Posts Tagged ‘Controversy’
Lost Daughters: Baby Veronica: What Adoption Does to Adopted Persons from a Legal Perspective
Lost Daughters: Baby Veronica: What Adoption Does to Adopted Persons from a Legal Perspective.
This post from Julie details much of why my Petitioning Parliament post was written. This is the basis of many of the issues created by adoption, some of which I extrapolated upon in my reply to Sir @martinnarey (who still hasn’t responded to my My Heart’s Desire post).
Julie’s post over on Lost Daughters (and the comments that follow it) talks about the impact that the act of being adopted will have upon Veronica’s life. The act of adoption changes the status of a person in ways that are more than just legal. The societal aspect of living as an adoptee is a minefield. If we’re happy with adoption, then we’re happy with the fact that a child is growing up unrelated to their own kin – whyever this happens, it is something sad. If we’re pissed at adoption, then obviously we must have “had a bad experience”.
One of my more recent FB page creations is The Lucky Adoptee, who – contrary to popular perception – I consider myself to be. I did get the steady life that adoption promises. While we weren’t by any stretch well off, my APs were excellent at juggling money (a trait I sadly missed out on picking up ;)) and so the life I lived was comfortable. In fact, were it not for the issues that BEING ADOPTED has caused for my life, I actually would’ve had that fabled “better life” that is the lure of adoption.
#WASO40 hints at posts relating to the future, so for inclusion I’m finishing where I started; wanting to get legislation changed so that the ADOPTEE is the one who ultimately gets to decide what they want for their life. Giving adoptees the chance to annul/overturn/however you wanna phrase it THEIR OWN adoptions scares people though – any of us could become ungrateful bastards if we can all undo what’s been done to us, think of how the number of adopters’d plummet if they knew we the adoptees could have the final say over whether our adoptions’re “forever” or not.
Is child abuse natural?
The following post was originally started {quote}5 months ago (8 March, 2013 @ 13:15:06){/quote}
I’m releasing it into the wild now – unfinished – after seeing Cheryl Bell’s Twitter post that linked to The Telegraph article, Head of children’s services chiefs accused of ‘defeatism’ after he says ‘we will never prevent all child deaths’.
It will, for the immediate future, remain in this unfinished state as I am still in recovery from my latest adoption-induced breakdown. However, I don’t think he’s wrong, and have been wanting to look into this in greater detail, hence the post being started.
{{ – – Everything below this line was in the draft that I’d saved – – }}
I was hunting for a post I remember reading recently on animals in the wild being abandonded by their moms to put in the “Taking newborns” post.
Mother’s Day Mayhem: “Worst” Animal Moms?
{quote}
This 2010 UK study is among many that show that the brain doesn’t reach maturity as once theorized until people are at least age 30. Executive functioning, such as planning and decision-making, social awareness and behavior, empathy and other personality traits, are the last bits of cognitive functions to fully develop.
{/quote}
Narey on Adoption
Martin Narey answers some parents… but not the adoptees.
Embedded above, rewritten below by me (so any typos’re likely to be mine, and I apologise in advanced if I got any wrong – all corrections’ll be followable by any thread :p); originally pimped out on Twitter by Mr. Narey himself.
{quote}
This is an open letter to some people who use Twitter to challenge my views about adoption. Some of those people have written or e mailed me and have received replies (albeit often necessarily brief replies). Others have preferred to stay anonymous and that’s fine. Some who tweet and blog have been abusive. I don’t much like that but I understand it because I believe it reflects an anger and sometimes a helplessness about their individual cases. I would, I am sure, feel the same way were our positions reversed.
I have never denied the reality that sometimes children are taken into care unnecessarily. It would be silly to believe otherwise when we have a workforce that is fallible. But I believe, and all I have read and seen supports this, that we have a far greater number of cases where we leave children at home when they should be removed. My interest is in children who are neglected (I know that children are taken into care for other reasons). I believe that, as a society, we tolerate neglect for too long. We do not, as many people believe, have record numbers of children in care. At the end of the eighties the care population was half as big again as it is now. And that was at a time when there were at least three times as many adoptions.
So I believe the case for care, for intervening earlier to stop neglect and then sourcing a new permanence for a neglected child is overwhelming and of course I shall continue to argue for that.
Incidentally, I do not – as many tweeters suggest – profit in any way from adoptions. And Barnardo’s, which I ran for six years never, in all that time, made any profit or surplus from the very small number of adoptions they dealt with. Nor do I have any power to intervene in cases. So I cannon, even if I wished, help to achieve the return of anyone’s child.
