Prior to coming to the Bar, Carolyne led national children’s rights charities for nearly 25 years, gaining considerable experience of initiating litigation and working with lawyers.
Across this same period, she built up extensive experience of successfully pressing for law reform to protect vulnerable children, for example: in 2004, she drafted amendments to the Children Act 1989 which require social workers to ascertain and give due consideration to the child’s wishes and feelings when investigating significant harm; in 2010, she pressed for new duties on schools to record the use of force on children, and to notify parents of restraint incidents; and, in 2018, she ensured new legislation around the use of force in mental health units includes special protections for children.
She served on a government advisory group during the development of the Equality Act 2010, and was a member of the reference group of the equalities review which preceded that legislation. She has given oral and written evidence to a variety of parliamentary committees, and to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse between 2018 and 2020.
In 2023, Carolyne successfully represented her charity in an information rights tribunal, which resulted in the disclosure of a report examining the deaths and serious harms suffered by children in care: Article 39 v Information Commissioner [2023] UKFTT 733 (GRC). The following year she secured core participant status to module 8 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry for Article 39, the children’s rights charity she founded in 2015.
Carolyne has worked closely with United Nations and Council of Europe human rights bodies, and was a member of the UK Government’s delegation to the UN’s Special Session on Children in New York in 2002. She has published widely on children’s rights, her latest book chapter appearing in The Child Protection Handbook (4th edition, Elsevier, 2024).
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