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A child needs parents, of any race Over the past 30 years, attitudes to transracial adoption have swung violently. In the 1960s, in the warm glow of the decade of peace, love and harmony, middle-class white families who adopted black children were seen as courageous and far-sighted, prepared to risk the wrath of racist neighbours in the cause of building a multiracial society. The Beatles sang "love is all you need" but, necessary as love was, it was not always sufficient to make transracial adoptions work. Children, growing up in a society where racism was prevalent, needed to be given self-esteem and a sense of pride in their own origins. Too many children were adopted by well-meaning families who lived in glorious white isolation in suburbs and rural areas; though many grew up into happy, well-adjusted adults, some did not. By the late 1970s, when my wife and I first thought about adoption, things were changing. We went to the head of the queue because we were willing to adopt a child from a different ethnic background (it hadn't occurred to either of us to state either ethnic or gender preference) but at least we were asked to attend sessions, with ethnic minority speakers, to discuss such matters. As a result, we decided to move from Hertfordshire to Haringey, north London, a more multiracial area. By this stage, however, some social workers had taken up the cry, first heard from the black consciousness movement in the US, that transracial adoption was genocide. Twelve years ago, after attending one too many racism awareness sessions, I joined other adoptive parents to set up Children First. It was a pressure group concerned about the growing trend to ban transracial adoptions, thus condemning too many ethnic minority children to a life within the care system. Our members included some people who had themselves been transracially adopted and a few courageous social workers, as well as parents. Journalists wanted to know if we were for or against transracial adoption. To their chagrin and confusion, we were neither. We argued that race and ethnicity are important in considering a child's future, but that sometimes, the best available placement is not going to be a perfect ethnic match. This is more or less the position taken by the new government guidelines on adoption, issued last week by the health minister, Paul Boateng. But our celebrations are muted. We first thought we had cause to toast victory as long ago as 1990, only four years after we started our campaign, when new guidelines were issued by the chief inspector of social services. They quite specifically advised local authorities that each case must be considered on its merits and that placement with a family of different ethnic origin would sometimes be the best choice for a particular child. But guidelines are useless to the blind, and their impact was negligible. As far as the mainly white social work establishment was concerned, black was good, white was bad. Any social worker who recommended a transracial placement to an adoption panel was likely to be criticised for failing to search far enough for an ethnic match or, worse, to be accused of implicit or explicit racism. This led to both tragedy and farce. The tragedy was that children faced ever longer waits before being placed. And inevitably, the later a placement is made the greater the chances of it breaking down. The farce arose as social workers presented panels with increasingly fanciful notions of matching families. An olive-skinned child of Muslim origin would be placed with an African single parent woman of a Christian background (I quote a real case) because both were deemed black. Even where there was a better matching of child and parents, many placements were, in my view, mistaken. One child was placed with an Asian family where the father believed in corporal punishment as the basis of family discipline and made it clear that he would not tell his soon-to-be son (he refused point-blank to countenance a girl) that he had been adopted. When I opposed this placement as a member of the relevant adoption panel, ! lost the argument. The professionals said that I did not appreciate the family's cultural background; anyway, the alternative was for the child to spend perhaps another year or more in a foster home because they had no intention of placing him in a white family, which was the only immediate alternative. One of the aims of those who supported ethnic matching was to recruit adoptive parents from a wider range of backgrounds. Children First entirely agreed with this objective, and campaigned for it. But despite some success in recruiting more ethnic minority parents, there was, and still is, a shortage. This is not, as opponents of transracial adoption have argued, because racist social services departments have turned down minority ethnic applicants. It is quite simply a matter of demography. The Afro-Caribbeans, the ethnic minority group at the centre of this debate, are, as a whole, younger, poorer and more likely to bear children out of wedlock than the majority population. So there are far more ethnic-minority single women bearing children who, for one reason or another, require adoption than there are couples of similar ethnic background who are willing and able to adopt. (The problem is compounded because, after white children, the largest group requiring adoption are from mixed-race backgrounds, rather than from an identifiable ethnic group.) These patterns may change, but until they do, transracial adoption is a far better alternative, for virtually every child, than a succession of short-term foster families and/or children's homes. A white paper on adoption, issued in 1993, looked like another step forward. It reinforced the 1990 guidelines, asserted that considerations of race and ethnicity should not outweigh other factors in making placements and, after a review of the research, specifically rejected any notion that placing children transracially led to difficulties later in life. But five years on, the practice has still not changed. Guidelines, white papers and academic research notwithstanding, social workers in general, and the government-funded British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) in particular, continue to plough their own furrow. Transracial placements are rare, and children from ethnic minorities wait longer for new families than white children. In response to the latest guidelines, the BAAF director, Felicity Collier, said: "For a child, it can be terribly important that the person who brings you up, takes you to school and walks down the street with you actually looks like you." Boateng's guidelines give local authorities, for the first time, a specific responsibility to ensure that they are actually put into practice. In launching them, the minister said: "I expect it [the code] to be rigorously and rapidly implemented … Adoption policies and practice revised in the light of this latest guidance will be robustly monitored." So far, so good. But I fear that nothing will really change until
there is a limit to the time adoption agencies can spend on searching
for an ethnically matching family, before being required to look
elsewhere. Many in the social work profession will view these latest
guidelines as one further obstacle to be circumvented. And with
BAAF as the main agency responsible for training social workers
in adoption practice, their attitudes are going to be very difficult
to shift. Ivor Gaber is co-editor, with Jane Aldridge, of "In the Best Interests of the Child: culture, identity and transracial adoption "published by Free Association Books COPYRIGHT 1998 New Statesman, Ltd. [ARTICLES] |