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

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Linking posterity

Reposting for posterity, because I think the links are so very much worthy. :)

[7rin] loves being on the Answer hidden due to its low rating list so hilariously often, and with such fantastically good company. :D

The question the base link in the post pointed at is: “So what exactly is my alternative to adoption in my situation?” over @ http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100824044336AA5ZbRu

Answer of the century award goes to Tish however, for her reply on the What makes someone a mother? question asked over @ http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100823193059AAxG6Px

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Sunny posted, asking:

What makes someone a mother?

Another poster on Y!A said this:

“The act of pushing out a baby does not make someone a mother.”

So what does?

tish_part deux‘s reply:

so…since the act of pushing out a baby doesn’t make one a mother, why the need for non-pushers to be on BIRTH certificates?

speaking of “birthing” these are the same folk who believe ALL BABIES have two mommy’s: a birthmother and a “real” forever family mother…

the idea that some mothers actually can become such without the use of another woman’s womb, is lost on some of these folks.

also, since the act of pushing out a baby is so diminished in the continuum of “mothering” they why do people spend gazillions of dollars to get knocked up in a lab, just to “push out a baby.”

personally, i have always thought that the “pushing out a baby doesn’t…’ banter was most often rhetoric from those who CAN’T PUSH…

i also find that those who can’t push, try to shift the “mother” definition to control for the ONLY variable which excludes them: the ability to conceive, gestated, and give birth to the child they are “mothering..”

so, i’ll try this:

a mother is one who:

conceived a child
gestated a child
birthed a child
nursed/nurtured a child
raised a child
loved a child

6/6==supermom
5/6==great mom
4/6==good mom
3/6==good enough, mom
2/6==try much harder, mom
1/6==give it up, mom
Source(s):
SUPERMOM who conceived, gestated, pushed, nursed, and raised my own children.

i’ll take my super mother prize in gift cards to nieman marcus…