Karen and Nick Woodall have long felt aggrieved that other charities receive funding they believe was rightfully theirs. They were particularly enraged when their contracts for the Centre for Separated Families dried up once their patrons, Maria Miller and Tim Loughton had moved on. They are too self absorbed to grasp that they were also beneficiaries in exactly the same way.
I share Karen Woodall’s dismay at the waste of taxpayers’ money on the Help and Support for Separated Families debacle, though for different reasons. My analysis shows that the money was wasted on ineffectual, piecemeal projects with no intention to scale up successful initiatives, but that the projects themselves were not actively harmful. On the other hand, the money paid to Karen and Nick Woodall, in addition to being stolen from the charity, was paid for activities that were actively harmful to separated mothers and their children.
Karen Woodall’s resentment started earlier on. In accounts submitted to Companies House for the year ending March 2009, justifying why she had made staff redundant and was unable to repay the mounting debt to HMRC, she complained that:
“The Charity has faced overwhelming competition from larger charities who, perhaps, saw the Centre for Separated Families as a rival for funding. The Trustees did not foresee this risk and the Charity was unable to match the lobbying power of the Kids in the Middle consortium” and “was excluded from this consortium, which lobbied government for significant DCSF funding, effectively preventing the Centre from securing any further funding”.
“Relate are the people who brought you the failed Family Resolutions Pilot, which cost millions and delivered to 23 couples. They were also a partner in the Kids in the Middle Campaign which wasted almost ten million on separated family ‘pilots’, the report on which now gathers dust on the shelves of the Department for Education.”
“When the state machinery gets involved in the personal lives of families, it rarely gets it right. From the waste of money that is the Department for Work and Pensions’ Help and Support for Separated Families initiative, to the millions being wasted on family mediation, not one of those people we worked with had either heard of, or ever used, government funded services.”
“Leading the way to the promised land are National Family Mediation, Resolution and Relate, with One Plus One and a few other ex New Labour government funded behemoths following up behind. Every one of them wedded to the idea that mums care and are good people and dads (should) provide and are largely not good people unless they are forced to be.”
“Relate, who appear to bend their delivery of services to meet the needs not of parents but of whatever funding stream happens to be available from government, are doing a national disservice to separating families in my view.”
“Kids in the Middle Campaign has reared another version of its pointless head”
“…the complete eviction of men from family life at the whim of the woman, not a bad move by the feminist architects of separated family legislation… We learned today that the £14 million which was made available by Maria Miller is being spent on projects which are showing dads how to behave themselves and stop being perpetrators, amongst other things (mostly mediation based). I shall be blogging about this massively misspent funding (alongside other massively misspent funds from the recent past) very shortly.”
“Just as we saw in the waste of millions in the Kids in the Middle Campaign (can anyone tell me where the evaluation of the pilots for parenting together after separation that was funded in that campaign went? Nope, thought not), in five years time when the 20 million made available by Maria Miller has been wasted, the evaluation of this round of nonsense will have disappeared too. It is breathtaking how much money is wasted in this arena, truly truly breathtaking and its got absolutely NOTHING to do with the well being of children or families.”
“The charities involved with children and families which sit around the government tell the government what they want the government to hear…the government responds by making money available…the money goes to the big charities, who spend it centrally, not locally. Good example is the North London Relate Centre which closed down just as the head office for Relate got a few million quid from the Kids in the Middle Campaign in 2010..to do what? Not very much in reality. That Campaign spent 10 million pounds on so called parenting apart pilots, the evaluation showed that the projects spent £3000 per head on delivering services over two years – £3000!!!! The evaluation of those pilots has disappeared into the void along with all the other wasted money. In reality, the money that is spent by government goes to fund inflated salaries for charities bosses and managers and gives those business the opportunity to ‘make their margins’ – ie: money to spend on expanding the already over bloated, over administrated, over managed sector which in turn gets to tell the government what is needed in the outside world…the people who work in those kinds of charities are as far away from what happens in the real world as the Civil Servants in the hallowed halls of Westminster and the Ministers they are talking to. Its a bubble of non reality and the money that is made available is simply spent on maintaining that. The Bad Men Project serves to ensure that the children and families sector continues to perpetuate the lie that men don’t care and women are poverty stricken after separation so that the children and families sector can maintain its over bloated domination and fund jobs for managers and CEO’s paid at a higher rate than the Prime Minister in some cases. And in the domestic violence sector, this is simply replicated but to an even greater financially breathtaking waste.”
