Processes and determining factors when family court judgments are made in England about infants entering care at birth

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Thoburn, June (2022) Processes and determining factors when family court judgments are made in England about infants entering care at birth. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 43 (4). pp. 455-466. ISSN 0964-9069

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Abstract

This paper reports on the England part of a research project exploring judicial decision making in eight jurisdictions with respect to care applications in respect of new-born infants. Descriptive data are provided on a total cohort of 278 care applications made to three English family court care centres in 2016. Attention is paid to final orders made and findings are reported on differences between the three care centres with respect to the proportions of orders made (mainly placement orders; but also care orders and Special Guardianship Orders). A particular focus of the paper is on the ‘transparency’ of court processes as evidenced by the availability of transcripts of judgements. To add to the small proportion of cases (11%) where a transcript was available, 30 English judgements on new-borns reported to the BAILII data base in 2016 were also analysed. Differences were found between proportions of orders made when a judgement transcript was or was not available. It is argued that these results add to the call for greater transparency in the family courts.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: This article reports on the England part of a larger study of decision-making in family court cases on compulsory removals of new-born children and adoptions from care, funded by the European Research Council and the Norwegian Research Council. The study includes child protection cases in eight jurisdictions (Austria, England, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Spain) (see Burns et al. for a fuller account of these different family court processes). The over-arching aim of the research is to contribute to understanding of the reasoning and justification of ‘best interest’ decisions by providing contextual information about family court processes in contrasting European countries and by analysing samples of written judgements from each country (see Krutzinna and Skivenes, Luhamaa et al.). Funding Information: This project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway under the Independent Projects:Humanities and Social Science programme (grant no. 262773).
Uncontrolled Keywords: child protection,adoption,court orders,family court,judgements,new-born children,transparency,sociology and political science,law ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3312
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Social Work
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 25 Nov 2021 01:41
Last Modified: 23 Oct 2022 03:22
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/82326
DOI: 10.1080/09649069.2021.1996082

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