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Researching Reform

Researching Reform

Category Archives: Adoption

Children in Care More Likely To Die Earlier Than Those Left With Their Birth Parents

27 Wednesday May 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, child welfare, Foster Care, Researching Reform

≈ 11 Comments

Children who experience the UK’s care system are twice as likely to die earlier than children who remain with their parents, a study has revealed.

The research was led by professor Amanda Sacker at University College London’s (UCL) institute of epidemiology and healthcare and tracked more than 350,000 people between 1971 and 2013, using government data.

The study, entitled, “The health and well-being of adults who had been in care up to 40 years earlier: are there differences by type of care?” was published in September 2018, but has since been followed by other long-term studies which also paint a stark picture of outcomes for children who enter Britain’s care system.

A report published in 2019 by Christian Munthe, a bioethics professor at Gothenburg University, found that foster care systems in the UK, other parts of Europe and the US adversely affected children’s development, and did not appear to offer better outcomes when compared to children who were raised in ‘adverse’ birth family environments.

Professor Sacker’s report found that over a 42-year period, adults who had experienced the care system as children were 70% more likely to die prematurely than those who had not spent time in care.

She also noted that while there had been a 40% increased risk for children who had been in care compared with those living with parents in 1971, this had surged to 360% in 2001.

The study also found that the likelihood of dying early had doubled in recent years, though the researchers were unable to determine the cause, or causes, of that increase.

The research highlights incidents relating to mental illness like self harm, as the number one cause of premature deaths among care experienced people.

Other conclusions in the report include the confirmation that the researchers’ findings could not be explained by childhood demographic and socioeconomic background, and that decades after children and youths were placed in out-of-home care, they were still likely to report worse health than children who grew up in parental households.

None of this will come as a shock to child protection reformers, who are all too aware that the system is in need of a cultural, training and evidence-based practice rehaul.

You can access the study’s summary here.

Screenshot 2020-05-26 at 13.55.36

 

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Councils Must Upload All Child Protection Documents For New Online Court Portal

12 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, event, Family Law, Researching Reform

≈ 9 Comments

Councils requesting care and supervision orders will be required to upload every document relating to a child’s case onto a new online portal, HMCTS (Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service) has said.

The confirmation came after this site sent in a series of questions to HMCTS, for an online event the court body held on 23 January highlighting digital reforms in child protection and adoption cases.

The panel included Ed Owen, HMCTS’s Communications Director, Emma Petty, the Service Manager for the HMCTS reform project and Deputy Service Manager Jason Lewellyn.

Screenshot 2020-02-10 at 10.18.00

Answering our question about whether local authorities would need to upload every document relating to a public family law case throughout the life of that case to make sure records were accurate and complete, Emma Petty said:

“It’s certainly our aim. By looking at the demo, you can see how easy it is just to go to your browser and upload the relevant documents.”

She added, “It’s really important to treat that case management system they have access to as the digital file, and have all of the information in the one place that everyone can access.”

We also asked whether public family law applications would have to go through an online vetting process to make sure they were appropriate. In response to this question, Emma explained that it would be the local authority who would submit the application and as part of the online process there would be “an element of validation”, and “mandatory fields” which local authorities would have to fill out during the submission process.

However, emergency applications would be unrestricted, allowing councils to submit these with little to no scrutiny during the uploading stage. Emma went on to say that once the digital service was in place, emergency applications would continue to be vetted by the court in the first instance.

We sent in two further questions which were not answered live:

  1. If councils upload documents, what recourse will there be if any errors are found inside those documents, and if they can be edited, how will those changes be recorded?
  2. There is an enormous challenge at the moment with factual inaccuracies inside family court documentation, which can have life altering effects on families and children, as the system currently does not offer a proper pathway to rectify those errors. Will the new system aim to address that challenge and if so, how?

During the conference the HMCTs panel confirmed that the service could not be used for all child proceedings. Only requests for care orders, supervision orders and emergency protection orders will be able to be submitted through the portal.

