Parents who adopt abused children hampered by woeful lack of support

Charities say parents receive little official support to cope with problems that emerge from adopting an abused child

Parents who adopt are being failed by a woeful lack of support and understanding of the needs of the country’s most vulnerable children.

While a shortage of adopters means that more than 85,000 children are in care across the UK, many families who do adopt complain of being unprepared for the difficulties and of facing threadbare or non-existent support services, said Jonathan Pearce, chief executive of the charity Adoption UK. “Once children are adopted from the care system they become forgotten children. There’s this ‘happily ever after’ myth, but the reality is far from that,” he said, adding that many parents feel judged when they go back to social services asking for help.

Pearce called on the government – which last week announced it would be encouraging more inter-racial adoptions, but is at the same time cutting many of the vital support services and social services budgets – to launch a root-and-branch reform of the adoption system. “We need a speeding-up of the court and legal system, we need better trained social workers, we need the agencies to start working together instead of competitively, and we need a fundamental change in approach if we really want to put the welfare of the child first,” he said.

The number of children being adopted in Britain is falling. Some 3,200 were adopted from care last year, 71% of whom will have faced extreme abuse or neglect in their earlier lives. But many of those new families feel cut off as soon as they take their new son or daughter home, leading in part to what Pearce estimates to be a breakdown rate as high as one in three families adopting children aged over four.

“We are faced with a situation where local authorities have a duty to make sure an adoption support service is in place to meet the needs of everyone in the triangle and it’s not happening, or it’s patchy,” he said. “Many are just paying lip service, either because of financial restraints or because they don’t understand the importance. A lot of our parents talk about being treated as if they are failures if they ask for help. It’s not only social services who are not there for these families, but also mental health and therapy services.”

His charity is constantly being contacted by anguished adopters who have been left to firefight their way through the system, ill-prepared and sometimes without all the information available on the child’s experiences. “Adopters also don’t get the information they should; they sometimes get a diluted version. It happens that a lot of social workers will put a more positive spin than is the truth – they don’t want to scare adopters off, and some don’t really understand themselves the full impact early childhood experiences can have. A lot of children also are given a rose-tinted view of why they can’t be with their birth parents. It’s all very misguided.”

For parents trying to do what’s best for their children, not knowing the full extent of their early experiences can be a huge hindrance. For Fiona, 42, from Perthshire, it was not until her daughter reached puberty and started to neglect her personal hygiene that she decided to go back to the adoption agency to check if there was any information that hadn’t been shared with them at the time.

“When we had our daughter placed with us aged six, we were told she had been neglected by her birth mother who had learning difficulties and didn’t really understand her needs. When at 13 her behaviour became quite strange, I went back and demanded to read the files. That’s when I found out she had been abused physically and, it was suspected, sexually,” she said. “I was still offered absolutely zero help or support afterwards, although I was so disgusted with the social work team concerned that I don’t think I’d have accepted any from them anyway. But at least then I finally understood what we were dealing with.”

Horror stories like that are not hard to find. One London-based mother said that it was only when her son had molested her six-year-old niece that anyone from social services “finally deigned to turn up, but only because the police asked them to, not because of us”.

Others tell of willingness and sympathy but a lack of resources. “Our local authority was very willing to help but has very little money to do anything,” said one mother. “It has recently withdrawn funding for support groups. We went for an assessment for our son who we were struggling to get to school and out of the house – we were given half a day every six weeks with an assistant social worker. This was just completely irrelevant and ineffective.”

Pearce said his organisation wanted to focus on long-term support. “What we hear time and time again is that adopters asking for help get judged and blamed for what’s going wrong. That’s rooted in a lack of knowledge and understanding by social workers of what abuse does to children. Often, by the time parents are asking for help they can be frazzled and aggressive about their needs and it can look like its part of the issue, when actually they are worn down by hitting brick walls. To put a child up for adoption is one of the biggest decisions we make as a society, a fundamental decision to remove a child out of one family and into another, and we have a moral and ethical duty to make sure that new family works.”

