Content note: This post discusses domestic abuse, child removal and care proceedings, domestic homicide, and the deaths of children.
How can it be fair to take children, often babies, into care because the mother is suffering in a domestic abuse relationship, rather than dealing with the actual domestic abuse and the man?
Surely if the social worker can deem that it’s too dangerous for a baby to be brought up safely in that environment, then why the hell is it ok to leave the woman there? Isn’t he the problem here? Mothers and children are suffering irreparable damage due to failures in the system that we’re living in, and it just isn’t right.
I’m pretty sure it’s not as simple as that, it’s a very nuanced issue. According to the BBC, one professor who studies this estimates that only “between a fifth and a quarter” of care proceedings are “clear-cut” serious harm or abuse, and most are neglect with complex needs [23].
And yes, there will probably always be, sadly, occasions where adoption or looking after children is required. I wanted to find out what the true extent of the numbers are today, and see how many might be due to system failures.
Domestic abuse against a parent was one of the two most common factors in children’s social care assessments in England in the year ending March 2025. It was found in 162,890 cases, which is about a third of all 513,250 assessments that year [1]. Just to be clear, these are not the number of children removed, these are the number of assessments undertaken, and the DfE themselves say that the data “shouldn’t be taken to represent prevalence”.
It makes my blood boil to think that mothers are sometimes being asked to appear in Family Court immediately after birth. And when I say immediately, I mean literally the same day or very shortly thereafter. 52% of the 4,872 babies aged under one in care proceedings in England in 2024/25 were there within their first two weeks of life, up from 39% in 2007/08 [3]. In fact the overall rate of babies under one in care proceedings has gone up 64% since 2007/08 and is now about 1 in every 118 infants [3].
Mothers, who are still bleeding post-birth, with their hormones crashing, are expected to somehow stand there, think clearly and defend themselves and their baby. Four in five mothers were given less than a week’s formal notice that their newborn might be removed [4]. Surely the social care system knows a woman is pregnant for a lot longer than that, why just a week? Councils have to give their own tenants at least four weeks’ notice before they can even go to court to evict them for rent arrears [31], yet a newborn gets one if they’re lucky. One in six didn’t even get that, they had an application issued and heard on the very same day [4]. Something has gone drastically wrong with the system if bleeding postpartum mothers are being dragged to court to have their babies taken from them, especially if it’s because they are also a victim. Why are the fathers not standing there in court? Maybe they are? I couldn’t find anyone who logs whether the perpetrator attends court or not, so there is no way to find out. A father with parental responsibility is automatically a party to the case. Although fathers were known and named in 80% of care proceedings, researchers say that the system fails to “fully engage” with them [5].
For example “Kelly” spoke to Channel 4 News on 25 February 2025. She had her two eldest children placed in care after domestic abuse was logged as a significant factor. Her ex-partner was later jailed, and she said “they are taking your world away, the only reason for living” [19]. Surely in this scenario they could have taken her ex-partner away and left her children with her?
Our system is truly fucked up if, as a result of domestic violence, the woman is beaten, assaulted and then, when she is at her absolute lowest, she has the most precious thing in her life taken from her, because of him. How the heck does this even make any sense? How have we become a society that doesn’t seem to care about this?
The court order that the mother receives is about her parenting. They can only make a care order if the child is suffering from, or likely to suffer from, significant harm, specifically from “the care given to the child” [6]. Since 2005, “harm” expressly includes “impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill treatment of another” [7], i.e. domestic abuse. So for more than 20 years, babies will have been taken from their mothers because a man in their life is beating their mother. In 2021 the Domestic Abuse Act was introduced, and in section 3 it stated that a child who sees, hears or experiences the effects of the abuse is a victim in their own right [8]. So now we have two victims that are suffering, the child who is no longer with their birth mother and the birth mother who is no longer with their child. And the most ridiculous thing is that the person who actually caused all the harm is not even the person the order is about. They seem to get off lightly. So lightly that professionals wrote about the abuse in their notes without even naming who did it [12].
For anyone thinking “why doesn’t she just leave him, take the baby with her?”, it really isn’t as simple as that. In September 2023 the London child protection procedures document, domestic abuse chapter, stated “Separation does not ensure safety, it often at least temporarily increases the risk to the child/ren or mother.” Plus we all know that domestic homicide is most common after a separation (76% according to the same document) [9].
In January 2026 a group of inspectors from Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, and the police and probation inspectorates [10] looked at six areas and slated the current system. They explained that the non-abusing parents are being expected to protect their children from the perpetrators, over whom they have no control. The plans in place relied too much on the role of these parents, who were mostly the mothers. And one mother told them she was judged as “a ‘bad’ parent who was failing to protect their children”, even though they are both victims.