This piecemeal approach is likely to cause concern among researchers, as elements of a child’s case could go unseen, or get overlooked during proceedings.

Several more questions were asked during the event, and included whether the new online system would require councils to input form data manually rather than the ability to upload that form as a whole document.

Miss Petty said that manual input for forms was often required to unlock the various tools available inside the new portal but that the digital team at HMCTS would be responsive to feedback about whether the measure increased councils’ workloads.

Jason Lewellyn explained that while the process may initially be more time consuming, it would speed up the life cycle of the case as all of the data would then be available in one place and much quicker to find.

Another question asked was how the service planned to deter judges from printing out bundles and using the new portal in a system where, culturally, digital innovation had been resisted. Emma said the service had been engaging with a judicial working group to try to provide an online service that was user friendly to everyone.

Not all of the questions sent in were answered during the session, but HMCTS has confirmed via email that answers to those questions will be offered in writing on the HMCTS website shortly, with a first draft of those answers expected next week.

While the service is still only running pilots in selected areas and courts, the next phase of the reform programme will begin in March, with HMCTS sending out email notifications to councils nationwide about when the service will be ready for use, and information on how to register.

Many thanks to the panel for answering our questions, and to Indie at HMCTS who helped us send the questions through and answered our queries about the event.

Links:

  • HMCTS Reform online event, 23 January 2020: Family Public Law and Adoption
  • The HMCTS reform programme

 

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Disrupted Adoptions – What Councils Don’t Want You To Know

07 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 49 Comments

Adoption was once viewed as the best solution for children in care, but research has proven that the only winners are councils and companies investing in the process.

While the world has become familiar with the UK government’s misguided practices when it comes to adoption – from financial incentives and targets for placing children, to taking children from birth parents without their consent – the phenomenon of disrupted adoptions has been kept quiet by agencies and local authorities with a vested interested in child placements.

This secrecy also validates the myth that adoptions are permanent, and are never undone. But adoptive families can give children back, and they are doing so at an alarming rate.

The technical term for this is adoption disruption, and happens when an adoption falls through, or adoptive parents decide to give their adopted children back to the agencies which hosted them.

Whether by omission or design, stats on adoption disruption are sketchy and there is currently no legal requirement on adoption services to keep a record of how many adoptions fall through or fail.

A Freedom of Information request in 2018 found that adoption disruption had been on the rise since 2012, peaking at 2016 and included breakdowns which happened after an initial placement was made.

Across all 152 local authorities the request revealed that there had been 87 breakdowns in 2012-13, increasing to 160 in 2015-16 and 132 in 2016-17. The figures offered are likely to be conservative estimates, according to Children and Young People Now Magazine which made the request.

However, some experts say at least one in five adoptions (20%) in the UK fail.

The latest stats, which haven’t been collected for 2018-2019 are likely to show a spike in disrupted adoptions, after several parents who spoke to the BBC said they had given back their adopted children because they were unable to cope with their needs.

It’s a heartbreaking scenario, and one which councils and adoption agencies must shoulder a large portion of the blame.

Adoption is a much cheaper option when compared to foster care and family support, as it allows councils to shed themselves of children, and the associated and often significant costs that go with fostering and social care.

Placing children in adoptive families means councils and agencies no longer have to bear the financial costs of child care, which are transferred, often in full, to the adoptive parents.

To enable these placements, social services teams and independent adoption agencies are not being honest with adoptive families about the children on their books.

Poor data collection and an at times wilful failure to produce proper Life Story Books – which are supposed to chronicle a child’s life fully before, during and after adoption – allows adoption bodies to present piecemeal information about a child’s complex needs.

Adoption agents gloss over details, ‘forget’ to mention a child’s complicated history and tell adoptive families whatever they want to hear to secure an adoption.

The end result: even more adoption disruption, as adoptive parents overwhelmed and un-prepared to look after a child with sophisticated needs find they can’t cope, and give their adopted children back.

