Adoption and rights
England is unusual in the number of children removed from parents and placed with adoptive families, and also because in the significant majority of cases this was not with the consent of the children or their parents.
Separating children from their parents should be a measure of last resort, and more so in the case of permanent separation as involved in adoption.
The stated position of ministers and successive UK governments has been for more active push towards adoption.
There needs to be full compliance with children’s rights, including support for families so that as many children as possible can be supported to live safely with their families and adoption only as a measure of last resort.
“Many birth parents find themselves in difficult situations often involving poverty and a lack of support. Adoption is a permanent solution to what may be a temporary problem…There should be the highest possible bar for removing a child from their family.”
“Birth family members repeatedly mentioned the lack of attention to the social contexts in which they lived. A number of respondents reported that housing, or the lack of it, was used as evidence against them in assessments.”
Professors Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta and Sue Mills
British Association of Social Workers: The role of the social worker in adoption –ethics and human rights: An Enquiry (2018)
“[The Council of Europe report] specifically criticised England for its child protection focus and the removal of children from women who have been subject to domestic abuse, or who are suffering from depression, particularly in the context of policies promoting non-consensual adoption.”
Professors Anna Gupta, Brid Featherstone, June Thoburn, Kate Morris and Sue White
The Conversation: By rushing to speed up forced adoptions we are letting children down (2015)
“…while other EU Member States have mechanisms for permitting adoption without parental consent in specific circumstances, few appear to exercise this power to the extent to which the English authorities do.”
PETI Committee, European Parliament
Adoption without Consent (2016)
“England and Wales are really unique in Europe in placing so many children for adoption, in particular in the young age group which is “popular” on the adoption market.”
Rapporteur: Ms Olga BORZOVA, Council of Europe
Social services in Europe: legislation and practice of the removal of children from their families in Council of Europe member States (2015)
“The use of adoption needs to be located and discussed in the context of wider social policies relating to poverty and inequality.”
Senior social worker quoted by Professors Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta and Sue Mills
British Association of Social Workers: The role of the social worker in adoption –ethics and human rights: An Enquiry (2018)
Trauma of separation
In discussing adoption it is necessary that we not forget that there is first a breaking for the child, a separation from their families, and that this commonly involves trauma. This can be the case even if the child loves their adoptive family. This is often glossed over in the representation of adoption as a happy event and in the language chosen by politicians.
There has been a clear strategy from government to re-frame the trauma and difficulties which adopted children experience as being due to abuse prior to adoption. However there is significant evidence that children removed from mothers at birth still experience trauma. This includes from the huge numbers of children removed over decades because their mothers were not married, where no abuse was suspected.
“Adoption has brought me love. My parents are the ones who remain by my side and who love me fiercely as I do them.”
Eloise Jones, adopted, adopter and social worker
Foreword Adoption UK The Adoption Barometre 2023
“I believe adoption is trauma, and yes, I believe that – for some children – adoption is, at the end of a long journey of investigations and considerations, the answer.”
Anstey Harris, adult adoptee
Foreword Adoption UK The Adoption Barometre 2023
“If my family had died in a car crash, my grief would be recognised, and everyone would wonder how I’d cope with losing my entire family; but as a foster care adoptee – and an older one at that – I was supposed to be excited and grateful that anyone even wanted me’.”
Adopted person cited in research
Professors Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta
Child and Family Social Work: On hope, loss, anger, and the spaces in between: Reflections on living with/in adoption and the role of the social worker (2019)
“Please, an apology to all of us. We are sorry, but we want those words to carry the recognition of our trauma, our distress, our sadness, our grief, which, even though decades old, is still very raw and painful to us.”
Liz Harvie, adult adoptee, adopted at birth
Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry: The Violation of Family Life: Adoption of Children of Unmarried Women 1949-1976
“Tell me of any other human loss as ignored as that of an adoptee? I lost my birth mother the day I was born, and I was told it didn’t matter.”
How to Be Adopted
Why Are You So Angry?
“It is important to note that adoption is far from the risk-free solution that Cameron presents it as. Feelings of loss and grief permeate the lives of many of those affected, including children separated from brothers and sisters.”
Professors Anna Gupta, Brid Featherstone, June Thoburn, Kate Morris and Sue White
The Conversation: By rushing to speed up forced adoptions we are letting children down (2015)
“Adopters are often sold a falsely positive narrative about adoption. No matter how much the adoptee is loved, they will always have experienced the trauma of separation and removal of identity.”
Adult Adoptee Movement
FAQs
“All my life I have felt that a part of me was missing.”
Adult adoptee, adopted at birth
Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry: The Violation of Family Life: Adoption of Children of Unmarried Women 1949-1976
“The judge does not state why the emotional damage that each of the very different subject children would suffer under a care plan which separated them from their mother, from their stepfather and no less importantly from their siblings, was proportionate to and necessitated by the identified risk.”
Jean Eveleigh, a member of the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign, fought for years to stop her child being forcibly adopted. She was unable to get support to look after her daughter and she was removed. Years too late the family court agreed the adoption might not have happened if she had got support. Tye had an unhappy adoption and cut all ties with their adoptive family as an adult and searched out their mother.
Jean and Tye talk about their experience.
