This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
PARENTS with a learning disability are 54 times more likely to have their children taken into care than others, an investigation has found.
Of the 72,154 children who entered care between April 2020 and April 2022, 8.1 per cent of children were removed from their family home after social workers identified their parent’s learning disability as a factor of concern, research by Channel 5 News revealed.
Since only 0.15 per cent of adults with learning disabilities are a parent, this means they are 54 times more likely to have their child removed compared to non-disabled parents, the report said.
Speaking to the programme on her child’s forced adoption, Jean Eveleigh, who is a member of Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign, said: “Time was stolen from us where we’re being punished for something that was not my fault.
“And we now have a lot of work to try to do, to try and get to that normal parent-child relationship.”
Support Not Separation’s Anne Neale said: “Our experience is that mothers are targeted for child removal by sexism, racism, disability discrimination and pervasive class bias in the ‘child protection’ system and in family courts.”