Speaking to the Yorkshire Press in 2018, a woman who gave back her adopted children said she felt social services “placed the children with us and ran for the hills. I felt abandoned. None of it was the children’s fault. Their behaviour is a result of their life experience. They are not responsible for anything to do with the breakdown.”

She went on to say, “There is a lack of support, energy and finance to do anything to help. I was spinning into a point of total despair and all the social workers would say was: ‘don’t worry, you are doing a fantastic job’. There was no recognition, no offer of support. What me and the children needed was just dismissed.”

And it’s not just adoptive parents who get short changed in the process. Birth parents are also abandoned, as councils prioritise cost-cutting over genuine care.

Birth families who need support and assistance have for a long time accused local authorities of removing children from them when they’ve approached their local councils for help.

Councils can see the costs coming a mile away, and the temptation to remove children and place them in adoptive homes is enormous. Adoption is much easier and more cost-effective than providing birth families with therapeutic services or specialist support.

And when an adoption order is made, birth families lose all legal rights to their children, so that when adoption disruption takes place there is no onus on the adoptive family or the agency to notify the birth parents of the change.

This oversight also limits the ability of councils to place children back with their birth parents, who may have turned their lives around or may now be able to demonstrate meaningful changes in their lives which would allow reunification.

But what about the children? By far the most important people in this process, they are reduced to numbers, data and failed policy, rather than highlighted and held up as our central priority, which of course, they should be.

We already know that an unprecedented number of children are being bounced around the care system, and research shows this is damaging children and their development. 

We also know that adoption only works for a minority of children, and that quality of life is far more important than securing an adoption placement with families who are clearly not appropriate.

The myth that adoption is permanent, and offers a fairytale ending to a child’s difficult life journey, falls far short of the truth.

Links:

  • Judge slams ‘outstanding’ council for breaches of law and guidance in ‘biased’ adoption application
  • Disruption of Adoptive Placements – Nottingham City Council Guidelines
child-sitting-1816400_1920

Image by Hans Kretzmann

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Government U-Turns on Adoption Drive, and other Interesting Things

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, child abuse, child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 7 Comments

The government’s acting Children’s Minister, Michelle Donelan, made a dramatic U-turn on Wednesday over a policy pushing adoptions for children in care after this site published a post explaining the proposal was illegal.

Donelan had asked all councils in a letter sent on January 16, to prioritise adoptions in every child protection case, and to ignore court judgments which approved alternative forms of care.

The proposal was met with strong resistance by several key stakeholders inside the child welfare sector, including fostering agencies who were concerned that the policy would lead to a reduction in business.

Children’s charities and child welfare professionals with no vested interest in fostering or adoption also expressed concerns that the minister’s demand was out of touch with reality, and overly simplistic.

But on January 22, Donelan released a video statement through the Department of Education’s (DfE) Twitter feed, expressing a different view.

In the video, the acting Children’s Minister, who is filling in for Kemi Badenoch while she is on maternity leave, said that all forms of care should be considered, including kinship care.

Donelan also unveiled a new project in an answer she gave to a written question sent to the House of Commons on January 23, which asked what recent assessment the DfE had made on the effectiveness of contextual safeguarding.

Answering the query, Donelan announced that the government had been looking at this issue in a pilot to test “contextual safeguarding theory”. Contextual safeguarding examines the way councils respond to vulnerable children who may be being exploited outside of a family setting. She confirmed that the DfE had given Hackney Council up to £2 million to work on the project.

The pilot has been running since 2017, and focuses on phenomena like county lines exploitation and is led by Professor Michelle Lefevre at the University of Sussex, Dr Carlene Firmin from the UoB Contextual Safeguarding team, as well as Professor Gillian Ruch and Dr Kristie Hickle from the University of Sussex.

