Speech by Tracey Norton of Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign (DMRC) and Support Not Separation to the Future of Child Safeguarding Digital Conference hosted by Knowledge Exchange Group, 4 July 2023

I co-ordinate the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign run by Winvisible, women with visible and invisible disabilities, we’re part of Support Not Separation. Support Not Separation is coordinated by Legal Action for Women and includes organisations of single mothers, women of colour and asylum seekers/refugees, women with disabilities, rape survivors, breastfeeding advocates, kinship carers, psychotherapists, men and former social workers. We are committed to defending mothers and children against unwarranted separation by the state and the devaluing of the mother-child relationship.  We work closely with Give Us Back Our Children in the US and with mothers in other countries.

I’m a mother with a painful invisible disability and my son is a severely disabled wheelchair user. He was wrongly taken into care, when he was a teenager, not because I was guilty of harming him but because the authorities wanted to stop the medical funding we’d won for his care and his home education as well as cover up serious medical malpractice by a well-known children’s hospital that nearly cost him his life. So, they blamed me, his mother and protector, instead.

Once in the care of the state he was abandoned into a completely unsuitable unregulated home where there was no accessible bathroom so he could not shower for 2 years. He was not allowed Christmas gifts because they were seen as symbols of my love – he spent the day alone in his room with no food and no sheets or blankets on his bed. I did not eat that Christmas, the thought of eating whilst he was starving was too much for me to bear. Social workers refused to allow any friends to visit or give him presents. When his grandmother died the social workers told him if he attended her funeral, they would have me, his mother, arrested so he was denied the right to grieve and say goodbye. He was denied an education and medical treatment, and when he had a seizure, he was left on the floor rather than being taken to hospital because to treat him would have proved that I was innocent.

My son’s disability significantly worsened because of the trauma of being taken from home and the neglect he suffered at the hands of the state and their private contractors. He now needs major life-threatening surgery that he would never have needed if he had stayed with me.

My son’s treatment is typical of many children in state care.  Right now, thousands of children are taken from loving mothers because of poverty, sexism, racism and disability discrimination, not because they have actually been harmed but because successive governments have cut funding for support in favour of the privatised  industry which makes millions in profits on the back of children’s misery.

Some social workers are finally pointing out that there is a conflict of interest in appointing Josh MacAlister, who founded a company training social workers, to conduct the government review. This is the kind of government corruption we face.

Mothers are children’s first protectors and must get the support we are legally entitled to under the Children Act s17 and the Care Act.  We must have a Care Income to enable and support the work we do for our children, instead of being witch-hunted.  

I now work with other mothers in similar situations to my own, and we hold regular collective self-help meetings for mums fighting in family court to stop children being taken or to get them back. 

We know that disabled mothers, single mothers, care leavers, women of colour, immigrant women, are often seen as unfit mothers. Many of us are low-income and have high disability costs and energy bills. We are entitled to state support but instead we are blamed for needing that support. Poverty is not neglect but it is used to imply neglect and remove our children. You are 10 times more likely to have your children taken if you live in deprived areas than in more affluent ones. A Ch5 News investigation found that mothers with learning difficulties are 54 times more likely to have their children removed.

Councils who say they can’t afford the support mothers are entitled to, pay private companies’ obscene amounts, such as £250,000 a year to place one disabled child in institutions like Hesley Group where rape and abuse are rife. Let’s not forget that many of the thousands of children raped and abused at Shirley Oaks, Rotherham, etc, were in state care and nothing happened to the social workers and police who allowed or even enabled the abuse.

Being disabled, being a victim of domestic violence (which disproportionately affects disabled women), being a single mother on a low income, being young or having grown up in care – are regularly flagged up as a “safeguarding issue”. We get referred to social services, and instead of support we come up against preconceived ideas and prejudices thinly disguised as concern for our children, who can then be taken from us. The government’s current proposals to extend mandatory reporting will exacerbate this.

Many of the mothers, especially those whose children have disabilities and/or who report domestic violence and ask for help or question what professionals are doing, are falsely accused of inventing or exaggerating our children’s disabilities (even when they have an inherited genetic illness). Fabricated Induced Illness, just like ‘parental alienation’ in domestic violence cases, are used to deny the disability or violence mothers are reporting and take our children.

Mothers are being tortured by the constant threat of removal, knowing how vulnerable our children are, and the devastation and trauma they will face if they are taken from us. Yet, the impact of this separation is hardly ever considered. As a result, we are often too afraid to ask for help. 

All this happens in closed courts and miscarriages of justice, such as in my own case, are never heard which is why we demand that the courts are fully open. DMRC has come together to make disabled mothers and our children more visible and to raise our voices. On 12 July, we are launching our Charter of Rights, which aims to spell out what we are entitled to and what councils and the family courts must do to end the discrimination and hostility we face. It is time the bond between  child and mother was recognised and protected, not denied for profit and abuse of power by the state.

Tracey Norton 4 July 2023