When Homelessness Leads to Loss: Women, Child Removal and the Need for Change

🕒 7 min read

For some women, homelessness is not just about losing a home. For a range of reasons, it can also result in the removal of their children. This is not just a series of isolated cases, it’s a widespread and deeply gendered outcome of poverty, domestic abuse, insecure housing and a lack of early support.

Using analysis and experiences of leading sector professionals, this blog will look at the link between women’s homelessness and child removal, the trauma this causes, and why change must focus on prevention, housing and trauma-informed support rather than crisis intervention alone.

Before we get started

If you’d like to learn more about how we support people at risk of or experiencing homelessness, join our newsletter for the latest updates—and consider making a donation to help us continue this vital work.

The scale of the issue: when homelessness leads to child removal

Local authorities are legally required to ensure children in their area are kept safe and protected from harm. When concerns arise over neglect, abuse, or serious risk of harm, children’s social care can step in. This can involve care proceedings that can result in children being removed from their parents or carers.

Outcomes following court proceedings vary. This can include foster care, adoption, or children staying with extended family under special guardianship orders. The level of contact between mothers and their children after removal can range from regular visits to infrequent letters, or no contact at all. These decisions are made by assessments of risk, and also the wider circumstances that families are living in.

As of March 2025, around 82,000 children were looked after by local authorities across England. Removal proceedings disproportionately separate children from their mothers, in part because women are far more likely to be the primary carer. For women experiencing homelessness, the risk of separation is even more acute. Research by St Mungo’s, for example, found that 79% of the mothers experiencing homelessness who they work with have had children taken into care.

This is also reflected in local cohorts. Speaking at our 2025 Frontline Network Annual Conference, Justine Adams from Changing Futures highlighted the scale of the issue when she spoke about the research into their own cohort which found that on average, about 85-95% of the women they supported had experienced child removal. In addition, 90% of those were also experiencing homelessness or living in insecure housing, showing the issues are deeply intertwined.

“A significant proportion of some of the most vulnerable women and children in our society are being affected by child removal, and this is a systemic issue rather than an anecdotal one.” – Justine Adams, Changing Futures

Research by Professor Karen Broadhurst has highlighted how child removal can act as a gateway to further disadvantage for women. Her work shows that more than half of women who experience child removal are under the age of 24 at the time of the first removal, and that a significant proportion return to family court within a few years. And around 40% have spent time in the care system themselves.

Rather than resolving underlying risks, removal often intensifies them. Broadhurst’s research shows that more challenges can arise after children are taken into care, including a decline in mental health, increased exposure to abuse and exploitation, substance use, offending and homelessness. This can push women into deeper instability.

How homelessness and child removal intersect

Homelessness is rarely the only reason that children are removed. It sits alongside other factors such as domestic abuse, poverty, poor mental health, substance use and previous trauma.

Homelessness often occurs after women have taken steps to protect themselves or their children, such as fleeing an abusive partner. This can result in housing insecurity, which is more visible to statutory services. Families who have fled abuse may be living in places like hostels or sofa surfing, or placed far from their support networks in out-of-area temporary accommodation. In these circumstances, maintaining routines, accessing schools and health services, or demonstrating “stability” becomes much more difficult.

Women are often required to prove that they can provide a stable home environment without having access to stable housing. Justine Adams from Changing Futures explained how this creates a stark contradiction: women may be advised to leave an abusive partner to protect their children, only to find that the resulting homelessness is later cited as evidence of instability: “When we spoke to women, they were saying that their social workers were unable to complete parts of their assessment about evidencing that they were able to take care of their children because assessing the home environment when you live in temporary accommodation was a real challenge.”

The trauma of removal

The removal of a child is a profound and often lifelong trauma. Many women describe it as an ambiguous loss, where the child is alive but absent, and grief is ongoing rather than resolved. At the 2025 Frontline Network Annual Conference, Sam Chu, a forensic psychologist at Paradigm Psychology, emphasised the profound psychological impact of child removal:

“There are huge issues around grief and loss over child removal … this notion of disenfranchised grief. Because nobody’s died, it’s not really treated as grief in the same way we might think about grief after a bereavement, but the feelings and processes attached to that psychologically are huge. So that needs to be acknowledged and supported.”

Her insights highlight how child removal can make trauma and feelings of isolation worse, making it much harder for women to access the support they need when they need it most.

