Leiland-James

[koalakate99]

I am pregnant currently, so probably over emotional.

A few years ago, a cousin's baby was forcibly adopted, the family were not entirely happy about this, ( cousin does have some mental health and historic addiction issues, but was very, very willing to make changes for the baby and had support of both myself and wider family).

Thee one thing that has been some comfort to my cousin, ( and the family I suppose), is that the process for approving adopters was meant to be very stringent, and so the baby, ( foster care since birth, ten months when moved to adopters), should have been well cared for.

Now this. This awful story has caused such upset amongst us .

Can I ask, honestly, how rare is it for people this obviously unsuitable to be approved ? ( very, i'm hoping !!)

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-61566996

My cousin is understandably in bits about this story.

Reading into it, it does seem awful, ( from other news articles), that his birth mum wanted to keep him, but soical services, ( who are meant to protect children), removed him at birth and placed him with a murderer who thought hitting babies was okay.

Oh I'm so sorry to read that.
It's heartbreaking.

There's so many awful cases arisen this last few years that just bring immense sadness.

There is cases of adopted children going to adopters who cannot cope and have harmed their AC but it's rare.

Please try, hard as it is, not get too saddened over these cases.
My eldest son was born around the baby P case and I became very down about it, looking at my baby and thinking of Peter.

All the luck for your pregancy OP, your baby will be born to a wonderful mother xx

It really is very rare. The overwhelming majority of people who adopt or foster just want a child to love and care for.

I am in no way defending Laura Castle or attempting to minimise what happened, but as always we don't know the full story.
This news report indicates that they struggled to bond with the baby, post adoption depression is as real as post natal depression. I don't suppose we will ever really know the full story.
But honestly something this extreme is exceptional. I'm sure your cousin's baby is well and happy

I genuinely hope so.

The fact SS took this child and placed it with an abuser makes us as a family more convinced that they also made the wrong decision when writing off my cousin.

The sad fact is, if SS had left this paticular child alone, he'd probably be alive now.

What was the assessment period like ? Was it pretty thorough ?

@koalakate99

yes I would say that the assessment is thorough.
You have medicals and have to provide references and have a DBS.
You have an assessment with a Social worker which is usually around 6 months where they pick over every aspect of your life, your own childhood experiences, your values, attitudes to parenting etc. There is also a preparation course which last about 4 days. You then go to a panel of people to approve you as a adopter.

When a child is identified for you, you have to to another panel ( different people) who approve you for that child. That decision then has to be ratified by a senior person in the authority.
When a child is placed with you your social worker still visits, every week initially, there are regular reviews and visits until you have your adoption order in place.

The news report suggests that problems were picked up in these routine visits but that action wasn't taken quick enough.

Just as I don't believe that all birth parents whose children are adopted are wicked, evil people, most deserve our empathy and understanding, I can't help feeling something more is in play here. Again I'm not trying to justify or excuse what's happened, or suggest that the verdict was not right, just that there may be more going on here.

The sad fact is, if SS had left this paticular child alone, he'd probably be alive now.

In all honesty there’s no way of telling. It’s incredibly difficult to remove a child from their parents, many are removed from situations that in the short or longer term present a threat to life.

That doesn’t change the fact that they should be safe with adoptive parents, but there really isn’t anything to say they would have been safer with their birth families. I imagine the couple having been assessed and approved during the first lockdown when services were very much trying to adapt to the restrictions in place will have had a bearing. I’m with @Ted27 in that there will be much more to this than meets the eye - I’ll be interested to read the significant case review when published.

Cases of adoptors seriously harming or murdering their children are so extremely rare. Sadly however there have been two cases of it in recent years. The other being the scully hicks case, again very distressing and very very sad.
Prior to that I beleive the only other case was in the late 90s. They do make the news because of course it should never ever happen.

Adoption assessments are intrusive and stringent. 99.99999r% of adoptors are wonderful people, and wonderful parents.

I can only guess that tragically whatever was lurking beneath with regards to laura castle just never came to the fore during the assessments process.

Surely your cousin would know how her child is? Most adoptive families maintain letterbox contact with birth families.

A few years ago, a cousin's baby was forcibly adopted, the family were not entirely happy about this, ( cousin does have some mental health and historic addiction issues, but was very, very willing to make changes for the baby and had support of both myself and wider family). Unfortunately, babies can't wait for adults to make changes. If you, and wider family, could have cared for baby and kept them safe, social workers have to have considered that.

