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Articles / 'I knew there was something missing from my life': The incredible story of ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 27, 2024, 04:41:26 PM »

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13777913/ITV-Long-Lost-Family-brings-three-siblings-adopted-strangers-sixties.html

'I knew there was something missing from my life': The incredible story of three siblings who met for the first time in their sixties after being given away for adoption to three different families

Episode six of Long Lost Family airs on ITV1 and ITVX tonight at 9pm

By Emma Pryer

Published: 16:55, 25 August 2024 | Updated: 08:44, 26 August 2024

When Mary Arbuthnot opened a letter from her dying father, Richard, more than 20 years ago, she had no idea it would change the course of her life. The sealed, brown envelope with 'Mary' on the front contained some paperwork and a note, reading: 'Alright Queen. If you want to find out any info, here are the numbers. Love always, Mum and Dad.'

One of the phone numbers her father had provided was for a Liverpool adoption agency a call to them began what turned out to be a long quest to find her birth family. The agency's records revealed that Mary's birth mother was an unmarried Irish woman called Rita O'Reilly, who had been living in London but for some reason travelled to Liverpool for Mary's birth in 1965 and that Rita had also given birth to two other children, a girl born in 1960 and a boy born in 1962. Mary, from West Derby, a suburb of Liverpool, was stunned. 'I'd known since I was seven that I was adopted as a ten week-old baby, but I'd had such a great childhood with my brother, who was also adopted, that I never thought any more of it.'

So happy was she, that she had often yearned for other siblings. Now she was left overwhelmed by the news she actually had two she'd never met. Named Bridget and George, they were born in London. And, like her, they had been adopted, each to a different family. Unusually, they shared the same father, an Irishman called Jim Melody. 'I was so shocked. It was a strange feeling because I've had a happy life, but there was always this thing that something was missing,' says Mary, 58.

Meeting her brother and sister, she felt, would make her life complete. That same year, 2002, she spoke to a counsellor at the Nugent Adoption agency, who was able to give her some more information about her birth parents and siblings. It threw up a mix of emotions. Mary had always imagined her birth mother as a vulnerable teenager, forced by poverty or family disapproval to give up her baby. 'Back in the Sixties, it would have been hard under those circumstances,' says Mary, 58.

Instead, she discovered that her mother was 34 when she had given birth to her and had already given two babies away. 'That didn't sit well with me. I'm not angry at all, I just can't fathom how any woman can give a whole family away. She was offered help by the Church but still chose to give us away.'

For the first time, Mary began to have doubts about trying to find her brother and sister: would they even want to be found?

'Did they know about me and, if so, why hadn't they come searching?' she says. 'Part of me thought that if I started looking and they didn't want to be involved, I'd be sorry.'

For the time being, Mary busy with her career as a hairdresser and her role as a mother to Stephanie, now 38, and Richard, now 30 put the search out of her mind. Then, three years later, her father died. That loss seemed to trigger an even more powerful longing for the siblings she had never met. She found herself glued to the heartbreaking stories of adoption and reunion on ITV's Long Lost Family, the programme that reunites relatives separated by adoption. In 2022, after yet another tear-jerking episode and a full 20 years since her father had given her the letter Mary finally decided to take a chance. She filled out an application to the show and then, as life got busy, almost forgot about it. Five months later, she received an unexpected phone call. 'It was one of the Long Lost Family team who wanted to ask some more questions. I nearly dropped the phone!' she says.

Because she had her siblings' dates of birth, the team was able to make a quick breakthrough. They found her brother George and sister Bridget who was now called Andrea. Not only were they both alive and well, but were living just 40 miles apart from one another, 240 miles south of Mary. In an upcoming episode of the series, co-host Davina McCall breaks the news to Mary at her home in Liverpool. 'It was just unbelievable,' Mary recalls. 'It was a life-changing moment, that's the only way I can explain it. I started shaking because even though I'd known about them, it was another thing to actually be told "we've found them".'

George and Andrea, meanwhile, were dealing with their own sense of shock after each receiving a letter from Long Lost Family explaining they had a sister who was trying to trace them. Andrea Tovey, 64, a former civil servant from Gillingham in Kent, initially thought the letter was a scam. 'I was a bit suspicious. It was just such a shock to get a letter saying my sister was wanting to find me when I never knew I had one,' the mum of two admits.

It was even more of an 'unbelievable, wonderful shock' to be told that she also had a brother. Today, as the three of them speak, there is an undeniable ease and warmth between them. They fall into a casual, comfortable patter as if they've known each other for decades, not months. With similar laid-back demeanours and endearingly gentle laughs, only Mary's soft Liverpudlian accent gives away the fact the trio didn't grow up together.nnAs Mary jokingly cuts across from George as he proudly claims responsibility for the reunion he had been looking for his two sisters for more than four years and was just days away from finding them himself before Long Lost Family got in touch you can see they have already developed that unmistakable knack for jovial sibling bickering. They chuckle about the obvious physical similarities: 'We are all very pale,' laughs Mary, 'and if you look at the shape of our eyes and mouths I think it's the same'.

Unlike Mary, both George and Andrea were raised as only children. Born in Highgate, London, and raised in Gillingham, Andrea had always known she was adopted. Like Mary, she had a blissfully happy childhood, brought up principally by her father, Leonard, after her adoptive mother Betty died of cancer when she was just six. Andrea had pulled her birth records as a young adult, but as she was the first child to be born to Rita O'Reilly, there was no mention of a younger brother or sister. Life was busy and fulfilling and she decided not to chase after her parents in case they weren't interested in meeting. Born in Hackney and raised in Loughton, Essex, George Buttwell, 62, had also known he was adopted as long as he could remember. Like his sisters, he had a happy childhood, leaving him with little urgency to uncover his past. In 1998, his wife, Lesley, saw a programme about accessing adoption records, which piqued steel fixer George's interest. He applied for his adoption paperwork and original birth certificate, which provided brief details about his birth parents. But it was really only years later in 2019 that his search got going. George's youngest daughter, Lindsey, 34, bought him a DNA test as a gift. The results opened a new chapter, throwing up relatives he never knew he had in Ireland and London. He began to discover more about his past than he had ever imagined. George's DNA test linked him to a second cousin in Ireland and through him and another member of his extended family, he heard he had two sisters for the first time. 'Knowing that, I became determined to find them,' says the father of three.

He then decided to explore a hunch that his sisters might have been born at the same Catholic nursing home in London as him. St Margaret's no longer existed, but he was told he might be able to find out more about his sisters through the Catholic Children's Society in Westminster. Its records contained the full names and dates of birth for his sisters. His local council adoption service agreed to contact his sisters on his behalf and was just doing some final legal checks when the letter arrived from Long Lost Family. 'I'd been looking for four years by that stage. I told [the adoption service] to call off the search. It was amazing news but perhaps not as much of a surprise as it was to Andrea, who didn't know about either of us.'

Last November, the three siblings finally came face-to-face in a Liverpool hotel in emotional scenes which will be broadcast tonight. As Davina explains as they wait to meet: 'It is very rare for Long Lost Family to find and bring together three full siblings all of whom until today have been complete strangers to one another.'

Andrea was first in the room; her heart in her mouth. 'It actually felt like quite a while before they came in and I started getting emotional before,' she recalls. 'It was something I'd never believed could happen after all this time but it was so nice. We held hands as we talked and we just seemed to get on straight away.'

George agrees. 'It did feel like we were all family. You could feel that straight away that we've got this thing in common, no matter how far we've drifted.'

Now, though, the sibling bond appears to be growing stronger with every passing month. They have an official family WhatsApp Group called O'Reilly Melody after the surnames of their birth parents. In January, less than two months after the show, they came together again at George's Essex home, where a picture of the three of them now takes pride of place in the living room. A second reunion followed in June, with a pub lunch in London and another trip to George's house to share notes on their histories and meet extended family. Just this week, George's daughter Sarah, 38, flew in from Spain and Andrea was there to meet her. Small things mean a lot: for Mary, it's been a thrill to send birthday and Christmas cards to her brother and sister for the very first time. The growing bond feels so natural that Mary has even taken to cutting Andrea's hair. 'Every time I've seen her she's blow-dried my hair and last time she actually cut it. I've never looked so glamorous,' smiles Andrea.

But for all the joy of getting to know one another (Andrea even jokes she shares the same love for the TV detective, Columbo, as George) there is sadness for the missed years they could have had together. 'I know that my parents would have adopted the other two if they'd have known and we could have all been together, as we should have been,' says Mary.

The siblings have discovered that Jim Melody passed away around 20 years ago and Rita O'Reilly around ten years later. As they were unmarried, Jim was buried in Ireland and Rita in Finchley, North London. From what they have gathered from relatives, the siblings understand that Rita and Jim lived together on and off for 40 years, but the real nature of their relationship remains a mystery: the pair have taken to the grave many unanswered questions for Mary, Andrea and George. 'For the time they were living in, for their background, it would have made a lot of sense to get married, so why didn't they?, George, who has visited his mother's grave, has often wondered. Why did their mother have them adopted, and to different families?

