Dear Ministers
We are adoptive parents. We adopted two girls, aged 6 and 4, believing we had been given an honest account of their background. We had not.
When we asked for assessments, we were told we were labelling our children for life. When we went privately, the evidence was ignored. Both girls were later diagnosed with ADHD, autism, FASD and reactive attachment disorder, and both had experienced 8 out of 10 adverse childhood experiences. No one told us. When we questioned this, we were told, “Well, you wouldn’t have adopted them if we had told you.” Despite our repeated requests, no meaningful support followed.
When our youngest daughter’s behaviour went beyond parental control, we were met with blame instead of help. We were subjected to a safeguarding conference and accused of emotional abuse. We did not abuse our children. We were loving, empathetic, experienced parents who understood early trauma and advocated strongly for them, yet we have never had a way to clear our name. We pursued complaints, including to Social Work England, but nothing has changed. The professionals involved left the service, were moved on or retired. No one admitted the failures, and our children and we have been left to live with the consequences.
We then had to fight for a Section 20 arrangement. We succeeded, but it has cost us dearly:
• £10,000 in damage to our home
• £23,000 in legal fees
• £68,000 on medical and expert reports
That is over £100,000, on top of the damage to our health and our family. And for what? We have nothing to show for it but grief, pain and stress-related illness, while local authorities carry on regardless.
The cost does not end with us. Our youngest is back in care, costing the government around £400,000 a year, when early assessment and evidence-based support would have cost a fraction of that. Our eldest is in supported living, and her housing, benefits, and frequent police and hospital contact are a significant cost now and will be for the rest of her life. Had we been believed and supported, this could so easily have been avoided.
We were wrongly blamed for the difficulties that early trauma presented in parenting our daughters. Yet the “therapeutic” residential home and community teams now caring for them face the very same difficulties, only worse. Their behaviours are not understood and are left to escalate, adding to the long-term cost to the public purse.
Adoption should not mean families are left to find their own way through crisis, or are blamed for the effects of early trauma. We support PATCH in calling for:
1. Full and honest disclosure of a child’s background before placement
2. Early assessment and therapeutic support, without waiting for crisis
3. An end to blaming adoptive parents for trauma-related behaviours
4. Real accountability when local authorities fail families
This Adoption Week, we ask you to listen to families like ours and act, before more families are broken and public costs escalate. Please stop ignoring the truth in front of you.
Yours sincerely,
Adopters