Now this. This awful story has caused such upset amongst us . You and everyone- this is totally tragic, and upsetting.

Can I ask, honestly, how rare is it for people this obviously unsuitable to be approved ? ( very, i'm hoping !!) Clearly, this sort of case is very rare. It's thankfully rare for any mother to murder their child, however their family was formed.

Reading into it, it does seem awful, ( from other news articles), that his birth mum wanted to keep him, but soical services, ( who are meant to protect children), removed him at birth and placed him with a murderer who thought hitting babies was okay. There are two separate issues here. 1. Birth mums often want to keep their babies. The question is, as your family found, whether they can make and sustain changes needed fast enough to care for a baby.

Totally unrelated is number 2- social services fucked up. They totally fucked up here. And there should be a serious case review. Laura Castle murdered the baby placed with her, and that is abhorrent.

What was the assessment period like ? Was it pretty thorough ? Yes.

The fact SS took this child and placed it with an abuser makes us as a family more convinced that they also made the wrong decision when writing off my cousin. The fact SS cocked up, and that there has been one tragedy, doesn't make every decision to remove children is the wrong one. To be honest, I think you're being naiive, or dishonest with yourself about your, your cousin's, and your family's choices in this.

The sad fact is, if SS had left this paticular child alone, he'd probably be alive now. And you know this how?

However, I have a number of things to add:

• This is a board for adopters (often struggling with little support), adoptees and birth parents- it's an interesting choice to come here and expect adopters who are doing the difficult job of parenting traumatised children unsupported to manage and respond to your reaction on this topic. What do you want to achieve?


• Like everyone else- I suspect there is a lot in this case yet to come out, I hope the serious case review sheds some light.


• Maybe this woman is a murdering psychopath. Maybe she had post adoption depression. We don't know. But post-adoption depression is as real as post natal depression, and the fact that one mother murdered her baby shouldn't be used as a stick to make mothers who struggle to bond even worse, and unable to reach out and ask for help.


• I suspect that while every mum here will find the abuse of this baby abhorrent, just like every birth mum who has parented a child with colic, every adoptive mum who has parented a child who whines all the time has a small part of them that can empathise with those who are ground down by this.


• There are campaigns to remind birth parents not to shake their babies. No one is perfect. Babies push mothers to their limits. Traumatised babies/children can be even harder.


• Leiland James was failed. Failed by everyone he deserved to look after him. His birth mother, social services, his adoptive mother.


• However, I suspect Laura Castle was failed, too.

These cases are rare. And thank god for that. As an adopter, my feelings about it have been hugely complex, and I would have liked to have a thread here on the adoption board where we could honestly discuss that. However, this isn't it, where adopters are being expected to justify this terrible series of events, we had nothing to do with.

If your cousin is concerned about her child, post adoption support and the letterbox service should be able to help facilitate some reassuring contact. If you wanted to put a letter through letterbox as a member of the extended family, you probably could, and then if the child's parents wish, they may respond to you, even. Good luck with your pregnancy.

@Coffeelotsofcoffee and the Skylar Giller case.

I totally get why you're upset OP. It's a heartbreaking case and his birth parents and birth parents must be justifiably so angry. Lessons need to be learned from this and possibly heads need to roll. Sadly though ss can only manage risk from both sides and mistakes can and will happen. As an adoptive parent I can assure you that my daughter is loved to infinity and beyond (as I tell her every day), well cared for and she wants for nothing. I can also promise you that the selection process is incredibly stringent. This is an absolutely tragic case but please know that a vast majority of adoptive parents would go to the end of the earth for their children xx

A terribly sad, heartbreaking case.

Very sadly, no systems are perfect. I think our adoption process was pretty thorough, and we have done our best for our boy, and continue to. However, there are always some awful situations where children are harmed by the people who should be looking after them, and even killed by them.

Hopefully, your cousin has letter box and will be able to establish that all is well with her child.

I am sorry this is so upsetting.

It is probably not my place to post here but frankly it feels like adoptive parents are cut a lot of slack ("there's probably more to the story..." "Laura Castle was probably failed too..." "Newborns drive any parents to their limits"), while birth parents get none ("we don't know that the baby would be still alive if he'd been left with his mother..." "SS must have had a good reason to remove him...")

This may be understandable on a board populated mostly by adopters but that's not exactly a fair approach, is it ?