And why, when Rita and Jim appeared to travel from Dublin to London together, did Rita keep leaving their London address and flitting to different areas?

For now at least, the unresolved questions are overshadowed by the joy of finding one another. 'I've got ideas of what I'd like to do if I get to the point of retiring, but this has given me this extra positive feeling. It's this happy unknown future now and there's already this genuine love there with us,' says Andrea.

'It's a feeling you can't really describe because it's something I've never experienced before,' says Mary. 'It was like I'd already known them forever.'

Episode six of Long Lost Family airs on ITV1 and ITVX on August 25th, at 9pm.

Adoption and Social Care Review / Uncovering The Past Abuse of Children in Care

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 23, 2024, 05:34:05 PM »

https://www.careleavers.com/history/

Uncovering The Past Abuse of Children in Care

During the 1990s and into the 21st century, the problem of the widespread abuse of children in care has been increasingly recognised. There were many investigations and reports into such abuse in the UK. The same occurred in a number of other countries (such as Ireland, Canada and Australia).

This section of our website is dedicated to highlighting this problem. Although it focuses on what we know about abuse in the past, we also know that abuse continues to occur. Cases are regularly reported in newspapers and on radio and television. We want to make sure that governments and professionals deal with this problem properly. We also want to support those courageous care leavers and professionals who seek to expose such abuse.

We disagree with those who have claimed that the investigations and court cases of the past 15 years have been a witch-hunt and have exaggerated the problem. On the contrary, our members know that much of the abuse that went on in the past was never uncovered and has never been dealt with. Many of us have directly experienced or witnessed physical or sexual abuse that was never brought to light.

Throughout history, the possibility of abuse (whether physical or sexual) within the child care system has often been ignored. For example, outbreaks of venereal diseases in children’s homes in the early part of the twentieth century were usually explained away as the result of ‘innocent’ transmission through shared towels, toilet seats, etc. (see Carol Smart’s article).

It was only in the 1980s and 1990s that we saw wide acceptance of the existence of such abuse. As the Police Complaints Authority investigation into the Leicestershire child abuse cases noted: “…even today it is beyond the comprehension of most people that a parent might physically or sexually abuse a child. It is even more unthinkable that this could happen to children under professional care”.
The Abuse of Looked After Children: Developments in the 1990s

There is now overwhelming evidence of widespread abuse during past decades that went largely unpunished and largely unnoticed outside the care system. A wide range of professionals and responsible adults refused to believe complaints made by children and by other adults. Reading through the relevant inquiry reports provides graphic evidence of the scale of suffering involved. The three most important reports are the ‘Pindown’ inquiry by Alan Levy and Barbara Kahan, (1991), the Leicestershire inquiry (1993) and the inquiry into abuse in children’s homes in North Wales (known as the Waterhouse Report, 2000).
Pindown

A total of at least 132 children, aged nine and upwards, experienced what came to be called ‘pindown’ in a number of Leicestershire children’s homes between 1983 and 1989. ‘Pindown’ was little short of a system of solitary confinement for large periods of time. It varied in length but did last, in one instance, up to 84 continuous days. It was punishment for such activities as running away from care or school, petty theft, bullying and threats of violence. It exhibited “the worst elements of institutional control: baths on admission, special clothing, strict routine, segregation and isolation, humiliation, and inappropriate bed times” (Levy and Kahan, 1991: 167). The social workers involved even wrote down, in detail, how their system operated. When you read through the report, it becomes clear that the ringleaders were clearly proud of what they were doing.
Leicestershire

This inquiry looked at high levels of physical, sexual and emotional abuse in a number of Leicestershire children’s homes between 1973 and 1986. These were homes run by Frank Beck, but Beck was not the only person convicted. At his trial in 1991, Beck was found guilty of 17 counts of physical and sexual abuse. In a parallel Police Complaints Authority investigation into why so many of the complaints made to police by children had been badly dealt with, the police admit that the central problem for these children was “that they considered the police officers who dealt with them did not believe their stories. They were justified in that suspicion. To most of the police officers who dealt with them, they were no more than juvenile criminals who habitually told lies.”
North Wales

This inquiry looked at abuse within children’s homes in North Wales between 1974 and 1996. This was by far the biggest of the abuse scandals, with fifteen individuals convicted of offences. The investigation received evidence from 259 complainants and concluded that “Widespread sexual abuse of boys occurred in children’s residential establishments in Clwyd between 1974 and 1990” (page 197). In the neighbouring county of Gwynedd, the level of abuse was lower and was mainly physical.
The Government Response

The Conservative government in the 1990s said that the reforms introduced by the 1989 Children Act would help to prevent such widespread abuse in the future. However, Waterhouse and other enquiries showed that the 1989 Act was not enough. Also, the focus of the 1989 Children Act on the rights of children had died down by the mid-1990s. Many residential social workers and others talked about the ‘excessive’ powers that the Act had given to young people.

Concern with child abuse in the care system in North Wales grew gradually and Welsh Secretary William Hague set up a judicial inquiry in 1996. He also set up a review of the safeguards for children living away from home in England and Wales. This led to the 1997 Utting Report. There were numerous other investigations already being conducted by the police. By February 2000, as many as 32 separate investigations into abuse were underway in England and Wales.

The main parliamentary debate on the Waterhouse Report took place in March 2000. It is striking no one raised concerns about false allegations of abuse. Indeed, the most common concern is that the abuse uncovered represents the tip of an iceberg. Even as late as December 2001, only a few questions relating to ‘Operation Care’ from Claire-Curtis Thomas MP (from Merseyside) gave a hint of the backlash against the abuse investigations that is now underway.

Given the widespread revulsion expressed by MPs whilst debating the North Wales abuse cases, the establishment of a Home Affairs Select Committee investigation “into the conduct of investigations of past cases of abuse in children’s homes” was a surprise. It resulted from behind the scenes lobbying by supporters of alleged victims of miscarriages of justice. The committee, focused on these alleged victims, seemed relatively unconcerned with the problems of a justice system that could allow widespread abuse to continue for so long. This is clear from the Committee’s terms of reference:

The Committee will not investigate individual cases, some of which may still be subject of legal proceedings, but it will address the following issues:

1. Do police methods of ‘trawling’ for evidence involve a disproportionate use of resources and produce unreliable evidence for prosecution
2. Is the Crown Prosecution Service drawing a sensible line about which cases should be prosecuted?
3. Should there be a time limit-in terms of number of years since the alleged offence took place-on prosecution of cases of child abuse?
4. Is there a risk that the advertisement of prospective awards of compensation in child abuse cases encourages people to come forward with fabricated allegations?
5. Is there a weakness in the current law on “similar fact” evidence?

Committee chairman, Chris Mullin MP, confirmed that his priority was accused professionals, even while trying to reassure the victims of abuse:

This inquiry raises difficult and sensitive issues. It has been suggested that a whole new genre of miscarriages of justice has arisen from the over-enthusiastic pursuit of allegations about abuse of children in institutions many years ago. The decision to conduct this inquiry was taken in response to a large number of well-argued representations received by the Committee. We shall be looking at the methods by which convictions have been achieved and whether there are adequate safeguards. We shall bear in mind, however, that people convicted of sexually abusing children are more likely to continue protesting their innocence than any other category of prisoner.

If one reads the report, it is clear from the tone of the questioning of various witnesses to the committee where its priorities lay. Witnesses representing abuse victims were repeatedly questioned about the role of compensation in generating false claims, the potential for ‘false memories’ and the validity and dangers of police ‘trawling’ for witnesses and survivors.

Given the scale of hidden abuse revealed by the inquiries, the priorities of the committee are questionable. No one wants to see falsely accused people put in prison. However, we already know from the inquiry reports that hundreds of children, at the very least, had been seriously abused in the care system and that this had been hidden for, in many cases, decades. Wouldn’t the committee have made a much better use of its time trying to understand why police and professionals had failed to protect so many young people from such crimes over such a long period? Throughout the Waterhouse investigation, members of parliament from all parties had been willing to accept, in the words of Roger Sims, a senior Conservative backbencher:

That the abuse of children in institutions is a widespread and continuing problem…while inquiries and reports are necessary, it is essential that, thereafter, measures should be implemented to ensure the prevention of further abuse. (House of Commons Debates, 17.6.1996, col.525).

