Adoption order rejected, child returned to birth family

[Lilka]

In the news today

Basically, in a first as far as I've seen, a Judge has rejected an adoption order application and returned the child to their birth family - I say returned, actually the baby has never lived with this aunt. The child was placed at 7 months, and is 20 months old now, but it was 5 months into the adoptive placement until the birth fathers identity was fully established (wrong bf named initially) and although the actual bf is incapable of parenting right now, he fought the adoption so the baby could live with his sister, who has been positively assessed, and the judge ruled in their favour after the hearing in November. The LA and Child's Guardian supported the Aunt.

Daily Mail article

The full court judgement is here, obviously better than any news story, but much longer

I have many conflicted feelings about the case and Judge's decision, but of course my thoughts are mostly with the baby's [s]adoptive[/s] parents right now

I also wonder whether this decision will impact upon future cases or not. Professional views on the case? (Spero?)

"What strikes me is that his birth family don't see the child as a person yet, they are fighting for the idea of the child who they deem to be 'theirs'. If they knew and loved this child"

But that is exactly the position prospective adopters are in when they are first considered for matching! They get a bunch of paper telling them things about the child. If the birth family haven't had the opportunity to meet the child, they can't be blamed for not knowing the child.

With this and the recent 'B-S' case I would be very concerned as perspective adopter.

I think yet again it's the courts making the decision on parents rights rather than those of the children. I don't believe moving this child to an Aunt at this stage is the right decision. The father dragged his heels for months causing this extremely painful situation for all concerned and even now doesn't want this child so it seems utterly bizarre to remove him from his loving parents to place him with a family member.
I would have a much harder time deciding what the best option were if he were to want to parent himself. I can not believe remaining with his adoptive parents and having direct contact with his birth father was not the best option for all concerned.
When we discussed foster to adopt with others everyone was saying about how risky that was, I'd always seen it that social workers were perhaps unwittingly downplaying the risks in normal adoption too. The B-S case and this one only seek to highlight that adopters are always second best in the courts eyes.

Lougle yes it is the same situation that prospective adopters are in when they go to matching/placement.
However, the other side of the equation is NOT the same. In normal adoption cases, the child is at that time in a temporary FC situation, rather than in a forever family.
I think there IS a difference between moving a child from FC to an adoptive family, and moving a child from a loving, caring family (adoptive or otherwise) to a different family (kinship care in this instance).

So prospective adopters cannot 'fight' for the child, they have no feeling of the child being 'theirs' before the child is actually matched/placed. And they are not contemplating moving the child from a stable forever home; rather, the child would need to move somewhere eventually in any case (unless the FCs decide to, and are allowed to, adopt the child).
So though prospective adopters have the same theoretical knowledge of the child, the whole situation is NOT the same.

Velvet, actually according to my reading of the judgement, it is absolutely and decidedly NOT about the parents' rights. Not the birth parents', not the adoptive parents'.
If I read this correctly, the birth father did not even have the 'right' to contest the adoption order. He was only able to contest it because the adopters 'permitted' him. He most certainly does not have any right for the child to grow up in his family.
The whole judgement reads as nobody having rights to the child, but the judge wants to achieve what is in the child's best long term interest. Of course, this is where opinions diverge.

The judge claims, by the way, that the ethnicity issues played NO ROLE in his judgement. He states that there is no evidence that outcomes are poorer in interracial adoptions. He sort of says he would have made the same judgement if all parties had been of the same ethnicity.

Basically, in my reading, he says that the child will have trauma in any case. Either the trauma of 'being an adopted person' - which at the moment is not at the forefront, but may become highly relevant to the child as he grows up. Especially, maybe, since he would have had to be told: Your birth family wanted to raise you, and was assessed to be perfectly capable to do so, and yet you were adopted. This 'trauma' includes not being immersed in his birth family's cultural heritage, not having a close 'family' relationship with his birth half sibling/birth father/other birth relatives. (Having direct contact is NOT the same dimension as growing up within the family)

Or the trauma of moving now, at the age of just under 2 years. And possible long term effects of this.