“I have been thinking particularly about my decision to leave the charitable world behind and how this has removed me from the circle of charities which sit around the government. This decision was probably the best I ever made in terms of my ability to focus upon my work as an alienation specialist. However it is clear that I cannot remove myself entirely from that world, just as I cannot remove myself from the world at large and in reviewing my writing over the past few months, although I am no longer active in government, my voice has never been silent for long about the way in which those organisations set up to support mothers and fathers are part of the problem and not the solution…
…I have always known that the concentric circle of charities sitting around government is a world in itself in which smoke and mirrors are used to great effect and money is spent often purely so that government can tell the world that it is doing something about X Y Z every five years or so. But I don’t think I realised until quite recently how little this circle actually bothers or cares about the work that it does (or even, for that matter, how little government bothers or cares).
The shock that arrives when one realises that these charities are simple reflections back to government of how they would like things to be, as well as bottomless pits sucking up funding to build empires over which CEO’s on inflated salaries can preside, is jarring to say the least. The realisation that actually nobody cares and its all just a wheeze to make a good living is a somewhat bleak outlook. The fact that others do not see this or conversely, they do and want a part of it, is something I have gotten used to. But its a grim reality to face, especially when one knows that these concentric circles are the core of the damage which is being done to families in this country.”
“Last week I walked past Action for Children’s headquarters and peered in through the shiny windows to see banners proclaiming ‘We did it...’ (presumably a reference to their successful campaign to get the government to change the law on child neglect to include emotional abuse as one of the elements that can be considered to be neglect of a child). This new proposal for a ‘Cinderella’ law as the media terms it, is one which has caused enormous consternation in some camps and triumphalist trumpeting in others. As I gazed through the windows of the headquarters of this charity, I found myself feeling a bit like a neglected child myself. Gone from the world of the charitable sector and back to the place where I feel most effective (and clean), I know the experience of living hand to mouth and making do and mend all too well. I know what it feels like to press my nose up against the glass of the corporate industry which is the children and families sector in this country, to see the money which is pumped through these institutions to fatten and bloat them. As I pondered on the presentation of the Action for Children headquarters and their campaign for this new Cinderalla Law, I wondered how much money it would make them and what in fact, would be the difference that they made to children whose lives are blighted by emotional cruelty. It left me thinking again about the reality of the charitable sector in this country (the national ones I mean, not the local ones run by volunteers in the spirit of true charitable work) and the way in which this is, just like all the other ‘sectors’ of business in this country, an industry which exists, mainly to serve the needs of its staff and supporters, not the needs of the children and families whose lives they purport to represent.
Campaigns of this nature are common in the children and families sector, where people pay thousands to marketing and media firms to run campaigns to ‘raise public awareness’ of an issue. Big charities such as NSPCC and Barnardos, regularly run such campaigns and off the back of these, come funding streams, either released by government or demanded of them, to ‘meet the needs’ demonstrated by the campaign which was paid for in the first place by funding raised to meet the needs demonstrated by the charity. The question is, what needs do these campaigns raise awareness of and how do the funds raised by the campaigns to raise awareness of these needs, actually meet the needs of the issues that are being raised in the first place – if you follow my drift. How much money is actually spent on meeting need and how much is wasted, frittered or used to shore up the over bloated salaries of those at the top of these government departments?
