Adoption is about children. It is about placing children who have not been blessed with loving and supportive environments into them.
It is not about easing the misery of parents who are incapable of caring for their children, or appeasing the guilt of parents who neglect their children, or fulfilling feats of social and demographic engineering, or religious agendas, or ensuring the smooth running of sections of local authorities. It is about children. Somehow, the grotesque farce of Britain’s adoption system has evolved to the point where this appears to have been forgotten. It is time to start putting it right.
Martin Narey, the former head of the Prison Service and chief executive of Barnardo’s, was commissioned by The Times to produce a review of Britain’s flawed adoption system. Rather than just complain, he has also delivered proposals to remedy it. He has now been appointed as the Government’s first “adoption czar”.
In part, his review is a passionate defence of the practice of removing vulnerable children from families that are failing or abusing them. It is also an assault on the fashionable belief that the preservation of the biological family unit is an inherently preferable outcome, and should be the driving force behind care for the young.
Why should it be, Mr Narey movingly asks, that some children who have been taken into care are tormented, often for years, with the instability and emotional damage caused by system that places a premium on returning them to their biological parents, even when there is scant evidence that these parents will ever be any more able or compassionate than they have previously been, and ample to the contrary? While this is happening, adoption is not happening, and the chances of a successful adoption are ever shrinking.
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The older a child is at adoption, the less likely that adoption is to succeed. Everybody involved in the care system knows this. Yet, due to the unthinking fetish for biological families, along with local authority red tape and incompetence and numerous administrative and cultural absurdities, the average time taken to place a child in care into an adoptive home has grown and grown.
On average, the process now takes two years and seven months. What once was considered the norm — the adoption of babies — is now a statistical insignificance. Last year, there were only 70 children adopted under the age of 1. In England alone, in the same period, there were 3,700 children under a year old out of the 64,000 in care.
Not all these children are prospective adoptees. Yet the chances of a child being adopted vary wildly across local councils and ethnic lines. As The Times has discovered, some councils manage to find a new family for one child in every five, while others manage only one in every fifty.
One in ten black children in care finds an adoptive home, compared with more than a third of white children. Often, this is the result of specific local authority policy. About 10 per cent of prospective adopters are turned down because they are white and children requiring homes are black.
We treat tens of thousands of babies, toddlers and older children as if they are none of our business — as if, in short, they are other people’s. But from the moment they fall into the nation’s care, they are our responsibility. We are failing them, through a mixture of political neglect, bureaucratic inertia and cultural bias. There are couples desperate to provide love and a good home to a child. There are young pregnant women who now make difficult choices on the assumption that to give a child up for adoption in this country is to consign him or her to a life in care. Most of all, there are children, lost and languishing, but within reach of a loving home, if this country cares to do anything about them.