It’s no secret that at Researching Reform we are advocates of an assault-free childhood, and have written extensively on the subject, but this new warning from the Council of Europe directed at Ireland, should be heeded world-wide.

The latest statistics on smacking children in Ireland, though dismissed by their government, indicates that a quarter of parents still hit their children. And in the UK, six out of ten parents of children aged four and under, say they regularly assault their children.

Whilst hitting children is currently banned in England within most institutions like schools and care homes, as is the case in Ireland, the Council of Europe continues to fight for the removal of hypocritical distinctions which allow for assaults of this nature to take place in the home, at the hands of parents. It’s a point we make often, but if it is illegal to ‘tap’ an adult, whether a relative of the victim of not, then the same must also be true of assaults against children.

It’s time to address this embarrassing double standard and show our children we genuinely value them and their place in the world.

If you’d like to read more on our anti-assault campaign, you can do so here. 

In a very interesting article published by the Guardian last week, the suggestion that social media is responsible for adoption placements breaking down once children find their birth parents online and causing those children emotional harm, is both seductive and on the face of it rational, but is it right?

The piece, which reads like it’s been written by a social work comms team (if the sector actually had one) attempts to examine the issues social media raises for adoptive families.

The article, prejudicial as it is, opens with a description of a young girl’s experience trying to find her own birth mother, when we are told that she chooses to describe her mother as a Disney princess and the social worker in her life (probably one of many given the transient nature of this kind of service), as a snake. The young girl blames the social worker for losing her mother. Predictably, the journalist places all the blame, for what she describes as a disastrous reunion, on the social media site that brought mother and daughter together.

But the journalist is wrong – and here’s why.

When a child is removed from a biological parent, regardless of whether the parent was able to care for their child or not, and often regardless of whether that child ends up in a loving and steady placement (again, the data tells us this does not happen as much as it should), every child needs to know about their personal, and cultural heritage. Social workers are supposed to make up scrap books for adopted children which tell them about their birth parents, but in our experience, many don’t get one and when they do, they are often superficial at best and at worst, fabrications of the truth.

So little attention is given to the fact that adoptive children do not simply start to breathe, live and experience the world upon adoption – they are alive the moment they are born and building memories and experiences which will shape who they are, for the rest of their lives. That our current adoption process is so crude, so short-sighted when it comes to support for these children, is galling in the face of all the scientific evidence and research we now have available to us about child development and how early life experiences impact us well into adulthood.

The piece goes on to blame social media and the part it played in the reunion between mother and daughter for the subsequent deterioration of the girl’s relationship with her adoptive mother, but fails entirely to question whether the adoptive mother’s bond with her daughter was strong and crucially, whether the adoptive mother was given all the information available about the biological parents and so able to fill in the pieces for her daughter and support her in the discovery process.

This brings us on to the deceptive nature of adoption itself and the conflicts of interest inherent within the adoption industry. We already know that children are sometimes unjustly removed from birth parents but adoptive parents often don’t know the background of the child they’ve adopted, either. In the UK, a full and frank disclosure of a child’s background and biological parentage is encouraged in theory, but in practice, where anything that threatens an adoption succeeding is considered fair game, this kind of disclosure is rare. So, what we have, long before social media kicks in and offers an outlet for self-discovery and, perhaps, a chance at being truly loved, is a system which sets adoptive families up to fail.

To the adoptive mother’s credit in this story she realises, after bitter experience, that honesty should have been the best policy all along, and that it may well have prevented her from losing her adoptive daughter entirely. But she is a lone voice, in an article filled with scaremongering spin from the social work and adoption sectors, busy demonising an inanimate object for the deep pain and confusion their flawed processes inflict on already vulnerable children.

If we are ever going to provide meaningful support for children who have suffered neglect and abuse, we are going to have to wake up to the realisation that their lives, like the rest of us, begin when they’re born. That they need to know how they came into the world, and who their birth parents are, and most importantly perhaps, have access to these parents in an appropriate and structured way, so that they and they alone can make the decision about whether their parents should be in their lives or not. And whilst this idea burns at the heart of the adoption industry – an arrangement that would put off most adoptive parents and see the industry, and its profit margins, shrink overnight – it is the only way forward.

Social media is not the enemy within the adoption process – it is just offering us a warning sign that the system is riddled with problems, and in desperate need of reform.

Around the world today states, charities and child welfare organisations will be remembering the many hundreds of thousands of children that go missing every year because today is International Missing Children’s Day.

And yet the level of awareness surrounding what happens to these children and where they go once they are abducted is still very low.

Did you know for example, that many children are stolen or bought from families to fuel the adoption industry around the world? It sounds like a conspiracy theory, one that may seem hard to believe, but there is ample evidence which highlights this terrible practice.

In order to raise awareness about missing children, we’ve added some very interesting links below:

• Key Facts about missing children
• Thousands of children in care disappear each year (UK)
• Your child is missing. Would you want their adoption to be easier?
• The Australian Federal Police offer links and support for missing children and their families
• The FBI would like your help in finding these missing children
• In the UK a child is reported as missing every 3 minutes – have you seen any of these children?
• Amazing app “You Have A Voice” Helps trafficked children and adults seek help.

In a news item on Parliament’s website published yesterday, specialists in the House of Commons library have put together issues they think the new Parliament might consider in the coming months. As you might imagine, child welfare barely gets a look in.

Whilst legal aid, education-related issues, child poverty and child care are included, the pessimistic and biased commentary in these sections is galling and appears to minimise the issues. One of the more jaw-dropping statements, which can be found within the child poverty segment, reads:

“If the new Government were to accept that the existing [child poverty] targets are not going to be met, it could amend the Child Poverty Act to introduce new, more realistic targets.”

It is evident that this government is going to put reducing debt ahead of preventing child deaths, at every opportunity.

The omission too of the nation’s Statutory Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse is a glaring oversight, as is the pressing concern over the need to debate the development of the voice of the child inside the justice system.

Of interest in this list for some will be the inclusion of discussions which may consider anonymity for defendants in rape cases, the stigma surrounding mental health and assisted suicide.

The proposed key issues can be accessed here with links to each segment, but we also add the issues below for ease of reference:

A survey which has sought to examine what makes children around the world happy has just published its findings and the results are fascinating.

The Children’s Worlds study surveyed over 50,000 children between the ages of 8-12 and was published by the Jacobs Foundation, a Zurich-based nonprofit, last week.

15 countries in total were included, and incorporates so called ‘poor’ countries as well as ‘rich’ ones.

Children’s perceptions of happiness, schooling and more are detailed in this eye-opening report about how children view their world. It is well worth a read.

Last week’s report includes data relating to children aged 10-12, however it is hoped that a report focusing on 8-10 year olds will be released later this year.

Some key facts from the current report are added below:

• Overall happiness is the same for boys and girls.
• Compared with girls, boys feel more satisfied with their bodies and appearances in Europe and South Korea, but not in the African and South American countries surveyed.
• About 60 percent of children in Nepal live with their parents and grandparents, while fewer than 10 percent of children in the U.K., Norway and Israel live in these multigenerational homes.
• Children in some countries, including Algeria, Nepal and South Africa, spend much more time caring for siblings and other family members than do children in richer countries, such as Germany, Turkey and South Korea.