My family has been broken apart and suffered significant trauma as a result of children’s social care intervention. I am of the view that the intervention contributed to my daughter taking her own life.
My daughter took her own life on 4 November 2016. Tania was 18 years old and 3 months at the time of her death. Prior to taking her life Tania had been transferred from children’s services into adult services due to concerns about her mental health. In the weeks leading to Tania taking her own life Tania had been sectioned under the mental health act, having been saved by a security guard at Liverpool One after jumping off the side of the docks after wrapping a rope around her neck.
This wasn’t Tania’s first attempt, but the gravity of the attempt and the fact that it was seconds from being successful highlights by that stage just how intent Tania was on taking her own life. Tania was sectioned at the Becklin Centre at St James’s Hospital, but in the weeks following the attempt in Liverpool the unit started allowing Tania to leave on a day release to visit me and other friends. I formed a view that the Becklin Centre must have a view that the risk of Tania making another attempt was reducing otherwise they would not have allowed her out of the unit whilst the section was still in force. Of course I was extremely concerned and on a high state of alert, but I interpreted Tania’s presence off the unit as progress.
After several of these visits had gone OK and the section had expired, there was one visit during which I went out with my son Jay (aged 14 at the time) to watch a football match. Tania seemed to be in a reasonable state of mind when I left but did not want to come so she stayed at home, but when we returned Tania was missing. I found a suicide note and immediately contacted the police. I thought I’d never see Tania again so of course I was overjoyed that Tania later called me asking me to pick her up, which I did, but given the extensive police search which was in progress I of course had to inform the police who picked Tania up and returned her to the unit.
Following this Tania refused to see or speak to me and I think she felt betrayed perceiving that I’d handed her over to the police to take her back to the unit (I wish I didn’t have to but I had no choice). Not long after this incident Tania called me to come and fetch her from the Becklin Centre. I had no information about it at the time and was still receiving no information from the Becklin Centre, but it subsequently turned out that the unit would not allow her back into the unit due to her being drunk and had discharged her.
I welcomed Tania home as I always did and again assumed that the professionals allowing Tania out was a positive sign that she was making progress. I have no experience of dealing with someone suffering from mental illness so I had little choice but to trust the professionals, thinking they’d know best and would have Tania’s safety and well being at heart. I later found out (at the inquest) that Tania made other attempts on her life at the Becklin Centre that week of which I was never informed, nor was I given any information that she was actually being discharged due to being drunk and not because the professionals thought she was ready to go home. The centre also failed to inform the community psychiatric nurse, which was picked up by the inquest. They let someone with significant mental illness and multiple recent suicide attempts go home without telling anyone who need to care for her any of the information about the risks she posed.
Tania stayed at home the next day. It was bonfire weekend and I had arranged to attend the Roundhay fireworks display that evening. I wanted Tania to come but she declined, however she seemed calm so, having no information to consider any heightened concern beyond that which I already felt, I left her at home with her brother for an hour or two whilst I attended the event. When I got home Tania was not there and Jay hadn’t realised she had gone out so I contacted the Becklin Centre and the police immediately to let them know Tania was missing. Tania was found the next morning by a dog walker having taken her own life.
I subsequently heard via informal channels that the staff at the Becklin Centre were split, with some people viewing that Tania was serious about wanting to take her own life whilst others believed Tania’s behaviour was attention seeking. The information presented at the inquest seemed almost co-ordinated to avoid such views becoming public, but something must have driven the lower level of risk she was assessed at and the fact that she was released without any communication to anyone of the risks which the centre knew about, but which no one outside did. I often think about that decision to send Tania home when she was drunk and I still try to work out whose primary concern was Tania’s safety and well being at that moment, besides me of course who wasn’t given any of the risk information.
Prior to being transferred to adult services, Tania and the family had been involved with children services for a couple of years. The referral was made due to Tania arriving at school with bruising to her face a couple of times which she claimed she had got by banging her head in her attic room or getting into a fight. Tania was also experimenting with drugs, mainly cannabis but I had concerns about her having access to harder drugs as well. Both school and I were worried and I welcomed the support of social services to support Tania, co-operating fully at every opportunity.
Tania did exceptionally well in her GCSE’s and decided to go to Notre Dame College. I would have preferred her to remain at Prince Henry’s where the teachers knew her and there was more structure to the learning which I thought would be good for her. At Notre Dame things deteriorated with respect to Tania’s behaviour, the bruising increased and the drug taking. I was against Tania using drugs in general and refused to let her use in the house, but I also tried to impress on her that whilst occasional cannabis use isn’t a big deal, harder drugs are much more dangerous. At the time mental health services CAMHS was also involved, having been involved for some time due to concerns about Tania self-harming, the earliest origins of which can be traced back to events in Year 8. By this time, Tania had extensive scarring on her arms which she was extremely sensitive about, and I helped her deal with it by consulting a plastic surgeon and buying make up to help her disguise it. Tania never opened up to me about why she was self-harming.
