'Care experience' is not a civil rights movement

On 1 December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks sits on a bus beneath a sign enforcing segregation. Black people in the United States at this time are not only segregated, they are facing hatred so severe it spills into everyday life. Lynchings take place in public. People are beaten or killed for speaking to a white person. White supremacist groups hide behind masks and terrorise communities with impunity. When the police board the bus and tell Rosa Parkes to move, she refuses. In a country her grandparents were dragged to in chains, she quietly resists an order that has controlled her community for generations.

Across the ocean in the UK, women are living with deep inequality both inside and outside their homes. They are raising children without childcare rights or maternity support. Those who work face lower pay, unwanted attention, and widespread sexual harassment in workplaces that rarely challenge it. At home, the law still treats husbands as having ownership over their wives’ bodies, marital rape is not criminalised until 1991. For many women, there was no meaningful protection, no effective advocacy, and no system designed with their safety in mind.

By 30 April 1999, another community is facing targeted hate. In Soho, London, neon lights shine on wet cobbles in what was known as the gay district. The community are out celebrating, filling the narrow streets with laughter. But their joy is shattered by a nail bomb that explodes outside the Admiral Duncan pub, killing three people and injuring many more, attacked purely for who they were.

These groups eventually became protected in law, but only after decades of violence, exclusion, and systemic harm. They had no structures to keep them safe, no dedicated services, no national programmes offering understanding or support.

Protection wasn't created because society overlooked them, but because society oppressed them.

Now, fast forward to today.

Children are living in homes where they are harmed, neglected, or abused by parents who are meant to protect them. When social care becomes involved, the state removes them from danger. Teachers are trained to understand trauma so that classrooms can offer compassion and understanding. Employers create schemes for care leavers. Housing providers offer priority accommodation. Universities run outreach programmes, give additional funding, and free accommodation. Organisations pledge support, mentor, advocate, and campaign.

The outcomes are still far from what we want, but the intention behind the system is clear: to protect children in care and to restore some of the dignity lost in their early years.

And this matters, because no other group entered protection with an entire statutory system already designed around them. Black people didn’t. Women didn’t. LGBTQ+ people didn’t. Protection followed failure. Law arrived after harm.

If we are asking for the same response for care experience, we have to be honest about whether the same failure exists.

This is not to equate experiences, but to recognise that care experience does not sit in the same category as the existing protected characteristics. Calling this the ‘civil rights movement of its time’ draws a comparison that is, frankly, irresponsible - even if that isn’t the intention.

With commentary like this, it highlights that we are not looking at this through an intersectional lens. Without that, we have to ask: what perspectives are leading this campaign, and which ones are excluded from it?