All too familiar

I'm reading a report about Emma (not her real name) and it makes depressing reading. It details a chaotic lifestyle, characterised by misuse of alcohol, heroin and cocaine. It isn't a probation report as you might imagine, and Emma isn't an offender. She's 11 months old and she's a victim. Her mother 'Dawn' is the addict and the report has been prepared by the local Social Services Dept. Next week, we will have to decide whether to grant the local authority a care order in respect of Emma, so that they can assume parental responsibility, something which neither mother nor her violent, drug-dependent partner want, but which their own lack of care of Emma does nothing to ward off. The report talks of Dawn's failure to prioritise Emma's needs over her own, or to engage effectively with social services to address her drug and alcohol problems and her parenting skills. In just the same way that she failed to engage with the maternity services during her pregnancy, whilst assuring them that she was not using. Even so, very shortly after her birth Emma began to show clear symptoms of withdrawal and had to be cared for on the special baby unit whilst being detoxed.

Dawn's two older children by a former partner have also been through the Family Court and are now in the longterm foster care of their maternal grandmother. The question remains unanswered at this stage as to whether grandma will be prepared and able to take Emma into her care as well. And then there will be the question of the next child; Dawn is already pregnant again.

When people think of drugs and the courts, they think in terms of the criminal courts, and indeed a high proportion of the cases we see involve abuse of drugs and the criminality needed to fund the habit. But, to protect the identity of the children concerned, the public are not admitted to the Family Court, and so this whole other area of drug impact goes largely unnoticed and unreported. The cost to the community in terms of the resources that have to be provided to rescue and protect children like Emma may not be on the same scale as the cost of drug-related crime, but it still involves enormous sums of money which is not then available for care of the elderly, the mentally ill and those with disability needs.