The ‘Child Protection Care System’ – is actually a ‘Trauma, Neglect, Punishment and Shame’ System
I’m talking about the UK system.
And the one in Australia.
And in other places.
The ‘Care’ System is anything but…
It is a system designed to manage children and home who are not being care for.
But the primary focus of the system is not to care for children – it is rather to manage them.
Equally, the ‘child protection’ system is anything but…
Rather it is a system designed to manage and monitor children (and their families) – where children are being abused or neglected.
It is consciously designed in a way – that actively harms and traumatises children and families – through providing a funding and staffing framework – which means that children are consistently moved on from professional to professional and from setting to settings – and from department to department.
And which focuses on stigmatising, shaming and punishing mothers (usually the fathers seem to get away scott-free) – rather than supporting them.
It is a system designed specifically to inflict sadistic treatment on to some proportion of the population
Hard to swallow right, but societies since time began, have long inflicted sadistic treatment on some proportion of its populace.
The ‘care system’ therefore is an extension of the practice of poor-baiting, berating poor people for being poor and ritually humiliating them.
This is not to say that there can be nothing good that can happen within these systems
Clearly good things can happen. But they result despite of rather than because of the intended objectives and design of these systems.
Look at this paper about the child protection system in Australia…
The whole system is designed to create more trauma than it solves.
Riggs, D. W., Lohmeyer, B., Rosenberg, S., Clark, Y., & Due, C. (2025). ‘The whole system is designed to create more trauma than it solves’: Australian foster and kinship carers navigating child protection systems. Children and Youth Services Review, 176, 108401. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2025.108401
Five key findings:
- High Staff Turnover Damages Trust Carers reported that frequent changes in statutory staff made it difficult to form trusting relationships. This high turnover was seen as traumatic for children, who are told to trust these workers, and left carers feeling unsupported and dealing with staff who they perceived as inexperienced.
- Child Protection Systems Can Be Inherently Traumatizing Participants felt that the child protection system itself creates more trauma than it resolves. Carers reported feeling that they were expected to be traumatized as part of their role, a sort of “informed consent” to their own trauma, and that they were complicit in a system that was damaging to children.
- Inconsistent Rules Create Instability Carers struggled with the inconsistent application and lack of transparency of rules within the child protection system. This inconsistency led to a feeling of instability, described by one carer as “the earth is so unstable that you stand on as a foster carer”. Some carers felt forced to figure out the complex bureaucracy on their own.
- Systems are Punitive and Require Compliance The study found that carers often experienced the system as punitive and risk-oriented. When problems arose, carers felt they were blamed rather than supported. This led to a feeling of needing to comply with the rules, even if it was distressing, to avoid investigation or punishment, creating a “box ticking, complicity”.
- Parenting Alongside the State Leads to Triangulation Carers faced challenges in their parental authority due to “triangulation,” where children would go to their statutory worker to override the carer’s decisions. This undermines the carer’s role as a parent and is exacerbated when statutory staff do not fulfill their own responsibilities, leaving carers with little recourse.