So the judge ruled that the latter was the least worse option - solely from the child's perspective. He reasoned that a) the adopters, loving their boy as they do, were committed to making the move as easy as possible; b) given that they had such a good attachment, it can be reasonably predicted that the child will be able to form new good attachments (which is very ironic - perhaps if the boy was less securely attached to them, they would have been able to keep him) c) the aunt was going to have intensive training on issues of attachment and parenting strategies and had shown herself willing, and able, to learn about these things; d) the LA had pledged unreserved long term support; e) the child's age played a role too, he was deemed to be young enough for this to make sense, f) professionals assured him that moving a child to a permanent home, at this age, done professionally and considerately, can frequently be highly successful - so with all of these factors, the judge deemed that though there WOULD be short term trauma for the child, chances were that in the long term the extent of the trauma would be mitigated. And hence the trauma of 'being an adopted person' weighed heavier than the trauma of 'having to move into a new family.

It is not a decision I would have been able to make, a think. But IMO at this stage of proceedings, the judge should NOT have ruled solely based on speculations about the best long term interests of the child. IMHO it is a matter of 'too late'. Birth parents who are not involved with their children's lives out of their own free will (as this father was, and as is the case in cases of relinquishment) can and do change their minds; but after a certain point, they are too late. In cases of relinquishment, this point is reached after the child has been placed for adoption, and most certainly after an application for AO has been submitted. IMO it should be the same for fathers who 'practically' relinquished their children by choosing not to have anything to do with them. They can change their minds, but only up to a certain point; in this case, that point was passed.

That's an interesting comparison with relinquished children. If the birth parents of a relinquished child decided to change their decision when they were informed of the adoption order application and wanted the child to go to a family member, would we be in the same situation?

My heart goes out to the adoptive parents - I can't imagine the pain they're going through.

"Birth parents who are not involved with their children's lives out of their own free will (as this father was, and as is the case in cases of relinquishment) can and do change their minds; but after a certain point, they are too late"

The father acted as soon as it was made known to him that the child was in care. I think that, given the relationship dynamic, that was a reasonable action. We're not talking about people in long-term relationships here. We're talking about a man who was cheating on his long term partner and a woman who was sleeping with several men. He wasn't going to want to risk his relationship for contact with the baby if that also included admitting his affair. However, there is a huge difference between denying you had an affair (and by extension that a baby is yours) to the realisation that you may never be able to have a relationship with your child.

Also, as I read the order, the couple had only had the child for three months when they applied for the AO and the father contacted SS one month after that. So people who are saying 'but he's been with them for 13 months' aren't giving credit to the fact that both the APs and the father have had to wait for 9 months to find out what will happen. It isn't their fault. Either of them.

The fact is that mistakes were made on all sides (bar the APs themselves) and while I don't find it very comfortable that a father can day that he wants a child returned to his family but not look after the child himself, and don't find it comfortable that the aunt and the father actually live quite some distance away from each other, kinship care is first choice for children who can't live with their parents.

kinship care is first choice for children who can't live with their parents normally yes and obvious the judge decided that this in the end over-rode every other consideration. But this not the normal situation - you would normally be searching for and assessing kinship carers as a first resort not removing the child from a settled and supposedly permanent home in order to resettle them with "stranger" kinship carers.

I'm not arguing that kinship are isn't the better solution in cases where a good kinship carer can be found. I'm not even arguing that the judge got it wrong here. I truly have no idea.

I am however saying that as a parent of a child with attachment problems aged 9 having been adopted aged 1, I think some of the professionals including the judge are remarkably dismissive about how the child will most likely find it easier to adjust because he are well attached to his current "parents".

I really am not convinced that people who haven't lived with this really grasp this point and how difficult it can actually be for the child.

ANd no Devora I don;t think the different issues our DC's have with their race is anything to do with parenting. My unprofessional suspicion is that its a combination of personality and school. Our school is so mixed race that its almost a caricature of itself!

Mixed Serbian/Korean, South African/British, Sudanese, Japanese, Bulgarian, Pakistani, Central Asian (DS), Ghanaian/British, Arabic/Pakistani - and thats just DS's class alone - you can thrown in quite a few more in the rest of the (very small) school.

"The father acted as soon as it was made known to him that the child was in care. I think that, given the relationship dynamic, that was a reasonable action."

Lougle, I had a similar first reaction to that. But the more I think about it, the less it makes sense to me.

The father took over a year to find out that his son had been taken into care. His long term partner, the woman he had cheated on, she had found out within weeks. (But not told him apparently.) That just goes to show how VERY little interest/involvement he had in his son's life and wellbeing.

When he found out the boy was in care, he acted immediately. Which seems to indicate that he at least cared for the boy enough to not want him to grow up in care. Good for him. A bit late, but then at least decisively.

