Why I’m no longer talking to the system about keeping brothers and sisters together

“New Zealand can afford to do it because they have more land.”

“I actually can’t go to McDonalds anymore because I see it happening.”

“All the to-ing and fro-ing it causes interrupts the plans I’ve got for my family.”

I’ve spent today in a workshop with social workers and others, talking about the rights that brothers and sisters have to see each other when they’re separated upon being taken into care. “Separated upon being taken into care” feels like a softer way of saying “ripped apart, with their relationships damaged, because of resource led decision making.”

I approached the event with as open a mind as I could. ‘This meeting will be full of champions for the rights of brothers and sisters’ I thought. At last, people are seeing sense, no matter what, they want these brothers and sisters to be together. The last time I attended an event about brothers and sisters being kept together, I got an email the next week saying that because of the quality of conversation, a different approach, more focused on the needs of the children, had been taken. I love getting to be part of this stuff.

I sat, I waited and then it began.

“We don’t have the resources…we’re having to use our own cars or work weekends” said a number of people in different ways.

“We don’t know much about this boy’s behaviour. Maybe it was because of him that contact with his siblings was stopped.”

“We need to be careful about too much contact, some of the kids are getting attachment disorder. They’re crying in the car park when it’s time to go home.”

I sat and I listened. I don’t mean I passively listened to voices and absorbed what was said. I actively listened. I asked questions. I prompted for a clearer understanding. I approached these new perspectives with curiosity. With only a sheet of paper and a case study with scant detail, people were filling in the blanks by speculating about the behaviour of the young people, not the behaviour of the crushing, entangled systems around them. On and on it went.

I tried to understand but there came a point when I couldn’t understand any longer.

My resolve broke. I explained to the group that the scenario they were discussing was reflective of my life. When I was 11, I was taken into care, through no fault of my own and ripped apart from my two brothers and two sisters. Why? Resources. That was that. Eleven years of my family life ripped apart because of ‘resources’.

It was a struggle. I got to see them every so often. Supervised by a social worker, who took notes like a biologist studying animals in the wild. We had done nothing wrong. We understood though that resources meant we couldn’t live together. It was little comfort, but we knew it wasn’t because we were in the wrong and we thought everyone else understood that too. There was no psychological or physiological reasoning, just that the resource wasn’t there. We accepted that and we accepted a new word into our lives: “contact”. Everyone just got on with it. Nothing that could be done.

Sixteen years later, I am in a cold meeting room and the naïve understanding I had as an eleven-year-old was shattered.

“I mean, we need to think about why the older brother is in a kid’s home and his brother and sister are in separate placements. What has he done?”

Someone from the audience posed this question when confronted with a case study of a similar group of brothers and sisters to my own. This wasn’t an informed thought, or a long series of different options. It was their first point.

This case study wasn’t my life, but it could just have easily been. At this point, a little piece of me broke inside. Those words were steeped in prejudice and judgement. “But what has he done?” Do people think that about me? Even though I was told it was resources that stopped my family living together, do people still think “Yeah but, really…”

I raised my hand and then fear built inside me. I almost put my hand down but instead, something compelled me to blurt out my inner thoughts. Perhaps it was the eleven year old inside me that pushed me over the edge.

“This is my life. When I was in care, I was separated from my brothers and sisters. I had done nothing wrong. I was told it was because of resources.”

The room was suddenly the quietest it had been and as I looked around the room at some of the people who had made the statements above made me think about a paragraph from Reni-Eddo-Lodge’s essay ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’.

“Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know you’ve got it wrong”

The problem was. I wasn’t wrong today and I wasn’t wrong when I was eleven. According to research by academics at the University of Strathclyde, over 70% of brothers and sisters in care are separated. That’s a systemic number, that’s not a “every case in considered individually” number. It is common practice to separate brothers and sisters and the kicker is that from the minute they are separated, it becomes, in legal and practice terms, more and more difficult to bring them back together. All because of resources.

The First Minister spoke at an event I attended before. Care Experienced people have talked for a long time now about care feeling loveless and grey. I’ve spoken to workers who have been pulled into a room and questioned whether their genuine, authentic relationship with a young person was going too far. The First Minister said that as we try to understand how to make love a central part of care, we also have to make sure that by separating brothers and sisters, we aren’t taking love out.

Today, I heard people stumble over themselves to talk about resources, cars, petrol, meeting rooms and all the reasons they couldn’t possibly have brothers and sisters live together. I came to a realisation.

I’m no longer talking to people about brothers and sisters being separated. Not all people, just those who are so determined to maintain the status quo that they can’t see how morally bankrupt continuing this practice on the basis of resources is, or how academic research makes it clear it’s a systemic problem or how damaging it is to young children who don’t have the agency to argue back. I’m not going to try to convince them. They’ve made their mind up and they’re wrong.

Care Experienced brothers and sisters up and down the country are campaigning for the right to live together, to see each other and not to have their motives questioned. They just want to love. I just want love.