Pro-adoption govt stance
Adoption has been given a high level of government support, with policy and practice focusing on adoption as the “gold standard” for permanence for children.
“A key message from many English respondents was that the government policy of promoting adoption has portrayed it as a public ‘good’ and the ‘right’ decision’ (senior social worker), with high profile politicians, including former Prime Minister David Cameron, involved in this. This was considered to have led to a culture that inhibited important ethical debates about adoption and its merits compared to other permanence options that do not involve the removal of birth parents so starkly from children’s lives.”
Professors Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta and Sue Mills
British Association of Social Workers: The role of the social worker in adoption –ethics and human rights: An Enquiry (2018)
“The current government promotion of adoption does not recognise the life-long effects on those involved. Adoptees have serious concerns which they have raised with us. Concerns about how their families are abandoned without support, about how their heritage and identities are negatively impacted and that the systemically poor communication compounds the harm that is experienced through adoption.”
PFAN, Love Barrow Families, New Beginnings, Parent and Carer Alliance, Southwark Family Council and Parent to Parent Peer Advocacy
Children’s Social Care: The Way Forward (2022)
“…we are determined that adoption should happen more often and should happen more speedily.”
Michael Gove,
Coalition Government
Speech on adoption (2012)
“We will legislate to tip the balance in favour of permanent adoption where that is the right thing for the child – even when that means overriding family ties.”
David Cameron, then Prime Minster
Quoted in BBC: Children in care ‘let down for too long’, says David Cameron (2016)
“…actively promoting adoption. The local authorities that are most successful in finding adoptive families for looked after children will generally be those with a very clear care planning process that always considers adoption as a possible permanence option and not an option of last resort”
Department for Education
Statutory Guidance on Adoption (2013 – today)
Human rights in adoption
Children’s rights include support for their families to enable them to stay with their parents where possible. In cases where this is not a viable option other approaches to permanence which do not sever all family connections need to be considered.
Right to family hijacked
The government’s pro-adoption approach misrepresent fundamental children’s rights by failing to recognise their rights to their family.
Within the current statutory guidance on adoption the only mention of a child’s right to family is an introductory paragraph which says: “It is the fundamental right of every child to belong to a family; this principle underpins the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which the United Kingdom ratified in 1991. Where children cannot live with their birth parents for whatever reason, society has a duty to provide them with a stable, safe and loving alternative family. “
A family. Not their own family as specified by human rights frameworks. The 2021 Adoption Strategy does not even mention the UNCRC nor child rights.
“Under the CRC, the child has “as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents”, not to be cared for by “parents” in general.”
Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe
Adoption and Children: A Human Rights Perspective (2011)
“Permanence has been hijacked to equal adoption – a child’s ‘right’ to adoption.”
Senior social worker quoted
Professors Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta and Sue Mills
British Association of Social Workers: The role of the social worker in adoption –ethics and human rights: An Enquiry (2018)
“Certainly, securing stable family-based care is a well-accepted and positive policy objective when children cannot be looked after by their parents, and the preamble to the CRC states that “for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, [the child] should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding”. But it is misleading and even dangerous to construe this valid statement as constituting a “right”, and all the more so to invoke this supposed right as a requirement to provide for and proceed with adoption.”
Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe
Adoption and Children: A Human Rights Perspective (2011)
Best interests of child
It is concerning that the ‘best interests of the child’ is repeatedly being interpreted to mean whatever the adults – or government – think is best for children, rather than as an aid in understanding their rights. Perhaps the clearest example is in the government’s defense in the Supreme Court of the two child benefit cap – that making children poorer was compatible with best interests of children because in the long term it would achieve higher levels of working families (it has not). Repeatedly children who have been removed from their parents are judged as having settled in their placements and that it is not in their ‘best interests’ to be reunited with their family.
“The tragedy is that even when the parents finally win in court, and can prove their innocence, they cannot get their children back, because a flaw in the English/Welsh legal system means that adoption orders cannot be reversed in any circumstances – in a misunderstanding of the “best interest of the child” who actually has a right to return to his/her birth family.”
“…the “best interests” principle is not designed to be a kind of “trump-card” or “super-right”, on the basis of which subjective determination of those “interests” should hold sway. It is, in contrast, a requirement for deciding on the most appropriate implementation of all the child’s other rights. “Best interests” cannot be used to override other rights, for example when determining whether or not a child should be considered “adoptable”.”
Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe
Adoption and Children: A Human Rights Perspective (2011)
Rights respecting options
“Identifying alternative carers within the family circle through “family group conferences” earlier in the process could be a better way of ending the overreliance on adoption by strangers and making it really the solution of last resort, “when nothing else will do” – which is meant to be the threshold standard as set by English/Welsh law and enforced in English/Welsh courts.”
Rapporteur: Ms Olga BORZOVA, Council of Europe
Social services in Europe: legislation and practice of the removal of children from their families in Council of Europe member States (2015)
“Adoption is archaic, we have many other options, if only we would begin to look at parents as human beings again, instead of the monsters we have painted them to be.”
PFAN, Love Barrow Families, New Beginnings, Parent and Carer Alliance, Southwark Family Council and Parent to Parent Peer Advocacy
Children’s Social Care: The Way Forward (2022)