AIBU - Men should not be allowed to adopt or foster children unless they're with a woman. Safeguarding first.

[RedQuail4]

I know this will get the "bigot" and "not all men" brigade out in force, but can we please talk about actual child protection instead of feelings and equality checkboxes?

Children in care are already some of the most vulnerable kids in the country. They've often been abused, neglected, or come from chaotic backgrounds. The state has a duty to place them in the safest possible environment, not to use them as a social experiment for adult rights or to prove how progressive we are.

Look at the data on who harms children. The vast majority of serious physical and sexual abuse is committed by males. Single male households show higher risks in the statistics for child abuse, domestic violence exposure, and poorer outcomes in some studies. Women aren't perfect (far from it), but the biological and statistical reality is that men pose a higher risk, especially without a female partner in the home. A woman in the household often acts as a natural safeguard - someone who is more likely to notice, intervene, or report concerning behaviour.

We've seen too many tragic cases where single men (or gay men with access to children without proper oversight) have gone on to abuse fostered or adopted kids. Social services and adoption agencies are under huge pressure to find placements, so corners get cut and "inclusive" policies mean they bend over backwards to approve single men. The child's safety should trump everything.

Why are we gambling with kids who already lost the lottery once?

Adoption and fostering aren't a right for adults. They're not about giving men a purpose or validating lifestyles. They're about finding the most suitable, lowest-risk home for damaged children. A stable married couple (or at least a man with a woman in the home) should be the gold standard. Single women? Fine, the evidence supports they generally manage better. Single men? A male couple? No. The risk profile is different.

If a man wants to parent, he can find a wife first. Harsh? Maybe. But we're talking about other people's traumatised children, not virtue-signalling or men's feelings. Safeguarding isn't prejudice - it's pattern recognition.

This isn't about hating men. It's about not ignoring sex-based patterns in crime and abuse data when placing vulnerable kids. Same reason we don't put male staff in every girls' changing room. Thoughts? Am I being unreasonable?

It is what you've said, it's how you've explained it. You've been very clear that what bothers you isn't homophobia, but the motivations of men who would want to care for a non related child, which I assume you believe must be nefarious. Whereas my view is some people in the world are just caring and nurturing. You can't relate and you don't know if others feel the same way. You're entitled to your opinion, I can't relate with not feeling care to others whether they're biologically related or not.

No.

It's not that all men in cases where there's two of them adopting an unrelated child will harm them, it's that the risk of it happening is too high to allow them to.

A person could drink a lot and drive. Maybe everything would be fine but chances are it wouldn't be.

This is why we have drink driving laws.

It's absolutely fine, on the basis of safety, to ban 2 males from adopting a child that is unrelated to either to them.

It could be utterly justified on grounds of safety, and legislation could be worded in such a way that it applied to all men regardless of their sexuality to avoid (untrue) accusations of homophobia.

It could be done now.

As an aside, this thread is really baffling: so many women willing to put the wants of men before children.

@QuintadosMalvados why do you keep focusing on the rights of men, instead of the rights of children? Because you keep skipping over the significant damaging consequences of implementing what you believe in. Of children being left without homes. Would you prefer we went back to orphanages?

So you can’t actually quantify the risk.

Also stop with the all men schtick. Straight men do not adopt children together. Be honest about what you’re talking about - you’re talking about gay men adopting together.

And you ignore the reality of thousands of kids living in happy, heathy, stable and loving families with gay dads right now.

Those are the sorts of kids you are very relaxed about allowing to just remain in foster care without giving a toss about their wellbeing - so you can also stop pretending any of this is about the welfare of children.

Because the poster doesn’t actually care about children or their welfare.

They’re perfectly happy for kids to remain in foster care for their entire childhood.

@ConveyancingHelll I think you might be right, though I'll probably get told I've misinterpreted that too...

Another one - so just to clarify you’re fine with hundreds more kids each year being left in foster care for their whole childhood rather than have stable, permanent, safe and loving homes?

I mean fine if that’s your position I guess but can you see what that is the opposite of thinking about the wellbeing of kids?

Yes, yes orphanages better than the alternative.

Is it actually the case that 2 men wanting to adopt a child that's unrelated to them is so high that the system would be overwhelmed if they were prevented from doing so anyway?

I think that this argument, like so many here, may be a red herring.

Perhaps all this is mere projection by women who don't understand that men aren't the same as them. Solipsism.

Gay men do make up a significant % of adopters, yes. It's been pointed out on the thread, if you think carefully you might understand there's reasons for that. And if you knew anything about adoption you'd know that there's already a significant shortage - in our region, typically five times more children needing adoption compared to the number of people registered to adopt - so anything that were to reduce that is harmful for children.
Presumably given that you're not at all homophobic, you also don't want single male foster carers, or fostering households where the male is the main carer, or where the support network or childcare is men - because for them to want to care for unrelated children is unnatural. So we vastly reduce the number of foster families too.

So by reducing one aspect you presume is harmful, based on your personal opinion, you're creating significantly more harm to children with the alternative. Hence my view that you don't care about the children at all.

I find your last comment baffling. If you're a woman, I'm pretty sure I have nothing in common with you and that I'm nothing like you, regardless of what genitals we have.

None of those situations you describe are the same as my view, though.

It's specifically about risks and how they add up: 1 man=risk.
Add another man: even more risk.
Those 2 men not related to child at all: very risky.
This does not automatically mean a child in this scenario will not be cared for, of course, just that the risk is too high to allow it.

You're right of course, an all male support network would not be good at all.
Unfortunately, we can't police people's personal lives to that level.

What we can do, though, is deny adoption to 2 men who are unrelated to the child. That's easily done.

