Law can't replace love

At 10 years old I was taken into care; removed from a home where I experienced both love and pain. Like most care-experienced people, I didn’t experience stability in care, and neither did the adults who tried so hard to support me.

My first social worker cried as the system restructured around her, and my case was being “reallocated”. Another social worker held my foster carers to account when they didn’t follow through on what they’d promised. My social worker at fifteen quit her job after a senior manager said:

“It’s Luke’s responsibility to find somewhere to stay tonight.”

That sentence led me to homelessness, until I was placed in a bed-and-breakfast accommodation while I was doing my GCSEs.

While social work was unstable, I collected stories from my foster carers.

My third foster carer found me hanging out of my bedroom window smoking a joint, my feet tied to the radiator with blue rope so that I wouldn’t fall. Another didn’t press charges when I stole their car, instead complemented me on my parking. One carer let me build a treehouse in their garden, even though risk assessments would never allow it.

My carers were great people who, despite all that I threw at them, responded with care, humour and empathy.

As I approached leaving care, I was lucky to have only one leaving care adviser. At 17, he let me drive his car around an empty car park. He wanted to give me extra driving lessons.

For parents, this behaviour would be encouraged. For leaving care practitioners, it can be penalised.

When I look back through the lens of this campaign, is raises the question: did I experience discrimination?

My honest answer: I don’t know.

I experienced instability. I experienced harm. I experienced poor decisions. But, was I treated unfavourably because I had been in care?

Equality law asks us to interrogate that question.

Should my leaving care adviser have been allowed to teach me how to drive? After all, this is what any loving parent might do.

What about the risk assessment that would have prevented me from building a treehouse; was that protecting me, or stopping me from taking the kind of risks all children need to take?

And the burnt-out service manager who spent day in and day out trying to find me somewhere to live when all I wanted was to leave care. Did they discriminate? Or were they giving me what I kept asking for?

All my childhood, I was lucky to grow up with people who broke rules, didn’t do as the system told them and positively disrupted. Some may call them radical. I call them real.

And, for those who work with me, will know that I behave in the same way today, I took invaluable lessons from these relationships.

None of these relationships lasted forever. But the stories did, and I cherish them all.

This campaign claims that the instability of these relationships is a discrimination issue, this is something that I disagree with, and a narrative that worries me.

A relationship requires two people to form what works for them. If we believe we can mandate permanence through equality law, we risk “doing to” young people (and practitioners) rather than working with them.

That said there is a negative bias in how we think about relationships breakdown between a practitioner and a young person. Our predisposition is often to assume this is because of the young person’s “attachment issues”, rather than accepting that the system may be at fault.

Is that discrimination? I don't think so.

It doesn’t usually prevent a young person from accessing relationships altogether, the system replaces the relationship.

Does it cause harm? Yes.

It causes harm for both the child and the practitioner. When we get matching wrong, two people grieve, because two people were in the relationship.

The most important question: will equality law fix it?

I don’t believe it will. Instability isn’t automatically discrimination, but it does cause harm. Harm and discrimination are not the same thing.

It’s important to make that distinction. And it’s important to remember, no matter what decision we make - law will never replace love.