To think that forced adoption is the best thing for many children

[ReallyTired]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31089412

Clearly taking a child into care or complusory adoption should be a last restort. However I don't think that there is a fundermental right to be a parent. There is a fundermental right for a child to have a decent childhood. Parents should not be numerous chances to get parenting right. Baby P is a prime example of a baby who should have been taken into care at birth.

I feel the secrecy of the family courts is an issue. In many cases there are strong reasons why someone should never be allowed to have care of a child. We need a way that there can be an appeals proceedure that puts the right of the child first.

Yes I do agree. Another issue it raises is that since it's very difficult to find children for adoption here, those who do want to adopt usually end up adopting children from overseas.

I think the idea of children being in long term foster care or orphanages is far worst than adoption. If parents cannot turn their lives around in a certain time frame then we need to look at providing a stable childhood for these children.

A placement with birth parents, foster parents or adoptive parents should be for the benefit of the children rather than the carers.

my dp says he should have been taken from his parents when he was a baby, when he was first abused to the point of losing his sight, when he was just weeks old. [sad instead he stayd there for another five years and still has memories of some of the things that were done to him. second chances for parents like that? fuck that.

Ah well it looks like the social workers/police finally descended just now on the neighbours. Two car loads of very official looking people. Only stayed half an hour so have clearly bought whatever tale they've been told. And no doubt so the story will go on. Those kids will be screamed at and abused, and be too scared to tell teachers or friends. Or they won't want to as it's their normality. And even if these people get moved on, their next neighbours will complain - and the next. And nothing will be done til one of these kids is badly attacked - or dead. Then the papers will scream "Why didn't the neighbours do something?"

I'd be amazed if they have even been forced to go to some half arsed 'parenting class'. And they had the SS descend over a year ago, so if there was any intervention, it failed. How many 'second chances' do these abusers get? And what about the damage done to their kids (and mine having to listen to it) in the meantime? Just get the kids to a place of safety already. Whether a home, fostered or adoption - anything has to be better than being the emotional (and possibly actual) punchbag of a pair of inadequates? I don't get how the parents' rights to parent are more important than the children's right to a childhood and some chance of normality in adulthood. 2 and 4 - still cute enough to foster/adopt.

One of my son's friends at nursery was adopted. He was born to some local teenage addict. His mum told me she went through hell to get him - and she happened to be a qualified social worker, herself. For some reason, even though he was given up as a baby, he was stuck with the chavvy name the birth mum had given him. He was a lovely kid, growing up in a lovely home with a family who adored him and luckily got out fast enough to not be damaged by the birth mother.

My oldest son is the right age to have had a classmate who was one of those Romanian orphan babies you saw rocking themselves backwards and forwards in shit covered cots. He was also got out of the situation as a baby and was a lovely, normal child. He had some sort of restricted growth problem, though, because of malnourishment as a baby.

I think getting children out of any bad situation is better than giving people second chances - abusive people are likely to be recidivists, surely, like sex offenders?

Joffrey you don't know what has been going on. 2 car loads of people? Unlikely to be social workers. Social workers tend to visit with police if they are concerned that they may need to act immediately as police can remove children without an order (social workers cannot)
The child also needs to be at immediate risk for that to happen. More likely, if it was social workers visiting, that they have returned for a strategy discussion with the police and will make a plan going forward.
They could go to court for a care order within a couple of days if that is what is decided.

My cousin had her first baby taken for forced adoption. The baby wasn't at risk of deliberate abuse but unintentional neglect, if that makes sense.. my cousin would have wanted to do the right thing but probably would have made the wrong choices.

Three years later she was pregnant again but her social worker felt she had grown up enough to be given a chance. Her son is almost a year old and still with her, things seem to be going well. Would things be going well for her daughter, who was adopted when she was two, if she had stayed with her mum? Who knows. I don't think the forced adoption was a matter that the social workers (or whoever it is that makes those decisions) took lightly.

Yes, could be two cars loads of social workers - whatever they were it was Officialdom. Mob handed, though, several with clipboards and they were almost all blokes.

I have assumed the younger child (who seems to be the difficult, screamy one) had fetal alcoholic syndrome or something, given the state of the mother 98% of the time. So hopefully that child was already on the radar.

The older one (aged about 4) goes to the village school nursery. I'm not sure if he's too young for a social worker to descend on him at school, and ask questions..? I think the only way they will get to the truth - given the parents' constant denials - is to get the older child to tell them what's going on. Of couse, by the time he's old enough the damage is done. The kids are always clean looking and well presented (dad is nearly 50 and he seems to do the parenting from all we have seen and heard). But I'm guessing social workers are used to that and see through it, if something sinister is going on beneath the surface...

I can almost guarantee they weren't social workers. Possibly housing if they were all men with clipboards.

Could be housing. Must have been half a dozen of them though!

When the social workers came weekly for a couple of months, they always had clipboards.

Last week a bloke in what looked like a Jag pulled up and got out. he was (expensively) suited and booted and had a briefcase. My husband reckoned it was a bailiff. I should add, I only knew someone was there at all, because my dog barks at the slightest noise outside so I tend to go and look just in case - also I'm expecting a deliveries a lot of the time.

They have very few friends - and it's been a while since they have had any visitors. Never have other kids round to play and because all the neighbours have heard them shouting and screaming in the garden, no-one dare speak to them. So they are isolated - but only because any interactions they have had with people have been aggressive or threatening.

If these were social workers they were high up ones - not the usual ones we have seen. Better cars and much better dressed! If council workers, that would be the entire dept at our local small council's housing office. A community officer from the council told me a couple of months back they'd been served with a Notice of Order Seeking Possession: not for DV or antisocial behaviour, we think, as we haven't been called to court as witnesses. But the chances of them being evicted are low, as they have young kids and can spin a sob story. But that also accounts for why they are so keen to keep the kids even though they can't cope with them at all. Lose the kids, lose the council house?

