A new podcast series published in October on BBC Radio 4 called The Adoption, follows a real life adoption and asks some insightful questions about the process.
The series took 19 months to make, and charts the lives of two toddlers, Bethany and Ben, as they find themselves being adopted.
There are currently 16 episodes, with each one looking at a different aspect of adoption. We’ve broken down each episode according to its theme:
Preview: Background information on the documentary.
Episode 1: The family court process and a look at who makes the decision for a child to be adopted.
Episode 2: The foster care portion of the process with thoughts from the foster mother.
Episode 3: An introduction to the children themselves and some input from their social worker.
Episode 4: How the biological grandparents fit into the adoption process.
Episode 5: Insight into how Bethany and Ben’s father is coping with the adoption.
Episode 6: A look at how the mother is processing news of the adoption, which also raises the question of wrongful removal.
Episode 7: How potential adopters view the process and what they’ve done to prepare for the children coming to stay.
Episode 8: The potential adopters attend an Information Day and learn more about the children, to see if Bethany and Ben are ‘right for them.’ (We object strongly to this notion, so we’re putting it on record here).
Episode 9: What happens when the birth family find out prospective adopters have been found Bethany and Ben.
Episode 10: Issues around telling the children they are being adopted.
Episode 11: How the Adoption Panel works, what it does and how it comes to its conclusions about adoptive parents.
Episode 12: The parents say goodbye to the children.
Episode 13: Bethany and Ben’s father reflects on what’s happened.
Episode 14: The children move in with the new family.
Episode 15: Ben and Bethany meet their ‘new’ mother and father.
We have not yet had the chance to listen, but we would love to hear your thoughts on the series. Was it sensitively produced? Have the team managed to get some nuance in to the series and have they highlighted potential problems with the process? Let us know.
Very many thanks to Rose Watson for sharing this on Facebook and Janie Doe for alerting us to the series.
Researching Reform 
Reblogged this on | truthaholics and commented:
Non-consnsual adoption is a doomed policy and waste of taxpayers money. More publicity is needed until the public rightfully demands full accountability so that this draconian, luddite policy is abolished and consigned to the dustbin of history where it rightfully belongs.
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Two simple questions for social workers and the local authorities.
1:- How can anyone justify ever taking away a baby at birth from a sane mother who has never broken the law because a judge says there may be “risk of future emotional abuse”? This happens very very often but how can it ever be justified?
2:-How can anyone justify isolating children in care by taking away phones and laptops and when parents visit forbidding children from speaking their own language (if foreign) and forbidding them to talk about abuse from fosters or social workers,forbidding them to discuss coming home one day or discussing their case?
How can treating these children worse than murderers in prison who can phone out,speak their own language ,and say what they like to visitors be right? How can that ever be justified
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Frankly, I heard only part of the latest episode and thought it sounded like something from a macabre fantasy.
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Oh dear x
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Reblogged this on Musings of a Penpusher and commented:
It’s hard to believe that adults human have devised a series so devoid of human integrity.
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Here’s a paper that we had published in 2016 that argues the pros and cons of non-consensual adoption:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09503153.2016.1164131
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And here is an open access version:
https://www.academia.edu/26396741/The_End_of_Non-Consensual_Adoption_Promoting_the_Wellbeing_of_Children_in_Care
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Thank you very much, Joe. For anyone wishing to access the report, you will need to sign up to the site.
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And here is some work I did a few years ago trying to give a birth parent’s perspective about practice:
https://www.academia.edu/26396736/Birth_parents_perceptions_of_professional_practice_in_child_care_and_adoption_proceedings_implications_for_practice
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Thank you, Joe.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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IF the “SS” threaten to take your children for adoption,make sure they never forget you .Hug them tight at “last contact” so they cannot easily be removed while you repeat to them that wicked people HAVE KIDNAPPED THEM and are stealing them for money ,and to say no to adoption when they try to give them a horrible new mummy and daddy !
THIS AT LEAST SHOULD HELP TO SABOTAGE ANY UNWANTED ADOPTIONS AND MAKE SURE YOUR KIDS WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU AND GET IN TOUCH LATER .Not many “adopters” will want to take in a child who has been told to say “NO” to adoption in any case.
