Moving beyond moral condemnation of parents: Vulnerable children and families in the context of trauma, neglect and abuse

Abstract

This special issue makes a vital contribution to how we may better understand the contexts of vulnerable children and families and the way intergenerational trauma impacts, influences and manifests within and across family systems. The articles within this special issue carefully challenge a sometimes commonplace attribution of harm solely to individual behaviours. Instead, we seek to shine a light on the role that moral condemnation plays in perpetuating cycles of disadvantage and family hardships.

Parents who struggle to provide good enough care for their children, who may abuse, neglect or inadvertently expose them to harm, are difficult for many people to understand. It is easy for people to respond empathically and with compassion to the children who are harmed, but much more difficult for people to respond to their parents with the same care and consideration. However, these parents were often child victims themselves. When families are embedded in systems of intergenerational disadvantage and trauma, the trauma that flows between generations can powerfully affect the quality of parental care. The emotional judgements that people make in response to severely compromised parenting, combined with narratives that warn against condoning harmful behaviour, can entrench conscious or unconscious moral condemnation, hindering therapists' capacity to provide effective whole-family care.

Within this special issue, we explore the imperative to identify and address moral condemnation, the role of shame in motivating difficult-to-understand behaviours and innovative ways that practitioners have found to respond, without condemnation, to traumatised parents and their children. Effective and meaningful support for vulnerable families requires approaches that address entrenched (mis)understanding and advocate for family-inclusive practices that reflect the lived realities of those involved. Moral condemnation offers little beyond a sense of privileged and positioned ‘knowing’, it should be pushed aside in favour of practices that seek to unpick the intergenerational threads of trauma. Practitioners and therapists—broadly conceived—are in a unique position to pioneer such approaches, challenging atomised views of family dynamics, and how multiple and interconnected factors impact family interactions and parental capacities. Insights from diverse fields and settings beyond traditional therapy offer valuable perspectives for advancing holistic, family-centred care. Several of our contributors within this special issue would not see themselves as family therapists, or even therapists, some are new to academic writing, and this is deliberate. Working with traumatised, vulnerable families and children requires us to stretch beyond our traditional boundaries to find ways to meet the challenges of providing compassionate and effective care.

As an editorial team, we are based at Centacare Catholic Community Services, a leading non-government organisation (NGO) in South Australia that offers an extensive array of programs, including intensive family services, reunification, foster care, disability support, family and domestic violence, homelessness, counselling and mental health services. In our collective roles, we are charged with the responsibility of implementing an innovative therapeutic framework across the organisation. This framework—stabilising trauma in everyday practice (STEP)—is a foundational inspiration for this special issue, as it reflects our commitment to rethinking and challenging traditional therapeutic models. Our aim is to democratise therapeutic practices to develop genuinely trauma-informed and trauma-responsive approaches, which address the deep-rooted social reproduction of trauma. This requires interventions that do not simply manage symptoms but actively disrupt the cycles of harm perpetuated across generations.

Many of the contributions to this special issue have a connection to or reflect the ethos of the STEP therapeutic framework. Together, these works underscore our shared dedication to challenging entrenched norms and advancing innovative approaches that address the complex, intergenerational impacts of trauma within vulnerable families and communities.

The issue opens with an opinion piece by Leonie Segal. Professor Segal has dedicated many years to researching the economic costs and policy implications of intergenerational trauma. She issues a call to action reminding us that out-of-home care is not a panacea, and that the inequitable distribution of funding between services for traumatised parents whose children have entered the child protection system and the provision of out-of-home care for their children adversely impacts birth families. Segal advocates for a systems-based approach that moves beyond the general principle of ‘child protection as everyone's business’. Instead, she envisions a coordinated framework in which roles, responsibilities, target clients and budgets are aligned, enabling timely support to families before harm escalates. Investing in high-quality, trauma-informed training across the human services workforce is essential to equip professionals with the skills to engage sensitively, effectively and safely with families facing complex challenges.

Twigger et al. compare clinician and lived experience perspectives to ask questions about the concept of non-judgement, enshrined as an ideal in the therapeutic literature and important in the quest to move beyond moral judgement. They identify that we often fall short of this ideal and draw our attention to the fact that we may not even recognise or be conscious of our unhelpful judgements.

The third article in this collection (Amos et al.) explores the under-recognised contribution of shame to the enduring emotional wound that lies at the heart of relational trauma in infancy, and attachment–caregiving disorganisation. The authors discuss how avoidance of this wound explains the use of aggressive, controlling and submissive behaviours, shedding light on the crucial importance of shame in driving unhelpful and harmful parenting behaviours. The hypotheses presented by these authors are then used to discuss how this knowledge of shame can help clinicians nuance their use of empathy when first getting to know traumatised families to reduce the chances of families feeling judged.

It is not just practitioners that need to have a clear model of why people behave in ways they would prefer not to. Families need this too, to counter the judgements that they make about themselves as people and parents. Walker and Coventry offer ‘a map of relational possibilities’ that provides an accessible way to share with families the theoretical information outlined in the article on shame (Amos et al.) whilst also allowing for relational possibilities to be broadened. When practitioners and families have a mutual understanding and language for what drives difficult behaviours, families can genuinely be invited to become equal partners in the change process. Walker and Coventry present a convincing justification for how the map offers a creative way to bridge the research practice gap without manualisation, which is often cited by practitioners as a barrier to adopting evidence-based treatment protocols. This map has been identified as a crucial thread for the development of Centacare's STEP therapeutic framework because of the way in which it offers a shared practice pathway across a large NGO.