 

We need more people to open their homes to a vulnerable child, whether through adoption, fostering or kinship care. To get behind this, Children's Minister @michelledonelan visited @Coram in London to talk about adoption and is supporting @barnardos Fostering Week. 👇 pic.twitter.com/B6Zsr0exrX

— DfE (@educationgovuk) January 22, 2020

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Poll Finds Public Want to Scrap the UK’s Adoption Policies

20 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 9 Comments

A Facebook poll has revealed that 93% of those surveyed are in favour of scrapping the UK’s full, forced adoption policy and replacing the model with simple adoptions.

Simple adoptions allow children and their birth families to remain legally connected, and encourage meaningful, child-focused contact with biological parents while in the care of adoptive parents, wherever possible. Adopted children are able to keep their original surnames and can inherit from both families.

Under the UK’s current adoption policies, which feature a full adoption process, all ties between birth families and their children are severed when an adoption order is made.

While post adoption contact is possible under existing legislation, the policy behind the law is weighted heavily in favour of the adoptive parents’ wishes and wants, making physical contact almost unheard of in adoption cases.

France uses a two-tier system which features both full and simple adoptions, but since the 1990s, the number of simple adoptions have far exceeded the country’s full adoptions, making simple adoptions the most common form of adoption in France today.

Luxembourg, which also uses simple adoptions, only allows a simple adoption to take place where there are strong grounds, and if it offers advantages for the adoptee. Interestingly, the law in Luxembourg also requires that the adoptive parent must be at least 15 years older than the child, unless there are compelling reasons to permit otherwise.

The survey, which this site ran on Facebook, gathered 445 votes and found that 93% of those polled wanted to see the UK’s current adoption policies removed and replaced with a simple adoption process, while just 7% did not want to see the current full adoption policy scrapped and replaced with a simple adoption framework.

One poster commenting on the poll said, “I Don’t think adoption should exist. I think working with families so much better for the kids overall health wellbeing.”

Another poster said, “Adoption should only happen with the consent of everyone involved.”

And another commentator responding to the survey wrote, “In cases where the parents are either dead or doing life in jail and NO ONE else could have the child, I don’t see it as a bad thing. However, we all know it is being abused…. It’s horrific how something that I am sure was devised with good intentions, is being used to target the ‘lower classes’.”

Adoption, by law, should always be the last consideration in any child protection case but in rare instances where it is an appropriate course of action for a child, adoptions should be fully transparent.

In practice, that means each adoption plan must be highly tailored to each child to ensure birth family ties remain, and should be reviewed regularly and updated to reflect a child’s developmental needs.

Screenshot 2020-01-20 at 10.13.56

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Acting Children’s Minister Pushes for More Adoptions, Breaking The Law.

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 13 Comments

The acting Children’s Minister, Michelle Donelan, who is filling in for Kemi Badenoch while she is on maternity leave, has told children’s services directors that adoptions must be a priority in child welfare cases.

The request was communicated in a letter, which also urged the child protection sector not to turn away prospective adopters based on factors like income, while confirming additional funds for agencies to “recruit” more adopters.

Startlingly, the Minister appears to have asked councils to ignore court judgments which have prioritised other forms of care.

In the letter, Donelan says, “We understand that some local authority decisions may be influenced by local court responses to previous applications, and this could mean some children missing out on the benefits of adoption.”

A recent shift in understanding around adoptions has seen the child welfare sector start to prioritise birth family support and temporary care arrangements with a view to reuniting children with their biological families, wherever possible.

The letter has been heavily criticised by sector bosses, who feel the Minister’s demands are short-sighted and overly simplistic.

Not unsurprisingly, adoption agencies in the UK welcomed the move, while fostering agencies threw temper tantrums over the declaration.

Shortly after the letter was shared, the hashtag #ambitiousforadoption was used by the Chief Executive for Coram, Carol Homden. Ambitious For Adoption is an initiative Coram has launched to try to secure more adoptions through collaborations with local authorities in London. (At the time of publication, this was the only tweet we could find using the hashtag).

Screenshot 2020-01-17 at 07.13.21

Coram has been criticised in the past for being both a children’s charity and running what it calls “one of the largest and most successful independent adoption agencies in the UK.” Social workers, charities and campaigners believe Coram’s portfolio creates a conflict of interest.