However, in this case the Home Affairs Select Committee was responding to pressures from groups that represent professionals. The inequality between such groups and their often isolated and damaged former clients is obvious. Care leavers often lack the networks, resources and influence to challenge such professionals. It was reassuring, therefore, that the government’s response to the report of the Home Affairs Select committee roundly rejected most of its recommendations and supported the conduct of the police investigations into past abuse. For example, the government response into the Committee’s activities stated that the government “does not share its believe in the existence of large numbers of miscarriages of justice”. It also noted that “the weight given by the Committee to the views of those who believe in miscarriages of justice, including those who claim to be the victims themselves of such cases, is disproportionate”. The government reply is also highly critical of most of the rest of the Committee’s approach.

Moreover, the police have always robustly defended their investigation techniques in this area and their view that there was, indeed, widespread abuse in the care system of the past. As a group of professionals who are used to sniffing out false accusations, one would have thought that their views should carry more weight with some of the critics of past abuse claims. The idea that significant numbers of care leavers have managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the police, prosecutors, judges and juries is simply not credible.
Further Reading

Corby, B, Doig, A and Roberts, V (2001), Public Inquiries into Abuse of Children in Residential Care. Jessica Kingsley: London.

Home Affairs Committee, Press Notice No.9: ‘Home Affairs Committee Launches Inquiry into the Conduct of Investigations into Past Cases of Abuse in Children’s Homes’, 16th January 2002. House of Commons: London.

Home Affairs Committee, 2002b: Oral Evidence, uncorrected transcript, 25th June 2002.

Home Office (Secretary of State) (2003), The Conduction of Investigations into Past Cases of Abuse in Children’s Homes (The Government Reply to the Fourth Report from the Home Affairs Committee) (Cm 5799), Norwich: The Stationery Office.

House of Commons Debates (17.3.200), Vol.346, cols 623-691.

Kirkwood, A (1993), The Leicestershire Inquiry 1992. Leicestershire County Council: Leicester.

Levy, A and Kahan, B (1991), The Pindown Experience and the Protection of Children. Staffordshire County Council.

Police Complaints Authority (1993), Inquiry into Police Investigation of Complaints of Child and Sexual Abuse in Leicestershire Children’s Homes: A Summary. Police Complaints Authority: London.

Smart, C (2000), ‘Reconsidering the Recent History of Child Sexual Abuse, 1910-1960’, Journal of Social Policy, 29 (1): 55-71.

Waterhouse, R (2000), Lost in Care: Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry into the abuse of Children in Care in the former county council areas of Gwynedd and Clwyd since 1974. (HC 201). The Stationery Office: London.

Articles / Mother and baby home survivors’ stories published: ‘I was told I was going’

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 21, 2024, 11:25:49 AM »

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-63038627?fbclid=IwY2xjawEymi1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHU21ti73F1Aw6t4g-fPDw3DUui3mpybIY9LRmilTeMvT3hvc8MEucoSxsQ_aem_BYCkPx4_aTyAQO43ZOP5b

Mother and baby home survivors’ stories published: ‘I was told I was going’

27 September 2022
By Robbie Meredith
BBC News NI Education Correspondent

“I became pregnant and when my mother found out I was taken immediately to a doctor and within a very short period of time I found myself in a Good Shepherd mother-and-baby home.”

This is part of one woman’s personal testimony about her experience of mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland. Her account has been published along with a number of others, running to hundreds of pages and made available on the Quote oral history website run by Queen’s University Belfast, external (QUB).

Those who experienced life in workhouses and Magdalene laundries have told their stories and the transcripts also include evidence from children born in the homes. The testimonies have been anonymised but have been published with the full permission of those who gave them. One woman, referred to as LC, was sent to a Good Shepherd mother-and-baby home when she became pregnant, aged 17. “I was just told I was going and that was it,” she added.

“I was put in a car with the local parish priest and my mother and off I went.”

LC’s baby was adopted against her wishes but later in life she was able to reunite with her adopted child. A mother referred to as HS also entered a Good Shepherd home when she was pregnant, aged 19. She said that she was made to feel “isolated and sinful” there. DH, meanwhile, was born in a mother-and-baby home and then adopted. The impact that it’s had on me as a person has been significant,” he said.

DH had begun a process on reuniting with his birth mother when he was in his 30s.

Stigma of pregnancy outside marriage

Mother-and-baby institutions housed women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. There was stigma attached to pregnancy outside of marriage and women and girls were admitted by families, doctors, priests and state agencies. The laundries were Catholic-run workhouses that operated across the island of Ireland. About a third of women admitted to the homes were aged under 19 and most were aged from 20 to 29. The youngest was 12 and the oldest 44. A number were the victims of sexual crime, including rape and incest. Numbers of entrants peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before a rapid reduction in the 1980s. The oral evidence had informed a major Stormont report into mother-and-baby homes and Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland, which was published in January 2021. It found that 10,500 women went through mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland and 3,000 were admitted into Magdalene laundries. The report detailed often harsh conditions and abuse suffered by some of those admitted to eight mother-and-baby homes, a number of former workhouses and four Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland. Some women said they had been detained against their will, were used as unpaid labour and had to give up babies for adoption. The experts from QUB and Ulster University who carried out the research for the 2021 report had said they intended to make some of the transcripts of evidence “available for consultation by members of the public”. That has now been done with full transcripts of testimonies from 24 individuals about their experiences.
‘Traumatic and upsetting’

Thirteen of the testimonies are from “birth mothers” women who gave birth while living in the institutions. Five are testimonies from the children of birth mothers, one from another relative and five from “other observers” of the institutions. The “other observers” include an elderly retired priest, a woman whose father worked in a Good Shepherd convent, a retired midwife, a woman who had lived in one of the Sacred Heart homes and a woman who knew a number of residents of one of the homes. Details have been removed from the transcripts that would identify any of those who agreed that their experiences could be published. An introduction to the transcripts said that a “range of contrasting and complex testimonies” had been collected. “They ranged from testimonies that were highly critical of the mother and baby institutions and Magdalene laundries through to very different narratives from individuals who worked within them,” it said.

“Readers will no doubt be aware that the testimony they will encounter is often traumatic and upsetting. The transcripts reveal many birth mothers were pressured to give up a child for adoption. Several relate testimony about various forms of mistreatment. The latter included a range of details, spanning regimental institutional regimes that imposed cleaning chores on heavily pregnant women through to, in a very small number of cases, more serious allegations of sexual abuse.”

The interviews were carried out by Prof Sean O’Connell of QUB and Dr Olivia Dee. Prof O’Connell told BBC News NI that he wanted to pay tribute to the courage of all of those who had been involved in the process and came forward to give oral evidence. Following the publication of the research report in January 2021, a Truth Recovery Design Panel which had been established by the Stormont Executive subsequently recommended that a public inquiry be held into the institutions in Northern Ireland. The PSNI has also launched an investigation into allegations of physical and sexual abuse in the institutions.

* Listen here to BBC News NI’s podcast ‘Assume Nothing: The Last Request’ about a man who was born in a mother-and-baby home and his last wish to track down his birth mother

Articles / I'm a forensic psychologist and have interviewed some of Britain's most ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 17, 2024, 01:07:44 PM »

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13742441/Im-forensic-psychologist-interviewed-Britains-horrifying-killers-murderer-hated-most.html

I'm a forensic psychologist and have interviewed some of Britain's most horrifying killers but there was a murderer that I hated the most

By John James

Published: 09:44, 17 August 2024 | Updated: 10:53, 17 August 2024

One of Britain's top forensic psychologists who sat across the table from some of the world's most deranged criminal minds has revealed he has never disliked a subject more than Moors Murder Ian Brady. Professor Jeremy Coid first met Brady back in 2003 whilst conducting a mental health review for him at Ashworth High Security Psychiatric Hospital in Merseyside. Brady, then aged 65, had been incarcerated for 37 years at this point for the gruesome Moors Murders with evil accomplice Myra Hindley in the 1960s. The twisted couple who have been remembered as 'The Moors Murderers' engaged in the sadistic brutality and murder of five children, before burying their bodies in Saddleworth Moor in North West England. Professor Coid made his comments in an interview with independent filmmaker Thomas Gardner, recalling that his first impression of the sadistic killer was remarkably low key. 'He was quite pleasant and courteous', he recalled, 'he looked to me like quite a shabby Oxford don. He was wearing a sports jacket and had a shot of grey hair.'

The child killer was born in 1938 in Glasgow, where he was raised by foster parents in the Gorbals, infamously known as one of Glasgow's toughest and most impoverished slums. As a teenager, Brady committed a slew of petty crimes, with the courts eventually sending him to Manchester to live with his mother, and her new husband, Patrick Brady. As time went on, with the intention to 'better himself,' Brady pursued new interests in building up a library of books on Nazism, sadism and sexual perversion. Staring across the table at the psychopathy, Professor Coid remarked that he exuded a desperate sinister need to 'control'. He continued: 'What happened during the interview was it became very clear it was very difficult to interrupt him. 'This was a man who was so self centered that he didn't want to do anything but talk about himself and about his negative feelings towards others.'

