Child courts must be Open
One of the great strengths of the court system is that by and large it is open justice. The Civil Procedure Rules have been designed to emphasise that. In order for justice to be seen to be done, ordinarily it must be done in public.
Another understandable principle is that the interests of children should be protected. We have already previously considered how those interests can clash with those of open justice: for example the need to identify a convicted downloader of child pornography, which will inevitably have a damaging effect upon that person's children.
Family proceedings are the last great uncharted territory. There is an understandable reason for this. Much dirty linen is exposed in such proceedings. Details could lead to identification of the persons concerned and have a detrimental effect upon the lives of their children. Those involved of course are not necessarily people convicted of any offence so the same principles that might be relevant on a criminal charge do not necessarily apply. Sometimes getting to the bottom of the case may involve revealing private matters which should remain private.
Unfortunately, whether rightly or wrongly, it seems that this secrecy can lead to public disquiet. There have been suggestions that in order to take advantage of alleged financial incentives to meet adoption targets that instead of taking on the difficult task of moving children out of care into adoption (persons at whom the incentives are said to have been aimed) that some local authorities are instead taking more newborns or very young children into care since they are easy to place for adoption. Thus the allegation is that children taken into care and placed for adoption for financial gain. The shroud of secrecy makes it very difficult to get to the bottom at any such suggestions. We know that in the past there have been totally misplaced allegations of ritual Satanic abuse which have led to numbers of children being taken away from their families on an entirely false premise. However that took a long time to emerge. There is thus both the risk of injustice being covered up, and the risk that secrecy means that spurious urban legends might spring up about the behaviour of authorities and social workers.
Social workers in children's cases are therefore operating in an arena which is removed from effective public scrutiny. That may mean that some get away with unacceptable conduct, it may mean that social workers are unfairly maligned by rumour because of the absence of hard fact. Either way it does not exactly reinforce public confidence in the judicial system.
Of course Child courts must always be able to take steps to protect the identity of those appearing before them with a view in particular to protecting the children. However that is not the same as a blanket ban on reporting. Even if a summary of the principles applied in the particular case is released, omitting identities and material facts which might disclose those identities, that at least allows one to see precisely what is being done. That would allow for example the policies of particular authorities to be scrutinised across a run of cases. It would allow the public to see the effect of judicial decisions in family cases, without being subject merely to assertions based on rumour by pressure groups on one side of the divide or another. Whilst children's courts can never be open in the way that ordinary courts are, the principle must be that the decisions and the participants should be open save insofar as is strictly necessary to protect the interests of the children themselves. In most cases there will be no need to disguise a decision or the local authority or the social workers in order to achieve that effect.