My role is simply to offer a view to Ministers about adoptions. That view is based on my experience at Barnardo’s and, since my resignation, many, many days spent visiting local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and speaking to adopters and the adopted as well as children in care and charities which support families struggling to keep their children. Some people call me the Adoption Czar, evoking an image of a large salary and a retinue of staff. Those things, like the Adoption Czar title, are inventions of the press. I have no staff and last year my total earnings from the Department for Education were about £40,000.
So what advice can I offer those who feel their children have been wrongly removed? It is this. Fight your case of course. But do not seek to do so by attacking adoption in general. Whatever the circumstances of your case it is demonstrably true that thousands and thousands of adoptions are successful. The number which breakdown are much lower than commonly believed (new research from the University of Bristol is likely to confirm this) and there are thousands of adult adoptees willing to speak positively about their experience. I am very close personally to four such adoptees and have met hundreds of others.
Nevertheless, I believe (and say frequently) that adoption is only appropriate for a small minority of the children taken into care in England, largely those neglected by parents who are unlikely ever to be able to be successful parents. It is indisputably right that for those children adoption brings stability and compensates for that neglect.
So, continue to pursue that which you believe in. But don’t undermine the specifics of your argument by ignoring the reality of neglect and the need for us as a society, when parents cannot be supported to offer decent homes (often because of drink and addictions) and if good quality kinship carers cannot be found, to find an alternative stability through adoption. Those who might advise that the way to seek resolution of your own cases is by seeking to undermine adoption are – at best – misguided. Instead I offer this advice sincerely, concentrate on demonstrating that the authorities have made grave mistakes in _your_ case
Kind regards
Martin Narey
{/quote}
Can UK Social Workers truly have “the best interests of the child” at the heart of their work
On Saturday 9th June this year, I went to the Birmingham Child Stealing by the State conference. I (kind of) gave a short presentation voicing some of the issues faced by adoptees (didn’t get to use my .pptx[1] ‘n’ got cut short to let John Hemming, MP go on :p). Whilst there, I heard it suggested that Social Work is a dying profession. This argument could be said to have merit, especially after the University of Southampton ended its degree programme in the subject, with a statement announcing:
the quality of the research being produced by the university was not of a high enough level to sustain the courses. It said it had not been able to reach a position where it could ensure that “internationally excellent research can be found in this academic discipline”.
Errors in judgement after errors in judgement after errors in judgement impact both public and professional perceptions alike – leaving it little wonder why the title has earned itself the rephrasing to Social Wreckers.
Whilst contemplating my personal attitude towards the Social Work profession, a timely reminder as to the nature of “social work” was posted by The Declassified Adoptee. “Social Wreckers” reminds the reader that not all social work is about taking kids. I actually am aware of this, but when caught up in the furore against wrongs, it can get difficult to still see some of the rights. Other Social Workers go nowhere near kids, and instead deal with the elderly, ensuring they get checked on when there’s no-one else left. Yes, I admit it, not all Social Workers are bad, or evil. ;)
Yet in this climate of fear these are people facing budget cuts, or other job threats for varying reasons. How can those who are in the child snatching adoption industry possibly have “the best interests of the child” at the heart of their work when their very jobs depend so very much on hitting the targets so recently drawn up by the Government in order to eliminate targets?
I honestly don’t think it’s possible that it can be – especially since it’s been known for decades that adoption is not “for the best”. That’s why in Australia, they’ve got it down to the sorts of figures it should be running at (if it must run at all). Perhaps somewhat more astoundingly, the Australian Government has issued an apology to those separated by forced adoption – yet in this country, forced adoption is on the rise.
Why?
It doesn’t make sense to me.
Of course, somehow or another, a paradigm change has happened over in Aus., and adoption is now seen as the last option, not the first. This is as it should be, because let’s not forget that despite “child protection” supposedly being about protecting kids; that child only exists for 18 years at most. Adoption stays inflicted upon us for the rest of our lives though.
If the Government are going to keep aiming to annihilate more and more childrens’ heritages, then they need to give the adult that child grows into the option to nullify their adoption. “As if” it never was.
ETA on 16 Sep
Another course bites the dust: Closure of MSc in MH Social Work at Institute of Psychiatry.
Footnotes:
[1] {THIS} is the .pptx that never happened, and {THIS} is the script I was stumbling over. And {THIS} little piggy is the snippet of a cam. copy of The Avengers, with the bit where “everyone” laughs when Thor says “he’s adopted” about Loki.
"Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful" - The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE
Adopted in the UK 