Welcome to a wet but slightly warmer Monday and our question this week, which is very straight forward.
Forced adoption is the controversial name given for the arguably controversial practice of removing a child from his or her biological parents when they are deemed to be unable to care for their child themselves. What makes this practice raise eyebrows is the fact that removal is not voluntary – parents are not required to give their consent when giving up their child. Instead, the Local Authority, usually, will take a child into care without parental permission and then, may place that child for adoption. These powers are given to the Local Authority through the law.
Our question then, is this: is forced adoption a necessary measure to protect children from harm or is there a better way?
Researching Reform 
5:-MR JUSTICE MOSTYN said”PARA 35. The proposition of the merits of adoption is advanced almost as a truism but if it is a truism it is interesting to speculate why only three out of 28 European Union countries allow forced or non-consensual adoption. One might ask: why are we so out of step with the rest of Europe? One might have thought if it was obvious that forced adoption was the gold standard the rest of Europe would have hastened to have adopted it. The relevance of this aspect of the case is surely obvious.”
Link – http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2014/3388.html
I think that for once the learned judge actually got it right !
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Thank you, that’s a good quote.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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I agree. If we MUST have ‘forced adoption’ it surely could be implemented in a more humane, a better way. I have heard too many stories where forced removal has resulted in trauma (in the true sense of that word) for parents and children, and children taken on what amount to trumped-up charges. ‘Risk of future emotional abuse’ is not a valid reason. I speak as an adoptee myself. Forced removal should only be carried out if there is imminent or present danger to a child, not on ‘what might happen’ sometime in the future.
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Thank you for your thoughts, Roger.
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Forced adoption is just that, forced! It’s to meet the needs of the government who want to offload their responsibilities and financial obligations and it’s to meet the needs of those who, in the main, cannot have children but want a family. It’s not to meet the needs of the child, no matter how the spin doctors portray adoption!
Forced adoption has become another arm of the child protection industry creating a revenue stream for those Agencies involved. The fate of a child should not be decided by the same people making money on the result!
No one has produced statistics to prove that adoption is a good thing for the child. There is however information that those children adopted are damaged by the experience of just being adopted.
No one has recorded just how many children have been damaged by adoption but it’s a known phenomenon that they suffer with mental health issues as adults with a higher reliance on alcohol or drugs than those unadopted.
Recent research has found that the mental health of children in foster care is better when a child has contact with their own family, so how must the adopted child feel? Certainly more vulnerable!
No one has produced statistics because once a child has been adopted no further information is required. So once a CRB is checked, if indeed it is and they get the child they can go off in the bright blue yonder without a backward glance. There is no follow up from local authorities. That is very worrying! I would say that forced adoption is just legal child trafficking! Where else can you acquire a child with the minimum of checks and no follow up?
It wasn’t so long ago that Reuters exposed “The Child Exchange” where unwanted adopted children in the USA were put up on yahoo boards, facebook and other social media sites to get rid off them to whoever wanted them! It was exposed the children went to peadophiles! Needless to say many disappeared!
Were these adoptive parents passed by local authorities as fit parents? Yes, but when they found they couldn’t cope or found being a parent wasn’t what they thought it would be like, they didn’t go back to the authorities and return the child but instead posted the child on a board! Did this happen just in USA? It would be naive to think so.
So where has the underground market for kids gone? Did anyone bother to check virtual world sites? No! If Microsoft and other big organisations can hold meetings online, who is to say Child Auctions are not being carried out? If not there, where else can they be, because they haven’t gone away because the market hasn’t dried up and adopted kids can and do just disappear!
There is one perspective that is often overlooked and one I gleaned from a lady who was adopted. She said, “If it’s neccessary to protect a child, child protection should be just that, protect the child whilst still a child.” That means not protecting the adult that the child becomes. Forced adoption goes way beyond beyond childhood into adulthood. The child is not just removed from the parents but the extended family too, sometimes forever.
These children are lost to great grandparents and most often to grandparents as they often die before the child’s coming of age or when they decide to look for their real family. That will depend on what was told to the child about their circumstances and the spin on that or how the adopted feel about contacting their real family whilst the adoptive parents are still alive out of “loyalty.”. It’s odd that when they do contact their own family they are, in the main, very pleased they did! It’s often said they feel complete, whole again!
All children need to know their own families and if the parents object to forced adoption then it simply shouldn’t happen!
There are other alternatives that should be explored but forced adoption is the default action by social services as decreed by the government if a child is under 5 years old!
Forced Adoption should be banned as it’s just child trafficking by another name! I wonder when the UK government will wise up? It cannot have escaped their notice that if kids are trafficked from foster care just how much easier it is to traffick kids through the legitimate adoption processes!
