My mother and stepfather adopted two children and fostered one while I was growing up
one of those children was already terminally ill when he was given to our family - I remember visiting him at GOSH before he came to us - yet with very little investigation they quite happily gave this vulnerable sick 2yo to a family where the existing three children all had major behavioural and self-esteem issues and had been through a messy divorce and had a new stepfather only a couple of years beforehand
following the death of that child, my mother went through a long, horrific depression (she was hospitalised at one point) and life for the rest of us was pretty appalling. It was actually the child's social worker who told my mother she wasn't "grieving normally" and needed to seek counselling. Nonetheless, about a year later this same social worker oversaw the adoption of a 5yo Indian child with severe autism, severe epilepsy and additional learning difficulties into our family. This child suffered treatment which would certainly nowadays be classed as both abuse and neglect - I won't go into lots of detail, but his upbringing included force-feeding (including his own vomit), screaming and swearing at him, leaving him stuck on the toilet all night until he fell asleep and fell off, because he was waiting for my mother to tell him to get down and she decided it was a "battle of wills", experimental "therapies" like holding him down on the floor and forcing eye contact for hours while he screamed and struggled, or pinching/slapping his inner thighs/pulling his hair to "get through to him" with pain. Once she grabbed his little penis and yanked it, ripping his skin and drawing blood.
Meanwhile the rest of the children in the family were thoroughly miserable, terrified wrecks and nobody seemed to give a shit
my mother's mental health deteriorated and detereiorated and frankly l;ife was hell for all of us. She began to come up with stream upon stream of nightmarish horrific memories of her childhood (ritual abuse, child murder, incest, satanism) and tried various therapies herself. She was susceptible to violent unprovoked rages which she would aim at anyone in her path.
they had their own little boy when I was ten - two years later they adopted a little girl from El Salvador (again, she was already in London and it was UK SS in charge). She is paraplegic, severe CP and learning difficulties and autistic traits. Her life hasn't been any better than my adopted brother's. Much less violent, but much worse neglect. The last period I was in contact with them she spent all the time she wasn't at school sitting in her chair at a tiny table in the corridor of their flat, facing the wall, with a few toys she'd clearly grown out of. My stepfather was doing all her physical "care" including intimate washing etc as my mother is too arthritic. SS did at one point come in and poke about a bit and say it wasn't ideal for him to be cleaning up after her periods, bathing her etc - but they melted away pretty quickly when my mother objected to their interference. For all I know she's still there - or maybe they "moved her on" when the money stopped coming when she turned 19, I don't know. She was 18 last time I saw her.
I remember really clearly the years when my mother and stepfather were obsessed with adopting. They had a little groups of cronies who enjoyed meeting up and poring over the "be my parent" catalogues and shopping for kids. We regularly had to watch videos and read blurbs about children - my mother would get a bit obsessed with a child for a bit - and if she went off the idea, or she phoned up and the child had "gone", she would just have another browse. Like buying a puppy. One family we were fairly close to for a while adopted three children and sent them back after about a year because they "didn't love them". I can think of various placements I saw happen which were just as outrageous as my mother being given these vulnerable children. This was in the 80s and 90s.