Remember also that since April 2014 the new section 51A of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, makes provision for applications for contact AFTER an adoption order has been made.
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Successive governments have seen an opportunity to make money out of a social need, it started with Blair,
As with the advent of abortion and single parenthood, the only babies/children available for adoption were those in care.
LAs took over all adoptions and small charitable agencies like Catholic Adoption ones despite their hard won experience were closed down, now most are private companies.
Adoption was Cameron’s flagship policy – announcing his shock that only 60 babies had been adopted that year from care implying that many lingered in care because of the court system.
Concurrent planning was renamed fostering to adopt, so children were placed immediately with prospective adoptors making it even more difficult for parents to reclaim their children .
Adoption agencies were also parent assessors like CORAM etc and were paid £27,000, if an adoption went ahead but only 7,000 for assessing the parents, if it did not, so clearly a conflict of interests.
This, and the 26 time limit , the forced joint instruction by CAFCASS, LA and parents of experts forced parents to rely on experts who were being used to show their lack of parenting skills.
The legal definition of at risk ‘significant harm’ needed for a care order has been extended now from emotional harm to neglect.
Mainly by lobbying/research with government money by NSPCC and Woman Aid and Refuge, the later made common assessors for the government of abuse, meaning that most abused woman now lose their children.
Now over 80% of application are based on neglect very few are based on physical or sexual abuse.
Curtesy of 375 US mental disorders and any parent with a learning disorder lose their children on risk of future emotional harm.
Now pregnant pre and post natal mothers are targeted with mental issues of depression.
Social workers on the mantra of early intervention were told to concentrate on the under 4s, with ever faster easier secret care orders, which have doubled to an average of 1650 per month care application in just 7 years
.
The % of successful care application has increased from 80% to 98%.
Older children were ignored and scandals like Rotherham’s managers blamed this policy
.
We are the only country in Europe bar Portugal to force adoption
The amount paid of public money per adoption to the agency, is a minimum of £30,000, but the maximum is discretionary, read here
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/inter-agency-adoption-fee-grant-for-local-authorities
The legal threshold for a care application is whatever is in the welfare of a child, but the welfare check list does not take into consideration the psychological affect per se of adoption, nor of thinking your parents were so inadequate your adoption was forced, nor the affect of being deracinated from all those similar to you.
And it assumes the permanency of adoption, without proof, as we still have no definitive numbers of the adoption breakdowns and I still do not think they are being tracked by LAs..
For proof positive, this is not about Child Protection, but the syphoning off of public money into private companies, last year LAs tried to exempt themselves from liability to the children they were paid to protect.
Sorry to go on, but I have followed this horror and found it all beyond disgusting and cannot envisage nor can anyone, the pain and permanent damage it has caused to so many.
And there is no evidence it has improved child protection..
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Foster care and Adoptions have become lucrative business. Whether they should be businesses at all is another question.
Click on the relevant link below to go straight to a particular company:
Foster Care Associates; National Fostering Agency, The Foster Care Agency; Acorn Care and Education, Fostering Solutions, Pathway Care Fostering and Heath Farm Fostering; Partnerships in Children’s Services, Orange Grove, ISP, Fosterplus and Clifford House; Swiis Foster Care; Capstone Foster Care; Compass Fostering, The Fostering Partnership, Eden Foster Care and Seafields Fostering; Caretech
https://corporatewatch.org/news/2015/dec/15/foster-care-business
Foster Care Associates
Owned by: Jim Cockburn and Janet Rees through Ideapark Ltd
Income from foster care in 2014**: £127.2m
Payouts to owner in 2014: £7m
Highest paid director salary and other benefits: £406,000
National Fostering Agency (includes the Foster Care Agency)
Owned by: Stirling Square Capital Partners (previously Graphite Capital until April 2015)
Income from foster care in 2014*: £94.5m
Payouts to owners in 2014: £14.4m to Graphite Capital
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: £318,112
.
Acorn Care and Education (includes Fostering Solutions, Pathway Care Fostering and Heath Farm Fostering)
Owned by: Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan
Income from foster care in 2014*: £73.1m
Payouts to owners: £13m accrued in 2014
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: £266,420
back.
