As ever the topic of interracial adoption is a complex one, one that makes the headlines in the New York Times on the same day – link here.

I think the title of the NY Time summarises the whole thing correctly. Yes race (and indeed religion) do matter. They are part of a child’s identity, and it will stay way into adulthood. In an ideal world therefore we would want to match a child with the same ethnicity and why not religion parents. But guess what? We don’t live in that ideal world. We live in one where that choice isn’t always possible and the alternative to that ‘perfect match’ is a life in care shunted around the foster care system with multiple placements (in the majority of cases with temporary carers of a different ethnicity and religion anyway).

After that? The prospects are bleak. Crime, prostitution and homelessness are too often the only future for young adults leaving care as pointed out in our report from last year. 

To say that I found Nick Ferrari obnoxious in the interview would be an underestimation of my actual feelings towards him. Apparently he is amazed that I trust social services to be the ones to be making the right decision in the interest of the child. Who else would be? The birth family who had a total of three children removed from their custody and given for adoption?

In his biased view it should have been taken into account that four sets relatives of the biological mother came forward to adopt, and on top of that they were Muslim. How perfect blood related and same religion.

Should that have been a decisive factor? Being of a specific religion or even ‘blood related’ does not make anyone suitable to adopt.

Worse so Nick and a lot of the press around this specific case were clearly making a point that ‘on top of that’ the white women were lesbians too. So let’s throw everything in the pot why not?

This is going to get really boringly cliché now. What children need is the permanent love of doting parents. When that is provided by biological same ethnicity and religion parents that is great. When that is not possible then the next best available match has to be found to ensure the best interest of the child in paramount. In that case, dare I say like mine with two Mexican children, cultural needs of children can be met by different-race parents who are committed to the best interests of their child.

So that children are not made to pay for having been born in a family which for whatever reason couldn’t provide for them (in this case mental illness) and then for being of the wrong skin colour and or religion.

Being left behind languishing in a care system waiting endlessly not just for ‘a’ muslim family but ‘the right’ muslim family will never be the right alternative to a permanent loving family. Now.

Type the search term, ‘adoption in the Queen’s Speech.’ It is Not Found. No surprise there. We’re used to promises and talk but not much action. What we’re really disturbed about though is that the most repeated words in the document are ‘Cuts’ and “Councils’. Together. So how are we going to look after these vulnerable young people already suffering because of Osborne and Cameron’s austerity package? In our report last year, we noted that many young people in care will have experienced traumatic, dysfunctional childhoods. Sadly children are not given away because their parents adore them. They are usually taken away when they have been abused or neglected.

As it was clear in our report from last year. Many young people in care will have experienced difficult and often traumatic childhoods and many of them will have been abused or neglected.When they leave the system after a life in care, their outlook is bleak. Cameron and his government seem to want to make it even worse. How bad does it have to get?
Seven organisations – Barnardo’s, The Care Leavers Association, Catch22, the Fostering Network, TACT, Voice and The Who Cares? Trust – are calling on the Government to reform the system in a new briefing, “Still Our Children”, published today.
The number of young people aged 16 and over leaving care has risen each year from 8,170 in 2007 to 10,000 in 2012. This is the result of the State as corporate parent. Changes are needed to improve comparatively low outcomes for care leavers:

• 23 per cent of the adult prison population has spent some time in care
• Around a quarter of those living on the street have a background in care
• Care leavers more than four times more likely to commit suicide in adulthood
• In 2011 just 12.8 per cent of children who had been in care for a minimum of one year obtained five good grade GCSEs, including English and maths; for other children the figure was 57.9 per cent
• The number of 19-year-olds who were looked after when aged 16 years and who are now NEET is 36 per cent, double the number of their non-care contemporaries.

Yes we agree that young adults should benefit from more support when they leave care. We absolutely do. However might it not be better to address the problem at its roots. An adoption system that actually works for the participants and placed children with families in a timely manner would be a huge start. And it would lessen the care burden. The foster care system currently costs the state £2bn per year. If we add the costs of prison, homelessness, and drug problems, the overall cost to society is a big one. Meanwhile, the foster care system is imploding and there continues to be a major shortage of foster carers. If there was less need for foster carers, the current ones could foster for longer and the children would have some stability. Astonishingly the government appears not to have made these connections and they are the only ones who cannot see that without an holistic approach to the welfare of children in our society they are doomed to perpetuate this chain of neglect and incompetence.

