Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to ensure that non-statutory child advocacy services are properly regulated to ensure competence, transparency and accountability.
If unregulated advocacy services engage in court proceedings there are real risks e.g the way that unregulated services can provide letters to their clients as a basis of 'evidencing' domestic abuse, based purely on self-certification in England and Wales.
In a Scottish context, any non-statutory child advocacy services that engages with a child who is involved in court proceedings, specifically those who may be made subject to an order under section 11(1) of the Children (Scotland) Act, must be regulated.
Section 11(1) of the Children (Scotland) Act relates to parental responsibilities of a child and allows for an order to be made depriving a person of some or all of their parental responsibilities or parental rights in relation to a child. The intervention of a child advocacy service can cause devastating emotional and wellbeing effects. Many have been the victim of unregulated and unaccountable interference in family life, often on the basis of unfounded or entirely false allegations.
Child advocacy services have no independent accountability, instead relying on supervision from a structure of overlapping agencies and individuals who are known to each other and, we believe, share the same assumptions. At best, we believe, without independence of mind, they may facilitate manipulation of one parent against the other. At worst they may be complicit in coercive control as set out in the 2018 Domestic Abuse Act. Regulation would not inhibit genuine effort to support children who have experienced or witnessed domestic abuse.
Not many parents can afford to take their case to court.
This petition is a Scottish issue. The basic approach of use of unregulated providers of such services affects us all of the UK.
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