Partnerships in Children’s Services (includes Orange Grove, ISP, Fosterplus and Clifford House)
Owned by: Sovereign Capital
Income from foster care in 2014*: £29.8m
Payouts to owners in 2014: £1.9m
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: not shown in accounts
we have not heard back.
Swiis Foster Care
Owned by: Dev Dadral and family
Income from foster care in 2014: £29.4m
Payouts to owners in 2014: £1.5m (from the wider Swiis group, see below)
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: £169,000
Capstone Foster Care
Owned by: Different individuals and companies (see below)
Income from foster care in 2015: £21.1m
Payouts to owners in 2015: £406,000
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: £185,000
Compass Fostering (includes The Fostering Partnership, Eden Foster Care and Seafields Fostering)
Owned by: August Equity
Income from foster care in 2015: £25.9m
Payouts to owners in 2015: £3.1m accrued
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: £131,000
caretech
Owners: shares are publicly-listed – Farouq and Haroon Sheikh biggest shareholders with 20%
Income from foster care in 2014: £12m
Payouts to owners in 2014: £240,000 in 2014
Highest paid director’s salary and other benefits: £324,000
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Thank you for all this information.
May I add that all this huge profit, £324,000 paid to just one Director of one of the many Companies, is made from our public money.
As are the salaries and fees of the army of experts, lawyers and court and public bodies and managers of them.
Yet 98% of Care Applications are now successful, so what are they doing other than going through the motions.
And how do the directors etc of fostering adoption agencies justify their twice the PM salaries ? When we have people desperate to adopt young healthy children and babies.
And how can all governments then continually tell us that the child protection services are in such a mess because of lack of cash ??
And keep ploughing in more.
And where is the regulation to ensure that the law is being complied with , the adopters are suitable, and the outcomes for children/babies better and such draconian intervention needed ?
Particularly, when, the LA wanted , despite these huge sums of public money, to exempt themselves statutorily for liability to these children/babies on whom such huge amounts are spent.
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Hidden down a driveway behind a street of red-brick houses, Clayfields contains a tiny school, a vocational unit specialising in construction and mechanics, and bedrooms for residents (words such as “inmate” and “cell” are also avoided). This one-storey, 1980s residential block is unlike the large institutions where most young offenders in the UK are imprisoned, first because it is so small, with a high ratio of around one staff member for every two children; second because it focuses on nurturing and educating the children, and finally because of the cost. Keeping a child here costs about £195,000 a year – almost three times the cost of a year in a young offender institution. AND 5 TIMES AS MUCH AS IT COST TO SEND PRINCE HARRY TO ETON !!
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Care homes are being built and we now have the new creation of Foster Hubs which appear a bit of both.
The one thing they all have in common is profit.
Care homes command up to £200, 000 a year.
Yet police are called out regularly to search for children who abscond, some never found..
My daughter’s NAS enforced by threat of Care Order and eventually by our consent to s20, which is a condition of funding, were paid £177,000 + a year and you can read in my blog the education she got, all appeared to be taught, not to SATs and eventually GCSEs but the labour created P scales. No one appeared to get a single GCSE for all that money
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I now have had time to listen to the episodes on the adoption podcast.
It is clear that noone has alleged that ANY of these children were ever ill,underweight,physically beaten, or hurt in any accident.Neither parent was accused of breaking the law yet their children have been stolen from them
.Those children who have been adopted will be deprived of the love of their mother who social workers admitted did love them deeply.Instead they will be handed over to strangers who might love and care for them or who could get fed up and be indifferent or who might even kill one as recently happened when the husban of the gay adoptive couple did just that! These kids have been thrown into a dangerous lottery so no wonder they are all (as the social worker put it ) traumatised by uprooting them so brutally.
Forced adoption should be abolished and children should never be taken from parents who obey the law ;
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Thank you for the feedback, Ian.
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please i ask someboby to watch this , this man robert sproul exposes the scottish family court to be nothing but a sham and stealing children with no evidence , please help our kids are being stolen , this video proves the corporate agenda.
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