The more significant issue here though, is not the battle for market share between adoption and fostering agencies, but the fact that this decision is plainly wrong in law.

We wouldn’t expect a politician to imagine this might be important, so we’ll explain it for Michelle, here.

In what is now considered to be one of the most prominent judgments in family law, made in 2013 and which also set a precedent, Lord Neuberger confirmed that care orders must be “a last resort, because the interests of a child would self-evidently require her relationship with her natural parents to be maintained unless no other course was possible in her interests.”

This comment was made to explain the intent behind clauses in the Children Act 1989 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. These are both pieces of legislation ratified by the UK, which bind all of us here in England and Wales, including politicians.

Baroness Hale, the former head of the Supreme Court, who was also involved in this case, offered additional guidance, saying that a care order should take place, “only in exceptional circumstances and when motivated by overriding requirements pertaining to the child’s welfare, in short, when nothing else will do. In many cases and particularly where the feared harm has not yet materialised and may never do so, it will be necessary to explore and attempt alternative solutions.”

Fast forward to 2015, and the then President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby warned councils in another case that adoptions with strangers must only ever be made after engaging with every available relative of the child, to see if they might be able to look after him or her.

This warning was rooted in existing legislation (the Children Act 1989), which makes it very clear that adoption should never be the first port of call, and if it is eventually considered, every effort must be made to try to place a child with appropriate members of their birth family.

The judgment led to a sharp decline in adoptions, as councils began to understand the implications of the law and the emphasis on doing what was genuinely in every child’s best interest.

And in 2017, the current President of the Family Division, Andrew McFarlane, who was acting as a High Court judge, raised serious concerns around the use of adoption in a speech he gave at a Family Justice Council event. McFarlane said, “Magistrates and judges up and down the country on every day of the week are making these highly intrusive draconian orders removing children permanently from their natural families on the basis that to do so is better for the child and that ‘nothing else will do’. But, I ask rhetorically: ‘How do we know this is so?’”

What we do know is that adoption does not work for a vast number of children, and that placements break down far too often. This site has written about these issues a lot, and much of the research in this area is available on Researching Reform to read.

We very much hope that others will join us in pointing out the Minister’s misunderstanding of the law on adoptions.

You can access more RR articles on adoption and the impact it has on children, here. 

Many thanks to Dana for alerting us to the hashtag.

Michelle-Donelan-

Michelle Donelan, acting Children’s Minister.

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UN Official Calls For Inquiry Into Forced And Illegal Adoptions in Ireland

03 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, forced adoption, Inquiry, Researching Reform

≈ 11 Comments

UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, has called for an inquiry into forced and illegal adoptions in Ireland, after a report she produced raised serious concerns around the sale and exploitation of children inside the country.

There is a very good summary of this development over on The Irish Examiner, but here are a few key thoughts from Boer-Buquicchio about why this inquiry is so important and what it should focus on:

  • Her report highlighted failures to provide information, accountability and redress to survivors of institutional abuse, and to individuals adopted in a manner that would amount to the “sale of children under international law”;
  • Commercial ties to forced and illegal adoptions were also highlighted;
  • The UN Rapporteur said the inquiry should focus on illegal activity around forced adoptions
  • Rather than focusing on individual institutions, she would like the State to focus on investigating “the gamut of human rights abuses identified in these and similar settings”

A Twitter survey carried out by this site in May found that 86% of those polled also wanted to see a full scale inquiry into adoption practices in England and Wales.

Further Reading:

  • Ireland: UN human rights expert calls for national strategy to protect children from sexual violence
  • UN Page on Ireland which includes Child Welfare Reports
  • Politicians Call For State Inquiry Into Forced and Illegal Adoptions
  • Adoption Agency Caught Illegally Registering Births Goes Into Voluntary Liquidation

Screenshot 2019-05-27 at 19.34.05

 

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Dr Gary Clapton: Life Story Work For Adoptees “Riddled” With Birth Parents’ Failures

01 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 6 Comments

Dr Gary Clapton, a Committee Member of Birthlink, a service which connects adoptees with their birth families, said child welfare professionals’ records of birth families for adopted children were often written more like justifications for removal than a detailed history of a child’s life before their adoption.