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
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Thank you for your comment, Dana.
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I agree absolutely.
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Nearly as bad as forced adoption is the way that some children are effectively kept by the State for life.As soon as certain children in care reach 18 they are said to have “no capacity” and are put Under the care of the so called “Court of protection”.Hapless parents waiting for their child’s 18th birthday for a joyous reunion are instead served with non molestation orders forbidding them all contact with young adults still begging in vain to return home .Too much cash going to adult care homes and introduction fees to those homes? By comparison the “court of protection” makes the family courts seem like a temple of mercy and compassion; because the even more secretive Court of Protection protects/imprisons its victims for life !
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Yes the COP has a bad reputation for that.
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Hi Natasha, your twitter flicker on most siblings being separated when placed in care doesn’t just relate to foster care. If the child is under 5 years old it is AUTOMATICALLY put up for adoption.
I wonder what the statistics are for siblings separated for some to go into foster care and other put forward for adoption.
I know of one judge saying that the needs of the younger child to be adopted trumped the needs of the older child in foster care, despite knowing it would be a traumatic experience for both but they would get over it!!!! This is very much a Nazi ideology!
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It’s awful D, and shows a complete lack of care and understanding. What have we become?
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Hi Natasha, it’s not what we have become but rather what the so called child protection industry has become!
I can’t help but see parallels between what happened in Nazi Germany Lebensborn and Social Services now. Children taken from parents, siblings separated from each other to grow up with strangers, those strangers having their own reasons for taking them in that may have little to do with the child’s needs. A social conditioning experiment that failed the children then and is continuing to fail them now. Children were raped, beaten and tortured and killed then in the 1940s just as they are now but now we call it grooming!
Historical abuses are flooding the news all the time but it’s shameful that even an inquiry into those abuses can’t get off the ground! Many people seem to be putting up all sorts of barriers to thwart the investigation.
How many kids are being abused in care currently? We don’t know! No one is concentrating on the kids in care now because no one wants to upset the the apple cart of recruiting more foster carers and adopters to deal with the rise of kids taken from their homes, more than doubled and then some more since the death of baby P!
What happens to the kids once adopted? We dont know but the government continue to push adoption, forced adoption! Every section of child protection is failing in this country and other countries report the same because the system just doesn’t work! It will never work because it’s totally flawed. The system is fundamentally flawed, the people trying to work it are flawed. Social workers admit it’s flawed too so don’t think I’m just a conspiracy theorist, I just try to relate the facts. We think it can’t get worse but it does!
Trafficking of children has hit new heights or should I say lows? Trafficking has risen and children are especially vulnerable. It would make you throw up if I repeated what is in the media about what happens to children or parts of them trafficked and yet our government thinks its OK to have kids adopted on the basis of a check list and a CRB! You couldn’t make it up! It needs to stop!
The whole care system needs radical reforms and I’m not alone in thinking that. Recently David Graham National Director of the Care Leaver’s Association spoke out after the Nation Audit report, Children in Care and admitted that most of the child care system is failing! The gulf between children in care and non care children is unacceptably wide! He proposes a radical rethink not just tinkering around the edges. I’m sure he reads the posts on RR because that’s what’s been voiced many times before and fallen on deaf government ears. What will it take for them to hear the clamour of the children’s voices?
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There has been a better way for over half a century!. The 1963 Children and Young Person’s Act emphasised the duty of local authorities to keep children out of State Care and to diminish the need for them to remain in State Care by providing support, assistance, and advice to families. This primary provision still remains in all subsequent legislation but has been consistently and deliberately ignored with a local authority preference for removing children as a first rather than a last resort. Resources of finance and the workforce have been heavily invested in child removal and preventive services have been seriously neglected .i.e. preventing family breakdown leading to children having to come into care.
This primary policy of keeping children with their families was maintained during the 1960s and into the 1970s but began to change with the David Owen Adoption Act 1976, which moved parental rights from natural parents to foster/ adoptive parents and this was reinforced in further legislation and LA policies until it became a Fast-Track to adoption system, wherein children are hunted for adoption and removed for specious and highly questionable reasons to feed the adoption market.
What is needed is for someone to seek an Order of Mandamus forcing local authorities to obey the primary purpose of child care law which is to keep children with their natural families and to provide support for them to do so. It should also be a requirement in adoption law that there is a burden of proof on local authorities to provide evidence that they have implemented this part of the law to its fullest before a decision is made to place a child for adoption. The present system is no more than child-stealing by ignoring the laws.
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Many thanks Richard.
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https://www.dropbox.com/s/m42xwd5xm3h9hb6/Traffic.mp4?dl=0
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