The theme of sharing knowledge and creating shared understanding continues in the interview with Heather Chambers, an early childhood educator and child psychotherapist in New Zealand. Her focus has been on how to skilfully explore relationship stories with parents and children together. Vitally and transformatively this includes difficult stories of hurts and harms. Chambers draws our attention to the importance of finding and proving that both parent and child have always been acting from the best of intentions, a powerful and practical way to provide non-judgemental care.

In many ways, Mary-Jo McVeigh's article builds on the insights from the Chambers interview, offering a critical exploration of how society's condemnation of mothers and children who have survived family violence not only minimises their resilience but inflicts epistemic harm by disregarding their lived knowledge. McVeigh introduces the concept of survivance, urging us to recognise the active resistance inherent in the stories these individuals share. Her work echoes Chambers' by bringing forth untold narratives that have often remained suppressed, opening space for the acknowledgment of ‘swallowed grief’—those unspoken losses that have strained parent–child bonds. Importantly, McVeigh hints at the postcolonial standpoint of the seanchaí, the Irish tradition of storytelling as a form of spiritual resistance. This serves as an understated thread for understanding survivance, positioning storytelling as an act of resilience that can counteract the silencing effects of systems and structures of trauma. Both McVeigh and Chambers advocate for a shift away from a focus on family disputes towards a family-centred, problem-solving approach and both place emphasis on peacebuilding, rediscovering a shared ‘voice of love’ and fostering relational harmony.

A multi-co-authored contribution from the Queensland Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma (QPASST) (Caveny et al.) continues the theme raised by Twigger and Lee that families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds may feel more judgement when accessing care. Given their lived experience of resettlement in Australia alongside professional expertise, these authors are particularly well suited to explore this issue. Through an innovative cooperative research methodology, they have mapped services across their organisation, capturing the complex layers of need and the dynamics of service provision. Their article embodies the inclusive values they advocate, carefully integrating diverse voices and perspectives. Their work exposes the compounding difficulties faced by asylum seekers in Australia and examines how misunderstandings within service settings can deepen feelings of marginalisation and reinforce cycles of judgement and exclusion. Importantly they also discuss how condemnation can be used to enforce assimilation into the dominant culture, against the humanistic alternative of accepting and celebrating difference.

Sometimes, parents encounter the child protection system, and their children are removed from their care before they can heal. Child removal is a powerfully traumatic experience. Histories of intergenerational childhood trauma complicate the picture. Unprocessed trauma often drives the difficulties that led to the child's removal and then disrupts the parent's ability to engage constructively with child protection workers. The child protection worker's statutory role and the requirement for them to exercise power compound the difficulties, trapping parents and workers in power-based and coercive relationships. These structurally defined relationships skew the system toward long-term orders, not reunification. In their paper, Carpenter and Sakar discuss the ramifications of these embedded power structures and present practitioners' experiences of shifting focus to the trauma experiences of the parent by introducing narrative exposure therapy into an existing NGO reunification service. This approach effectively extends the role of the NGO from one focusing on practical and trauma-informed intervention into a combined social casework and trauma-responsive treatment service, fostering more productive engagement with the child production system. They present anecdotal evidence suggesting that using an evidence-based intervention designed to treat trauma across the lifespan can also improve parenting in a child protection context. This article raises questions about who can deliver trauma-responsive care, the best settings for trauma treatment to take place, and suggests that NGOs have a role to play in delivering trauma-responsive interventions. These questions lead us into the closing section of the special issue, where we consider the creative potential of stretching the traditional boundaries of therapy even further.

The next article in this collection explores how innovations in the organisation of foster care services can increase the chances of successful restoration of children into the care of the birth family. Again, building on Twigger et al.'s work, Boyle et al. outline how, faced with the histories of harm sustained by children in their family of origin, foster carers sometimes struggle to suspend moral judgements of birth families. This can complicate reunification as foster carers may consciously or unconsciously fail to lend their full support to the process for fear that the children will sustain more harm. This paper describes a unique model of specialist reunification foster care where foster families are supported to become part of the team around the birth family providing them with ongoing support and care. This is a novel way of enhancing the provision of therapeutic support to birth families working to have their children restored to their care, as also articulated by Segal in her call to action.

The final offering is an interview with Corin Morgan-Armstrong, architect of the Invisible Walls ‘whole-family’ model, which aims to support people serving custodial sentences to continue their roles as parents and valued family members. Morgan-Armstrong describes how the Invisible Walls remit has evolved since it began back in 2006 at HMP Parc, a Category B male prison in South Wales to become a model that has been successfully replicated in prisons across the UK, Europe and globally. This inspiring approach takes what some might recognise as therapeutic work into an environment where men are being formally sanctioned for their actions and where the idea of therapy has little traction. Moral condemnation of fathers serving custodial sentences is rife within the prison system and in the wider community. However, the Invisible Walls model has demonstrated that supporting families and children to maintain positive relationships not only improves resettlement and reintegration outcomes but improves the wellbeing of the children of these fathers. What stronger evidence could there be that what other authors have said about mothers in this special issue must also apply to fathers—including those who we especially condemn, such as men who have transgressed to the point of incarceration.