Brady and Hindley eventually tortured and killed five children aged between 10 and 17 and buried their bodies in Saddleworth Moor at least four of the victims were sexually assaulted. Their first victim was Pauline Reade, who was murdered by Brady and Hindley when she was just 16 years old, in 1963. She had picked up by Hindley and taken to the moor where she was sexually assaulted and strangled by Brady. Hindley and Brady then lured schoolboy, 12-year-old John Kilbride, from a market in Ashton-Under-Lyne in 1963. In a familiar pattern, the three of them ended up taking a detour to windswept Saddleworth Moor. Brady told Hindley he sexually assaulted and strangled the boy. The third victim was 12-year-old Keith Bennet in 1964, with Hindley luring him into a van by asking him to help with some boxes and sadistic lover Brady watching his prey from the back seat. With the three taking yet another detour to windswept Saddleworth Moor, Brady later told Hindley he sexually assaulted and strangled the boy. He is the only of the five victim's whose body has never been found. Youngest victim Lesley Ann Downey, 10, had been lured from a fairground to Hindley and Brady's home in 1964, where, once inside the house, she was undressed, gagged and strangled. She was later found naked with her clothes at her feet, in a shallow grave on the moor, after a sickening 16-minute recording of her death was captured by the pair. The final victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans, who was attacked with an axe, smothered with a cushion and strangled with an electrical cable in 1965. Professor Coid said that although Brady's crimes were shocking he had on the occasion encountered worse. However, the Moors Murderer's aura engendered in him a personal dislike he had never encountered before. He explained: 'I think if you're an experienced forensic psychiatrist it's important to be aware of how your patients make you feel and how they make you feel towards them. He didn't make me afraid at all, but he produced in me a profoundly negative feeling. A feeling of personal dislike towards him that grew and grew as the interview went on. He was doing something to me, to my inner world. It became quite clear he was trying to control me throughout the interview. I've seen offenders who have committed extremely unpleasant and sometimes possibly even worse murders that haven't managed to produce such a negative reaction in me.'

Brady never showed any remorse for his heinous crimes, while Hindley maintained she had been beaten and drugged by her partner into becoming a cold-blooded killer. Touching on the deviant's callous lack of remorse, Professor Coid said: 'He never showed any remorse and made it clear he never would. 'I asked him about remorse and he referred to it as wind and said "if they want wind they would have to wait till Doomsday before they got it."'

Articles / JoJo Siwa, 21, reveals VERY ambitious pregnancy plans after coming out as gay

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 15, 2024, 02:52:48 PM »

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13656215/jojo-siwa-pregnancy-plans-announcing-gay.html?ito=social-facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawEq42ZleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHeCaT3ycxjxWC7zCtAE43URifU4enUWcJUm-p5vo_0b_aZaWjWYdEGlVdw_aem_0Dtfb6pMZpFK115DePUPCQ

JoJo Siwa, 21, reveals VERY ambitious pregnancy plans after coming out as gay

READ MORE: JoJo Siwa recalls moment she realized she was gay

By Noa Halff For Dailymail.Com

Published: 15:45, 21 July 2024 | Updated: 17:50, 21 July 2024

JoJo Siwa has revealed her ambitious pregnancy plans after coming out as gay. The 21-year-old former 'Dance Moms' star, who came out as gay in 2021, did not hold back when it comes to her dreams of motherhood. The singer has frequently expressed a desire for motherhood, telling DailyMail.com last year that she wants a baby ‘literally tomorrow' and already revealing the names she has picked out. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Siwa announced her intentions to have not one, not two, but three babies all at the same time with different surrogates. Because I'm gay and I have to plan a pregnancy much different than a straight person, I actually want to take three eggs, fertilize three eggs, and have three surrogates,' she said in the July 15 video. So technically, they'll all be [from] the same batch but they would all be born separately.'

'Then maybe their little birthdays will land on different days and they can be like triplets, but like, not,' she continued.

She shared the names of her said future kids, saying,' 'I'm like, 'Just so you know, there are three children. Their names are Freddy, Eddie and Teddy.'

The 'Karma' singer confirmed confidently that her three children will 'be here' in three years 'whether you like it or not.'

Siwa explained that she discusses her plans with partners very early on in the dating process. 'I'm like, 'Just so you know, there are three children. Their names are Freddy, Eddie and Teddy,'' she said. ''I will have as many more as you want, however many more but FET is coming and they will be here in three years, whether you like it or not.'' Those are my nuggets and no one comes before my nuggets.'

This wasn't Siwa's first time expressing her desire for motherhood. She told E! News earlier this year about her plans to have three children a baby girl named Freddie and twin boys named Eddy and Teddy. ' 'I got three tattoos dedicated to them,' she said in March. 'Got a sperm donor lined up. We're ready. We just gotta be patient. I got a couple of years.'

Last year, at age of 20, she told DailyMail.com that she wanted a baby 'literally tomorrow,' while gushing about how she 'can't wait to be a mom' months after she was slammed for pretending to be pregnant. The Dance Moms alum spoke out about her desire to have children while chatting exclusively with DailyMail.com. While discussing her co-star Nick Viall's impending fatherhood, JoJo couldn't contain her own excitement about one day becoming a mother. When asked if she wanted to have kids of her own, she said, 'Literally tomorrow. I can't wait to be a mom.'

Research / How Mother-Child Separation Causes Neurobiological Vulnerability Into Adulthood

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 13, 2024, 12:47:10 PM »

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/how-mother-child-separation-causes-neurobiological-vulnerability-into-adulthood.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawEoJhFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbYn0RwlLWzSDQrYK5dv8IIBXJU15aHUEgu2nJSmG9cH2o98o9OQWPqVnA_aem_tX-yhka-ybBWdBn2r4XS5g

How Mother-Child Separation Causes Neurobiological Vulnerability Into Adulthood
June 20, 2018

The evidence from psychological research is clear: When children are separated from their parents, it can have traumatic repercussions for kids' lives down the line.

But attachment is much more than a feeling according to research in Current Directions in Psychological Science, it's an umbrella term critical to development across the lifespan.

The attachment bond between a mother and her child is first formed in the womb, where fetuses have been found to develop preferential responses to maternal scents and sounds that persist after birth, explains Myron Hofer, who was director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychology at Columbia University until his retirement in 2011. These rapid early-learning processes continue during the newborn stage of development, in which children begin to recognize their mothers' faces and voices.

From this point on, early maternal separation can result in a series of traumatic emotional reactions during which the child engages in an anxious period of calling and active search behavior followed by a period of declining behavioral responsiveness.

In a study of infant rats, Hofer found that this behavior was largely a response to the loss of warmth a child receives through bodily contact, nutrients, and other physiological interactions with its mother. While Hofer was able to normalize the cardiac and REM-sleep cycles of neonatal rats in his lab by providing them with artificial warmth, tactile stimulation (e.g., petting them with a paint brush), and abundant milk, this research did not, he writes, account for the role of higher-level behaviors such as reciprocity, imitation, attunement, and play in the mother–child relationship.

"In thinking about the implication of these findings for human infants, one can suppose that these kinds of simple maternal regulators would be found early in a baby's postnatal period, but that soon more subtle and intricate interactions would become important," Hofer writes.

Hofer and colleagues also studied the effect of separation on rats in adolescence and adulthood. When submitted to a 24-hour period of immobilization, 80% of adolescent rats who were removed from their mothers before weaning were found to develop stomach ulcers in response to the stress. Normally reared rats, meanwhile, experienced no ulceration at all. Unexpectedly, those same early-weaned rats were then less vulnerable to ulcers in adulthood, when approximately 50% of normally reared rats experienced ulceration, suggesting they may have become less stress-responsive with age.

Though human relationships are more complex than those of rodents, the research suggests that withdrawing maternal support early in a child's life can have a number of physiological and behavioral consequences that may contribute to a complex, changing pattern of vulnerability over the life span, Hofer says.

"Variations in qualities of mother–infant relationships among humans thus appear to have deep biological roots in the form of their capacity to shape children's psychological and biological responses to their environment effects that extend into adulthood," he writes.

