Book aim: what Care Home Without Walls is about

Care Home Without Walls is an interdisciplinary law-and-psychology book about what happens when a disabled person’s ordinary home becomes the place where institutional levels of care, supervision, risk management and dependency are imposed without the staffing, safeguards, freedom or accountability expected in a formal institution. It asks how a person can receive sufficient support at home without family members being coerced into unpaid labour, without intimate care being exchanged for compliance, and without disability being used to erase autonomy.

The book’s central aim To provide law students, lawyers, psychologists, clinicians, social-care professionals, advocates and disabled people with a rigorous method for separating lived harm from legal labels; identifying the evidence required for each claim; and designing support that protects safety, capacity, identity, belief, relationships, companion animals and freedom of movement.

Questions the book investigates

  • When does inadequate or coercive home care engage the Care Act, safeguarding, equality duties or human rights?
  • When can compelled family care approach forced labour, servitude or another form of exploitation—and what must be proved?
  • When does control of exits, transfer assistance, communication, food, treatment or companion animals become false imprisonment rather than merely poor or discriminatory care?
  • How should capacity, consent, duress and “best interests” be analysed without treating disagreement or an unwise decision as incapacity?
  • How can DSM‑5‑TR formulation assist courts and care planning without turning veganism, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or understandable trauma responses into diagnoses?
  • When may denial of vegan food, relationships, gender expression or animal companionship amount to discrimination, harassment, Article 8/9 interference or evidence within a wider confinement case?
  • What records, expert evidence, comparisons, risk assessments and remedies convert an allegation into a legally testable case?

    • What the book does not claim

    The book does not claim that every unmet need is slavery, every coercive choice is false imprisonment, every offensive remark is statutory harassment, or every distressing event produces a DSM disorder. Each legal cause of action and clinical diagnosis has separate elements. The book’s method is to preserve the seriousness of the lived account while refusing to collapse distinct tests into one another.

    “Care Home Without Walls” is a proposed analytical and service-design concept, not a statutory entitlement or clinical diagnosis. Its practical purpose is to ask which functions an institution would provide, which of those functions are actually needed across the day and night, and how they can be delivered lawfully in an ordinary home with proper staffing, consent, contingency, review and accountability.