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This booklet is published by the University of Edinburgh/NSPCC Child Protection Research Centre, in collaboration with the National Union of Journalists in Scotland. It results from our deep concern at how some of society’s most vulnerableyoung women under 16, including pre-teens, are publicly vilified in cases that involve sexual activity. This adds to their suffering and humiliation. It also makes it less likely that other vulnerable young women will be protected in future from abuse or exploitation.

This study, undertaken for the NSPCC, is the first comprehensive systematic search and review of research undertaken in all four nations of the United Kingdom on the subject of child protection. It covers the five year timespan January, 2010 through December, 2014 to produce a mapping review on the landscape of child protection.The research questions were:1) How can child protection research be classified?2) What child protection research has been published between January, 2010 and December, 2014?a. What proportion of the published research was undertaken within academia?b. Who undertakes child protection research in the UK?c. In which disciplines was the research undertaken?d. On what aspects of child protection has the research focused?e. What research designs have been used?f. What types of data have been used?g. Whose perspectives have been included?3) Who funded the research and how much money has been allocated to the research?

Foster carers can play a key role in supporting a child’s recovery from abuse and neglect and improving their mental health, but optimising this requires appropriate formulation of the care arrangements. This is a report on a scoping study into the extent to which the way foster care as conceived and supported, provides the basis for meeting the emotional and mental health needs of young children. It focuses on children aged up to 60 months who have been removed from their parents’ care because of maltreatment, or risk of maltreatment and who have been placed in state provided (non-familial) foster care provision in Scotland. The project had three main objectives: 1. To establish what is known about the emotional and mental health needs of young children (aged zero to five years) coming into the care system. 2. To look at the preparation and support for foster carers in Scotland relevant to caring for these children, through analysis of local authority documents. 3. To explore the experience of foster carers in meeting the emotional and mental health needs of children, through interviews with a sample of foster carers.

Foster carers can play a key role in supporting a child’s recovery from abuse and neglect and improving their mental health, but optimising this requires appropriate formulation of the care arrangements. This is a report on a scoping study into the extent to which the way foster care as conceived and supported, provides the basis for meeting the emotional and mental health needs of young children. It focuses on children aged up to 60 months who have been removed from their parents’ care because of maltreatment, or risk of maltreatment and who have been placed in state provided (non-familial) foster care provision in Scotland. The project had three main objectives: 1. To establish what is known about the emotional and mental health needs of young children (aged zero to five years) coming into the care system. 2. To look at the preparation and support for foster carers in Scotland relevant to caring for these children, through analysis of local authority documents. 3. To explore the experience of foster carers in meeting the emotional and mental health needs of children, through interviews with a sample of foster carers.

In Scotland, couples are able to enter into a written agreement regulating the division of their property and any ongoing support for each other, or for their children, when they separate. These ‘minutes of agreement’ mean individuals do not have to go to court. They may register their signed agreement in the Books of Council and Session where it becomes a legally binding agreement with the same force as a court order. Spouses wishing to divorce still have to obtain a divorce decree from the court, but the court is under no obligation to review the content of the minutes of agreement about property at that point. Usually people only become aware they can reach agreement over their property in this way after consulting solicitors who advise their client what their rights are, based on the provisions of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 1985.

Previous research in this area has found that the majority of children do not have their views taken when parents take a dispute over contact to court (Scottish Executive 2000, McGuckin & McGuckin 2004). The present research is the first to collate data on the actual views expressed by children and on the impact of those views on the outcome of the cases. It is also the first court based research collating data on domestic abuse and contact outcomessince the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 put the need to protect a child from abuse onto a statutory basis. It also goes some way to plugging the gap left by Wilson and Laing’s (2010) research into the views of (mostly male) pursuers in contact cases through the inclusion of the views of defenders and children to ‘enable a more rounded picture of how parties experience court action’

Contact between a parent and a child may become an issue when the child’s parents do not live together or when they have lived together but are now separated. This research briefing reports on the treatment of the views of children when their parents take a dispute over contact before a court in Scotland and there are allegations of domestic abuse made by one or both parents.

The broad aim of this research was to add to our understanding of private ordering and its outcomes in the family justice system, taking Scotland as its case study example. It explores the imact of these changes in law and legal practice on the use of agreements, the detailed nature of their content and the experience of the parties involved and considers if and how the broaded objectives of the statutory framework of family law are observed in private ordering and how much private ordering is carried out "in the shadow of the law".

This paper is set against the background that legal aid for family actions has recently been removed in England and Wales in almost all instances except where there is recent evidence of domestic or child abuse, and against the background that the handling of family cases is also under review in Scotland. The author presents findings from her recent Scottish court-based research which illustrate the importance of access to the courts for parents who have welfare concerns for their child when in the care of the other parent - even though these concerns may not generate documentary evidence in advance of court action. Rather the court action itself provides the opportunity for investigations into all the circumstances of the child, including the child's views on contact, often leading to evidence of abuse becoming available. Courts are also unique in enabling protective orders to be put in place and the limiting of the exercise of parental rights - without which brute force alone might determine contact outcomes. The article therefore concludes that blocking access to the courts by the removal of legal aid will mean increasing numbers of children are forced into contact that distresses them. The article includes a consideration of the pre-existing differences in the processing of child contact disputes in England and Wales and in Scotland which may, in part, underpin the pronounced differences in the response to the need for family justice reform in the two jurisdictions.

The study aimed to determine the extent to which couples use minutes of agreement to regulate property division, what they actually agree, and the extent to which what they agree reflects the provisions of the 1985 Act and the wider policy objectives of the family justice system in Scotland. Ethical considerations are detailed in the full report.