Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / A blunt instrument?

Transcript

A blunt instrument? · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Usually undertake a safeguarding inquiry and provide the court with a summary of the issues concerned.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if the court requires a more detailed assessment, it may direct a family court advisor to prepare what's called a section seven report.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now that report can include discussions with the parents, information from other agencies, contact with the child, and recommendations about where the child should live or how they should spend time with each parent, and the court makes a final decision.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, a Kafkas recommendation can be extremely influential.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that influence creates an obvious responsibility.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And a recommendation may help restore a child's relationship with a safe and loving parent, but it may also lead to a frightened child being required to enter or remain in a relationship which has not been adequately understood, as I've been saying throughout the series so far.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now the difficulty is that the assessment may take place within a very limited window.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: The practitioner meets the family after the difficulties have escalated, often after months or years of conflict, each parent arrives with a developed account of what's happened.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the available records may be extensive, possibly incomplete, or even contradictory.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So the practition practitionerist then makes sense of the child, the adults, the history, and the possible risks.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now this isn't a small task, and a snapshot may reveal something important, but it still remains a snapshot.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So a parent who appears calm during an interview may behave very differently within intimate relationships.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I've certainly seen this many times.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And a parent who appears anxious or disorganized may be responding to prolonged fear rather than demonstrating inability and instability.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen that a lot more.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: A child may speak openly on one occasion and become guarded or even silent on another.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: They may describe different experiences depending upon whom they've just seen, what's recently happened and what they believe will follow from speaking.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, none of this makes assessment impossible.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: It means that conclusions must be proportionate to the evidence.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, CAFCAPS now operates through a child impact assessment framework, and its published guidance recognizes several possible explanations when a child resists or refuses contact, including domestic abuse, harmful conflict, harmful parenting, and where it's evidenced alienating behavior.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a welcome position.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Family Justice Council guidance also makes clear that a child's refusal is not sufficient evidence of alienating behavior, and that psychological manipulation and its effects upon the child must be established through evidence.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The problem, therefore, is not necessarily the formal guidance, it's whether the quality and depth of practice consistently matches it.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is so often the case.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: In complex cases, language can begin to replace analysis.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: A family might be described as high conflict.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: A parent may be described as anxious, hostile, or unable to promote contact.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: A child may be described as aligned with one parent.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And each description may contain some truth, but none explains how that situation developed.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: If there's been coercive control, describing the parents as being in conflict may create a false equivalence.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: If a parent is anxious because the child has reported frightening experiences, describing that anxiety without examining its source tells us very little.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: If a child is aligned with one parent, we still need to know why.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in family systems therapy, when we talk about triangulation in its systemic original context, we're talking about that being a protective position that the child has taken.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So alignment may therefore result from manipulation, but it may also result from fear, shared experience, and dependency or the child's own judgment.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The word identifies the position of the child, it does not establish its cause.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is where a blunt assessment, frankly, can become dangerous.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Complex information is compressed into manageable categories.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the categories they appear to explain the family.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And once an early formulation has been adopted, contradictory information may receive less attention.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is sometimes referred to as confirmation bias.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So a practitioner who initially views one parent as obstructive may interpret later anxiety as further obstruction.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: A practitioner who believes that abuse has occurred may interpret every difficulty through that framework.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the risk exists in both directions.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: The protection against it is not neutrality in the sense of refusing to form a view, it is disciplined investigation and curiosity.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So what supports my present understanding is a question I ask alongside, and what contradicts it.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And also, perhaps the most important question: what have I not yet seen?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: There might be other explanations.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the quality of the information matters as much as the quantity.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Police, schools, health professionals, social services may each possess one part of the history.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: A single incident may appear unremarkable until it's placed within a pattern.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Equally, the presence of numerous referrals does not prove that the concerns raised within them were true.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Several records may all repeat the same original allegation.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: That said, in my experience, when several referrals have been made, they will almost always be a new episode which starts to demonstrate a pattern.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this is something to the credit of safeguarding, which is taken very seriously.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Just because one referral may result in no action, because the risk level is not seen as imminent or active, doesn't mean that if subsequent referrals come in and the same outcome is reached.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: There comes a point when somebody says, we have a pattern here.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly I've experienced that as well.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to think about these different distinctions.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: An allegation can gradually become a fact, or important concern can disappear because no single agency holds the whole picture.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is fair to say that there is much more joined up thinking.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly, when the police are involved, an automatic safeguarding referral will follow on.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the same is true of other agencies.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: However, it is the joined up picture that is the one that is most important.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's extremely hard for these agencies because they're not involved in a case in a constant way.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're not constantly monitoring.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: And they are overwhelmed by demand.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Some will speak freely and others will say what feels least dangerous.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: So when we have a situation, for example, where a child discloses something to a parent or another family member, and the parent acts upon it because they have a responsibility to do that, it doesn't follow that the child, once interviewed by a stranger, will repeat the same thing.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's extremely difficult because those of us who are aware of it know that, yes, we take it seriously, but we also depend to some large extent on the child actually disclosing.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't always happen outside of the family.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we we have to uh look at this from a very different point of view.