But.
For that whole first year, he was perfectly happy for his son to grow up with BM (as he assumed) (who, incidentally, is White, so is her partner, so they ethnically are the same as the adopters), and having no contact with his own family whatsoever. Having had a quite intensive affair with BM over several months, he must have been aware of some of the issues she had - drugs, alcohol, and more - issues which were significant enough for her other two children having been adopted already, and for her newest child to be removed from her care before leaving hospital. He won't have known the full extent, but he must have become aware of some parts. And yet he was happy for his son to grow up with her, and for him to have no involvement.

And a second but.
So he learned that his son was in care and decided that he didn't want his son to grow up in care, and put his sister forward to care for him instead. Ok; good for him. But then a week or so later he learned that his son was not actually going to grow up in care, but rather, was to be adopted (by 'perfect adopters' what's more).
So if it had been about not wanting his son to grow up in care, he would have dropped his efforts at that point. His son was NOT going to grow up in care; he was going to be adopted.
It seems to me that his continuing efforts to get his boy integrated into his family, must have been about something else. It seems to me that he simply changed his mind about wanting his son to play a part in his life.

In effect, he was happy for his son to grow up with a drug and alcohol abusing White mother with her violent/convicted White partner, who both pretended the boy was White himself, and with no involvement from him or his family (and don't tell me he could have just waltzed in later and attained access to the child - he had no legal relationship to the child at all, there being another man named on the birth certificate - any future contact would have exclusively relied on the BM's goodwill, a BM who probably isn't the most reliable and stable); as long as he assumed that his son was in that situation, he did NOTHING.
But he was NOT happy for his son to grow up with and be adopted by a loving, stable, thoroughly assessed and trained White couple who had dedicated a lot of effort to promoting the boy's ethnic and cultural heritage, and would have been willing to have court ordered regular direct contact. When he realised that this was going to happen, he fought tooth and nail for the boy to be placed with his sister instead.

Yes, I think there is a 'too late'. If he had heard of his son being taken into care/decided to come forward/decided that he wanted the child in his life, a couple of months or so later, the adoption order would have been through, and there would have been nothing whatsoever he could have done. So it would have been indisputably too late, despite the child's best interest perhaps still being the same as the judge judged - to be sent to live with the aunt.

And in my humble opinion, there are a number of reasons why it should have been 'too late' in this situation also. The parallel to relinquishment cases for instance. And the possibility that this judgement destabilises all adoption cases where the father is unknown or not disclosed, and all relinquishment cases. If adoption is to be one of the 'tools' in our toolkit, then it needs to be feasible, with clear legal implications. It cannot be that at that late change, a birth parent can 'change their mind' - be it on a whim, or due to them having attained new information (such as 'I just found out that the child is in care'). In relinquishment cases, if the relinquishing parent changes their mind at that late state, they have to fulfil a clear test - their desire to have the child back is not enough, them having attained new information is not enough; they have to be able to demonstrate a significant change in circumstances. AND then it has to be in the child's best interest, too. IMHO this should have been the test in this case too; but it wasn't even addressed.

I agree with 64, and all the wise words from Velvet, dibly and AdventuringAbout and others.

I am totally saddened by this case.

KneeQuestion you said ...the baby would not have been placed with a white family if his true racial background was known from the outset would he?

Children of mixed heritage or a different heritage are placed with white adopters if adopters of the child's heritage cannot be found within the 'child's time frame'.

Also the birth mother was white and the birth father was under the impression that the child was being cared for by her and her white partner, as 64 points out. I understand quite a few people are in families of mixed heritage where one parent leaves and so the remaining parent has could be bringing up a mixed heritage child while they are white or black. It is not that unusual.

Of course ethnic or racial heritage are important but they are not the only consideration.

It sounds like it is all about the birth father, why is he suddenly the most important person in the equation! Surely the child's needs come before his needs.

and KneeQuestion you said It is widely accepted that a black or mixed race child is better placed with parents/carers who are also black/mixed race. For many reasons.

Surely this is assuming all other things are equal. But in this case they are not. The child had been in an adoptive placement for a long time and had attached to the new parents. The aunt and birth father are people who have never met the child. The aunt also has a child of a similar age. Adoptive parents are normally dissuaded from adopting a child without a suitable age gap between children. So the two options are not, in my mind, at all equal, even though I am sure the aunt is a lovely person and a great mum to her child it doesn't follow she is the best mum to this little lad just because she is biologically related to him.

