Adapting adopting
Adopted children should have more contact with birth families, report says
Adopted children should have more opportunity to keep in touch with their birth families unless this would not be safe for them, a High Court judge says in a report to the senior judiciary published today. Mrs Justice Judd, who sits in the family division, says that people who have been adopted should also have better access to their family records.
Judd was asked to review adoption by Sir Andrew McFarlane, the senior family judge of England and Wales, as part of a project to better address the needs of children and families after a steep rise in the number of care cases coming before the courts.
Her report points out that until the 1970s mothers would give up their babies for adoption with no expectation of future contact. It says “the stigma attached to illegitimacy and infertility meant that the decision not to promote contact was considered to be a protective factor for the adopter, the adopted child and the birth family”.
Since the 1970s, adoption has been used as a way to take children out of the care system. These children tended to be older and were more likely to have some memory of their life before adoption.
At the same time, says the report, “research was beginning to highlight that closed adoptions might raise some significant disadvantages. There were concerns that it might lead to difficulties in the adopted person making sense of their identity, greater anxiety among the adoptive family about the possible risks posed by the birth family and problems with the birth family coming to terms with their loss”.
The number of adoptions in England and Wales peaked at around 25,000 in the late 1960s but was just under 3,000 in 2022.
Contact
Legislation passed in 2002 requires courts to consider contact before making an adoption order. Amendments in 2014 allow courts to order post-adoption contact. But such orders are rare and tend to consist of “letterbox” contact, which involves the two families sending letters to each other, perhaps through an intermediary. Indirect contact of this kind can be challenging for all concerned.
Apps are being developed to exchange information electronically. Arcbox is marketed as “a child-centred, digital platform that houses an interactive life-story tool and a communications app to safely facilitate and manage birth-family contact”. Another such platform is called Letterswap.
Today’s report calls for a major change on the issue of direct contact:
Greater consideration needs to be given, throughout the child’s minority, as to whether they should have face-to-face contact with those who were significant to them before they were adopted.
It is recognised that this will not be safe for all adopted children but the current system whereby face-to-face contact is the exception rather than the rule is outdated.
Records
“The ability to obtain access to information and records about birth families is of huge significance to adopted people and their families,” today’s report says. “Although the need for sensitivity is ever-present, people now appreciate that the shroud of secrecy which has so often surrounded adoption can be very detrimental to the health and well-being of all involved.”
But the working party found “concern amongst judges as to what principles to apply to court applications and inconsistencies between courts as to how they are processed”. It called for more guidance.
Practice and procedure
“The current practices and processes involved in adoption and placement applications can be slow, distressing and often confusing for the parties involved,” says the report.
It recommends a series of practical improvements, including more guidance on international adoptions and a national strategy for the small number of cases where parents now choose to place a baby for adoption.
Response
McFarlane welcomed the report’s recommendations and thanked those involved. He delivered major speeches on adoption last November and in May of this year.
“The recommendations concerning contact with a child’s birth family are especially important,” he said, “but the particular arrangements in each case much be determined by the needs of the individual child.”
Comment
This report took four years to produce and is not going to lead to lead to the immediate changes that some families may have been led to expect. The review is intended to be a catalyst for positive change but this will need the support of those working in adoption and related services.
Some reforms will depend on developments in case-law, others will require legislation and many will not succeed without adequate resources.