Social services teams are quick to judge, however the available support is slow to arrive, and that disparity is penalising women and children. There have been significant cutbacks and removal of preventative services. The £2.5bn of early intervention spending by councils in England in 2024/25 is 40% lower than it was in 2010/11, even after adjusting for inflation. The majority of the children’s services budget, 82%, now goes on late intervention, up from 62%. Surely it’s better to prevent issues rather than trying to clear up the mess afterwards? And this isn’t just a spilled ice cream, these are people’s lives that are forever changed, irreparably. Spending on children in care doubled over the same period, from £4.2bn to £8.4bn, and it costs on average over £100,000 per child in care each year [13]. A postcode lottery also comes heavily into play, with early help spending in the most deprived areas dropping by 53% per child [14].
Women that do try and escape often find it exceptionally hard, and this isn’t helped by a shortage of bedspaces in refuges. In England in May 2025 there were 4,619, 19.9% short of the Council of Europe standard, with lack of space being cited as the commonest reason (42.7% of refusals) a refuge referral was turned down [15]. Clearly there are many barriers abused women and children are facing, and having somewhere safe to go immediately is a huge one.
Support clearly isn’t there for these women, as 1 in 4 mothers in care proceedings is back in court within 10 years, and 1 in 3 where the first case ended in adoption [16]. There needs to be more support for women. It needs to be immediate support and it needs to be multidisciplinary.
There also needs to be far tougher action on men who commit domestic violence. They are just a tornado of destruction, powering their way through households, towns and cities and destroying women and children’s lives, and they need to be held to account. It breaks my heart and fills me with rage at the same time.
The way the system is set up is partially to blame. The police and family court are two entirely separate systems. So a baby can be removed from a mother and the abuser has never been arrested. There really should be a collaborative approach: if the child is at that much risk, then why isn’t he arrested? Casework is “routinely focused on mothers, irrespective of the whereabouts of their partner or those causing harm” according to a Sheffield University report. And those people who caused the harm were “largely absent from plans” and services for them were “sparse and difficult to access” [17]. So even if families wanted help, it really wasn’t readily available in any meaningful way.
The inspectors’ report in January 2026 named it too, saying there was “a lack of attention on the perpetrator, which can lead to ineffective safeguarding of children” [10]. I mean, no shit Sherlock... The same inspectors found probation services were “not consistently realistic about the delivery of interventions for perpetrators” [10]. As far as I can tell, that means probation was writing perpetrator programmes into men’s sentence plans that it did not then have the staff or places to deliver, so the plan said he was being dealt with and he wasn’t.
There are some programmes available for high harm perpetrators, one of which is Drive.
In the Drive programme each man gets a case manager who works with him directly and also the police, probation, children’s social care, housing and mental health teams at the same time. It was piloted from 2016 to 2019 in a handful of areas with 506 perpetrators. An independent evaluation by the University of Bristol found physical abuse down 82%, sexual abuse down 88%, harassment and stalking down 75% and jealous and controlling behaviour down 73% among the men it worked with. A year on they had fewer police incidents and were less likely to be referred to a MARAC than a control group [32].
The problem isn’t an easy fix though, because “specialist responses to perpetrators of DA [domestic abuse] are alarmingly piecemeal” [18]. So basically if people happen to be in an abusive relationship, and they’re lucky enough to be with someone that wants support to change, or they themselves want support to leave safely, the odds are very, very low. You have to be living within a postcode that has budget, in an area where shelters have spaces, and keep your fingers crossed you’re in a place that has a perpetrator programme. When the Domestic Abuse Commissioner surveyed over 4,000 survivors in 2022, half wanted their abuser to get help to change, but only 7% received it, ranging wildly from 16% in the North East to 3% in Wales [33].
So what is the true extent of the numbers today that are due to system failures? It is impossible to calculate because nobody has counted. I searched everywhere I could but there is no published estimate in existence for England on how many children enter care because of domestic abuse across all ages, not just babies. The DfE’s “reason for entry” categories for children in care don’t include domestic abuse, so there simply isn’t a figure to count. There’s also no research showing what happens to the numbers if the perpetrator is removed from the family circumstances.
The only figure I did find was a partial one, relating only to babies. It came from a charity’s Freedom of Information request that went to all 153 English councils. 90% of them replied, supplying figures as an average over the period 2021 to 2023. They found an estimated 1,924 babies (aged between 0 and 2) a year had entered care with domestic abuse as a factor, out of 48,067 babies a year that had been referred to children’s social care with domestic abuse as a factor. This was about 1 in 4 of all babies entering care. The charity commented that this is most likely an underestimate too [19].