The books are intended to hold sensitively written information about a child’s birth family, carers and their life experiences.

In an interview with The Scotsman, Dr Clapton criticised the current practice around record keeping, saying, “Often troubling is the lack of presence of the parent, or at least their side of the story. The records tend to focus solely on the child and their prospect of an adoptive family or the system requirements of a case to be made out for removal of the child from their parents – invariably the latter is an account riddled with all the instances of parental failure. In the files we read, it is difficult to discern the human presence of a parent who has lost their child.”

Dr Clapton, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Edindburgh focusing on adoption and fostering, fathers and fatherhood, children and families social work practice, and moral panics, and a Committee Member of the Fathers Network Scotland, also mentions the importance of keeping physical tokens from birth parents.

Concerns around whether or not these children are able to access tokens and keepsakes left by parents are also raised in the piece.

The article, published today, follows alarming research carried out by adoption agency Coram and The Hadley Centre at the University of Bristol in 2015 which found that Life Story work was not being prioritised by adoption professionals and that there were wide variations in the quality of the storybooks.

The national study noted that over 30% of adopters rated their children’s life storybooks as ‘terrible’, while around 40% said they were ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.

The study also uncovered the following issues:

  • Many of the books were of poor quality, and often had to be ‘redone’ by their adoptive parents;
  • Adoptive parents reported that the stories were often not child-centred and lacked narrative and explanation;
  • Many adoptive parents also found that the level of detail in the books was inappropriate:
  • Some adoptive parents said there was either too much emphasis on one part of the story, too little detail or too much unnecessary detail;
  • Other concerns centered around a frustration that the books could not be updated as the children grew up.

BBC Radio 4 covered the research in their You and Yours series the year the study was published, interviewing Coram’s Director of Operations, Renuka Jeyarajah-Dent on the findings.

Jeyarajah-Dent said, “Adopted children cannot start with a blank slate. Their past is significant and should be valued. Understanding life history becomes particularly important when young people reach adolescence and develop and define their sense of self.”

Ofsted has also repeatedly criticised Life Story work, and has noted that adoption agencies who needed to improve also needed to produce better life story books. As a bare minimum, Ofsted recommended that Life Story work should represent a realistic account of a child’s circumstances and that there should be a dedicated Life Story Worker in every adoption team.

LSB

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New Study Suggests Children Suffer Most Harm After Entering the Care System

26 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, forced adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 6 Comments

A new study from Australia suggests that a significant number of children who languish inside the care system may be going on to suffer much greater levels of psychological and physical harm than children who are placed with appropriate carers at an early age.

The study, which was published in the Australian Social Work Journal, also casts doubt on research from the UK which suggests that children who are adopted from care have similarly high rates of mental health problems to those who stay in state care.

The research paper, “Descriptive Analysis of Foster Care Adoptions in New South Wales, Australia”, was produced by Andrea del Pozo de Bolger, Debra Dunstan and Melissa Kaltner.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first piece of research identifying the care system as potentially posing a risk of harm to children.

In addition, the research also emphasises the need to preserve birth family connections.

Looking at post adoption contact, the researchers concluded that care plans for children being adopted needed to be fluid throughout a child’s life and include contact with birth parents where possible, rather than the current provision of one care plan which is intended to last for the duration of their childhood and which very rarely features face to face contact with birth parents.

Unlike the UK, Australia appears to be committed to keeping birth family connections alive, which the researchers say is demonstrated by the frequency of face-to-face contact in the sample cases they studied from New South Wales (NSW).

In the UK, post adoption contact usually takes the form of indirect letterbox contact twice a year.