I hope it works out well for this little boy but I feel very very sad for him, it must be terrifying to be taken from all you know and should not be done without very good reason.

lougle but surely the child was in a suitable family, an adoptive one. The fact that the other family option was not known about makes all the difference because in all that time that child was attaching to those parents. The child has no say in all this. It has to be done for his best interests and I cannot see that it is.

Also lougle, you said To be fair though, a foster carer who grew to live the child after fostering him for a year or more would not be allowed to adopt the child because it would be traumatic to move them on to adoptive parents he had never met. From the child's point of view at that age, it's no different.

Firstly, some foster parents do adopt, if they are the best option for that child. It does happen. It doesn't seem to be encouraged and I wonder if that is because it may well mean a county council or local council would lose a good foster carer. But I know of a foster carer who was encouraged to adopt a child they were fostering and another who did because she was the best option for the child.

And to clarify, I am an adopter and not a foster carer and my child is older but to be honest I do think fostering and adoption is very different. Children in foster care know they are in foster care to some degree, they do not call the carers mum and dad normally etc. Of course this child is still very young but we now know that children can remember trauma in their bodies. Also, children are not usually in foster care at this age for this length of time.

Threeplus1 you said How also, would the child or adult react to the knowledge that they could have been raised in a willing and suitable birth family? This is not their birth family, it's kinship care. Also transracial adoption now is very different to how it was a generation ago, things are different and I think everyone now understands a lot more about cultural identity. The way things were done in the past was sometimes very wrong but to be honest I think a lot of the way all adoption was 'handled' in the past was done badly! With children not necessarily told they were adopted until they teenagers and some not finding out until old age! Lots and lots has been learnt about adoption, identity and heritage since those days.

I was just about to say Attachment issues can also affect children for a lifetime and I see Lilka has already said that.

This is, I believe, because trauma can affect how the brain develops, how fundamental is that!

I cannot quite believe the judge in questions understands this!

Also, it seems this father was really very much in denial. He may have only formally known for a while that the child was his but the father must have had an inkling that he was indeed the baby's father.

The report claims " ... during the pregnancy he {the birth father} had a chance encounter in the street with the mother and her own mother. The mother was obviously pregnant. The mother herself said nothing, but her mother said words to the effect that "it's yours." Although the father later claimed that he did not take that seriously, it must have been obvious to him that there was a real possibility of him being the father due to the history of frequent unprotected sexual intercourse around the likely time of conception."

Also "Soon after the child was born someone showed Miss D [the father's partner] a photograph of the baby. She could see that the colour and the features looked like her own daughter, F, and also like the father. She told him "I really think he is your child." He continued to deny to her that he had had sex with the mother and that, therefore, he could be the father."

Then... "... the father finally admitted as follows: "The mother came round to my flat about two or three weeks after the baby was born (viz in the first part of April 2013). She showed me some photographs of the baby. I could not tell whether he was white or black or mixed race. But the mother said that I was the only black guy she had slept with and that I was the father. She said that because she must have known that the baby appeared to be of mixed race."

So he was really only concerned with himself and attempting to deny that any affair had happened for a very long time, precious time when a different route could have been chosen for this baby.

I think this case is shocking.

IG, I am glad you raised the issue of the children being close in age: I have known friends where links have been turned down due to the fact they have bc of a similar age to the ac but here it doesn't seem to have been an issue at all. I also read the judgment in detail and do not accept the bf acted quickly as soon as he found out. He acted in a state of denial, completely on his own timetable and seemingly not to get into trouble with his girlfriend. This dilatory approach seems to have been sanctioned by the Court with no thought for how the trauma of separation from his parents is going to affect the child.

Lilka, sorry to ask but the original link you posted isn't working. I'd very much like to read the full judgment.

Children of mixed heritage or a different heritage are placed with white adopters if adopters of the child's heritage cannot be found within the 'child's time frame

Yes, but my point was, if the childs true ethnic background had been known from the outset , then it is likely that attempts to find an adoptive family that reflected that would have been made.

Yes, but my point was, if the childs true ethnic background had been known from the outset , then it is likely that attempts to find an adoptive family that reflected that would have been made.

YEs but thats not the point, the point is would you remove a child who has been settled with a family for over a year to another family which had the "correct" ethnic heritage. You can always wait a bit longer and hope to find a better match but sooner or later you have to shit or get off the pot and just accept that any permanent home is better than none.