Martin’s work in the criminal justice and prison system for twenty years convinced him that putting children in care was the moment a child’s life turned for the worse. He believes the problem with unwanted or neglected children lies not only in the current processes used to deal with them but also the general attitude surrounding adoption. Fundamentally it is not accepted in society. The idea of middle class people parenting working class children is not seen as inherently good but something to be pitied – a kind of last resort even when it all works out successfully. .

In The Times, Martin sums it up: “There is bad use of the research. There is the system itself — hopelessly slow — and there is some troubling confusion in both the legal system and among social workers about the Human Rights Act and how that affects the rights of parents and children.

“On Day One I want to persuade Tim Loughton, Michael Gove and David Cameron to lay down the line that children’s interests have primacy when it comes to intervention, to make clear that the Children’s Act puts children first and the Human Rights Act does not undermine that.”

Martin believes we can double the number of adoptions over the next two years and his report contains 19 recommendations which you can read here.

His proposals include performance league tables for local authorities to avoiding an often followed route where case workers place the child with a member of the extended family. As Narey says in the piece, this is, “often just another branch of the same dysfunctional family.”

In what is bound to be a major talking point he recommends that adoption be offered, as part of counselling, to pregnant women who do not want their child. I can see his thinking, especially as his research indicated that services which ‘help’ women with unwanted pregnancies, do not offer adoption as an option. He is scathing about the way social services appear to go with the flow, telling teenagers they will make good mothers and leaving them alone.

From The Times: “For six months we are all over her telling her how well she is doing and then she is on her own. What we are doing is cowardly. Adoption should be a third option to abortion or keeping the child. It is an attitude that must be allowed to grow. In the US mothers who give up their children for adoption believe they are giving them a great start. Here it is viewed as a success if we talk them out of it.”

After years of muddy compromise that leave children with a minimal shot at a decent life at best, I welcome his recommendations. They are clear, concise and go to the heart of what is wrong. I support the idea of allowing pregnant women to decide for themselves if they would like to have their child adopted as soon as it is born. This would certainly assist in cutting down the time (and misery) for children. Instead of languishing for years in foster care during which their chances of becoming dysfunctional and therefore unattractive for prospective adoptees, they would literally start life from the beginning in a better place.

Bruce Oldfield made this point in the foreword to my book Mexican Takeaway, saying that children do pass their ‘sell by-date.’ People find it harder to adopt older children and when they have been shunted through the system for years, they become more challenging as time goes on. And that’s the main cause of adoption failure, not colour or religious differences as the authorities would have the public believe. If we can make this dramatic change it will be literally life-saving.

I’m behind Martin and congratulate him. He is brave and no nonsense. I am also grateful to The Times for their relentless campaign and commitment to the children in care in this country. We have a target: doubling the number of children adopted out of the care system into loving homes regardless of creed, colour or culture. The government needs to grasp these recommendations and make things happen. Whether they are brave enough to take more than baby steps remains to be seen.

Black and mixed race children wait three times longer than white children to be adopted. For too long social workers in the UK have been implementing what are effectively ghettoisation policies where children must be placed with a family of the same ‘culture’ despite the availability of a loving, stable home in another ‘culture’. Meanwhile they languish in foster care scrapping for a life, while edging closer to their ‘use by’ date, the point at which nobody will want to adopt them because they have become too ‘difficult’ and unlovable.

While the government’s shift on this is a step in the right direction, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Only one-fifth of children waiting for adoption are from minority ethnic families. Meanwhile we have an adoption system that itself is a victim of neglect. It is hard to see how any change can be implemented by social workers without the necessary training. Yes, at times their decisions border on the ridiculous but what is even more absurd in when the DfE points the finger of blame at these messengers and refuses to be accountable for its part in this inhumane and at times, immoral, circus.

If this wasn’t enough to deal with, the lack of any coherent government strategy means it’s about to get worse. Cash strapped councils have always known they can save money by keeping children in care rather than helping them towards adoption. The cuts they are now being forced to make will only exacerbate the situation. While money can be saved in the short-term, the long-term cost to a society that already cannot afford to care for its neglected children may well be greater than anything the government has budgeted for.