International Day of Families 2025 — Poverty Should Never Be a Reason for Separating Families
Published on Exchange Chambers, May 2025.
On this International Day of Families 2025, I want to set out a simple but important principle: poverty should never be a reason for separating families.
In my practice in the Family Court, and in my doctoral research into the child protection legal system, I encounter repeatedly the ways in which poverty is conflated with risk, deprivation with neglect, and material hardship with harm. Families who are struggling financially — who cannot afford adequate food, heating, or housing — are drawn into the orbit of the state’s child protection apparatus in ways that families with economic security are not.
This is not an abstract observation. It is the lived experience of the families I represent and the families I study. The research is unambiguous: the children most likely to enter the care system are the children of the poorest families, in the poorest communities. That is not because poor parents love their children less, or are less capable. It is because poverty creates the conditions in which the state intervenes.
On this day, I call on all who work within the family justice system — lawyers, judges, social workers, policymakers — to hold this principle clearly in mind: poverty is not a safeguarding issue. Support for families in poverty is a matter of social justice. And the separation of children from their families on grounds that are, at their root, economic rather than protective, is a human rights violation.