However, for every story of woe there are families who never need help and can get on with their lives successfully. Julie Selwyn, director of the Hadley Centre for adoption and foster care studies at Bristol University, estimates that perhaps a third of adoptive families might hit a serious crisis point.

“Yes I hear a lot of horror stories, but I also hear a lot of the opposite – people who were told their child was traumatised and damaged and within a year they have just blossomed. Really lovely stories are just as common. But, yes, we really don’t understand enough yet about the mechanisms of the developing brain and we really can’t predict what sort of effect a child’s experiences will have on them,” Selwyn said.

Observers say many problems still exist with the public perception of adoption – that, for instance, adopters cannot be smokers or too old or too fat. In fact, a lot of cases involving apparently decent white middle-class couples being turned down have at root the fact that the potential parents have been deemed unable to appreciate how to raise a traumatised child for whom all the normal “supernanny” rules do not apply.

Amanda, an adoptive mother, said it was an exhausting process. “From our family experiences I would say that one of the key issues around adoption support is the fact that you have to fight hard and jump through countless hoops just to get recognition and acceptance of our child’s needs, let alone get them met,” she said.

Selwyn added that, while many families will never need or ask for help, it is vital that the safety net is there.

“Some adopters see asking for help as a failure and some don’t really listen when they are told negative things, they just want to be parents. Things have moved on hugely in adoption; we’re not making the mistakes we made 30 or 40 years ago but we are still making mistakes, different mistakes.

“But what we do know is that adopters are 100% committed to their children and that’s one of the things that makes the difference. Adopted children need someone who is one their side, fighting for them. That’s what makes the real difference to their lives.”

Hannah, 44, from Leicestershire, adopted Tom, now 14, 10 years ago.

“Then far less was understood about brain development and behaviour. But today I still hear adoptive parents asking the same questions I was asking, so I wonder what has changed.

“The thing I was never told is that you cannot parent these children like an ordinary child – you can’t have a naughty stair or time out or controlled crying because you reinforce their understanding of abandonment. My son was weeing all over the place and his bedroom stank to high heaven, but only later was it explained that he was recreating the smells of his cot when he was a baby.

“The social workers kept telling me it was fine; he was attached because he was happy to give cuddles, it was normal. But they didn’t understand, my son would give any stranger who came to the door cuddles – he just wanted adult attention.

“I was made aware that children like my son would need extra care. I totally believed that, give it three years and he would be as if he was born to me. What actually happened was that he was extremely distressed by his early experiences. With hindsight he was showing classic developmental trauma. He would push me away at the same time as wanting a hug, he would destroy things, threaten me, have tantrums that seemed to come out of nowhere, he would threaten to hurt himself and talked about killing himself – which came as such a shock as I did not realise four-year-olds could think like that.

“He would punch himself in the face, bang his head against the wall, his speech was delayed and he found it very difficult to be away from me at school. He was permanently excluded at the age of nine, unable to read or write.

“I asked for help from day one. I was told in a letter: ‘There is nothing wrong with this child and you need to get on with being a family’. I discovered about Family Futures, a therapist unit in London, but was refused funding. When I finally got a charity to pay for an assessment four years later they said it was probably too late.

“As Tom got older he started to run away. I had police helicopters out searching for him when he went missing for 11 hours aged eight. One day on a walk with the dogs he came at me with a huge stick and then started throwing boulders at me. I was scared he was going to kill me. At the end of that tantrum he ran away from me and fell down sobbing that he wanted to die. It got worse and worse.

“I never stopped fighting for him and eventually got him into a residential unit at great cost to the local social services. They all agreed they did not have the right services available locally, but it took years to get to that stage. I had to prove I had tried everything.

“Support until then was non-existent, ineffectual or patronising. I was asked by emergency social services one evening as he was threatening me with a knife: “Have you tried after-school clubs?”

“In between this he was a lovely, kind boy. But being left to struggle was horrendous, its taken on a toll on my health and my income. My son is now 14 and doing well, but with hindsight had I known what I know now, things could have been a lot different for him, a lot earlier.”