The Child Care Law Reporting Project was established to examine and report on child care proceedings in the courts.

In this volume we focus on a special category of child care cases, those involving children who must be cared for in a secure unit in order to receive the therapy they need. These are children with severe problems, who require to be detained for their own protection. They may be suicidal or self-harming, or engaging in such anti-social behaviour as to be a threat to others. Because they have not be convicted on any criminal offence, the power to detain them is only vested in the High Court, and their detention must be regularly and frequently reviewed to verify that it is still required, so they come before this court on a regular basis, on what is known as the “Minors’ List”, heard every Thursday.

As in previous volumes, a number of cases involved the children of parents who were abusing drugs, alcohol or both. Some had been in care themselves. These included a case where an infant was found in a car on a cold night with two adults who were about to smoke heroin, and where the child had a gash to his neck he said was caused by his father.