Noah’s Campaign
Preventing broken attachments through care
#ittakesavillage
‘It takes a village to raise a child’ originates from an African proverb and conveys the message that it takes many people (the ‘village’) to provide a safe, healthy environment for children, where children are given the security they need to develop and flourish and to be able to realise their hopes and dreams.
The FosterWiki Team
“Attachments are the golden thread of life, our relationships with others are what makes us feel whole, what safeguards our mental health, what defines our wellbeing and future. Imagine being a child in care and being robbed of these most fundamental connections, the connections that underpin our entire self. We are supposed to be giving looked after children a better life, not plunging them into this dystopian nightmare”
Niki Kalisperas, FosterWiki Campaign Manager
Introduction to our campaign to prevent broken attachments
Children come into care suffering one of the most primal traumatic experiences, being separated from their mothers and fathers, on top of that they have experienced many acute adverse childhood experiences. Our role as a whole community is to prevent any further harm and to protect and repair their mental health and well-being.
In April 2023 FosterWiki published an article ‘A little boy’s heartbreaking journey to adoption’ or Noah’s story as we call it. The response was overwhelming from everyone and anyone in the children’s care sector, from those who have experienced care first-hand, to foster carers, siblings, extended family, adopters, social workers and more.
We had story after story, many identical, all saying the same thing, that in fact we were not protecting and looking after the crucial attachments our children had after all.
The impacts this has on a child’s development and across their whole lives is well researched and documented, and the statistics for looked-after children speak for themselves (see below).
We have to do better, we can do better.
Our goal to prevent broken attachments
See below our goals on how we want to help prevent broken attachments:
- To ensure children and young people are re-centred in their own lives.
- To listen and hear the care experienced, fostered and adoptive children, and promise to act responsibly for them.
- To deliver training for all fosterers, adopters and service practitioners involved in the child's care journey to be trauma informed and sensitive to each child's needs and understand the critical importance of attachments.
- Create a policy that will protect children from the further trauma of broken attachments. A policy that will ensure accountability from the adults and practitioners working in the system.
- For those people to base decisions on informed policy which places children’s attachments at the front of decision making.
- Ensure all work within modern parameters of respected research, and banish entrenched outdated beliefs, for example the ‘needs a clean start’ mentality.
For the children
- Children in care have a ‘village’ around them to to help them feel safe, and provide a healthy environment where they are given the security they need to develop and flourish and to be able to realise their hopes and dreams.
- Children will develop a healthy self-concept and self-esteem.
- Children will trust themselves in the world and make positive choices.
- Children will able to receive and give love and develop healthy relationships now and in the future.
Our plan to achieve our goals to prevent broken attachments
- To work with leaders in the field such as University of East Anglia (UEA) Moving to Adoption, social work good practice model, developed from modern research and others in the industry to write up the new policy.
- Work with local authorities and the government on ways to monitor, evidence, and oversee to ensure delivery.
- Highlight and educate through simple emotive tools such as spoken word poems and through the arts with young care experienced people leading this in order to hear their voices, easily shared nationwide, through social media networks, WhatsApp groups, email, wider media.
- Share an open letter from a child, written from the words and feelings of care experienced and adopted people across children’s social care and beyond.
- Events and forums encouraging conversation, creating more empathic understanding between young care experienced adults, social workers, foster carers, adoption agencies, adopters and birth families.
Statistics
- Care leavers are 4 times more likely to die by suicide in adulthood and 4 times more likely to have a mental health issues.
- Care leavers show significantly lower academic achievement than their peers, with just 12.8% of children in care gaining five GCSEs, compared to the national average of more than 57.9%. [*Source: Barnardo’s / Action for Children]
- 23% of the adult prison population have previously been in care Of the young people in the youth justice system, more than 40% have been in local authority care at some point.
- 1 in 5 homeless people are care leavers.
- Half (46%) of families with adopted children aged 13 to 25 say they are at crisis point, or facing severe challenges.
- Over half (58%) of adopted young adults accessed or attempted to access mental health services last year.
- 23% of adopted 16 to 25-year-olds are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), nearly double the UK average.
- 16% of 13–18-year-olds have been drawn into criminally exploitative activity.
Voices
There comes a point that we have to stop just pulling people out of the river. We have to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.
