This is the dilemma felt by many looked-after children. Still, most children will defend their parents’ name and thereby their attachment to them. It is often in adolescence that the looked-after children reveal how impelled they feel to renew their links with birth parents no matter how abusive or destructive such relationships may be. Foster parents and care professionals are on the receiving end of angry tirades that claim their care and protectiveness is abuse and ‘spoiling their fun’. Carers have to stand on the sidelines whilst many of these young people run off, pour drugs and drink into themselves, expose themselves to rough sleeping, casual sex, abusive relationships with exploitative others, selfharm. Adolescents often frequent the neighbourhoods from which they originated, turn up on mother’s doorstep, try to go home. These young

people are rarely running away – they are running back (Wade et al. 1998: 65-8) If we set this behaviour in the context of attachment theory it begins to make more sense. The situation of a child with an attachment to an abusive parent is necessarily difficult to resolve as Main and Weston pointed out:

The situation is irresolvable because rejection by an established attachment figure activates simultaneous and contradictory impulses both to withdraw and to approach. The infant cannot approach because of the parents’ rejection and cannot withdraw because if its own attachment. The situation is self-perpetuating because rebuff heightens alarm and hence heightens attachment leading to increased rebuff, increased alarm and increased heightening of attachment.