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Foster care is a crisis

The guardian recently did an investigation into the state of Britain’s foster care system and unsurprisingly it is an underfunded chaotic mess. I’m sure the people who work with in it absolutely have their hearts in the right place but they are not actually going to make any difference because the whole idea is intrinsically flawed. It all circles round on itself

Children who have been in the care system are far more likely to become teenage parents than their peers. “We struggle a little bit with children in care having children. There is a very negative, repeated cycle – they have ­children, and their children go through the care system again. Being a looked-after child, there is a significant risk of having another child in the care system,” Delores, who has worked as a social worker for 14 years, says.

“We are always quite shocked when young people who have been in the care system have children who get referred to us. I have seen it a lot with children who were in care, in secure units, in foster care or residential care. We have to remove their children because they can’t parent them, they can’t given them ­emotional warmth. They can’t do it.”

Parents who have been through the care system are twice as likely to lose the right to care for their own children – this is just one of many negative indicators about the dismal life chances for children who are looked after by the state.

So it seems Foster care as it is done now is actually more damaging for families and society. It doesn’t break destructive cycles it perpetuates them

I used to think putting more money in the foster care system would fix it and its clear that the foster care system is deeply underfunded:

It is clear from the state of the office carpets that money is tight. The phones are old, the computers are old, there are old grey filing cabinets, pushed together at ugly angles, there are a lot of unhealthy, deadish plants, the walls are covered with stranded spots of Blu-Tack and dried-up sticky tape

Probably training foster carers would make a difference: according to the government website preparation for becoming a foster carer consists of

Once it has been decided you are suitable to become a foster carer, The Criminal Records Bureau will check that you have not committed an offence which would exclude you from fostering. You will also have a health check, to rule out any health problems.

A social worker will then help you fill in an application form and you will be asked to attend a group preparation session with other people who are applying.

Finally your application will be sent to an independent fostering panel, which will recommend whether or not you can become a foster carer. This can take up to six months.

Which seems like less than adequate preparation for supporting and living with traumatised children. But even if foster carers were given excellent training I still don’t think that would be the answer. It wouldn’t solve or remove all the issues that caused the child to be removed in the first place.Every situation in the report involved poverty, mental health issues, addiction or learning disabilities on the part of the parents. So while there does need to be more money spent on supporting families and keeping children safe, instead of putting it into the foster care system why not spend it on rehab programs, mental health support, training and employing people to help parents with learning difficulties/disabilities to look after their children? Why not train would be foster carers as family support workers. Why not set up community support centers? Why not focus on community regeneration?

There will always be emergencies, there will always be situations where children have to be removed from their parents but putting and infrastructure like this in place would cut down enormously on the children being taken into care. It would also support families who need extra support but are under the radar of social services or families who are to scared to ask for social services support because they fear if they do their children will be taken away,

instead of focusing on overhauling foster care having an infrastructure like this would prevent the double trauma of abuse/neglect and then the removal from the family that children in care have to go through.

Asylum seeker mothers fight to be reunited with their children

Mothers in the London-based All African Women’s Group are campaigning for the right to be reunited with their children following the successful settlement of their asylum claims. Many of the women, most of whom have experienced rape and torture, felt they had no choice but to leave their children in order to keep them safe, but when they enter the UK they are not recognised as mothers with dependants:

Go read more at The F Word and then sign the petition

Open adoption roundtable 13

The prompt for the Open Adoption Roundtable 13 is:

We often hear about open adoptions where the two sides don’t want the same level of openness. First mothers who don’t get updates as often as they would like, or not as many visits each year. Or adoptive parents who want to include their child’s first mother in his life, but she is not ready.

But what we don’t often discuss is when people on the same side of the triad can’t agree on the level of openness in an adoption.

* It could be a wife who wants a fully open adoption but the husband only wants to send letters once a year.
* Or a first mother isn’t ready for an open adoption but the first father wants to be part of the baby’s life.
* Maybe a spouse isn’t supportive of their partner entering into reunion with their first mother.
* Or a partner who came along after the adoption and isn’t comfortable with your relationship with your placed child.
* And the classic Hallmark movie of the year scenario: Your mother-in-law is convinced that the baby will be snatched away from under your nose if you have an open adoption.