The research does make one mistake, though. It claims that recent legislative changes in NSW are consistent with what the researchers see as a drive to increase adoptions in the UK.

That is no longer the case in the UK, after several successful challenges in the European Court of Human Rights clarified the law in this area, namely that adoption should always be a method of last resort.

The researchers make several interesting observations:

  • Children placed with appropriate carers at an early age and who experienced continuity of care displayed “seemingly small numbers of behavioural and emotional disorders.”
  • Positive developmental outcomes may only apply to those adopted children who are placed in favourable circumstances at a very early age.
  • This outcome differs from the high rates of complex psychopathology (attachment difficulties, relationship insecurity, sexual behaviour, trauma-related anxiety, conduct problems, defiance, inattention or hyperactivity, self-injury, food maintenance behaviours) identified in the population of children in care.

The research also offers alternative explanations for these outcomes:

On early adoptive placements that lasted:

“The finding [that children who are adopted at an early age and who receive consistent care] may suggest that an agency is more likely to pursue an adoption application if the child does not experience high needs.”

“Second, the finding may be the product of the timing of the data collection. An English study suggested that children adopted from care have similarly high rates of mental health problems to those who remain in care…

However, the data were gathered some years after adoption, whereas the present study describes functioning at the time of adoption.”

“Therefore, a longitudinal study under the new legislative arrangements is required to determine if this outcome is enduring. This study should include comparison groups featuring children placed early in stable foster placements to ensure that any developmental outcomes observed are not erroneously attributed to placement type.”

On post adoption contact:

“In regards to the arrangements for post adoption contact recorded in adoption plans, some important issues emerged…

Contact plans suggested the NSW Supreme Court attempts to contemplate fluid circumstances as well as consideration for broader birth family ties. This is consistent with recommendations from international literature…

Thus, a single contact plan is unlikely to meet a child’s needs as they develop. Likewise, further exploration of the impact of face-to-face contact on children’s wellbeing is necessary to inform Australian practice, given its infrequent use in other settings.”

Researching Reform advocates for a system which offers birth families in need tailored and dynamic support, while ensuring that contact with birth families remains, wherever possible.

This could be done through a truly open adoption process which allows birth parents to remain in frequent contact with their children while allowing adoptive parents and highly trained child welfare professionals to assist with the day-to-day love and care all children need.

Alternatively, where needs are less great, allowing children to remain with their birth families while providing families with expert support, including regularly updated care plans to reflect the ever changing needs of children.

It is absurd that we don’t do any of this already.

Further Reading:

  • Apolitical – Child health: Why campaigners are battling the UK’s adoption policy
  • First Ever Post-Adoption Contact Appeal Confirms Adopters Have Final Say
  • Top Social Work Professor: Adoption Works For A Minority Of Children.

Adoption 7

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Interesting Adoption Resource

18 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, forced adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 6 Comments

The Donaldson Adoption Institute is based in New York and promised to offer  “independent and objective adoption research, education, and advocacy that addressed the needs of birth parents, adopted people, adoptive parents, the people who love them, and the professionals that serve them.”

However, the Institute appears to have closed its doors, or at least shut down its adoption reform efforts, though they have kindly left a lot of their research up on their site and some of it is free.

While this is a US based organisation and some of the content may not apply to the UK directly, it may offer some powerful insights where US and UK policies on adoption cross.

While we have not had the chance to look at the publicly available content on the Institute’s site, at first glance it looks very interesting.

Here are some reports we thought our readers would find useful:

  • Adoption and birth certificates (access, rights)
  • Birth Parents (safeguarding the rights and wellbeing of birth parents, best practice)
  • Identity (pioneering research on adoptee identity)
  • Openness in Adoption (ongoing relationships between adopters, adoptees and birth parents)
  • US Adoption reform (recommendations)
  • Opinion Surveys on Adoption (adopters, adoptees and birth parents)

There’s also an archive with the Institute’s newsletters, which offer emerging issues in adoption law, policy, practice, research, news and resources up until 2018.

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