Parental experience of The Family Drug and Alcohol Court through a qualitative,longitudinal lens: Why do some parents achieve change

The Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) in England offers a radical alternative to ordinary, adversarial public law proceedings. Underpinned by principles of therapeutic jurisprudence (Winick and Wexler, 2001), successive waves of FDAC evaluation in England have found that these treatment courts offer better experiences and outcomes for families. FDAC delivers higher rates of substance misuse cessation and family reunification, consistent with the US evidence (Harwin et al. 2014; 2016). In contrast to standard care proceedings, treatment courts offer a highly co-ordinated therapeutic response based on careful matching of parental need to services, overseen by regular non-lawyered court hearings. In ordinary proceedings, the focus is largely on examining the evidence for, or against, making of an order for a child. Parental substance misuse is one of the key reasons why parents come before the family courts and risk having their children removed into state care. The search for solutions is pressing given that numbers of care proceedings have more than doubled during the past decade.