Resources

Hofer, M. A. (2006). Psychobiological Roots of Early Attachment. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(2), 84–88. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2006.00412.x

Pascuzzo, K., Moss, E., & Cyr, C. (2015). Attachment and Emotion Regulation Strategies in Predicting Adult Psychopathology. SAGE Open, 5, 215824401560469. doi:10.1177/2158244015604695

General Discussion / Neurodiverse Mother and Daughter Sue Birmingham Council for ‘Wrongful’ ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 11, 2024, 03:14:28 PM »

https://bylinetimes.com/2024/08/07/neurodiverse-mother-and-daughter-sue-birmingham-council/

Neurodiverse Mother and Daughter Sue Birmingham Council for ‘Wrongful’ Separation

They claim the council was negligent in pursuing a care order and breached their human rights
Natasha Phillips
7 August 2024

An autistic mother and daughter are suing Birmingham City Council for separating them during child protection proceedings claiming that the council was negligent in pursuing a care order, did not understand neurodiversity, and had breached their human right to family life. The child, who was born in 2016, was taken into care when she was seven weeks old, after her mother had asked the local authority for support. Byline Times learned of her story through the Family Court Reporting Pilot which allows accredited journalists access to court hearings that have historically been held in private. No details that can lead to the parties involved being identified can be reported. The mother, who was subjected to intimate partner violence by the child’s father resulting in an indefinite restraining order and criminal conviction against him, contacted the council because she felt anxious about being a first time mother. She expressed fears about whether her autism might make parenting more challenging and whether the abuse she suffered by the father might affect the way she felt about their daughter. Local authority staff claimed the mother was mentally unwell and had a borderline personality disorder, and applied for a care order. The child, who is now eight, was initially placed in foster care for more than 20 months and then given to her paternal grandmother to be looked after. The care proceedings for the child concluded in 2018 and the child was returned to her mother. “Because I was taken from momma at the age of seven-weeks-old, I feel that whenever momma goes out to the shops or something she will not come back,” the young girl told Byline Times. “I don’t think the courts make decisions that are the best for children. Social services did not provide me with a life story while I was in foster care, so I don’t even know my first word.”

Several court filings, which this newspaper has seen, are critical of the local authority’s actions, with one judge concluding that the mother “had been deprived of the opportunity to demonstrate her ability to care [for her daughter]” and that both mother and child were now “seeking damages from the local authority”.

The details of the claim against Birmingham City Council, which have been shared with Byline Times, allege that the mother and daughter suffered psychological harm as a result of the care order and that the council had prevented the child from forming a secure attachment to her mother. The filing also alleges that the council failed to provide opportunities for the mother to breastfeed and restricted their ability to bond. The claim goes on to allege that the council’s removal of the child was not in her “best interests and was a disproportionate and draconian response to the difficulties experienced by [the mother],” and “failed to appreciate that [the mother] had not been provided with adequate intervention and specialist support”. The council is also accused of providing “contact arrangements that were initially chaotic and denied any contact”.

The young girl has since been diagnosed with an attachment disorder and is waiting for an assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The UK’s Care Crisis

The United Nations has become increasingly concerned by the numbers of children being placed into care in the UK. Observations produced by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2023 urged the UK to take a child rights-focused approach to children’s social care and ensure children’s voices were heard in care proceedings. It also pushed for the UK to reduce the number of child removals and to do so through “early intervention and preventative services”. Government figures show there were 83,840 children in care at the end of March 2023, equivalent to one child in every 140. Children with Special Educational Needs (SEND) appear to be disproportionally represented. Research produced in 2020 by UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health found that 80% of children in England who were in care between the ages of five and 16 received support for SEND, which includes children with a diagnosis of autism. Established research estimates that one in five people in the UK are neurodiverse. Neurodiversity refers to the different and natural ways in which people’s brains process the world around them. It can refer to the learning and processing differences found in children and adults, including autism, ADHD and SEND. Details about the case against Birmingham City Council emerged in documents produced for a separate but related set of proceedings in the family courts about the girl’s contact arrangements with her paternal family which began in 2019. The child began to complain in 2022 about a contact order which had been put in place and an application was filed by the mother to vary it. The arrangements broke down in part because the father failed to write letters to his daughter as required by the order, and to read letters she had written to him. The paternal grandmother also made comments during contact which upset the child, including repeated remarks about her autism “not being real” and being constantly asked to keep secrets from the mother. The mother was accused of trying to turn the child against the father and paternal grandmother and as a result engaging in parental alienation. The final hearing for the family court case was held in August in the Birmingham Family Court. The child’s father did not attend and had a Qualified Legal Representative acting on his behalf. Qualified Legal Representatives’ are appointed by the court to ensure cross-examinations of vulnerable witnesses such as victims of domestic violence are not carried out by the perpetrators of the abuse. The mother attended the hearing with her barrister and solicitor, while the paternal grandmother attended with her Qualified Legal Representative. In her application to vary the contact order, the mother said her daughter’s health had deteriorated significantly since the order was made and alleged that the contact arrangements between her daughter and her paternal family, which were produced by the Cafcass support service, had not been mindful of her daughter’s needs as an autistic person and did not take into account her daughter’s wishes and feelings. They included wanting to be able to decide when to see her father and paternal grandmother. The mother added that her experience of intimate partner violence with the father had also been ignored by the Cafcass officer. The child tried to tell the Cafcass officer on several occasions that she was not comfortable with the arrangements and eventually became distraught and suffered volatile meltdowns. Responding to a Cafcass feedback form which asked what the child thought about Cafcass’s engagement with her she said, “I got so angry that I chewed [the letter], ripped it and stamped on it. Your questions were silly and nothing about contact. You didn’t even ask me what my wishes and feelings are.”

Replying to questions about how Cafcass approached her autism, she said, “I feel that you didn’t respect my disabilities. Your approach was not autism friendly.”

"You didn’t help me. You didn’t make a difference, you only made it worse" - The daughter on Cafcass

“I feel that as an institution, Cafcass are institutionally ableist. During care proceedings they refused to make any reasonable adjustments for me,” the mother told Byline Times.

The mother, who is currently on benefits and receiving legal aid for her cases, used her savings to commission an Independent Social Worker with experience of working with autistic families to produce a report on the current contact arrangements and make recommendations to vary it. The recommendations for contact, which were largely in line with the mother’s and daughter’s wishes, were approved by the judge at the hearing in August. “Had I not funded this report, I think the hearing would have probably gone down another child protection route,” the mother said.

The judge concluded at the final hearing in August that the arrangements for contact needed to be revised in line with the child’s needs and wishes, and made several changes including ensuring the young girl was not forced to have contact with her father and that he completed a drug rehabilitation work and a domestic abuse programme. “Autism per se does not mean that you can’t parent. In some ways, I think an autistic parent might argue they had a better insight into the needs of their autistic child, because they can share some of the experiences,” Frances Harris, a barrister at Harcourt Family Law who represented the mother at the final hearing, told Byline Times.

Justice System and Social Care Not Properly Trained on Autism

Legal professionals inside the child protection system are becoming increasingly aware that neurodivergent individuals, particularly autistic parents, face significant challenges in child protection proceedings and assessments about their capacity to parent. Alia Lewis, the co-founder of Family Law Advice for the Neurodivergent Community (FLANC) and a child care law solicitor at law firm Duncan Lewis, told Byline Times that the justice system and children’s social care did not provide adequate training on autism. “The biggest problem is that no-one inside the system has any specific training on autism or neurodivergence. If you don’t have the knowledge, then that means everything that you do in relation to a child is based on what you think you know rather than what you need to know," - Alia Lewis, co-founder of FLANC

She added that, “another problem” due to a lack of training amongst both areas within child protection and family justice, in terms of neurodivergence, is that “unless you really have a good understanding of the complex needs that arise with many of these children, it’s very difficult to know what assessments to ask for in court in order to be able to properly care for the child.”

FLANC’s website states that the advice service was set up to ensure “the neurodivergent community has equal access to justice by addressing barriers to participation in family proceedings and dispute resolution”.

Other issues which arise for autistic children and adults during family court cases stem from the set up of the court room. Bright lights, a lot of movement and long hearings can all be challenging for autistic people and can make participating in proceedings almost impossible. In his closing statement, District Judge Stephen Parker said it was important for anyone who was not autistic to try to understand this form of neurodiversity: “It’s very difficult to look at it from our own perspective because we are in our own little world whereby what we perceive as normal is normal, but that may not be others’ worldview.”

“You can see someone’s got COVID, sneezing, coughing, looking awful. But with neurological issues, be it depression or neurodiversity we may be able to see something is wrong, but we don’t feel it because we haven’t been through it ourself. But we need to understand so as to have empathy with it as it is a different worldview,” he added.

In a statement included in the filings for the hearing, the mother said: “I hope that there is much needed change within social services and the family courts, so that should [my daughter] ever decide to have her own children, she is able to do so without being misunderstood or seen as a deficit, simply because she is autistic. I would like the court to be aware that care proceedings were extremely traumatic for me. Neither [my daughter] or I have had any support or therapy in relation to our separation.”

Byline Times contacted the legal representatives of the father and paternal grandmother for comment but they did not respond. Birmingham City Council declined to comment.

This story was written as part of the Family Court Reporting Pilot which allows accredited journalists access to a range of family court hearings that have historically been held in private.

Articles / Long Lost Family viewers are left 'broken' and 'sobbing their hearts out' as ...