After all this, those kids will be left in that situation, and every time we approach the authorities after witnessing the latest thing, we'll be made to feel like arseholes.

No forced adoption doesn't mean that children will necessarily remain with abusive parents. I live in a country where there is no forced adoption, and the authorities can and will remove children from their parents. Such children are then out into foster care or orphanages.

Surely then forced adoption is much better. If it's only happening when authorities are confident that a child will not return to their birth family. It's got to be a much better option than a children's home or foster family.

I don't think anybody is arguing that children who could have remained with their families should be swooped down upon and adopted. If we are only talking about cases where children can't remain in their families then surely it's a no brainer? I can't see any downsides at all. Am I being really naive?

Yes I do think that forced adoption is a better option. But I do wonder why it's such a rarity - very very few countries allow it. I'm not sure what the arguments in favour of long- term foster care/ orphanages are, but the UK is unusual in allowing forced adoption

I worked with a kid whose home situation was untenable and she was with a foster family. They were brilliant for her, and she started to thrive with them. They were happy to have her longterm. Forever, essentially. Her mother had murdered her father - in front of her. So mum was in hospital and dad was dead.

And she was doing well and happy with them and doing well in school - I was her teacher in Year 3.

The only destabilising thing in this situation? The social workers. Her social worker once told me, in a meeting, quite gleefully words to the effect that the foster carers were the "wrong shade of black". Essentially, birth mum of little girl had come from one Caribbean island and foster carers another. SW told me she'd have no compunction in getting the girl moved to a new foster family, if one came up that was 'a better fit'. This was years ago. The 1990s. I hope things are better now. I suspect they're not.

All these years on and I have never forgotten that SW's actual pleasure in the thought of uprooting this little girl, who was a delight, and whose foster parents were so caring and involved in the school and the little girl's life. She had found a love and stability she could never have hoped to find. But the SS would have moved her on at the drop of a hat. My input wasn't required - yet I was with her from 9 - 3 every day and knew her better than most of the adults in her life. My husband and I were invited by the foster parents to see her as Mary in their church's nativity play, one evening. We went and had a lovely time. She was one of my favourite kids ever. By the end of that year, she was scoring the highest grades in the class in standardised tests we ran at that school. That would not have happened had she been unhappy at home with her foster parents.

So when people go on about how unstable foster care is upto adoption - experience makes me sceptical. If that situation is unstable, one reason can be the social workers involved. Not the foster carers or child.

Joffrey please don't parrot stories that supposedly happened in the 90s as if they represent anything now. I fail to see how you knew the people with clipboards were social workers anyway - we don't wear uniforms!? And high up managers don't do home visits. I really don't like the way you are making all sorts of claims you can't possibly back up and using them to bad mouth social workers.

I live in a country where there is no forced adoption, and the authorities can and will remove children from their parents

And then what happens to them? If it's Ireland a series of foster placements until they get thrown out.

And many children not taken into care when they should be because the alternative of constantly moving between foster carers isn't frankly much better so whats the point. There is no hope at all of a fresh start somewhere else for a neglected or abused child.

Becasue parents rights are more important than the childs.

I don't live in Ireland, and I am not at all arguing in favour of lomg- term foster care/ orphanages. I have already said that I think forced adoption is the better option.

I was posting because it seemed that some posters thought that no forced adoption means children aren't removed from parents. And slso because I think it's interesting that forced adoption is not allowed in most countries, when it does seem to be the best option

Sorry Odoneel I jumped the gun!

I get so irate when people think that countries which have no adoption without parental consent are utopian dreams for children with neglectful parents that I did read your connect your earlier posts.

You need to get some people with direct experience of a country with no hope of adoption for the majority of neglected children to hear first hand what a hopeless situation it is for many of them.

And it does discourage people from reporting abuse and neglect becasue they just don;t see the point

Oh and the reason countries have no forced adoption is not because there is a compelling reason for it but because there is written into law the enshrinement of family (or marriage) rights. And mostly these rights way pre-date any sensible research into the best outcomes for the children.

I think partly what's needed is more openness and accountability in the family courts. There's a lot of scaremongering at the moment, particularly online, about SS removing children for spurious reasons. And because the process is so secretive forced adoption can be a very frightening threat to patents with mild mental health difficulties, financial or housing problems, or who have children with behavioural problems. To a lot of patents the secretiveness leads them to believe that it's a danger to them (rightly or wrongly, I don't know). More openness about the reasons for forced adoption might well mean more support.

It seems some of you are all too ready to criticize and condemn. Where is the support?

Joffrey how do you know there is physical illness, lack of familial support, financial trouble? With that family? How can you assume the mother is an alcoholic/addict?

Not excusing their behaviour, but I don't think such cases are as cut and dry as you'd be lead to believe.

it's very difficult to find children for adoption here, those who do want to adopt usually end up adopting children from overseas.

Can I just correct that statement because it's not true.

There were about 5,500 domstic adoption orders in the UK in 2014, there were 58 known intercountry adoptions finalised in the UK in 2010/11. I think numbers are now so small no-one even bothers tracking them.

I have no idea why anyone has the idea that intercountry adoption is the majority choice or the easier choice. In my experience its significantly harder (practically).

MrsDV - me neither (re clipboards) but more the the point I've never seen a social worker with a jag!!! Mine usually turned up on a bike.

And most family court cases are available (anonymised) on BAillii website. Beleive me the people who would suffer most if names were published in the majority of cases would be the birth parents.

For example www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCC/Fam/2014/B45.html