This view that adoptive parents are automatically above reproach because they had to jump through all these hoops is actually harmful, not only to adopted children but to the adoptive parents themselves. Perhaps there would be more adequate post-adoption support if everyone admitted that adoptive parents are just people, and they can get impatient, angry, resentful... Just as well as any birth parent.

I often hear that the threshold in the UK for removal is so, so high, that it's rare for this threshold to be met - but that is just not true, is it ? Out of all european countries, the UK is by far the one with the most domestic adoptions. It follows that it is the country with the most forced removals of children, since few people give up willingly their children. So the threshold is really not that high. In fact the threshold is the lowest in Europe. Not sure where this myth comes from tbh. You can think children are removed rightly or wrongly, but they are definitely removed more often than anywhere else.

I think the adoption system in the UK has a lot of issues frankly. The secrecy, and the fact that birth parents never win their appeals (that's when they're even allowed to appeal) doesn't speak of a system that works well - it speaks of a system that doesn't admit that it can (and will) make mistakes.

The mistakes when a child is wrongly left with a birth family are clear - they usually make headlines. But the mistake of a child wrongly removed is silent.

The point of this post isn't to bash adoption or adoptive parents. Adoption is a wonderful thing when done right. I just question the way it's done in the UK, and all the preconceptions that seem to surround it.

I'm sure some people on here will come to say "well MY children had to be removed, birth parents did X and X to them." That may be and I'm not disputing that some children absolutely have to be removed for their own safety. But can you really be certain that the thousands of children removed every year, every single one of them, truly is removed for the right reasons and every other avenue truly was explored ?

Considering the lack of post adoption support I do struggle to believe that pre-adoption support to birth parents is that much better.

Maybe if SS actually did have a high threshold for removal, they would have more resources to give to both birth and adoptive parents. And maybe UK parents wouldn't be scared of them (I have seen posts before of parents scared to ask for help as they were afraid of their children being removed. Judging by all of the above, I'm not sure they were wrong to be wary).

I'm sure the Children's Act was implemented with the best intentions, but it really feels like adoption has been so normalized (people forgetting so much what a trauma adoption is, whether the removal was justified or not) that adoption has become a go-to solution.

Here's the link to the statistics if anyone wants to check (see domestic adoption on page 3), it's a pdf file :
www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/583860/EPRS_BRI(2016)583860_EN.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjJkoz5-4D4AhXalZUCHWVBBYgQFnoECAgQAg&usg=AOvVaw15RLhIPSa8LPqzjxZgzR8v

Correction to my earlier post - while the absolute number of adoptions in the UK is the highest, it's not if you take into account population size. However it's still one of the highest in Europe so I think my point about the "high" threshold for removal not being really that high stands.

@Marty13

Where is it suggested that adoptive parents are automatically above reproach?

Have found some statistics around adoption/foster care deaths and injuries from adoption resources U.K.

19 deaths occurred between 2007 - 2019 of which 2 were children place with their prospective adopters. An additional 9 suffered significant harm.

www.instagram.com/p/Cc80xUSMyhQ/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

The thing that has struck most about the case is that Leiland James was left in the care of his prospective adopters despite his SW saying she would not support any application to the court for this particular couple to adopt even the review they organised to discuss the next steps was to be held quite some time later after the SW made this decision.

It follows that it is the country with the most forced removals of children, since few people give up willingly their children.

Im in Scotland, where around 2% of children are placed in care, of those who leave care around 6% will end up in adoptive placements (around 500 children per year), the vast majority of children are returned to their parents - and often taken into care again at a later date.

There are clearly issues to be addressed in this case, which the forthcoming SCR will deal with. The fact remains that adoption placement places unique stresses on the adoptive parents, the child and the birth family - it is an option of last resort. No one here is saying the parent here was above reproach, if anything adoptive parents often feel they need to meet much higher standards of care than birth parents because their child comes with significant additional needs at the time of placement.

Noone here is absolving the parent in this case of her responsibility, but we do need to look underneath to find out what happened given the levels of assessment and scrutiny that are part of the process. Simply saying she was evil won’t do that.

And in my experience children are much more likely to be left in incredibly harmful home situations in an effort to keep a family together than are likely to be permanently removed in error.

Just to clarify, my cousin does have 2x a year letterbox contact with her child, which reports the child as happy. Obviously the problem is, Laura Castle was highly unlikely to be writing " we enjoy hitting the baby," in her letterbox letters. Hopefully however, we can reassure my cousin the extreme behaviour in this case is very , very rare.

