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How the children of prisoners are abandoned by the state [1]

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Date: 2023-05

Warning: contains references to suicide

Discovering a child is living by themselves while their parent is in prison is not an unusual occurrence for Sarah Burrows. Sometimes it'll happen once a month. But in January last year, the founder of charity Children Heard and Seen (CHAS) was alerted to five separate cases across England and Wales.

One was a 15-year-old boy, who had been alone for months – with no gas or electricity – after his mother had been jailed. Another time, a victim support officer visited the home of a teenage girl, only to find she had been alone since her father’s arrest. A third time, a criminologist visiting a house for research purposes found just children living there. And so on.

It’s why Burrows set up the charity in 2014. It’s the 21st century, she says, “how is it possible that there are children living alone?”.

The answer is because there is no statutory duty for any government body – whether it’s the care system, the criminal justice system or the Department for Education – to identify or support children impacted by parental imprisonment.

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In the examples described above, after their arrest the parent failed to disclose they had a child at home (in all likelihood because of fear of social services intervention, says Burrows) and so the children simply fell through the cracks.

This happened to Layla, who when she was eight – along with her six siblings – lived for several weeks without any parent or carer after her mother was arrested. “No one cared enough about who was going to look after us, we just got left,” Layla, now 21, says. Her ten-year old sister was the eldest and “took on the whole clan”. It was only when they took their malnourished six-month-old sister to the hospital that anyone realised their situation.

“I received little to no support during the process of my mum being arrested and going to jail,’ says Layla. “This impacted me hugely and I still struggle with attachment issues, poor mental health and poor physical health.”

Research by Children of Prisoners Europe in 2019 found 25% of children aged 11 or over who had a parent in prison had an increased risk of mental health problems.

Burrows says that when she set up CHAS, she was struck by the “shame, stigma, isolation and loneliness” that children were dealing with. Some were bullied at school, others faced violent attacks on their home. One story that particular resonated was that of a five-year-old boy who was the only one not invited to a classmate’s birthday.

Children of prisoners are routinely ‘othered’ by their friends, their community, even wider family members, she says, “because the offences [of their parent] are distasteful. It’s simpler to see them as associated with ‘something else’, rather than as just a child.”

Before he was arrested in 2015, Kat’s* father was a well-liked figure in the community. After his conviction, however, Kat says “it flipped completely and even though I was just a child, people didn’t want to know me.” Feeling judged and ostracised by people at her school and in the community added an extra layer of self-consciousness to her teenage years, she says.

However, Kat, now 21, did have individual support from her school mentor because her mother had informed the school of her father’s situation. “I’m so grateful my mum was that strong. Many children don’t have a parent who’s able to ring up and tell anyone what’s going on, and that’s where the downfall is.”

Child impact assessment toolkit

Layla agrees that for a child going through such a complex experience, “just having someone who can listen to their worries is key”. Today, she mentors children with a parent in prison, and has contributed to the creation of the “child impact assessment toolkit”, a project led by Sarah Beresford in collaboration with the Prison Reform Trust.

“The trauma that children go through when their parent goes to prison is huge,” says Beresford, “particularly if they witness the arrest.”

This could be avoided if the systems and agencies that such children came into contact with – police and probation staff, social workers, teachers at school – had specialised training and adequate support to help them. Currently, this is completely lacking.

The toolkit aims to combat this, providing a framework that practitioners from a range of fields can use to understand how a child impacted by parental imprisonment is feeling, and determine what kind of support is needed.

“We need long-term policy reform, but also actions that can be taken now within the current job descriptions that exist now,” says Beresford. “For example, there could be a police officer whose role is focused on the children, who at the point of arrest takes them into another room, tells them their mum or dad is going to be safe, and asks if there’s anyone they can call. It’s simple stuff but none of that is happening.”

She cites the example of a judge in Scotland “who postponed the sentence for six weeks for the family to make proper childcare arrangements”. That is the kind of system England and Wales should be aiming for, she says, “one that mitigates the impact on children as much as possible.”

The toolkit, which was published in December, is already used by some practitioners, including social workers, teachers and mentors in England and Wales, and is helping support pilot projects within criminal justice processes, such as in sentencing.

Abolish short sentences for mothers

Dr Shona Minson from the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University agrees that suspended and deferred sentencing are both options that should be used more, and that short sentences should be abolished entirely, particularly for mothers. Some 70% of prison sentences handed to women are for less than 12 months, but spending just a few months in prison is enough for a mother to lose her home and often her children, says Minson.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/children-parent-prison-ignored-impact-assessment/

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