Poverty linked to children in care

The more deprived the area a child lives in, the greater their chances of being taken into care, with poverty and domestic abuse “key drivers” of demand for child protection services.

That is according to professor of social work at Huddersfield University, Bríd Featherstone, whose UK-based research — the Child Welfare Inequalities Project — has found that it is “primarily the poorest people in our society” that the child protection system is dealing with.

“In every country [England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales] we found a statistically significant link between deprivation and your chances of coming into care.”