We need to be curious about care experience to foster greater trust

April was Care Experience History Month, a great time to think about being care-experienced and its impact on Identity.

Each care-experienced individual’s journey is unique and often brings shared themes and narratives to the care-experienced community.

My identity as a care-experienced person and social worker has shown up in various ways, and in different spaces.

This has allowed me to think about how my identity has formed, and its evolution and significance at various points in my life.

Fear, risk, and pity are frequently intertwined in understanding the experiences of care-experienced children and young people and the meaning they are given in different spaces, places and from different faces in their lives.

Being a child in care in the 90s, I was perceived differently.

In my local authority, terms like “Hampshire Child”, “looked after”, or “subject to a care order” were common. In one children’s home, we received charity gifts at Christmas and were viewed with pity.

In another home we faced fear and mistrust. Our Christmas presents were given in bin bags, and the police were often called.

As I grew older, my care experience shaped my interactions with systems and professionals. I began to understand what it meant for me. Becoming pregnant for the first time filled me with fear of social services involvement, which heightened my anxiety.

This made me reflect on how others position care experience, potentially reducing me to a person posing a risk to their child or as someone in need. I would have welcomed a curious conversation filled with empathy and compassion rather than a tick-box question that would result in an automatic referral to children’s services.

This got me thinking about how we work in the context of care-experience individuals. Are we curious about someone’s care-experience?

We should pause and think about what “care experience” means to us. It’s not about asking a person what they have experienced, more about making the implicit explicit.

We need to create space for these discussions right at the beginning of our work with care-experienced children and young people and consider how identity interacts with systems.

By remaining curious we can explore how to adapt our practice to lessen some of the fear and trauma, and foster trust and collaboration which are the cornerstones of relationship-based, and brave practice.