In this chapter, we examine the category ‘disorganised attachment’, recently subject, as we have glimpsed, to a good deal of critical debate. As Duschinsky (2015) notes, this classification has come to prominence because of its alleged relationship with child abuse and abusive parenting, vividly invoked in a contribution to a debate on early intervention in the UK's House of Commons from Andrea Leadsom, a Member of Parliament:

[I]f a baby has what is known as disorganised attachment— where one or both parents are frightening or chaotic— they cannot form a secure bond precisely because the person who is so frightening and chaotic is also the person whom the baby should be turning to for comfort. The baby's brain is confused and they experience disorganised attachment, which leads to very significant problems for that baby. If we look into the babyhood of children who brutalise other children, of violent criminals or of paedophiles, we can often see plenty of evidence that sociopaths are not born; rather they are made by their earliest experiences when they are less than two years old. (Leadsom, 2010)

Yet, there is some considerable debate in the primary literature about what the classification really means (Rutter et al, 2009; Duschinsky, 2015). Indeed, it is suggested that it might be possible that the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) itself – which is, after all, a ‘strange situation’ – elicits disorganised behaviours. For example, Mesman et al (2018, p 857) ponder whether the unusually high numbers of disorganised infants (23%) in a Dogon subsistence farming community in Mali subject to the SSP may have been due to the infants finding the procedure ‘highly’ instead of ‘mildly’ stressful. Yet we can see that this degree of uncertainty has not dampened enthusiasm for the classification in policy and practice. Increased transparency in the family courts with more cases being reported provides evidence that the classification is being invoked in expert reports to the family courts as the following extracts from four different cases show.

Extract 1