There is an argument, which I generally support, that this industry exists to serve itself rather than anything else. If you take a closer look at these behemoths, their employment rates are astonishing, they are corporate in their approach and they ‘make their margins’ where-ever they can, including from the funding given by government for charitable purposes. Analysing how money is directly spent upon the people that these corporations are supposed to serve is an eye watering experience. Let’s take a campaign that I have some knowledge of in recent years, the Kids in the Middle Campaign which joined Relate, Families need Fathers, Gingerbread and the Fatherhood Institute in an unholy alliance to suck up the oxygen, funding and trajectory towards a fairer, more egalitarian approach to supporting separated families. Orchestrated by someone calling himself a ‘social entrepreneur’ – you will know him, he is busy socially entrepreneuring a new coalition with his new wheeze mums and dads net – this group of charities paid in the region of £30,000 to a media and marketing group to launch Kids in the Middle, a campaign which called upon government to support the children affected by family separation. In 2010, the outgoing Labour government, captivated by the chance to receive the approval of a group of agony aunts, shovelled several million at this group and from there, a half hearted, hastily cobbled together programme of services to support their version of collaborative parenting was born. Several grass roots groups from around the country received hundreds of thousands of pounds to run ‘seed bed’ projects, supposedly to grow new services which would meet the needs of both parents and children as they went through separation. Some of these groups spent their thousands telling men that they should be glad that their children had a ‘step father’ to take their children on and others spent their time sending single parents on days out to relieve the stress. The evaluation reports from these projects never saw the official light of day, one glimpse however told us all we needed to know, the cost per head of service delivery was around £3000. So much waste, so much fattening of the corporates sat at the top of this campaign, so little concern for the lives of the families that this parasite fed from.
A recent discussion about this issue lead to someone telling me that this sounded like a ‘bitter dispute about funding..’ a remark which would be funny if it were not so ignorant of the reality of what is being done with the money that tax payers hand over in this country. This fellow had himself had a run in with family law and was, supposedly, conversant with the way in which this blights the lives of families. I considered his remark and his complete lack of awareness of how this whole field is infected with greed and the notion of pointless posturing just to keep the funding flowing. With this inability to understand what is really going on at the top by the grass roots, how will we ever convene the kind of change that challenges the institutionalised wanton waste, let alone the discrimination which runs right through the children and families industry.
Action for Children are trumpteting their success with their Cinderella law at the moment, presumably this will, in their imaginations, lead to funding for a new department. I can see the adverts already and the NSPCC wringing their hands (why didn’t we think of it) and Barnardos and all the rest of the big departments who are set to benefit working out what their share of the spoils will be. But what about Cinderalla and the childhood that was supposedly stolen from her by her step mother. What about this so called law that will address the issue of emotional cruelty or neglect?
Those against this law suggest that this will introduce a level of subjective policing which will, if we are not careful, put us all at risk of imprisonment for not considering the emotional welfare of children. I understand that concern. I also however, understand the reality of emotional abuse of children. I understand it because I work with it most days of my life. Emotional abuse of children is, for me, more damaging in the longer term than many other forms of abuse,because one cannot see the bruises that emotional cruelty causes. The broken emotions and the battered psychology of emotionally abused children are invisible but they are, nevertheless, real and they are incredibly difficult to heal. When children can point to the damage that has been done and can be helped to recognise that for what it is, they are more likely to heal. When they cannot do that and, worse, when they blame themselves first because they cannot put the blame where it belongs, the damage that is done is pervasive and so deeply rooted it can sometimes never be repaired.
Emotional cruelty can, like sexual abuse, cause the very roots of the growing child to twist and disort and fail to grow. I know it, I work with it, I see the damage that it does. Sadly however, what I term emotional abuse of children is likely to be so far away from what the children and families industry identify that it is as if we live in parallel universes. From where I am standing, most of those charities who supposedly support children and families are themselves involved in the institutionalised emotional abusive act of ripping children away from their beloved parents. Most refuse to accept the importance of a child’s relationship with both sides of their family after separation and many will refuse to countenance the reality that alienation of a child, is something which is made easy by the family justice system in this country. And most significantly, most, if not all of the charities which feed from the government, remain fixed in their negative views about fatherhood, steadfastly refusing to support it without the caveat ‘where it is safe to do so’ all the while proclaiming to be doing their bit for shared parenting whilst behind the scenes fervently doing their utmost to prevent it.
It doesn’t get much more emotionally abusive than that and yet it will be these charities who clamour loudest for this law and those who will be busy channelling the cash for their shiny new offices and their glossy brochures proclaiming their care and support for these children.
I walked away from Action for Children last week feeling once again relieved that I have left that world behind. I may be neglected in that my words are not listened to in any significant way (other than by those who read this blog) and I may not be sitting on a big fat pile of cash, but I know that my work, at the end of every day has made a difference to real people’s lives.