How would/do you navigate these situations? Does your current relationship impact the type of open adoption that you have? How does this affect your current relationship?

My open adoption was a mess. I don’t think it was at all what my adoptive parents wanted. I think they expected a nice clean closed adoption. I think almost all adoptions were closed then. My adoption was a test case. it was the first legally binding open adoption in the UK. My first mother due to legal technicalities had enough leverage that the adoption couldn’t go through unless some of her access conditions were met and my adoptive parents contested that which resulted in a long drawn out stressful court process. But the thing is nobody actually asked us, me and my siblings, not really. I still haven’t unpacked how I felt about it because there was so much manipulation going on on both sides. I felt like i imagine children in divorce custody battles feel. torn and guilty and feeling like i was supposed to be able to please both set of parents and not being able to.. I mean we were asked but in such a manipulative way that we gave the answers that we knew were wanted. it was all about the parents feelings about what they wanted not what we wanted or needed. It was about both my mothers feeling threatened by each other and trying to exert their control over the situation.

In the end we had to legally see my first mother four times a year. And my adoptive parents always turned it into a great big drama which always turned into a huge anti climax because my first mother hardly even spoke to us she spent the whole time talking to my adoptive mother.

I guess the point of this post is make sure you know what your children want. Don’t assume and when discussing it with them keep your own feelings out of it. If you are not careful they will pick up on your feelings about it and do what you want them to rather than what they need to. it is your children’s needs that are important here not yours or your partners or your extended families

Experts urge Nepal to ban international adoptions

A team of adoption law experts who visited Nepal in November found documents were routinely falsified and children’s homes were largely unregulated, with the interests of the child often not considered at all.

“A new law for inter-country adoption is needed. It should be integrated with a comprehensive law on child protection measures and national solutions for children without parental care,” said the report, from intergovernmental organisation The Hague Conference on Private International Law.

“To undertake the necessary reform of the inter-country adoption system, a temporary suspension of adoptions will be necessary.”

Nepal first suspended international adoption in 2007 after reports that foreigners were paying up to $20,000 to adopt children, most of whom were not genuine orphans.

Child welfare campaigners say some were effectively trafficked out of the country by unscrupulous orphanages that falsified documents and lied to parents about where their children were being taken.

From here

Support SOS childrens villages in Haiti

Earthquake orphan appeal: Do not adopt earthquake orphans

Things adoption taught me: sometimes grief is forever; Part one

for some of us adoption isn’t a wonderful thing to be celebrated or encouraged, lots of adoptees do not see adoption as a good thing, as something to be happy about. It’s painful, confusing, identity annihilating. I am a colonised person, I lost my name, my culture, a language connection, a religious connection, my bloodlines. There are griefs that I cant even name.

The societies we live in are so invested in the lie that adoption is a win/win/win situation for everybody involved that it is totally ignored the two of the three parts of that triangle loose something irreplaceable. And its totally unacknowledged that we might grieve this forever, that it’s not always something we can or should “get over” or “work through”

I always thought Frodo Baggins said it best:

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep that have taken hold.

I’ve meditated on this quote a lot and come to the conclusion that some pain doesn’t go away, that for some of us who have been deeply and repeatedly wounded grief is not a season but a thread, a bass note in the structure of our lives and part of healing is coming to terms with that, of building something positive out of that grief and sadness, but also just living with it. I’ve learnt that if i don’t acknowledge it as part of myself, if i don’t honour it I get depressed I go blank, I don’t feel all the good sweet ,positive things about my life either, cutting of my grief cuts of all my emotions. Grief is part of the kaleidoscope of who I am, I wouldn’t be myself without it.

coming back here

Is like touching a raw wound.

And the other places that are suposed to be safe

So much to say, but it hurts too much.

“so you think they should be left to rot?

So something else people often say to me is something along the lines of “so you think those children who would otherwise be adopted should be left to rot in the foster care system?” and then a tirade about how I better be single handedly overhauling the foster care system if I want adoptable children to grow up in it rather than being adopted. This just really brings home to me how much adoption is about commodity, is about adoptable children,is about the adoptive parents needs rather than about the support and nurture of disadvantaged children.