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 09, 2024, 04:10:12 PM »

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13662721/Long-Lost-Family-viewers-broken-sobbing.html?login&param_code=4ggp707h17c3q8z6hzbj&param_state=eyJyZW1lbWJlck1lIjpmYWxzZSwicmFuZG9tU3RhdGUiOiIzZDZkZDE0MS1lMzM5LTRjOWUtOWUyYS0yZDdmODYzOGRhNDAifQ%3D%3D&param__host=www.dailymail.co.uk&param_geolocation=row&base_fe_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2F&validation_fe_uri=%2Fregistration%2Fp%2Fapi%2Ffield%2Fvalidation%2F&check_user_fe_uri=registration%2Fp%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fuser_check%2F&isMobile=false

Long Lost Family viewers are left 'broken' and 'sobbing their hearts out' as woman, 71, reunites with her son 55 years after she was forced to give him up for adoption by her ashamed mother

READ MORE: Woman, 61, is reunited with brother she never knew she had 60 years after they were separated when their 'cruel' adoptive parents sent him back to the children's home

By Alanah Khosla For Mailonline

Published: 17:41, 23 July 2024 | Updated: 17:54, 23 July 2024

Long Lost Family viewers have revealed their heartbreak after watching last night's episode of the ITV show. The moving British documentary series, hosted by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, reunites family members after years of separation, with many participants forced to live apart from relatives due to factors out of their control. In a touching third episode of the series, which aired on Monday evening, a mother and son reunited after 55 years apart. Grandmother Sue Stalley, from Bedfordshire, was still at school when she got pregnant. Her mother forced the pregnant teen to give up her son, Richard, five weeks after his birth. But thanks to the Long Lost Family team, Sue's son, now named Steve, was discovered in the Netherlands, and the duo reunited in emotional scenes, with viewers claiming that while it was 'great TV', they were unable to 'stop the tears'. Viewers took to X, formerly Twitter, to share their thoughts on Sue and Steve's emotional journey. One said: 'I haven't watched Long Lost Family is ages and here I am, I can't stop the tears. It's such great TV'.

A second said: '12 minutes in a I'm crying. [It is] a record, I think. #LongLostFamily'. A third added: 'Just broken, I'm sobbing my heart out, lovely programme.'

'Long Lost Family sets me off every single time,' another said. A fifth added: 'I've got something in my eye...#LongLostFamily'. Another added: 'Time to cry my way through Long Lost Family'.

Another joked: 'That was a brilliant episode of Long Lost Family. I'm so pleased for the families being reunited. Could the show sell some merch? Usual things, mugs, clothing, bedding etc., but also "eye gutters" for when you're absolutely in bits.'

The episode revealed how Sue's mother was so ashamed of her daughter's pregnancy that she forced her to wear a thick coat throughout to hide the growing baby bump. Despite Sue being just a teenager when she first became pregnant, she was convinced that she could look after her baby. She recalled: 'My boyfriend said, "well, let's get married". But his mum said no, we're far too young. So it didn't happen. My mum was mortified, to say the least. I'd brought shame on the family. She bought me this massive thick coat, and it was the middle of summer, and I was walking around with this big coat on and everyone kept saying, "are you cold?" and I'd have to go "yeah, I'm cold", so nobody knew I was pregnant.'

Sue's family decided that she would give the child up for adoption and sent her to a nearby mother and baby home, where Sue was miserable and desperate to keep her son after his birth. 'I did try, I did say to her, "I don't want to get the baby adopted, I want to keep him" and they said no, you're too young,' Sue recalled.

Sue tried to return home and ask her mother to reconsider, but the parent refused. Sue spent five weeks with Richard before she had to hand him over to foster care. She recalled on the show: 'He wasn't taken and then fostered straight away, I looked after him for that five weeks. It was lovely, you've got this little thing in your arms, he needs you, and you need him. He's yours. And no one can take that away from you. He'll always be mine,' added the mother, who went on to have five more children.

Five weeks after Richard's birth, Sue was told a foster family had been found for him: 'I was told to pack my bags, leave the baby in the nursery and just go. I didn't get to say goodbye. I just cried all the way through it, it wasn't what I wanted. But then what I wanted didn't come into it I don't think.'

She added: 'Afterwards I went home, I got myself a job, still was seeing my boyfriend, and then I found out I was pregnant again. My mum hit the roof, and I thought, I can't do this again. I was very determined. I've got to put my foot down. She wanted to get him adopted, but I said no. I said, "if you keep saying I've got to get him adopted, I'll move out and I'll take him with me", and with that, she said "let's come to an agreement".'

Sue's mother looked after the baby in the day whilst Sue was at work. Sue went on to have more children and raised them mainly as a single mother. She has always regretted giving up her first born son, and felt that she could have coped. The team discovered Richard is now called Steve, but they had difficulty locating him in the UK. It was only when they widened their search that they discovered Steve living in the Netherlands. Co-host Nicky Campbell met with Steve to tell him about his birth mother. Steve sympathised with his mother's plight, particularly as he has also brought up his own two children as a single parent. 'My ex wife, she got cancer,' Steve revealed. 'My son was 12, when she died. So I stopped working and brought my son up. And my daughter I had from a different relationship, she came to live with me as well at six-years-old. So I know what it's like bringing kids up on your own, it's tough.'

When co-host Davina McCall told Sue the news that Richard has been found, she was tearful but delighted and couldn't believe the parallels with his single parent status. She also discovered that Steve had been in the military, as has much of her family. Steve, his daughter, and his granddaughter, travelled to meet with Sue, who still lives not far from where he was born. Ahead of their meeting, Steve said: 'It's really important [to meet my birth mother] because you do have a bit of an identity problem, you know. It's a big chunk of your life that you've missed out on, so you want to know a bit, what her life was like, anybody would have a thousand questions to ask, you know. I can't wait.'

Sue was emotional after their first hug and recalled: 'I knew that cuddle from when he was a baby. I felt that immediate bond, it was lovely, it was heartfelt.'

Sue also gifted her son a St Christopher medal to keep him safe on his travels. It was an emotional reunion and Steve met his younger sister Stefanie and her family. 'It just feels amazing that he's back. 55 years and there's my son right in front of me. I've longed for that. My family is complete. I've got all my children, and that is all I ever wanted,' said Sue.

Steve added: 'Fantastic we'll be a family now it just feels natural.'

Articles / Long Lost Family: Adopted woman who spent 40 years searching for her ....

« Last post by RDsmum on August 09, 2024, 11:41:56 AM »

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13719265/Long-Lost-Family-Adopted-woman-spent-40-years-searching-biological-sister-having-childhood-shrouded-loneliness-reveals-joy-finally-meeting-sibling.html

Long Lost Family: Adopted woman who spent 40 years searching for her biological sister after having a childhood shrouded by loneliness reveals her joy after finally meeting her sibling

Liz Allward, 60, from North Somerset, was adopted as a young baby
SPOILERS AHEAD
READ MORE: Long Lost Family viewers are left 'broken' and 'sobbing their hearts out' as woman, 71, reunites with her son 55 years after she was forced to give him up for adoption by her ashamed mother

By Alanah Khosla For Mailonline

Published: 15:22, 8 August 2024 | Updated: 17:03, 8 August 2024

A woman who spent nearly 40 years longing to find her biological sister has revealed her joy at finally meeting her, adding that it still feels 'surreal'. Part-time hairdresser and counsellor Liz Allward, 60, from North Somerset, was adopted as a baby and always had a strong 'intuition' that she had a birth sibling, despite never being told so. Though Liz had a happy childhood, she always felt a sense of 'loneliness', exacerbated by her adoptive family moving around a lot, making it difficult for Liz to maintain friendships. It was on her wedding day in 1996 at the age of 23 that her adoptive mother informed her that she had an older biological sister, but with few other details, Liz was unable to locate her. After years of failed attempts to locate her biological sister, Liz contacted ITV's Long Lost Family on a whim, unexpectedly leading her to the information she had longed to know for years and, most importantly, her biological sister, Deborah. Talking to FEMAIL, Liz recalled: 'When I was younger I didn't know if it was a brother or a sister; I just knew something was missing. I was adopted in Leeds at a very young age, and then we moved quickly down to Surrey, then we moved to Bristol. I had a lovely family and a lovely mother and father, I can't fault them, [they were] very traditional and very honest.'

She added: 'I had a nice life, I was bit lonely during childhood, the moves were difficult for me.'

It wasn't until Liz's wedding day at the age of 23 that her adoptive mother confirmed the intuition she had always had. Liz recalled: 'When I got married, I asked my mother, I said: '"Am I one of a twin?" She hesitated and told me that there was a daughter born to my birth mother a couple of years before [me]'.

Her instinct was confirmed, but Liz knew nothing more about her biological sister other than her existence. 'I got and married life went on I tried for a quite a few years [to find Deborah], always with the support of friends,' she said.

