David QuinnA new report shows how little we needed the children’s rights referendum after all, writes David Quinn
During the children’s rights referendum two years ago we were told that it was too hard in many cases for the State to remove abused or neglected children from their families. One lawyer said that because of the Constitution, a child had to be within an inch of their lives before the State could intervene.
This was a terrible mis-interpretation of the Constitution and now we categorically know this to be the case courtesy of the Child Law Reporting Project which is in charge of cataloguing cases of children being taken into the care of the State.
It issued its latest report last week and that report looked at 486 cases that appeared before the courts involving 864 children. Many of these children were put into the care voluntarily by the parents but many more were taken into care against the wishes of the parents.
The reasons for the children being taken into care varied widely but in very few cases were the children in danger of their lives or anything close to that. This alone shows that the State already has wide powers of intervention in family life and this is even before the children’s rights amendment comes into force. (It is currently held up in the courts because of a constitutional challenge).
Very strikingly, nine out of ten cases dealt with by the courts and covered in this latest report involve children from families where the parents are not married. For the most part the parents are not living under the same roof at all.
Census
This is wildly disproportionate to the number of unmarried parents in the population because 72% of children still live with their two married parents according to Census 2011.
As the report points out, only the family based on marriage receives explicit constitutional recognition. One of the claims being during the children’s rights referendum was that it was the protection given to the married family that made it very hard for the State to intervene on a child’s behalf in some cases.
However, given that so many children coming to the attention of the State’s care services are from unmarried families, the Constitution is acting as no barrier in these cases, and never did.
In other words, the claim that the Constitution was seriously impeding the State in its work protecting children from abuse and neglect was bogus.
Commenting on the fact that so many of the children are coming from unmarried families, the report itself says: “One of the issues this raises is the protection afforded by the Constitution to the families coming before the child care courts. Only one in ten families involves a married couple, the only family type recognised by the Constitution, and whose rights are therefore the subject of constitutional protection.
“The concern that the Constitution inhibits the ability of the State to protect children, while well-founded in relation to the children of married parents in long-term foster care, who face great obstacles in being adopted, therefore does not apply to the vast majority of the children who come before the District Court in child care proceedings, according to these statistics.”
This was never admitted during the children’s rights referendum by the Government or the various child welfare groups who wanted a children’s rights amendment. Instead we heard over and over again that the Constitution was impeding their work.
In fact, as the above passage from the report says, the only real obstacle the Constitution placed in the way of the State vis a vis children is that it is hard to adopt the children of married parents. It is much easier to adopt the children of unmarried parents.
This can mean that the children of married parents spend a long time in foster care and never get a chance to be adopted.
Concern
But frankly, even this cause for concern was exaggerated because very few children in Ireland get placed for adoption in any case, whether the parents are married or unmarried. There seems to be a strong bias against adoption in the system which is probably a reaction against the overuse of adoption the past. (We seem to spend our time over-reacting to our past instead of rationally reacting to it).
So the case for the children’s rights amendment to our Constitution was never very strong.
For the record, there are currently 6,332 children in care, with the great majority of these in foster care. Of those in care, 2,666 were placed in care voluntarily and 3,664 were taken into compulsory care.
The single biggest reason for taking a child into care was the disability of one or both of the parents. This accounted for 15% of cases. This was followed by drug abuse and alcohol abuse.
What stands out from the figures overall, however, is that so many of the children are from unmarried families. It would be too simplistic to say that marriage on its own is the answer to this because poverty is a very big part of the picture as well.
In any event, marriage does not simply turn a bad parent, or one who simply can’t cope, into a good parent or one who can cope, overnight.
But what marriage does mean is that there will be two parents on hand to deal with a difficult situation instead of just one and that obviously makes things easier.
In fact, when you think of it, the highlighting by children’s rights campaigners of the protection the Constitution gives to marriage was entirely perverse, given that marriage is so protective of the best interests of children, and marriage is in decline in Ireland, especially in our most disadvantaged areas.
Those groups should be promoting marriage if they really want to help children.