Domestic abuse was recorded in just under half of all serious child safeguarding incident notifications and reviews in 2023 to 2024, and in 52% where the child died [11].
The Domestic Abuse Commissioner estimates that about 700,000 children under seven years of age are living in families with domestic abuse, and if siblings are included that number rises to 1.5 million [11].
So if the abusers were dealt with properly, how many of those 1,924 babies would still be at home with their mothers?
Birth family support also varies wildly. Some people are sent to residential family centres for assessment and guidance. In March 2026 there were 120 centres in England, which has more than doubled since 2018 [21]. However a King’s College study in June 2026 noted a typical stay of about three months but with “little evidence about their longer-term effectiveness”. They said there was no clear evidence the assessment predicted future parenting [22]. According to File on 4, more than 70% of families are placed at a centre outside their own area [23], which takes vulnerable young mothers away from their local support network, their family and their local services.
The disparity between what one local authority deems as requiring the removal of a child or a baby varies wildly from location to location. Children in the most deprived 10% of small neighbourhoods in the UK are over 10 times more likely to be in foster or residential care or on protection plans than in the least deprived 10% [20]. And although 18.5% of newborn care hearings were same-day nationally in 2019/20, there are big regional differences, for example it was 41% in the North East [4].
Salford is doing something right, and the whole country could and should learn from them. More than a decade ago they started Strengthening Families, a service for parents who’d had a child removed and vulnerable first-time parents. It’s run by the council’s early help service, not social care.
They offer long term, non-residential, intensive support for parents, which has resulted in many of the children being able to stay with their birth families. It runs from pre-birth all the way through the first five years and has had astonishing results [24, 25]. They’ve prevented 181 babies from going into care, saving nearly £6m [25], but critically, the handbook they work from names domestic abuse as one of the stresses it works on [24]. Between 2018 and 2020 a government-funded programme tried to spread Salford’s model, along with three others, across all ten Greater Manchester councils. By 2021 it was running in some form in other boroughs, but the learning report says no model was fully in place in all ten, and the promised cost-benefit analysis hadn’t been published [34].
What’s happening in Salford does give me a little bit of hope. However, in May 2026 the government announced £2.4 billion over three years for the Families First Partnership Programme, which pays councils to help families earlier so fewer children end up in care. The money is ring-fenced for prevention. But domestic abuse doesn’t have a spending line in it: the programme guide only lists domestic abuse services as partners councils should involve, and the implementation plan for 2026 to 2029 does not even contain the words “domestic abuse”, “perpetrator” or “father” anywhere [26, 27]. So the money exists, and yet the thing that is causing a third of assessments isn’t even named in it.
I don’t think that we should be looking at this issue in a silo. Why are we not taking domestic abuse more seriously in the removal and disruption of these families? I mean, surely if the men who carried out domestic violence were removed from the family home, in addition to having extra support both for the victims and the perpetrators, then how much difference might that make to the numbers of babies and children going into care? And not only going into care, but the number of women and children who are on the receiving end of abuse could be reduced. And if boys and young men were educated in misogyny and domestic violence and healthy relationships from an early age, and preventative support was put in place to help reduce the rates of domestic violence, how much of a knock-on effect would that have on the number of babies being taken into care? Because the result of a baby being taken into care is destroying lives. This isn’t just a singular issue, it’s obviously very complex. But the result of this complexity, yet again, is bad men trampling over women, and in this case children as well.
81,770 children were in care in England at 31 March 2025, with 32,270 coming into care during that year [29]. Of care leavers, 40% of 19 to 21 year olds were not in education, employment or training in 2025, against 13% of all young people that age [29]. Outcomes for these people could be so much better if the systems worked together and put women and children’s safety as a priority.
I have known women who have had dealings with the social services system, and the women and children were treated appallingly. They weren’t believed by professionals, whereas the father was, and lives were destroyed. It was a fight that was physically and emotionally draining, chronically affecting their mental health, and every touch point along the way was a battle that was made exceptionally difficult at every turn. It was an utter nightmare for the women and their children.
The response from social services being so quick to take children away is understandable from the standpoint of protecting children that could potentially be seriously hurt. However, this needs to go hand in hand with immediate and multidisciplinary support. That involves support before, during and after the birth of a child. It involves departments sharing information and working together. It involves the abuser being held accountable, and this is a man in most cases.
Ultimately it should be the abuser that is taken away, not the child. Why should an innocent child and a bleeding mother have to suffer irreparable damage because a system cannot contain the problem, which is the abuser?
