The number of applications to the family courts for children’s deprivation of liberty (DOL) orders – most of which are granted – has risen massively in the last six years, from around 100 to more than 1,200, as reported by the BBC’s File on 4 programme last week. This is testimony to a broken children’s services system. Worse still, the places children are detained in are staffed by untrained agency workers who are unsuitable to support some of our society’s most vulnerable young people.
Children affected have usually been removed from families where their safety is at high risk from physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Placements are few and far between and often unsuitable, sometimes hundreds of miles away from their friends and relatives.
Local government children’s services and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), which are responsible for helping these sometimes highly disturbed young people, have been hollowed out, understaffed, overwhelmed with demand and demoralised, with high vacancy rates and high rates of staff turnover.
Importantly, the reasons for this increase in DOL orders are symptomatic of wider issues of poverty, social dislocation, insecure housing, adult mental illness, parental drug and alcohol abuse, cost of living pressures and cuts in family support services. Unless the causes of this scandal are tackled, we are left treating the symptoms, storing up huge problems as these children emerge into adulthood.
Steven Walker
Retired social worker and CAMHS specialist, Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