Cinderalla I may be, but the ball I go to, is one where children’s lives matter and change is something that happens between people who care about each other and ‘honour’ amongst these institutionalised thieves of childhood is something I will never have to encounter again.”
“A tweak here, a tinker there and a whole load of investment in ensuring that the circle of sychophantic charities that sit around the westminster village are ‘on message’ from the outside, even if nothing at all has changed on the inside, is about the height of its achievement. At the heart of it all, the single parent lobby continues on its merry way, convincing one and all that dads are feckless, wreckless, mad, bad and dangerous to their children whilst the father’s lobby looks like a neutron bomb has been dropped on it from a great height.”
“Despite all of the Coalition Government’s promises of change, the only difference now is that charities which previously overtly supported the single parent model now covertly support it, whilst at the same time as they have hoovered up the funding (in the case of child maintenance this is around twenty millions pounds) to present their wares via shiny new websites which promise much but deliver nothing different at all.
Take One Plus One’s new invention which is being promoted by CAFCASS, the online parenting plan. Designed for use before any court action is taken, it is supposedly aimed at parents to help them make their child arrangement orders, something which has replaced the old terms of residence and contact and something which all parents are now required to consider. A quick rinse through this CAFCASS endorsed entity tells us that post separation talking to each other might be difficult, but that we should put the needs of the children first and that if we find that hard we should use mediation. Staggeringly close to the HSSF endorsements to ‘talk about things and if its difficult use mediation and here is a calculator so that you can work out how much would be paid under a statutory maintenance arrangement’, this is a pointless, spineless, circular piece of nonsense which is devoid of imagination, steeped in the same old single parent stereotypes with a dash of this government’s remedy of choice, mediation thrown in for good measure. What a waste. What an absolute waste of time, money and effort. And I say that as someone who sat on both government working groups throughout the first years of this government, giving up swathes of my time and energy only to watch it all swirl away down the proverbial pan.”
“The Family Separation Hub and its developing network of shared parenting support centres is working across the country now in delivering services to support shared parenting. We don’t need to make a big noise about it, we are simply doing it. We don’t need or want government funding to deliver it because those people who, like us, know that the only way to help people is in the real life relationship between people, are getting on and delivering the change we want to see in the world. If you don’t know about that then that’s because you are not looking in the same direction as us. Those who, are also stirring and beginning the process of bringing about change are. Away from Westminster there is a stirring afoot which is building the change for families right now. There is the future, not HSSF or big glossy greedy charities who don’t even work with families for the most part.”
Cinderella and the Forty Thieves of Childhood
8 April 2014
“Last week I walked past Action for Children’s headquarters and peered in through the shiny windows to see banners proclaiming ‘We did it...’ (presumably a reference to their successful campaign to get the government to change the law on child neglect to include emotional abuse as one of the elements that can be considered to be neglect of a child). This new proposal for a ‘Cinderella’ law as the media terms it, is one which has caused enormous consternation in some camps and triumphalist trumpeting in others. As I gazed through the windows of the headquarters of this charity, I found myself feeling a bit like a neglected child myself. Gone from the world of the charitable sector and back to the place where I feel most effective (and clean), I know the experience of living hand to mouth and making do and mend all too well. I know what it feels like to press my nose up against the glass of the corporate industry which is the children and families sector in this country, to see the money which is pumped through these institutions to fatten and bloat them. As I pondered on the presentation of the Action for Children headquarters and their campaign for this new Cinderalla Law, I wondered how much money it would make them and what in fact, would be the difference that they made to children whose lives are blighted by emotional cruelty. It left me thinking again about the reality of the charitable sector in this country (the national ones I mean, not the local ones run by volunteers in the spirit of true charitable work) and the way in which this is, just like all the other ‘sectors’ of business in this country, an industry which exists, mainly to serve the needs of its staff and supporters, not the needs of the children and families whose lives they purport to represent.
Campaigns of this nature are common in the children and families sector, where people pay thousands to marketing and media firms to run campaigns to ‘raise public awareness’ of an issue. Big charities such as NSPCC and Barnardos, regularly run such campaigns and off the back of these, come funding streams, either released by government or demanded of them, to ‘meet the needs’ demonstrated by the campaign which was paid for in the first place by funding raised to meet the needs demonstrated by the charity. The question is, what needs do these campaigns raise awareness of and how do the funds raised by the campaigns to raise awareness of these needs, actually meet the needs of the issues that are being raised in the first place – if you follow my drift. How much money is actually spent on meeting need and how much is wasted, frittered or used to shore up the over bloated salaries of those at the top of these government departments?