@rosiethefemaleone I think you need to think about your comments r.e. myself needing to "think about my choices," in relation t my cousin It is not my fault, or my choice she developed alcohol and mental health problems, which were as the result of grooming and extreme abuse by very nasty, ( and semi professional ), groomers in her late teens.

Not something the family would have encouraged in anyway.

@Marty13 , you make some incredibly insightful, thoughtful posts. I think removal at birth, ( especially when no other children have been born),is an incredibly overused tactic in the u.k.

No one is blaming the average adopter for this awful women's behaviour. Cleary most adopters would not dream of behaving like this. But it is upsetting.

Out if the over 600,000 babies born each year less than 2,000 are removed at birth - less than 0.5%.

How long do you think we should allow newborns to live with parents who can’t or won’t care for them? Over what timescale should we allow them to be neglected? New born babies don’t have the ability to meet their own basic needs, they can’t wait out a mental health crisis on the part of their parents, or wait for their parents to make the changes needed to care for them. What level of lack of care is acceptable? Those are decisions made by social workers and statutory services all the time. Too many infants are left in really quite poor conditions for too long with all the long term consequences for their health and well-being.

If a baby is removed at birth it’s because there have been clear, ongoing indications of the potential for significant harm to the new born, how much harm is too much for a very small to suffer? There are always reasons why a mother might be unable to care for her child, poor parenting that she’s received, early and ongoing trauma, substance misuse, significant mental health issues - the list is as long as time. Small babies can’t wait for the storm to pass, until mum is able to care adequately, they need immediate, constant, consistent care from the get go.

Most babies do end up returned to their mother, very few end up in long term care or in adoption, but those early weeks and months are crucial. And of course if social workers do leave a baby with their mother and things go wrong, their decision making is publicly called into question again. If we could have a crystal ball and see ahead to the parents who do quickly pull things together enough, or to see the ones who will for various reasons just never manage it, the job would be much easier - but they didn’t give me a crystal ball when I graduated.

I agree with pp btw. There is NO excuse for what this woman did to him. She will and should suffer consequences. Something you learn when adopting though is that there's just no room for hate or vindictiveness towards anybody in this world. Most if not all of the world's problems come from a lack of compassion and empathy not an excess of it. In the same way I feel heartbroken at some of the downright evil things that lots of birthparents do to their children but don't feel that there's anything to be gained from hating them or calling for them to suffer. The most important and constructive thing we can do is try and understand why these things happen and do whatever it takes to stop them happening again.

A child has a right to grow up in their birth family.

The only reason children are removed for adoption is because that birth family are unable/unwilling to parent that child. This is the law, as adoption is "draconian". So I stand by what I said. Maybe you were too young to care for this child, but what it means if a child is adopted out of the birth family is that NO ONE in the birth family chose, or were able to, put that child first, and honour their right to grow up in their birth family.

Look closer to home before you assume the family actually bothering to raise your cousin's child, probably with no support, are abusers.

If people want a general discussion of this case, without adopters who can see nuances, and areas of grey, the main boards are that way ->

I think most adopters know that adoption is a last resort for children. The best thing for a child is to remain with birth family safely. Unfortunately, this does always happen.

The amount of children taken away from birth is pretty small. I don't think you should exclaim that is it over used. My own son was taken away at birth. He was the youngest in a large family. He was hospitalised for over 5 weeks due to withdrawal. As @Jellycatspyjamas says newborns cannot wait for birth parents to stabilise.

It's a terrible thing that has happened and no one on this board is trying to suggest Laura Castle is innocent.

99.99999r% of adoptors are wonderful people, and wonderful parents.

99.99999 may not be murderers but that statement is crazy. I know three colleagues who adopted children and I wouldn’t have wanted my child to grow up with any of them. Not awful people, but certainly not wonderful people or parents.

OK...well 99.999% minus the 2 people you know? Not really sure what u want me to say. Obviously I wasn't being literal. I haven't personally counted them.

My point was most adoptors are great people.

This particular case is tragic in that a person who shouldn't have been 10 miles within a vulnerable child sadly managed to worm her way through the assessment.

Only the independent review will find out of reg flags were ignored .

I also think no one truly knows what type of parent they will be until they become a parent. Social workers have to assess both birth parents and adopters the best they can, often without the people being parents at that point. However, time isn’t always a luxury in the fact that bad parenting can have devastating consequences for all involved as in poor Leiland-James’ case. I think it is heartbreaking to know that the social workers had concerns but it is hard to criticise when not involved in the case.