The mother-of-two sought information online and applied for her adoption papers from North Somerset Council. It was in the document that Liz discovered the name of her birth sister. She said: 'There was one line that read "Deborah", it was just overwhelming, it was frightening as well'.

When Liz turned 60, she decided enough time had gone by without knowing her biological sister, and with encouragement from her daughter, she sent an application to ITV's Long Lost Family. 'I think after turning 60, I thought: "I've got to do something", my daughter told me to go on Long Lost Family, I thought I'd never get on, but I did'.

'Within two weeks someone replied with the process it was brilliant,' the mother-of-two recalled.

The Long Lost Family team located Deborah, now known as Debbie, and discovered that, unlike Liz, Debbie was adopted within the family by her maternal aunt and that although she knew her birth mother as a child, she had long since lost contact. Debbie said: 'I was adopted into the family, so I knew a lot of the relatives. Growing up, we didn't have a lot, but we never went without. We'd had a holiday to the seaside every year and at Christmas, it might have been second-hand things that we got, but we didn't mind, we appreciated everything we got'.

Unlike Liz, Debbie discovered she had a birth sister at the age of eight, explaining: 'I thought about her quite a lot over the years I had never forgotten."

She explained that while she would have loved to find her biological sister, she 'wouldn't know where to start'. In October last year, she was surprised to come home to a letter from Long Lost Family. 'Everything was going through my head', she recalled.

'It took me all day and I rang the number on it, and that's when I found out that it was real, and I was thrilled to bits'. There were a few similarities in life along the way, but I think we're both quite sensitive underneath but feisty in other ways.' She added: 'I think we're very similar in lots of ways'.

The mother-of-two continued: 'It filled that hole, and it made me feel complete really, I had this urge to do it at 60, and I acted on it, and it was brilliant, and it's just been a bit of a whirlwind since then it still feels a bit surreal.'

Debbie added: 'It was brilliant, I felt like I had known her all my life'.

The pair are now enjoying getting to know each other and making up for lost time, with the pair chatting weekly on the telephone. Liz and Debbie are planning on getting to know each other face to face in October, when Liz is planning a visit to Debbie's Yorkshire home.

100

General Discussion / Speech by the President of the Family Division: Adapting Adoption to the ....

« Last post by Forgotten Mother on August 02, 2024, 01:49:02 PM »

https://www.judiciary.uk/speech-by-the-president-of-the-family-division-adapting-adoption-to-the-modern-world-part-two/

Speech by the President of the Family Division: Adapting Adoption to the Modern World, Part Two

POTATO Conference

Adapting Adoption to the Modern World: Part Two
Friday 17 May 2024

President of the Family Division

The Right Honourable Sir Andrew McFarlane

It is both a pleasure and an honour to be invited to give a keynote address to the POTATO Group Conference 2024. As this lecture will be published I should explain that POTATO stands for ‘Parents of Traumatised Adopted Teens Organisation’. It is a group of parents who have adopted children from the care system in England and Wales over the past 20 years or so and have experienced challenges, often very significant challenges, during their children’s teen years as a result of the effects of previous trauma being played out.

Dr Pangloss would no doubt regard adoption from the care system as providing a child with ‘all that is best’ in ‘this best of all possible worlds’, with a child moving on to some sunny adoptive upland and living happily ever after in their forever family. In such a world, the POTATO Group would not exist as there would be no need for it. But, sadly, in the real world POTATO does exist as its services are very much needed by a significant number of adoptive parents whose child, despite all of the love, care and worry that they have devoted to them, has gone off the rails in one way or another during adolescence. POTATO Facebook group has 640 members. There are 150 attending this conference today and 125 tomorrow. As these figures suggest, the need for POTATO’s services and support is a real one.

The situations facing POTATO parents will, of course, vary from family to family, but, at the extreme, but by no means rare, end of the spectrum, the adoption will have broken down and the young person may have returned into local authority care, or ‘walked with their feet’ and returned to their natural family.

It is beyond both the scope of this address, and my role as a judge, to offer any analysis to explain why some adoptions fail in this way, despite the great care taken in selection, training and placement, that is the hallmark of adoption work in the UK. What I can do is to focus on just one element of the adoption equation. It is an element that is, at least to a degree, in the control of the Family Court, and it is, in my view, one that could be used to a far greater extent to support adopters and their children in the post-adoption years than is currently the case.

That element is, of course, contact with the child’s natural family. Rather than a degree of real contact unsettling an adopted child, research (as I will explain) suggests that it might have the opposite effect and be beneficial to the overall sense of stability and wellbeing for the child as they move through the choppy adolescent waters.

In addressing this topic I am returning to themes that I began to develop in the Mayflower Lecture, that I delivered to the Plymouth Law Society in October 2023[1]. That lecture was entitled ‘Adapting Adoption to the Modern World’ and I see this POTATO address as being ‘Part Two’ by giving greater focus to the issue of contact after adoption and offering some thoughts on how the court might alter its practice and approach to better meet the needs of adopted children in this regard.

In the Mayflower Lecture I offered an overview of the model of ‘forced adoption’ that had existed, and had continued until the 1970’s, under which the children of single, unmarried, mothers were ‘relinquished’ for adoption, often as a result of irresistible pressure from professionals. I went on to suggest that, whilst the model of forced adoption may have gone, it had left a legacy in the approach that professionals, and the courts, had taken to the issue of post-adoption contact in the decades following the 1970’s.

I said:

Until the 1970s adoption largely involved the relinquishing of young babies by a parent or parents with no expectation of any future contact. Children placed under this arrangement were usually very young and had no attachment or memory of their birth family. The stigma attached to illegitimacy and infertility meant that the decision not to promote contact was considered to be a protective factor for the adopter, the adopted child and the birth family. There was thus little call for post-adoption contact.

I identified the issue of post-adoption contact as being the element that needed to be developed in order to adapt adoption more suitably to the modern age.

In order to get our collective eyes focussed in on the legal structure, I will repeat the description of it that I offered in Plymouth:

Once a placement for adoption order has been made, all previous orders or arrangements for a child and his or her natural family to have contact with each other come to an end. When making a placement order, the court has the power to make a further order under ACA 2002, s 26 requiring the person with whom the child lives, or is to live, to allow him to visit or stay with the person named in the order, or for them otherwise to have contact with each other. Unless such an order has been made, there is no legal requirement for the local authority to arrange any contact with the child’s natural family.

… The normal arrangement, after a short interim period in which existing contact arrangements are run down and cease with a ‘farewell’ visit, is for a minimal link to be established via what is called ‘letterbox contact’. The details will vary from case to case, but normally involve each side of the divide, namely the adopters and the natural parents, communicating with each other by a short letter or report once each year. These communications might, or might not, contain photographs and would give a brief update.

The report in 2013 of a House of Lords Committee on Adoption Legislation quoted[2] from two authoritative sources on the relevance and importance of contact post-adoption for the children who were now being adopted in saying that

‘It was important to remember that contact should be for the benefit of the child, not for the parents or other relatives. The reasons why a child might benefit from contact were spelled out in evidence from After Adoption: “it is not about maintenance of the relationships as they were with the birth family . . . what [children] like is to have some continuity that enables them to integrate the past with the present, and obviously then the future. I think contact can play a very useful role for the child in helping them understand their world and their life history.”

Helen Oakwater described the role that facilitated contact could play in assisting a child to “integrate their past, allowing them to form a coherent narrative and more robust sense of self.”’

In terms of the ‘modern world’, as the context in which post-adoption contact is to be seen, I described the explosion of digital communication in the past two decades and the possibility of an adopted child, quietly, alone in their bedroom, without the knowledge of their adopted parents, tracing and finding their family. I said:

‘The temptation to do so, and then to make contact with [the birth family], must be almost irresistible. But the dangers of doing so, and the potential for significant emotional harm to result, are easy to contemplate. Unlike the babies taken at birth of yesteryear, today’s adoptees have normally been removed from their family because they have experienced, or were likely to experience, significant harm there; harm of a nature and degree that justified permanent life-long placement as part of another family.’

Members of the POTATO Group do not need me to spell this out; it will be their own personal, painful, experience.

Finally, in terms of summarising what I said ‘previously’ (as they say on TV) in ‘part one’, I referred to a report by the President’s Public Law Working Group, Adoption Sub-Group with Mrs Justice Frances Judd as its chair. The report, which was published for consultation in September 2023 (with the final report due later this year), noted how adoption had adapted and changed down the years, but was clear that it needed to continue to do so saying:

‘First and foremost, we recommend that there needs to be a greater focus on the issue of contact with the birth family as long as it is safe and for adopted adults to have more straightforward access to their records.‘

In terms of contact, the report went on to say:

‘Whilst there has been a great deal of research in recent years as to the potential advantages to adopted children of maintaining some sort of face-to-face contact with the birth family, it remains unusual for the care plan for children who are going to be placed for adoption to propose more than indirect or letterbox contact. The House of Lords Children and Families Act 2014 Committee, which reported in December 2022[3], concluded that the current system of letterbox contact was outdated and warned that the failure to modernise contact threatened to undermine the adoption system.’