The foster care system sucks beyond belief, I know that, I spent four years in it, my sister grew up in it, I worked within it for three years. But what people are actually saying to me when they rant about how bad the system would be for adoptable children to grow up in is that non adoptable children don’t matter, that children who are too old, or too emotionally disturbed, or of the “wrong” ethnicity or have whatever else “special needs” are disposable, that we don’t need to overhaul the foster care system for them, it’s only the adoptable children we need to worry about.

In the UK the number of children adopted from the foster system is static at about 4% every year . Which means that 96 % of children in foster care don’t get adopted, are we not supposed to be working to make the system better for them or do we just let them rot?

The foster care system is one of the places where the poisoned underbelly of patriarchal racist capitalism exposes itself. Dorothy Roberts on the Pro choice public education web site explains

We should extend our struggle for reproductive justice to challenge the foster care system because it violates thousands of women’s right to parent their children. Most of the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. child welfare system go to removing children from their homes and maintaining them in foster care. Foster care is a political institution reflecting social inequities, including race, class, and gender hierarchies, and serving powerful ideologies and interests. The U.S. child welfare system is and always has been designed to regulate poor families. Most cases of child maltreatment involve parental neglect, which is usually difficult to disentangle from the conditions of poverty. Nationwide, there are twice as many neglected children in foster care as children who are physically abused. The child welfare system hides the systemic reasons for poor families’ hardships by attributing them to parental deficits and pathologies that require therapeutic remedies rather than social change.

Foster care is also marked by shocking racial disparities… The racial disparity in the child welfare system also reflects a political choice to address the startling rates of child poverty in communities of color by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty’s societal roots.

While this is about the American foster care system it describes the UK system as well. The racial disparities in the UK system are not so large but they are still there. According to community care.co.uk

Children from ethnic minority backgrounds are over-represented in foster care: 17% of looked after children are from ethnic minority backgrounds compared with only 13% of the general population. The largest groups of looked-after ethnic minority children have one or both parents with an African Caribbean or African heritage. There are much smaller numbers of children with Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani backgrounds…

A 2004 study found that 70-80 per cent of children who are looked after will have left care within two years, but that children from some ethnic minority groups: African Caribbean, Pakistani, those with one white and one African Caribbean parent, and those in the “any other black” group, were more likely than other groups to stay in care for over four years.(1) The same study followed up the cases of 297 ethnic minority children placed in the 1980s. Fifteen years later, it found that one third had been placed as permanent foster children. An important finding was that children with both parents from a ethnic minority background were more likely to be permanently fostered than adopted.

so it seems to me that all those people who claim that adoption is about the child’s needs should damn well be working to overhaul the foster care system too, firstly by working out why so many kids end up in foster care and putting preventions and supports in place to stop that happening and then for those kids who do end up in care, who really need to be there we need to make sure that it is a safe nurturing supportive place for them whether they are deemed “adoptable” or not. Just because white middle class people do not view a child as consumable, doesn’t mean they are not important.

Just now

FM Radio

I heard about, i heard about your daddy got sick.
Drove down to the river to die alone.
Seven days, seven days till they found him all.
Wrapped up in a blanket on the boat.
So we put him in the ground.
Down, Down, Down.
Your momma said “stay strong, don’t cry.”
So that is what you did.

Years later, years down later down the road.
On a bus with your FM Radio, half drunk, a cigarrette
hangin out.
What happened to your lonely soul? Crying out.
What happened to your lonely soul? Screamin out.
You said try and lose.
You said try and lose.
Everything you’ve known.
Everything you’ve seen.
Everything you’ve loved.
Everything you’ve been
And everywhere you walk
Every Song you sing
Everytime you wake
it haunts you once again.
My Daddy ain’t comin home
Daddy ain’t comin home
My Daddy ain’t comin home
Daddy ain’t comin home
My Daddy ain’t comin home.

(Trying to do Nablopomo when my life has just taken off is crazy, I know I’ve got a backlog of comments to reply to and emails to send, I’ll get to that in the next three days, also I promise the next post will be more than videos or images!)