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for practitioners like myself, we need to consider the child's development, their emotional presentation, and freedom to express mixed feelings.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have to understand the chronology and the case.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, once again, we're back into not just looking at headlines but looking at stories.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: As a clinician, I have more time to do that, I think.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing I should perhaps say is that it is not my my primary work with children isn't about safeguarding.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Safeguarding comes up alongside my work, and very often for children who come to me, they are exhibiting behaviors and difficulties which represent that there is something which is happening in the family which may or may not have a safeguarding component, and so I wouldn't want it to be thought that that is primarily what I do.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: I do far more of it than I I'd ever anticipated, but that that isn't that that wasn't intentional, that's a consequence.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I so I want to know things like does their account have an emotional quality which suggests a lived experience, or does it consist mainly of unexplained adult conclusions?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And these these questions require sensitivity.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: They mustn't become a test in which a child is expected to perform credibly, nor should the child be repeatedly interviewed until they provide an answer which fits the professional formulation.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as I've said before, when it comes to the legal forum, as it were, and I'm talking about a court, there there is no there is no way in which evidence offered by any professional is going to carry any credibility if that evidence is seen to have been gathered by virtue of frequent questioning, leading questioning, or anything that suggests that the information is not, is, is has not been offered in an authentic way by the child.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, having said that, we we do facilitate children.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: We facilitate them in terms of I I often ask children, could can they help me understand?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I'm doing that, uh what I'm trying to do, I'm tr is I'm trying to invite the child to tell a grown-up who doesn't know as much as they do about how things are and what it's like for them.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this this is a very uh neutral approach, but what it does is it invites the child into something.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't mean that they automatically say, yes, of course, here's the chronology and the history.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: But what they begin to do is tell me from their point of view what what what things are like.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: It could very well be that some children, and I can think of one in particular, immediately responded by giving me a very detailed account of a series of events that had been taking place for some while.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: There had been no no no safeguarding involvement, there hadn't been any any kind of attempt to block the child having access to the abusive parent.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: But what followed was an immediate safeguarding referral from me because my assessment indicated that there were too many things which were too consistently communicated to be ignored.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And as a consequence, a very thorough safeguarding investigation took place.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And although it was not a case that went to court, the young person by this time uh had decided I don't really care what anybody thinks, I'm not going.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh really interestingly, both his his both his mother and her partner worked tirelessly to try and engage the father in a in a constructive way, but they were unsuccessful.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: In the end they gave up.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, here's here's something that I think is it's really important to understand.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes parents talk to me about, but I might be ordered by the court.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, you may be ordered by the court, however, an order does not make a child want to see the other parent.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And okay, how how is that order going to be enforced?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because what will happen is that if the child still refuses to go, then there's nothing, you what are you gonna do?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: You take it back to court, and then what's gonna happen is a more detailed investigation will take place and it will then become a section 47, which is a much more detailed inquiry into what's going on, particularly if it's seen that the this this is really not a question of one parent impeding the other, but the child has decided to vote with their fee.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: It happens, and as children get older, it happens a lot.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: What I do want to do is come back to Kafkas, though, because uh they they were really caught between a rock and a hard place.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Kafkas can't compensate for every uh deficiency that exists elsewhere within the overall system.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it can't conduct a criminal investigation, it can't provide long-term clinical work or undertake a comprehensive forensic assessment within that same piece of work.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, therefore, the instrument becomes kind of blunt when it's used for purposes requiring greater precision.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't so much a criticism of CAFCAS, it's it's it's a recognition.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's our its practitioners are asked to make consequential recommendations with an imperfect process, but institutional pressure doesn't reduce the effect of a poor assessment upon a child.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: A brief report may influence arrangements which shape the child's daily life for years, and that's why professional humility is essential.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: The most reliable practitioner is not necessarily the one who reaches a conclusion most quickly, it's the one who can show how the conclusion was reached, what alternatives were considered, and where uncertainty remains.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: When a child says no to contact, CAFCAT should not begin with the assumption that contact must be restored, nor should it begin with the assumption that refusal proves danger.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Its task is to help the court understand the meaning of the refusal.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that requires more than interviewing the parties and selecting the accounts which appear most plausible.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: It requires chronology, collateral evidence, developmental understanding, and a willingness to examine patterns rather than isolated incidents.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: It needs also to be informed by corroborative, independent professional information.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in my experience, I've been able to provide Cafkas with my independent views for them to be further informed in their assessment.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Used carefully, Cafkas can provide the court with essential insight into a child's life.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: But use too quickly or asked to answer questions beyond the reach of its assessment, it risks reducing a complex family to a few persuasive sentences.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's something here about the court.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Courts need to answer questions.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: The guidance is essentially that they have to consider certain things.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I've worked in some cases where the judge themselves has been so forensic in their understanding and actions in the case, it it's hugely refreshing.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, this isn't a question uh a question about judges, it's about the court system.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: The system needs to be much more attuned to what is what what else is going on within the headline.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: They need not only to rely on CAFCAS or social services, they need to have their own questions.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: They do need to consider of course they can't answer it for themselves, but they do need to consider: is there a clinical opinion on this?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a clinical view?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: What's the educational view?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do these views match?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Where are they different?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is this is this is not about which parent is right or wrong.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's about coming back to the child and asking the all-important question, what is right for this child?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And also, what is this child's behaviour telling us?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm afraid the system as it is frequently forgets about the child.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: How ironic, because that's apparently who it's for.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you think this series may help someone trying to understand.