I listened to the File on 4 podcast and it was yet another story of systemic failings in our country’s support services. I personally know several children’s social workers, all of whom have ended up quitting because they couldn’t cope with the enormous workload that was thrust upon them. They all raised objections and said how this was putting people’s lives at risk, and that thorough support needed sufficient resources, which they simply didn’t have. Perhaps if the government was serious about this they would invest more in it.
At the end of the day, there will always be cases where a baby does sadly need to be taken away, and my argument isn’t that removal is wrong in these cases. Social workers must carry Baby P and Sara Sharif heavily with them during every case. My issue is that this system can get a court order to remove a baby inside a week, but not provide a refuge bed for an abused mother. It’s already decided exactly whose safety it’s paying for, and it’s not hers.
The Receipts // (Sources)
[1] Department for Education, Children in need, reporting year 2025, 30 October 2025; dataset C3, Factors identified at the end of assessment.
[2] Not used.
[3] Lancaster University, Centre for Child and Family Justice Research, Born into Care: 1 in every 118 infants in England at risk of care proceedings in 2024/25, 6 October 2026.
[4] Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, Newborn babies in urgent care proceedings in England and Wales, 4 June 2021.
[5] Philip, Bedston, Youansamouth, Clifton, Broadhurst, Brandon and Hu, Up Against It: Understanding Fathers’ Repeat Appearance in Local Authority Care Proceedings, Nuffield Foundation, March 2021.
[6] Children Act 1989, section 31.
[7] Adoption and Children Act 2002, section 120.
[8] Domestic Abuse Act 2021, section 3.
[9] London Safeguarding Children Procedures, Domestic abuse, revised September 2023.
[10] Ofsted, Care Quality Commission, HMICFRS and HM Inspectorate of Probation, The multi-agency response to children who are victims of domestic abuse, 21 January 2026.
[11] Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, Victims in their own right? Babies, children and young people’s experiences of domestic abuse, April 2025.
[12] Lisa Deblasio, The Re-traumatisation of Domestic Abuse Survivors: The Problem of Mother Blaming in Public Child Law Proceedings, Child and Family Law Quarterly, 2022.
[13] Pro Bono Economics for the Children’s Services Funding Alliance, Rebalancing the system: Children’s Services spending 2011-25, June 2026.
[14] Pro Bono Economics for the Children’s Charities Coalition, A long road to recovery, April 2025.
[15] Women’s Aid Federation of England, The Annual Audit 2026, March 2026.
[16] Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, recurrent care proceedings research, reported 24 November 2022.
[17] Morris, Featherstone, Hood, Cunnington, Liao, Bowyer and Wilde, Rethinking Domestic Abuse in Child Protection: responding differently, University of Sheffield, Nuffield Foundation, 2025.
[18] Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Spending Review submission to HM Treasury, February 2025.
[19] For Baby’s Sake Trust, New data reveals almost 50,000 babies are referred to children’s social care each year with domestic abuse as a factor, 26 February 2025; Channel 4 News, 25 February 2025.
[20] Bywaters and others, The Child Welfare Inequalities Project: Final Report, Nuffield Foundation, July 2020.
[21] Ofsted, Main findings: children’s social care in England 2026, 30 July 2026.
[22] Baginsky and Hood, Residential family assessment centres in England, NIHR Policy Research Unit, King’s College London, June 2026.
[23] BBC File on 4 Investigates, Forced Adoption: Is it happening today?, BBC Radio 4, 6 October 2026; Claire Kendall and Judith Moritz, BBC News, 6 October 2026.
[24] Salford City Council, Strengthening Families Handbook.
[25] Children and Young People Now, Programme breaks cycle of repeat orders.
[26] Department for Education, Families First Partnership Programme Guide, Year 2 (2026 to 2027), March 2026.
[27] Department for Education, Delivering the children’s social care reset: An implementation plan for local partners, 2026-2029, 2026.
[28] Not used.
[29] Department for Education, Children looked after in England including adoptions, reporting year 2025, 26 November 2025; Become, November 2024.
[30] Not used.
[31] Shelter England, Notice seeking possession: rent arrears in council and housing association tenancies.
[32] University of Bristol, Domestic violence programme shown to reduce physical abuse by 82 per cent, 22 January 2020 (evaluation of the Drive Project, Hester and others).
[33] Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, A Patchwork of Provision: How to meet the needs of victims and survivors across England and Wales, November 2022.
[34] Godar and Botcherby, Learning from the Greater Manchester Scale and Spread Programme, Research in Practice, August 2021.
Sources correct as at 20 October 2026.