There is an argument, which I generally support, that this industry exists to serve itself rather than anything else. If you take a closer look at these behemoths, their employment rates are astonishing, they are corporate in their approach and they ‘make their margins’ where-ever they can, including from the funding given by government for charitable purposes. Analysing how money is directly spent upon the people that these corporations are supposed to serve is an eye watering experience. Let’s take a campaign that I have some knowledge of in recent years, the Kids in the Middle Campaign which joined Relate, Families need Fathers, Gingerbread and the Fatherhood Institute in an unholy alliance to suck up the oxygen, funding and trajectory towards a fairer, more egalitarian approach to supporting separated families. Orchestrated by someone calling himself a ‘social entrepreneur’ – you will know him, he is busy socially entrepreneuring a new coalition with his new wheeze mums and dads net – this group of charities paid in the region of £30,000 to a media and marketing group to launch Kids in the Middle, a campaign which called upon government to support the children affected by family separation. In 2010, the outgoing Labour government, captivated by the chance to receive the approval of a group of agony aunts, shovelled several million at this group and from there, a half hearted, hastily cobbled together programme of services to support their version of collaborative parenting was born. Several grass roots groups from around the country received hundreds of thousands of pounds to run ‘seed bed’ projects, supposedly to grow new services which would meet the needs of both parents and children as they went through separation. Some of these groups spent their thousands telling men that they should be glad that their children had a ‘step father’ to take their children on and others spent their time sending single parents on days out to relieve the stress. The evaluation reports from these projects never saw the official light of day, one glimpse however told us all we needed to know, the cost per head of service delivery was around £3000. So much waste, so much fattening of the corporates sat at the top of this campaign, so little concern for the lives of the families that this parasite fed from.
A recent discussion about this issue lead to someone telling me that this sounded like a ‘bitter dispute about funding..’ a remark which would be funny if it were not so ignorant of the reality of what is being done with the money that tax payers hand over in this country. This fellow had himself had a run in with family law and was, supposedly, conversant with the way in which this blights the lives of families. I considered his remark and his complete lack of awareness of how this whole field is infected with greed and the notion of pointless posturing just to keep the funding flowing. With this inability to understand what is really going on at the top by the grass roots, how will we ever convene the kind of change that challenges the institutionalised wanton waste, let alone the discrimination which runs right through the children and families industry.
Action for Children are trumpeting their success with their Cinderella law at the moment, presumably this will, in their imaginations, lead to funding for a new department. I can see the adverts already and the NSPCC wringing their hands (why didn’t we think of it) and Barnardos and all the rest of the big departments who are set to benefit working out what their share of the spoils will be. But what about Cinderalla and the childhood that was supposedly stolen from her by her step mother. What about this so called law that will address the issue of emotional cruelty or neglect?
Those against this law suggest that this will introduce a level of subjective policing which will, if we are not careful, put us all at risk of imprisonment for not considering the emotional welfare of children. I understand that concern. I also however, understand the reality of emotional abuse of children. I understand it because I work with it most days of my life. Emotional abuse of children is, for me, more damaging in the longer term than many other forms of abuse, because one cannot see the bruises that emotional cruelty causes. The broken emotions and the battered psychology of emotionally abused children are invisible but they are, nevertheless, real and they are incredibly difficult to heal. When children can point to the damage that has been done and can be helped to recognise that for what it is, they are more likely to heal. When they cannot do that and, worse, when they blame themselves first because they cannot put the blame where it belongs, the damage that is done is pervasive and so deeply rooted it can sometimes never be repaired.
