not so recognised because they involved a disabled child. This was sometimes because, as one social worker put it, it was thought 'parents have enough to put up with'. This kind of perspective can be made more likely by the tendency of the primary focus of the relationship to be with the parent rather than the disabled child. Ironically, the philosophy of working in partnership with parents is more advanced in work with parents of disabled children than it is with parents of non-disabled children but this in itself is sometimes associated with a failure to focus on the child's needs
We know that the criminal justice system denies justice to adults who do not use ordinary speech to communicate, or who have cognitive impairments (Westcott and Cross, 1996, pp. 118-123). A disabled child may not even get to the stage of being able to communicate an experience of abuse. The majority of disabled children in contact with social services have significant communication needs, yet social workers rarely have specialist training to help them. Only 27% of the children on the caseload of the Children with Disabilities Team in one of the case study areas used speech to communicate while another 25% used limited speech. Amongst a sample of another case study area's specialist Team's caseload the percentage with speech was even lower (7%), while 14% had limited speech. In about 3 out of 10 cases allocated to each Team, social workers were of the opinion that the child's communication and/or cognitive impairment prohibited communication at all.
Social workers themselves identified that they needed training and support. 'I paid to do a Makaton course myself' said one, 'I wanted to do a more advanced course but the department wouldn't fund it.' Another social worker talked about a workshop she had been to some years ago where 'there was someone, a psychologist I think it was, who was absolutely brilliant at telling you how you could interpret body language and the
sounds that some children make. That's the kind of thing we need, and we need help with doing it.'
Amongst the City Team's caseload, 43 cases out of 136 (32%) were reported by the social workers concerned as having been allocated because of child protection concerns. Most of these children did not communicate using ordinary speech and social workers would have required considerable skills and experience to enable them to disclose abuse.
In London Borough , an inter-agency procedure states that the 'onus is on social workers to overcome communication barriers' and specifically refers to disabled children. However, there had not been any resources identified to enable social workers to fulfill this requirement: as one senior child protection worker put it, 'A lot is theory rather than practice'.
The Team Manager in City referred to situations where there had been difficulties with police reaction to the Team's identification of child protection issues - a common initial response is that there has been no disclosure on the part of the child because the child did not use speech to communicate.
