For the Next Generation

An Open Letter to Everyone Committed to Protecting Children and Families

One day, another generation will look back at us.

They will read our laws.

They will study our court judgments.

They will open our records and reports.

They will see the language we used when we talked about children, parents, risk, protection and family life.

And they will know something we do not.

They will know what happened next.

That is the strange advantage the future always has over the present.

We make decisions without knowing their full consequences.

They will see the consequences.

Perhaps that is worth remembering now.

The national apology for historic forced adoption has asked Britain to look back at an earlier generation and reconsider decisions that once belonged to ordinary public life.

For the people who lived through them, of course, they were never simply history.

They were childhoods.

Motherhoods.

Missing relationships.

Questions about identity.

People they never knew.

Years they could not recover.

Today we can see things that many people at the time did not see, or did not want to see.

The next generation may have the same advantage over us.

I hope they use it kindly.

But more importantly, I hope we give them less to regret.

That should be one of the ambitions of any society that learns from history.

Not to prove that we are morally better than the people who came before us.

That is too easy.

We know things they did not know.

We have evidence they did not have.

We live with social values they did not share.

The more difficult task is to remember that the people who come after us will also know things that we do not know.

So what do we want them to find when they look back?

I hope they find a society that took child abuse seriously.

A society that did not look away when children were frightened, neglected or hurt.

A society willing to intervene when intervention was genuinely necessary.

Children deserve that.

But I hope they find something else as well.

I hope they find a society that did not become so frightened of failing to intervene that it stopped asking what intervention itself might cost.

I hope they find professionals who understood that protecting a child sometimes meant separating a family, but who never allowed separation to become ordinary simply because the system knew how to do it.

I hope they find that we tried support before replacement wherever it was safe to do so.

That we looked for grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and other people who already belonged to a child’s life.

That we understood family not only as a legal category, but as memory, identity and belonging.

I hope they find records written with care.

Because those records may one day belong, morally if not legally, to the children they describe.

I hope a person opening their childhood file at thirty does not discover that the most important years of their life were reduced to a few labels.

“Difficult.”

“Non-compliant.”

“High risk.”

“Failed to engage.”

Words may be necessary.

But a human being should remain visible behind them.

I hope the next generation finds that we became better at telling the difference between fact and prediction.

Child protection cannot avoid prediction.

Adults have to think about what may happen to a child tomorrow.

But predictions carry a particular responsibility when they are used to justify decisions that may never be undone.

So I hope future readers find evidence that we asked ourselves:

How sure are we?

What do we actually know?

What are we assuming?

What might change?

What help has been tried?

Is there another safe way?

And if we are wrong, which decision will be harder to repair?

Those are not questions of weakness.

They are questions that belong wherever power and uncertainty meet.

I also hope the next generation finds that we listened.

Not only to the loudest voices.

Not only to experts.

Not only to people who agreed with us.

I hope we listened to social workers when they said they did not have enough time to do the work properly.

To families when they said they did not understand what was happening.

To children when they tried to tell adults what mattered to them.

To adults who had once been children in care or adoption when they told us what our decisions became twenty years later.

And I hope we did not wait until those voices became part of another inquiry before deciding they were worth hearing.

There will still be mistakes.

We should be honest about that.

No generation creates a perfect system.

There will be cases where professionals act too late.

There may be cases where they act too soon.

There will be judgments made with incomplete information.

There will be families who feel failed by institutions.

There will also be children who grow up knowing that intervention protected them when nobody else could.

The aim cannot be to leave the next generation a history without mistakes.

The aim should be to leave them evidence that we were willing to notice mistakes earlier.

That we corrected what we could.

That we remained open to evidence.

That we did not confuse authority with certainty.

And that when someone asked an uncomfortable question, our first instinct was not always to close the door.

Perhaps that is what institutional progress really looks like.

Not perfection.

A shorter distance between harm and recognition.

A shorter distance between evidence and change.

A shorter distance between someone saying, “Something is wrong,” and someone being willing to listen.

There is something else I hope we leave behind.

A little humility.

The humility to accept that our language will age.

Some of the terms we use confidently today may sound strange in fifty years.

Some assumptions may disappear.

Research will change.

Professional knowledge will develop.

Future generations will ask questions we have not yet thought to ask.

That is not a reason to distrust everything we know.

It is simply a reason not to treat today’s knowledge as the end of knowledge.

The people affected by historic forced adoption waited decades for their experiences to be recognised publicly.

We cannot give those years back.

But we can decide what kind of inheritance their history becomes.

It can remain a story about what earlier generations got wrong.

Or it can become something more useful:

a reminder to every generation that power should never lose the ability to question itself.

So this letter is for the next generation.

For the children growing up now.

For the children not yet born.

For the future social workers, judges, parents, researchers and policymakers who may one day read about us.

When you look back, I hope you find that we protected children.

I hope you also find that we protected something of their families whenever we safely could.

I hope you find that we were willing to act.

And willing to reconsider.

That we trusted knowledge.

And kept learning.

That we made difficult decisions.

But never forgot that real people had to live inside them.

We cannot know how you will judge us.

But we can give you one thing:

evidence that we tried to ask the difficult questions while there was still time to change the answers.

That may be one of the best things one generation can leave to another.

Su Qing