Tag Archives: Sir Andrew McFarlane

Hearing from adopters about living with traumatised young people

In March 2016 I went to Kings Cross to meet with someone I had been talking to on Twitter for a year. Needless to say, my family were horrified! I have just been looking back over our preparatory conversation – lots of nonsense about what we both looked like and whether we would be wearing a rose to recognise each other. Reader, we both survived the experience and became good friends, working together to raise awareness of child to parent violence and abuse and the lack of support particularly for older adolescents and young adults post adoption. 

This last weekend, ‘J’ – because it was her I met, founder of The POTATO Group – and the rest of the POTATO committee, put on a conference in Birmingham: Far, far beyond the adoption order, Lessons from lives impacted by trauma. Organised entirely by themselves, while simultaneously parenting traumatised young people and adults, it was by far one of the most powerful and moving presentations I have ever seen. 

Continue reading

1 Comment

Filed under conference report, Family life

Deprivation of Liberty stories

Summer is the time that I catch up on reading all the research papers and news articles that I have been storing on my laptop; and so I have finally found the space to pull some thoughts together. One thing that has particularly caught my eye over the last months has been the reporting on the rise in the number of vulnerable young people subject to Deprivation of Liberty (DoL) Orders.  

Children and Young People Now has run a number of articles about this, examining the reasons for the sharp rise in orders (here), and analysing the growing gap in secure care provision (here), and in this piece from the beginning of August, looking at the impact on the young people themselves, often placed at great distance from their families and support systems, in unsuitable accommodation and in situations likely to increase their trauma and vulnerability rather than aid their recovery. 

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Discussion, Law