Anthony Douglas

Chair of the London group of the Association of Directors of Social Services

Anthony Douglas, chair of the London group of the Association of Directors of Social Services, kindly gave Pat Basquill, chair of Trackers International, permission to quote from this article, which was first published in Inform, the association’s journal, then in the Guardian.

"I saw my birth father just the once, at his back gate, as he was driving home from work. I’d been longing to meet him, as his potential emotional assassin, for a good many of my 28 years.
It was 1978. I introduced myself to this man as his son from the relationship he’d had when he and my birth mother were both 18.
As a five-minute conversation, it was one of the more memorable I’ve had.

Within the numbers of missing or absent fathers in Britain, more of these bizarre meetings and conversations are taking place every day, with children, now adults themselves, compulsively setting out on a journey to discover their origins.
Not so much The Origins of the Species, as the origins of a foetus.

Growing up adopted had its ups and downs. I had a better education in London than I would have done as a child of a shunned single parent in the northeast during the 1950’s. On the other hand, I might have met Bobby Charlton on the streets of Ashington.
While I am probably better off in material terms, I have no sense of place or community to return to.
I always thought I was in the wrong place in a west London suburb, but then so did lots of my mates. We saw the suburbs as a British wilderness, as culturally arctic.

The politics of adoption is just politics. It trades in quick fixes to irreconcilable personal traumas.
In my adoption quadrangle, four groups lost out: myself and my adopted sister, who felt deprived of our rightful families (she has different birth parents): my adoptive parents, as we were patently not the answer to their sterile childless marriage, but who did nothing wrong: my birth mother, who was forced to relinquish me or else be banished from her own family and community; and my own family who have had to live with those of my moods directly attributable to a detached and muddled childhood.

If there is one thing I find depressing but predictable about government thinking, whichever party is in power, it is the obsessive kow-towing to adults who want to adopt, and the implicit policy of being seen to maximise their chances of realising their dream, even if nobody else can.
The voices of children and birth mothers, and the role of family support in keeping families together, are scarcely audible.

Of course many children are desperate to be adopted, and more children should be settled with secure families rather than drifting through the care system. But if it was hard to find the right adoptive families 50 years ago, let’s not fool ourselves it's any easier now. The kids are usually older and more disturbed, second hand children with burned-out engines who disrupt and reject the very love they need to get started again in life.

Many will never be able to let go and trust, however wonderful the adopters. Some will need foster care. Some will need residential care, unfashionable as that has become. Just as many should be placed with relatives as should be placed for adoption.
Where do we hear or read of the role of grandparents, aunts and uncles and the post-placement support they need?
Or indeed, of a properly resourced national placements budget which funds what’s needed, rather than cash-limited local authority child care budgets which face countless other priorities?

Don’t get me wrong. I support present government policy. Setting up a national adoption register to match children with adoptive families is sensible, although placing children in another part of the country is not as simple as it sounds. Children are often bullied if they arrive at school with a different accent. And we must not return to the days when inner-city children from minority ethnic races and cultures were placed in the middle of whites-only areas. The jury will be out for many years yet on whether trans-racial placements work.
Some do, but we can’t base social policy on a hit-and-miss success rate.

Relationships are changing faster than politics. In some urban school classes, few if any children come from two parent families. Serial families and temporary households are commonplace. Many children in the care system face a future in which their caseworkers and carers routinely move on, so there is no constant person in their lives.
Minor legal reforms, and speeding up the adoption process, will make a small difference when the current prime ministerial review is implemented, but a greater challenge will be to find enough carers, whatever their status, for children with exceptional levels of need and disability.

Adoption as an issue is a red herring in terms of the future of British child care provision.
The real issue is resource deficits – of carers, of sufficient skilled and trained social care professionals, of post-placement support and of preventative services.
Solving those will take more than soundbites."

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008