This is not a personal opinion. I know it instinctively nevertheless it's backed up by research.

Your last comment is both funny and ridiculous because I imagine you indignantly typing it out, thinking I'll take offence, however, you are utterly incorrect as biology and the differences between men and women absolutely matters and we do, in fact, have a great deal in common.

I'm 'pretty sure' about that. Lol.

It's specifically about risks and how they add up: 1 man=risk.
Add another man: even more risk.
Those 2 men not related to child at all: very risky.

OK, so imagine we do stop all-male couples or single men adopting.

That child stays in foster care, probably moving through a number of different places. Many foster carers are female / male couples. By the time the child has been through three placements they’ve been exposed to more unrelated men than they would have been if they’d been adopted by a male couple.

Your logic doesn’t appear to hold up.

Yet again - you’re not advocating for the interests of children when you want hundreds of them to be denied stable safe homes and to remain in foster care instead.

You’re wrong about the research by the way.

It actually shows the adopted children of gay couples - both male and female - have the same or marginally better outcomes than adopted children of straight couples.

Not actually indicative of a particularly at risk cohort, is it?

Yabu. Just because someone is gay or single doesn't mean they're a nonce and being in a relationship with a woman doesn't mean they aren't a nonce, it also doesn't mean that if a woman was with a nonce, that she could or even would be willing to protect the child and theres no guarantee that she's not a nonce herself too.

Or she might not even know what’s going on, that’s how it was with my DM. There was no doubt about her love for us as a mother either.

Either way, a woman being in the home is not a guarantee that a child is safe from sexual abuse.

Stop being ridiculous. Not all men are fucking weird! Some women are too you know? No one could have known this would happen. It’s tragic and awful and makes me so angry but you’re being ridiculous.

The pro-men lobby is doing a great job of convincing themselves.

Star Hobson was abused and murdered by her mother, and her female partner.

It's not pro-men. It's pro child. Look at the actual risk levels.

About 5% of children experience 'contact' sexual abuse, and of that, about 5% is committed by step fathers and 4% by fathers. Even if you assume that adoptive fathers abuse at the same rate as stepfathers (not proven) and you assume that the vetting process doesn't even slightly lower the risk (unlikely) - you still end up with an abuse risk figure of about 0.25% for an adoptive father. Let's even assume the logic of 2 men = twice the risk (again, deeply flawed) - that leaves you with a 0.5% chance of sexual abuse in an adoption involving two men, compared to 0.25% in a heterosexual adoption/foster placement.

600 kids a year are adopted by gay male couples (roughly). Even using the deeply flawed assumptions that posters have made about gay couples posing a higher risk, the actual risk in terms of children would be three out of six hundred, compared to two out of six hundred if in heterosexual adoptions or foster placements. In other words, at the most, and even with all of the nonsense assumptions asserted - this 'risk reduction' would mean one child on average not experiencing sexual abuse.

Sounds fair enough right? Who wouldn't want to stop even 1 child being abused?

But if your approach to getting there is to create much worse outcomes for 597 children, then that becomes a disproportionate situation of risk management when the alternative would be greater support to local authorities so that social workers can actually spend the time in post-adoption support and monitoring.

For accuracy, it was Savannah Brockhill, not the mum, who murdered Star Hobson.

Frankie Smith (the mum) was found guilty of causing or allowing her death.

Smith was later found by a clinical psychologist to have a low IQ of 70 and to be highly compliant and subservient and was reported to have played with dolls until the age of 16. She gave birth to Star when she was 18.

There's an over representation of parents who are care leavers and parents from working class backgrounds in child protection investigations too. Do we ban them from fostering and adoption? Or do we individually assess them and recognise some of them bring strengths and qualities that some people who had a nice middle class upbringing with minimal adversity won't have? How far so we go in the name of safeguarding? No gay teachers/social workers/carers/police? They're all in positions that give them power and access to children and vulnerable adults. Do we stop the working class and care leavers going into them professions too?

That's good, 'cause they ain't convincing me.
I'm only arguing with them at this point because they keep on replying to me.
I've stopped now.

I think that this is down to cognitive dissonance: they know that men are more likely to be more abusive, there's two of them with sole care of a child and, importantly, neither has a biological instinct to keep the child alive as neither are related to it, yet here they are, for some reason (social work?) having to defend this unholy trinity of risk factors so it's like people have to agree with them.

I won't and never will.
I don't even believe the outcomes twaddle.
After all, I don't even think it's been 20 years (21?) since same sex adoption legalised in UK.

This isn't about heterosexual vs homosexuality.
It's about the far, far more lethal class of people (men) versus the far, far less likely lethal class of people (women.)

Anybody who thinks about it can see that.

This isn't about heterosexual vs homosexuality.
It's about the far, far more lethal class of people (men) versus the far, far less likely lethal class of people (women.)

I'm with you here and I actually don't think most people on this thread objecting are doing so because of homophobia. I do think they're calculating risk badly though. Are there any figures on whether men are more of a risk without a woman in the house than they are with one? I just don't buy it, I think the worst person to let adopt man be a single woman who may then subsequently have a series of men in her house. There seems to be something particularly dangerous about step father figures.

So if you want to lobby for no unrelated men living with children then that makes statistical sense to me. I don't really get the focus on gay couples being a particular nexus of risk.

I'm very confused by what you think care / care homes are. Do you think children in care are looked after exclusively be female carers or something? The way you're describing that an orphanage ( dear god) would be better shows you haven't actually researched or read other people's posts on this thread about the outcomes of being a care leaver, and you also.sound like you naively think being in care means these children never being looked after by am unrelated male

I think twisting people's actual concern for children based on facts rather than emotive prejudice into being "pro men" is just showing how unlogical people are being.