Sam also highlighted how, for many women, child removal is closely linked with experiences of domestic abuse and coercive control. “A lot of the women I work with are experiencing child removal due to domestic abuse, and often the onus is put on the women to protect the children and remove herself from that relationship, with very little real understanding about coercive control and why it’s so difficult for women to leave,” she explained.

Repeat removals and compounding harm

Even when women want and are working towards reunification, systemic barriers often make this impossible. Rebecca Smith, service manager at Target Housing, also spoke at the 2025 Frontline Network Annual Conference. She detailed the information that came out of their co-production sessions within their service called the GROWTH Project, which is an 18-month pilot for women who are experiencing homelessness in Sheffield and have also experienced child removal.

She said that difficulties around legal advice was a key barrier for women: “If you aren’t a care proceeding solicitor, it can often feel like a really complex system to navigate. So imagine how women might feel when they’re accessing or trying to access legal advice.”

In addition, many have no face-to-face contact with their solicitor, with their first contact being in court, “They told us, this person is representing me at one of the most important, pivotal moments in my life and they don’t know me, they’ve never met me. So they felt as though it was sort of an unfair system.”

What effective support looks like

If the barriers women face are structural, then support must be coordinated, trauma-informed and housing-led. At the 2025 Annual Conference, Rebecca Smith explained that women involved in the GROWTH Project were clear about what was missing from traditional services. One of the strongest themes was the need for trauma-informed practice.

“That was certainly a theme that women felt as though services could be more informed around. A trauma-informed approach, so an understanding of past experiences and how that might impact how we might present now,” she said.

For women who have experienced domestic abuse, homelessness, childhood trauma or previous removals, behaviour that is interpreted as disengagement or instability can often be rooted in unresolved trauma. Without that understanding, services risk responding to symptoms rather than causes.

Creating safe, consistent environments was another priority they identified. Rebecca described the importance of spaces where women feel able to speak openly about their experiences without fear of judgement or further consequences.

Access to timely therapeutic support was another topic raised during co-production sessions. Many women are required to engage in therapy as part of care plans or court proceedings, but face long NHS waiting lists and rigid referral systems. As Rebecca explained, “Access to timely and flexible therapy is a real common request that we see from children’s services and court-ordered therapy. Navigating NHS waiting lists can be difficult and long and some people might have got time frames that they have to access specific therapy by.”

When therapy is a condition of reunification but cannot be accessed within required timescales, women are placed in an impossible position.

Alongside trauma-informed practice and therapy, housing stability underpins everything. Without secure accommodation, women may struggle to demonstrate the stability required in care proceedings, regardless of progress made elsewhere. The GROWTH Project in Sheffield was designed to respond to these challenges, bringing together housing support, legal navigation and emotional support within one coordinated approach.

By intervening earlier and working across systems rather than in silos, models like GROWTH aim to reduce repeat removals and create genuine opportunities for reunification where it is safe and appropriate.

What Needs to Change

In a recent briefing by Agenda Alliance focusing on the impact of child removal on women in Greater Manchester, they found that affected mothers had a deep mistrust in the authorities, and that care proceedings such as family courts were deemed “confusing, alienating and leave women feeling shamed”.

It is clear that more needs to be done for women who have experienced child removal. In their briefing, Agenda Alliance calls for:

• Investment in specialist wraparound support for women and girls to address the root drivers of child removal.
• Immediate access to secure housing for women who have had a child removed, creating a realistic pathway to stability and, where appropriate, reunification.
• Dedicated, funded Support Advocates to work 1:1 alongside mothers as they navigate care proceedings.
• Training for all staff working with women experiencing child removal, to challenge bias and stigmatisation.

As we’ve explored in this blog, real change requires a systemic shift.

Housing must be recognised as a central pillar of child protection and family justice. Courts frequently assess “stability” without taking proper consideration into the structural barriers that women face in accessing safe, secure accommodation.

Early intervention should also be a key priority. In too many cases, support only comes at crisis point, such as during pregnancy or when care proceedings have already begun. By then, risks have escalated and trust has been damaged. A preventative, housing-led approach could make a big difference.

Finally, women with lived experience must be included in service design and policy decisions. As the GROWTH Project demonstrates, co-produced services are more likely to address the realities women face across housing, legal systems and children’s services.