There are a growing number of media articles seeking to address a ‘new epidemic’ of family relationships going ‘no contact’. As a researcher and campaigner, I have spent significant time talking to the worldwide media about this subject. I founded, grew, and led the non-profit Stand Alone, and with my collaborator Dr. Lucy Blake, we have conducted substantial research to try and bring deeper understanding of family estrangement.

One of the questions I most often am asked by journalists is whether cutting contact with family is common. There is a widely circulated belief that the urge to walk away from a family relationship is led by an individualistic ‘snowflake’ generation. It has been posited that younger generations possess vastly different attitudes towards family ties than older generations, who held duty as the paramount value.

Yet there is no longitudinal evidence to suggest that more family relationships are becoming estranged than in previous decades or that one generation is the instigator. However, we can say that family estrangement isn’t uncommon. I led a study with social research agency Ipsos MORI in 2015, which found that eight percent of respondents over the age of fifteen in the United Kingdom were estranged from at least one member of their family. This suggests estrangement is not as “atypical or rare” as society may have us believe.

While the causes of estrangement are multi-faceted, common themes emerge from my research including surviving abuse, divorce and remarriage, favouritism, mismatched expectations of family life, and differences in morals, values, and beliefs. Some relationship breakdowns can relate to characteristics in the family, such as a lack of acceptance for coming out as LGBTQI+ or rejecting cultural practices inherent in first- and second-generation migrant families, such as forced marriage or FGM. Parents may struggle with the idea of their child being transgender or oppose their plans to transition.

The idea that the younger generation are the architects of the cutoff when it comes to estrangement is also unproven. Sweeping changes to how we relate in family life rarely happen in a vacuum and are often made in response to, or reaction against, the previous generation’s view of family. Divorce is a major cause of estrangement in the research. If the previous generation had not changed how we approach marriage, we would not have the new family forms that often instigate estrangement.

Our research has also looked at the consequences of lacking family relationships for the individual. It also felt important to understand how individuals were supported by society if they lacked the emotional, material, and financial capital that family is assumed to bring.

My research found that some of the key support systems in the United Kingdom had very low awareness of family estrangement and had ‘othered’ this group of people, for whom biological family was not close. Specific challenges came to accessing basic aspects of infrastructural support in society, such as student finance, housing, and emotional support such as counselling. These systems, policies, and professional bodies fundamentally misunderstood family estrangement. Instead of approaching the subject with compassion around family trauma, young people were seen cynically and given a high bar of evidence to prove their circumstances and the abuse they had experienced. They were seen as dishonest, taking advantage of the system, and were stopped rather than supported.

This was, of course, if their circumstances were recognized at all. A substantial amount of my investigation found that no specialist support existed for those who had estranged family relationships but who weren’t part of an institutional care system. This led to these young people not qualifying for even basic housing or not having enough finances to study at university.

A large part of my work focused on raising awareness to give this group of young people a voice, and visibility. In the end, we won sweeping policy changes across UK governments to help these young people be seen, their numbers understood, and, importantly, to get them the specialist support they needed to have an equitable experience at the start of their adult life.

I have spoken factually here, but so much of my research has been about giving young people a voice. One story that has always stayed with me is of a young woman graduating from a university in Scotland who was estranged from her family. She had achieved highly in her degree and wanted to go into the legal field. Yet she was struggling to understand how she would house herself after her residence contract at the university ended—she had no guarantor to access private rented accommodation or a large enough sum to pay six months’ rent upfront. Her friends were all ‘going home’ and she had no parents or wider family she could rely on. She told me that she had gone out the previous week and had bought a tent from Argos ‘for insurance.’ The care system is not perfect but she would have had far more support and a corporate parent to fall back on had she been considered a care leaver.

It is my absolute desire that we raise enough awareness of these gaps in the public policy safety net so that no young person moves from higher education into homelessness or even considers it.

Becca Bland is currently working on a PhD by publication at the University of Brighton, which brings together her published research papers. It will focus on the deficiencies in public policy when it comes to creating support for those estranged from family. Becca will be sharing her work as an associate researcher through the network.