Vulnerable children with complex needs are being locked up in unregulated placements and being “severely harmed by the state” while their parents are driven to despair, the former English family judge has said. Sir James Munby calls the lack of safe and therapeutic homes “a shocking moral failure”.
According to the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, the number of applications for “deprivation of liberty” orders for children suffering from psychological and behavioral problems reached 1,368 last year.
Munby, a former president of the High Court’s family division, wrote in the Observer that the rising applications for this draconian measure were a sad reflection of the catastrophic failure to support children whose complex needs often lead to self-harm and suicide. attempts.
Munby criticized the government, which he said has “failed to address the dire lack of adequate provision”, and referred to “dozens and dozens” of rulings expressing the concerns of his fellow judges, which have been published since his own “blood on our hands” statement about a 17-year-old girl named “X,” which made national headlines in 2017.
Reports from the news site Tortoise Media last year showed that “all the help X received came far too late to save her,” Munby said. Barely in her twenties, X – not a criminal – was eventually locked up in a high-security mental health hospital, where she remains today.
“Seven years after my judgment in her case, the situation for other children across the country is even worse than I dared to fear,” he warned.
In 2021, the Supreme Court mentioned the fate of these children “a scandal that contains all the ingredients for a tragedy”. Journalists’ years-long efforts to highlight the escalating crisis mean no one can ever claim the scandal is a hidden scandal, Munby writes, citing the BBC’s recent “shocking” investigation in which children were interviewed about their ‘heartbreaking’ experiences of forced coercion. detained in inappropriate placements under custodial orders.
The Observer It has recently been reported that hundreds of highly vulnerable children have been sent to unregulated homes due to a chronic shortage of secure local government units.
Meanwhile, the government has done nothing of any significance or value to help these most vulnerable children, Munby says.
His successor, Sir Andrew McFarlane, last year tried to involve Education Secretary Gillian Keegan in the situation of another suicidal teenage girl for whom a safe, therapeutic placement could not be found.
Keegan was ordered to attend court. After she refused, his published judgment expressed his “genuine surprise and real dismay that the issue has apparently not been raised in any meaningful way in parliament, in government or in wider public debate”. McFarlane said: “It was, I found, shocking to see that the Department of Education seemed to be simply washing its hands of this chronic problem.”
Munby warns that the many published statements about distressed and damaged children being held without contact with the outside world “paint a picture of a system unable to cope with the rising number of young people with emotional and behavioral problems, almost always born out of trauma or neglect in childhood.”
When a system routinely detains vulnerable children in grossly inappropriate conditions, the country faces “another shocking moral failure – a moral failure of the state and of society,” he says, before questioning whether any party should take up the issue would tackle during the crisis. election campaign.