Dear those who wonder why we speak out,
We have been asked whether our campaigning puts prospective adopters off, gives adoption a bad name or damages relationships with the professionals we need to work alongside. I have even been asked to apologise.
I understand the importance of working together. But before asking us to be quieter, to apologise or to reconsider our approach, I would ask you to look closely at what we are saying and, more importantly, why.
Adoption can be wonderful. My own journey as an adoptive parent has been beyond difficult, but also wonderful. I believe in adoption and in its place as an option for children who cannot safely remain with their birth families. I believe in permanence and in the difference a family can make. I am also an adoptee who loves and adores her parents.
But I believe we must be honest about what happens when things go wrong. Both realities exist. One does not cancel out the other.
I founded PATCH because I could not ignore what I was seeing and hearing, both as an adoptee and adoptive parent, and as a social worker. I did not set out to undermine adoption or the professionals working within it. I wanted change for families struggling to access the support they and their children need. That remains our purpose.
When Speaking Out Becomes the Problem
Think about Hillsborough, the Post Office scandal, Windrush and the infected blood scandal. These are different circumstances, but each raises difficult questions about what happens when people speak out, challenge accepted accounts and struggle to be heard.
We rightly ask why people were ignored for so long. Why, then, when families challenge the systems around them, are we sometimes more concerned about how they speak than what they are telling us?
Why does the challenge itself sometimes become the focus, rather than the harm being described? Why are families questioned about their motives before their experiences have been properly examined? Why can defending established practice seem easier than investigating whether it needs to change?
When someone tells us that something is wrong, our first responsibility should be to listen, examine the evidence and ask what we might have missed. Not to protect our own position at the expense of understanding theirs.
As a social worker, I signed up to safeguard children, act ethically and challenge practice when I believe something is wrong. I cannot set those values aside because the issues are uncomfortable, challenge my own profession or affect me personally.
My experiences have made these questions personal. My professional responsibilities mean I cannot simply look away.
How many families reach crisis before the right support becomes available? How many children are understood through their behaviour without sufficient consideration of what has shaped their development? How many professionals are expected to make life-changing decisions without sufficient knowledge of trauma, health science, brain development and neurobiology?
We cannot expect professionals to know what they have never been taught. But we must ask why practice has not kept pace with what we now know about child development and the effects of adversity.
HARM Seen: Looking Beyond Behaviour
Through HARM Seen — Hurt, Abuse, Rupture and Memory — we are asking professionals to look beyond behaviour and consider the whole child.
Imagine a child carrying a backpack filled with hurt, fear, loss and broken relationships. Some children have carried it since before they were born. We see the behaviour, but do we understand the weight they are carrying? Do we recognise the cumulative impact of their experiences, or do we wait until that weight becomes too much to bear?
Permanence does not erase a child’s history. Love and stability matter enormously, but they do not automatically resolve the effects of earlier adversity or developmental injury.
When harm remains unseen, we risk managing its consequences without understanding what is driving them.
And what happens if we do nothing?
Some young people with care experience or who have been adopted encounter youth offending services or prison, experience significant mental health difficulties into adulthood, or struggle to sustain relationships and family life. Some families break under the pressure. Some children return to care. Some young people die.
We cannot claim that every outcome could have been prevented. But we must be willing to ask what might have been different if harm had been recognised earlier, professional knowledge had informed decisions and appropriate support had been available.
We cannot keep watching these patterns unfold without examining the part our systems may play.
The Questions We All Need to Ask
Professional challenge should be safe, respectful and welcomed as an opportunity to learn. We must be open to scrutiny, willing to question our assumptions and curious about experiences that challenge what we believe we know.
So, with the utmost respect for the responsibilities each of us carries, I ask you to consider how you see the families who are speaking out.
If you are a social worker, are you considering the child’s disrupted childhood development and history, or are you relying primarily on the behaviour in front of you?
If you are a manager, do you encourage professional challenge, curiosity and thinking beyond established processes? Do you recognise the gaps in practice, and are you actively seeking change?
If you work in health, education or criminal justice, do you have sufficient knowledge of trauma and neurodevelopment to recognise when a different response may be needed?
If you shape policy, training or commissioning, are you confident that professionals have the knowledge, skills and resources they need? How do you know? Who is accountable when the support provided is not enough?
And if you have concerns about PATCH, our approach or the relationships we are building, have you looked closely at the stories and experiences shared with us? Have you examined what families are actually telling us, checked the facts and considered the evidence behind our concerns?
Have you contacted us directly to discuss your concerns?
We are always willing to have those conversations when there is a shared willingness to engage constructively.
I am not asking you to agree with everything we say. I am asking you to examine it properly before deciding we are wrong simply because we are speaking out.
Not all practice in adoption and adoption support is poor. We know there are committed professionals doing excellent work, often under enormous pressure. But too much is not good enough, and pretending otherwise will not improve it.
The problem is not necessarily the professionals themselves. It is also the outdated systemic responses, limited resources and gaps in knowledge that professionals are expected to work within. Those systems must be challenged if practice is to improve.
We all occupy different seats. We have different responsibilities, knowledge and levels of power. But none of us should be so invested in our own perspective that we cannot see what needs to change.
What is your ethical and professional responsibility, and what are you prepared to do about it?
What We Are Fighting For
PATCH brings together parents, adopters, people with lived experience and professionals who recognise the harm that can occur when children’s needs are misunderstood or left unmet.
We are not standing outside the system looking in. We want to work with the people within it, bringing together lived experience, professional expertise, science and research.
We want a system that understands trauma and development, recognises harm earlier and supports families before they reach crisis. We want professionals equipped to ask better questions and leaders prepared to examine whether their services are delivering what children need.
We want to build relationships. But relationships cannot depend on silence, and collaboration cannot mean avoiding difficult conversations.
Throughout history, people have challenged accepted thinking because something needed to change. Their concerns were not always welcomed, and the fact that they challenged established systems did not, in itself, make them wrong.
We must be careful not to dismiss those raising concerns simply because their challenge is uncomfortable.
We can respect professionals and challenge practice. We can value adoption and question the support available to families. We can acknowledge good work while being honest about what is failing.
These things are not contradictions.
We have something worth protecting: children, families and the future of adoption.
I founded PATCH because I believe in adoption, in children and in our responsibility to get things right. I am an adoptee, an adoptive parent and a social worker. I know what permanence can mean, but I also know that good intentions are not enough.
We are not fighting against adoption. We are fighting for children to receive the support they need, for families to be heard and for practice to improve.
We want adoption to remain a meaningful option for children who cannot safely remain with their birth families. We want decisions and support to be informed by knowledge, evidence and an understanding of the whole child.
Above all, children’s needs must come first, even when recognising those needs means admitting that something in our system must change.
So, please, look closely at what we are saying. Examine the experiences, question the evidence and consider the responsibilities attached to your role.
Together, we can do more to recognise harm, listen to families and hold ourselves accountable for what happens next.
I could not sit quietly when I believed something was wrong. We will continue to work with anyone willing to listen, learn and help make things better.
We are not asking for perfection. We are asking for honesty, accountability and change.
It is time to make HARM Seen.
Fiona Wells
Founder, PATCH
Passionate Adopters Targeting Change with Hope