When Tania started 6th form college the accusations by professionals against me hitting Tania started. I can only imagine this came about by assumption as I don’t think at that time Tania had ever accused me of causing the bruising and my son Jay certainly never reported any concerns to professionals. It was a narrative which became increasingly prevalent however. Knowing so little about what children’s services were thinking I have now requested a subject to access request to help me understand events better. But to my dismay the professional focus was placed almost entirely on me and no longer on Tania and the challenges she was experiencing even though there were clear and obvious reasons to have concerns about her behaviour, her mental health and her drug use.
With the help of children’s services Tania moved out of the family home, initially to stay with the family of her best friend which I was very supportive of as I knew them well and trusted them to have Tania’s best interests at heart. Tania’s behaviour continued to be challenging and Kath (whose care she was placed in) had to put certain rules in place for her household (with three other daughters) to function. In response to these rules Tania voluntarily returned home, probably because I was less strict about a number of things (e.g. bed times and noise in the house) and I think Tania realised this.
Tania always aspired to independent living so that she could opt out of parental control, and eventually due to the failed placements with friends and her returning home she was placed by social services in her own flat, in Little London aged only 17. I was extremely concerned by this because I felt Tania still needed some level of control and structure. She wasn’t yet and adult and as intelligent and independent as she was it was clear to me that she needed some protection from what she thought she wanted. I saw Tania regularly when she was living in the flat, often helping out with shopping, washing and lifts, but Tania’s situation deteriorated and I later found out that she completely lost control of who was coming in and out of the flat. It became a party flat with lots of drugs and dealers coming in and out who Tania had no control over. I don’t think she was being supported or safeguarded by any adults or professionals at this time as Tania became evasive to visits from professionals. It all became too much for Tania and she abandoned the flat and returned home.
By this time Tania was increasingly becoming distant from family and friends, her mental health had deteriorated significantly. She was going missing a lot, she seemed to be having auditory hallucinations and she had become a completely different person, telling everyone around her not to share any information, and she’d become quite annoyed if anyone seemed to her to be intervening in her life. Despite all this social care and education’s focus seemed to be on me and how I was at fault, and the child protection meetings centred on telling me to stop hitting Tania (which of course I wasn’t) and not on Tania and how best to help and support her or get her what she really needed.
Tania was on a downward spiral and all the services wanted to focus on was me. The child protection meetings increasingly became a group of professionals (up to ten at times) rounding on me and even shouting at me in my face, with my voice alone talking about the mental health issues and the drug use, points I made explicitly every time at every meeting; I knew I wasn’t hitting Tania so I knew their focus wouldn’t address Tania’s problems. But I was talking to myself because they all seemed so certain that I was the problem. In the end Tania’s actual problems (mental health and drug use) were left unaddressed, she was given the ability by professionals to opt out of any interventions in her life and this just led to further worsening and eventually Tania taking her own life. It has completely broken our family, left me without my wonderful daughter and Jay without his sister whom he adored.
I am now aware of services that Leeds could have provided but these were also never suggested or recommended to me. Instead Leeds City council took one approach and one only, this was to seek to blame me for everything, by doing this they completely lost sight of Tania and her situation. I have no problem in allegations about me being taken seriously, despite being completely innocent, providing it would have got to the root of the problems, but of course it didn’t and the failure to address any of the things which really were causing Tania problems inevitably led to a chain of events which culminated in Tania taking her own life.
The loss of Tania continues to devastate me every day nearly nine years on. It has also had a huge impact on my son who I know is still dealing with it. Nothing can bring Tania back, but I do hope there is a chance that Tania’s story could help bring change in professional services. I don’t think it’s right that young people die in this way, and I honestly think it was avoidable in Tania’s case if the chances to intervene had been taken. It was difficult for me bringing up two teenagers as a single parent whilst doing a full time job anyway, but the involvement of the professional services made things much, much worse for me and did nothing to address the real problems which Tania desperately needed help with facing. In fact, I think the actions taken isolated Tania even more even though it is probably what she thought she wanted.
I knew Tania so very well and loved and cared for her deeply, whereas professional services never did. This is why I am keen to tell our family’s story and to talk about the trauma created by the involvement of professional services, who I believed at the time were there to help us and co-operated with fully when it was still possible, but ultimately these services made things worse and in my opinion their actions definitely contributed to Tania’s death.