The judge in this case weighed up the long term damage caused by another move to a child who is settled vs the long term benefit of being placed with a birth relative. Neither risk is known or quantifiable, Neither sets of proposed "parents" were culpable in any way for why the child was in this position.

In the end the judge decided that the long term benefits outweighed the risks. It wasn't specifically because of the ethnicity of either group. I think his assessment of the damage of another move is sadly not based in any reality that I live with. But I hope he is right and I'm wrong.

My heart really goes out to the adopters. It would be like a birth parent having your one year old child removed from you whilst everyone accepted you were brilliant parents and the child is settled with you and loves you but because someone switched the names at the hospital the child must go back to birth family - in fact to an aunt because the birth parents aren't considered to be capable of parenting the child. Staying with you and having contact with the birth family is apparently not an option

Thanks Jameme. I will read and absorb. On headlines alone, it sounds utterly heartbreaking and my thoughts are with the parents involved.

Kew - in a recent case in South Africa, the mother of a child switched at birth decided she would rather keep the one she had been raising rather than swap for her biological child (I think the outcome of this case was that both children remained with the family who had raised them, but can't just find a link)

Knee you said Yes, but my point was, if the child’s true ethnic background had been known from the outset , then it is likely that attempts to find an adoptive family that reflected that would have been made. and this is true. Although such a family may not have been found. But you are right they would have looked for such a family.

And sadly the social workers very (IMHO) very negligent in not taking into consideration that the birth mum might be unsure or lying (especially as she may also have wanted to conceal an affair, just as the birth father did). Sadly, this is not something new because in a documentary I watched years ago (and re-watched recently) called Love is not enough, a baby was offered to a mixed heritage couple on the basis the baby was mixed heritage but fortunately, for all concerned, the true ethnicity of the baby was discovered and the adoptive parents-to-be did not end up adopting that child, not even sure if they got as far as meeting the baby. They did get as far as just beginning to bond to a photo and they were pretty upset. This was years and years ago!

But IMVHO one blunder is not undone by a further blunder. This is my own opinion. I have noted more experienced adopters than I have said often they cannot say if the decision to move the child was a right or wrong one. I also cannot say with certainty whether this will work out better for the child in the long run. But my own option of this very sad matter is that it is not the right one for anyone in this situation, most of all for the child.

When our adopted son was placed with us (aged 3) I began to make him promises about his life with us, that we were his forever family etc. If I had been forced to break those promises I would have felt heartbroken, for myself but most of all for him. Of course I would have been devastated and maybe a part of me would never have gotten over that loss. But I am an adult and I was prepared for this process very well.

My son is older than this toddler and the age may make a difference in favour of this move (in that the move may not prove as devastating as many here are saying) but I do know a lady in real life whose son was adopted as a baby and he has attachment issues. Really it is a myth that a young child will not have issues related to adoption but these are not necessary about being adopted but about all kinds of other things like multiple moves etc.

Kew I do not ever normally disagree with you but in this case I would say the birth father and mother were to some extent ‘culpable’.

Culpable in that the birth mum knew she had slept with multiple partners and she knew there was a chance the baby was not her partners. For the birth father there was evidence from when the baby was very little that the boy was his! This was not from social workers or total strangers but from the mother of the birth mum (the woman he had an affair with) and that was while the birth mum was present, and from his own partner (who is also white and noticed that the ethnicity of the child was similar to the ethnicity of her own child with this man). The birth mum and birth father both caused this appalling delay in identifying the ethnicity of the child.

But my understand, if I have read other posters correctly, is that the judge said this was not about ethnicity but about birth family.

So even if the ethnicity had been known the child might have been placed with an adoptive family which reflected his heritage.

Would the judge have been taken the child away from an adoptive couple who matched his heritage so he could stay within ‘family’? I personally doubt it.

For me the whole thing makes a mockery (in my mind) of what adoption is, adoption is becoming a new family through law rather than biology and although the legal process had not ended in this very sad case, it had started and was very much in process.

Italian - I think your last para in your post of 1759 is spot on re adoption being becoming a family by law not biology.

I do wonder if the cumulative effect of this and other recent events will be that prospective adoptive parents will need independent representation where they are matched with a child from the same LA, whose priority will always be for the child

Italian I read Kew's post about "neither set of proposed parents" as meaning the adoptive parents, or the proposed household of the aunt. So I think you probably do agree with Kew after all, and the universe is all as it should be

Your post us very thoughtful and thought-provoking, thanks for writing it.

Not "us", should be "was" - sorry.