Emotional cruelty can, like sexual abuse, cause the very roots of the growing child to twist and distort and fail to grow. I know it, I work with it, I see the damage that it does. Sadly however, what I term emotional abuse of children is likely to be so far away from what the children and families industry identify that it is as if we live in parallel universes. From where I am standing, most of those charities who supposedly support children and families are themselves involved in the institutionalised emotional abusive act of ripping children away from their beloved parents. Most refuse to accept the importance of a child’s relationship with both sides of their family after separation and many will refuse to countenance the reality that alienation of a child, is something which is made easy by the family justice system in this country. And most significantly, most, if not all of the charities which feed from the government, remain fixed in their negative views about fatherhood, steadfastly refusing to support it without the caveat ‘where it is safe to do so’ all the while proclaiming to be doing their bit for shared parenting whilst behind the scenes fervently doing their utmost to prevent it.
It doesn’t get much more emotionally abusive than that and yet it will be these charities who clamour loudest for this law and those who will be busy channelling the cash for their shiny new offices and their glossy brochures proclaiming their care and support for these children.
I walked away from Action for Children last week feeling once again relieved that I have left that world behind. I may be neglected in that my words are not listened to in any significant way (other than by those who read this blog) and I may not be sitting on a big fat pile of cash, but I know that my work, at the end of every day has made a difference to real people’s lives.
Cinderalla I may be, but the ball I go to, is one where children’s lives matter and change is something that happens between people who care about each other and ‘honour’ amongst these institutionalised thieves of childhood is something I will never have to encounter again.”
“Take One Plus One’s new invention which is being promoted by CAFCASS, the online parenting plan. Designed for use before any court action is taken, it is supposedly aimed at parents to help them make their child arrangement orders, something which has replaced the old terms of residence and contact and something which all parents are now required to consider. A quick rinse through this CAFCASS endorsed entity tells us that post separation talking to each other might be difficult, but that we should put the needs of the children first and that if we find that hard we should use mediation. Staggeringly close to the HSSF endorsements to ‘talk about things and if its difficult use mediation and here is a calculator so that you can work out how much would be paid under a statutory maintenance arrangement’, this is a pointless, spineless, circular piece of nonsense which is devoid of imagination, steeped in the same old single parent stereotypes with a dash of this government’s remedy of choice, mediation thrown in for good measure. What a waste. What an absolute waste of time, money and effort. And I say that as someone who sat on both government working groups throughout the first years of this government, giving up swathes of my time and energy only to watch it all swirl away down the proverbial pan.”
“The reason the book is taking a long time is because I have to write it in and around the other work we do to earn a living, sadly, though millions are thrown at the national charities who don’t even believe that alienation exists, not a penny comes this way – not that we would take it now, working outside of government, directly with and for parents is THE only way to do this in my view.”
“In between we have the individuals eyeing up the finishing line of their race to secure new funding for their ever so clever ideas. The self proclaimed ‘social entrepreneurs’ whose role it seems, is a bit like that of a rackateer in wartime. Making money off the backs of other people’s work, these spivs sell their wares across the internet, gathering around them other people’s expertise to make them appear both knowledgeable and part of the field we work in. Furtively opening their coats to show us the goodies they have for sale, they even proclaim their wheezes were written on the back of a fag packet in a train station..some will fall for this and others will not. Whilst meaningless in terms of shaping the way that family policy will evolve, these spivs are eyeing up the cash just like everybody else is.”
“I no longer work in the charitable sector and I have long since left the murky world of government family politics and thank heavens say I, as all around us begins the familiar feeding frenzy for new government funding. I had forgotten all about the way in which government funding can cause the most staunch proponents for this or that to switch lanes and if necessary even, swim in the other direction. I had forgotten that those who appear on the outside to be pro shared parenting, can be busily stabbing the very possibility of shared parenting in the back behind the scenes. A la Relate, great winners of government funding to promote collaboration and shared parenting in the last round, who were, at the same time, signing pledges with the coalition against shared parenting that lead to the watering down to almost nothing, of the amendments in the Children Act 1989. As I watch this feeding frenzy begin, knowing as I do that in the charitable sector sitting around the government, it is money that matters most, I wonder whether any of them anywhere will ever get to the place where they really understand why all that money, all those initiatives and all those endless, pointless, steering groups, focus groups, reports, evidence based or otherwise, will only ever end up in exactly the same place. Usually the bin. The reason? The disconnect between the lives those charitable organisations think they are representing and the lives of ordinary people that are really being lived up and down this land. A disconnect so wide that it like living in a parrallel universe.”