Its Rightful Place: Ethnicity, Racial Justice, and the Future of Family Justice

In this guest article, Dr Beverley Barnett-Jones h.c. MBE argues that racial justice must be treated as central to how the family justice system works, backed by better evidence and culturally responsive, trauma-informed practice.

In recent years, conversations about ethnicity, inequality and racial justice within children’s social care and family justice have moved closer to the centre of professional debate. This shift matters because family justice represents one of the most powerful intersections between the state and family life. Decisions taken within the system shape a child’s future, a parent’s identity and a family’s sense of belonging, recognition and hope.

Despite increased attention to disproportionality, the evidence base within family justice in England and Wales remains incomplete. We know considerably more than we did five years ago, but important gaps persist in both data and explanation.

My perspective is informed by more than three decades working across children’s social care and family justice, including managing a court assessment and support service, working as a Children’s Guardian and, more recently, serving as Associate Director at the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NFJO).

So, what do we know?

One of the clearest findings from NFJO and wider academic research is that ethnic disparities exist within the family justice system. Research undertaken by NFJO with the Centre for Child and Family Justice at Lancaster University found that children and adults from Black, Mixed and ‘Other’ ethnic groups are over-represented in both public and private law proceedings.

NFJO’s 2023 briefing on ethnicity in care and supervision proceedings highlighted important differences in age at entry. White and mixed ethnicity children entered proceedings at an average age of five, whereas Black and Asian children entered at an average age of seven and were more likely to be aged 10 or over. By contrast, White and mixed ethnicity children were more likely to enter proceedings in infancy.

These findings raise critical questions about timing: whether some families receive support too late, or whether others enter proceedings earlier than necessary, and what drives those patterns of decision-making.

Differences are also evident in outcomes. Black and Asian children are more likely to leave proceedings without a final order and, where orders are made, are more likely to receive supervision orders rather than more interventionist outcomes. They are less likely to be subject to adoption or placement orders. However, they have the highest proportion of secure accommodation and deprivation of liberty orders. These patterns suggest a complex and uneven distribution of intervention across groups.

Policy changes have not always produced the intended effects. In 2014, legislation removed the requirement to give due consideration to a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural background in adoption decisions, partly in response to concerns that Black children were waiting too long for placement. However, subsequent data indicates that the number of Black children adopted fell between 2014–15 and 2019–20, and delays in adoption persist. Mixed heritage children remain significantly over-represented. The Ending Racial Disparity in Adoption Report (2022) emphasised the need to recruit more Black adopters, rebuild trust with racialised communities, support interracial adoption and strengthen culturally responsive practice.

These disparities cannot be understood in isolation from wider structural factors. Ethnicity intersects with poverty, neighbourhood deprivation, disability, domestic abuse and migration history. Data from the Child Welfare Inequalities Project has consistently shown deprivation to be a strong predictor of state intervention in family life. In contemporary Britain, poverty itself is racialised, meaning inequalities in family justice are closely tied to broader social and economic disadvantage. This is particularly evident for families with no recourse to public funds or insecure immigration status.

There are also important gaps in what we know. Ethnicity data across the system remains inconsistent and incomplete, limiting the sector’s ability to understand patterns of inequality fully. For example, ethnicity is not routinely collected for those subject to deprivation of liberty orders. This creates significant blind spots at the most intensive end of intervention.

Equally important is the gap between quantitative data and lived experience.

Administrative data can describe what is happening but offers little insight into why. For many Black and other ethnically minoritised families, interactions with statutory services are shaped by intergenerational experiences of mistrust, surveillance and unequal treatment across education, policing, housing and healthcare. These experiences influence how families engage with the family justice system and how decisions are perceived.

This creates a critical tension. Professionals may avoid conversations about race for fear of getting them wrong, or reduce complex family experiences to narrow identity-based explanations. Neither approach is helpful. The challenge is to situate ethnicity within a broader framework of racial justice that acknowledges both structural inequality and individual experience.

The emergence of the Racial Justice Family Network reflects growing recognition that this work requires sustained, collective effort. The network provides a space for practitioners, researchers and leaders to share learning, challenge assumptions and deepen understanding. A key task for the system is to develop reflective cultural intelligence: the ability to consider how culture, ethnicity, faith and inequality shape family experience without resorting to stereotypes.

Racial justice must also move beyond a narrow focus on disproportionality or harm. There is a risk within safeguarding systems that racialised groups become disproportionately associated with narratives of risk and deficit. In turn, the strengths of families including resilience, kinship networks, cultural identity and spiritual resources can be overlooked in assessments and court processes that remain dominated by deficit-based frameworks.

There are, however, signs of progress. Across children’s social care and family justice there is increasing emphasis on trauma-informed practice, anti-racist leadership, culturally responsive services and reflective supervision.

The anticipated Family Justice Strategy presents a significant opportunity. For many years, family justice has operated without a fully articulated cross-government vision of what a fair, relational and child-centred system should look like. The key test will be whether racial justice is treated as central to system functioning rather than as a peripheral equality issue.

If the strategy is to command confidence across communities, it must engage honestly with evidence on disparity and unequal experience, while avoiding simplistic explanations that fail to reflect the complexity of family life. There is an opportunity to move beyond a narrow focus on timeliness and instead articulate a broader vision of justice: one that considers whether children and families experience proceedings as fair, culturally responsive, trauma-informed and humane. Delay matters, but so too do dignity, belonging and trust.

Ultimately, advancing racial justice within family justice is not only about policy or procedure. It is about whether systems truly recognise children and families in the full complexity of their identities, histories and strengths, and whether they respond with fairness, dignity and humanity. This remains one of the defining challenges for the future of family justice in England and Wales.

Dr Beverley Barnett-Jones h.c. MBE

If you'd like to talk about any of the themes in this article, please contact Morgan Nasir-Finlayson

To read about our work in family justice and view resources we have created, head here: DFJ Trailblazers Pilot Programme,