PAR (Parents Advocacy and Rights) is a Scottish parent-led support group that supports parents with children in the care system, child protection, children’s hearings, and other situations where they have lost care of their children, or risk losing care. In October 2019 PAR launched an on-line survey that invited sharing of experiences of child protection processes. The survey was made public on the PAR website with links sent to others with an interest such as kinship carers support groups and relevant women’s organisations agencies eg. Refuges and those supporting victims of domestic violence. PAR members and subscribers were also contacted. The aim was to gain the first ever impression of parent and other relevant relatives’ experiences of Scottish child protection systems and processes and to make this a contribution to the Scottish Government-initiated Independent Care Review that was taking place at the time (this Review has now been published: https://www.carereview.scot/).
The survey was in the form of a four-part, 35-question schedule involving a combination of Likert Scale responses and free text. This paper presents and discusses the one hundred and ninety one responses to the survey between October and December 2019. See Appendix 1 for the questionnaire.
The paper begins with what we already know about parent experiences of child protection.