The group suggested a change in social work practice and training for all involved in the process (including prospective adopters) to give more focus to contact and the benefits that it can bring for many (although not all) adopted children. They said:

‘Our main recommendation is that there should be a tailormade approach to the issue of contact for each adopted child which includes and promotes face-to-face contact with important individuals in that child’s life if it can be safely achieved. The issue of contact needs to be actively considered throughout the child’s minority, not only before the adoption order is made. The other recommendations are intended to support this overarching aim.’

The PLWG report goes on to quote from the December 2022 House of Lords report:

“Contact, where safe, appropriate and properly managed, can be valuable for an adoptive child, their new family and their birth family, including siblings and other relatives. However, contact orders and support can vary, and the current system of letterbox contact is outdated. The failure to modernise contact threatens to undermine the adoption system.”

Since speaking in Plymouth last October, I have had the benefit of reading further research on adoption and, in particular, contact. What follows is neither the result of a methodical trawl of all sources nor an authoritative summary of all the available research; to a degree that more in-depth exercise has been conducted by the House of Lords Committee and the PLWG Adoption Group. The overall direction of travel of the research is already recorded. My intention here is to provide examples of the detail that underlies the broad conclusion that a different approach to contact is now required.

One very recent article is of particular note. It is ‘How do adopted adults see the significance of adoption and being a parent in their life stories? A narrative analysis of 40 life story interviews with male and female adoptees’ by Professor Beth Neil, Julia Rimmer and Irina Sirbu[4]. As the title suggests, the researchers interviewed 40 (now adult) adoptees who had gone on to become parents themselves. It is a fascinating read. The researchers categorise the individuals’ narratives into four broad typologies:

‘Continuously stable’: largely happy childhood.

‘Pulling through’: those with a redemptive arc, having overcome significant adversity.

‘Still struggling’: those with a predominantly pessimistic tone with adoption largely seen negatively with ongoing feelings of loss.

‘Robbed of parenthood’: past and ongoing difficulties resulting in the unfair loss of their parenting role.

In words that I am confident that POTATO would endorse, the article recommends intervening early to help adoptees cope with the impact of adverse experiences:

‘The high levels of difficulties that many adopted adults in our study experienced, and which potentially threatened their parenting, point to the importance of trauma-informed support for adoptive families particularly early interventions (ie during childhood, preventing escalation in adolescence or adulthood) and help specifically at the parenting stage.’

Under the heading ‘promoting openness in adoption’ the report states:

‘Adoptive parents being “communicatively open” and supporting birth family contact where appropriate was valued by adopted people across all four narrative types. Openness, particularly with adoptive parents, seemed vital in strengthening adoptee’s trust in their adoptive parents and building an adoption narrative, and promoting both these types of openness needs to be a priority when placing children and preparing, assessing and supporting adoptive parents. The need for post-adoption support in making sense of and managing birth family relationships extends into adulthood and may be particularly needed at the parenting life stage where birth family relationships often come under review.’ [emphasis added]

In a chapter written by Beth Neil and Mary Beek for the ‘Routledge Handbook of Adoption’ (1st edition 2020), the writers record that plans for contact in most adoptions are limited to letterbox contact, although (relying on 2018 research by Beth Neil) ‘more than half of these arrangements are not sustained’. Any face to face visits are likely to be with siblings or grandparents, rather than birth parents. They report that the picture in England and Wales has been ‘static’ over the past 20 years. This is in contrast to New South Wales, Australia, where the default position in law is for there to be ongoing contact with birth parents.

Neil and Beek write:

‘Where children are able to stay in touch with birth parents, meetings can elicit a range of positive and negative feelings, allowing adoptive parents and (sometimes) birth parents the chance to understand and manage their child’s adoption-related emotion (Neil, Beek, and Ward, 2015). Adoptive parents have reported the ways they felt maintaining a relationship had been helpful to their child (Neil, Cossar, Jones, Lorgelly, and Young, 2011). Some parents felt their child would not have been able to commit to adoption without this: “[it] would be ripping her away from the family she loved … and she would never allow herself to love us if that was the case.” Others felt that contact helped children feel less worried about family members: “She needed the reassurance that her mum was okay,” or that maintaining relationships gave their child important lessons for adult life: “[it’s] better for his relationships when he grows up. If he sees it is not losing all the time, then it is good for him” (Neil, Cossar, Jones, Lorgelly, and Young, 2011, p. 160).’

And

‘Where adopted children have had positive relationships with parents, grandparents, or siblings before adoption, feelings of sadness, loss, and anxiety can be strong when relationships are cut oﬀ. Children generally ﬁnd staying in touch with siblings or grandparents less emotionally complex than contact with parents, and contact with these birth family members is often lasting and rewarding (Neil, Beek, and Ward, 2015; Neil, Cossar, Jones, Lorgelly, and Young, 2011).’

A 2019 article, signed by a dozen international experts, led by Jesus Palacios. entitled ‘Adoption in the Service of Child Protection: An International Interdisciplinary Perspective’[5] looked at the place of adoption in the child protection system. Whilst adoption is taken up to significantly varying degrees in different countries, a common trend has been away from relinquished babies given up by unmarried mothers (following developments 50 years ago in contraception and abortion) towards greater emphasis on family preservation and reunification. There has been a corresponding drop internationally in the number of adopted children. One particular trend that has been observed is

‘the development of open adoption (with some form of contact between the child and members of the birth family) in an increasing number of countries. As an example, the increase in domestic adoption numbers in Australia is accounted for by one State (New South Wales) where adoption is only available if open, thus facilitating the adoption of children in long-term foster care by their existing foster carers (del Pozo de Bolger, Dunstan, Kaltner, 2017).’

The writers stress the fundamental importance of achieving permanence and stability for an adopted child. They then go on to say:

‘It is also important to emphasize that children and young people can retain varying degrees of relational permanence to people they have lived with previously, including their parents, extended family, siblings, former foster parents, and foster siblings (Cushing, Samuels, & Kerman, 2014). Child welfare policy and practices have not sufficiently recognized the importance of maintaining established, psychologically permanent relationships when children are placed into care, or move from one care placement to the next, or exit care to guardianship or adoption (Stott & Gustavsson, 2010). This is especially critical for children who enter care at older ages with very established family relationships, as well as for children who are moved from foster parents to adoption by another family.’

This audience will not be surprised, but will, I hope, be reassured, that the article is clear in recording the adverse impact on adoptees socio-emotional and mental well-being of early adverse experiences.

In those cases where the adoption was open, and the contact had worked well, satisfaction with the contact, rather than any one or other model of contact, predicted less ‘externalising’ behaviour during adolescence and beyond.

Finally, this eminent group of international experts recognised that some adoptions break down and understood that not all breakdowns will be recorded, in the same way that few near breakdowns will also be below the radar. The causes of breakdown are recognised as many and complex, but greater pre-adoption adversity and an older age at adoption are plainly two. The group concluded, importantly for the purposes of this address:

‘Taken together, these diverse outcomes demonstrate that adoption needs to be thought of as a lifelong experience, both in terms of benefits and potential difficulties. Three findings stand out: adoption introduces a major positive change in [an] adopted persons’ life trajectory. However, there is convincing evidence that preadoption adversity (abuse and neglect, malnutrition, multiple separations) may have substantial short and long-term negative consequences for adopted children’s development. Furthermore, the adopted population is quite heterogeneous, and mediating and moderating effects play important roles in predicting adult outcomes.’

In this regard they stress the importance of sharing detailed and accurate information about the child and their past experiences with the adopters, and as appropriate with the child through life story work, and they expressly endorse the role that contact may play:

‘Evidence suggests that, when in a child’s best interests, contact with birth relatives and with previous caregivers can be helpful; agencies need to develop plans to facilitate and support this contact. The concept of adoption has moved from being thought of as ‘closed and secret’ to one that recognizes the need for greater openness and transparency and acknowledges the child’s history.’

I have taken time to quote at some length from this paper because of the eminence and number of its authors, and because of the international experience and research upon which it is based. It demonstrates, to my mind, a detailed understanding, not only of the profound challenges that previously abused children will face even in the most loving and stable adoptive home, but also of the ‘mediating and moderating’ steps that can be taken to reduce the impact of those challenges for the child – and the article clearly identifies the potential role for ongoing contact as one of these mediating and moderating interventions.

In 2016-2017 Beth Neil and her team at UEA undertook research[6] into the views and experiences of adoptive parents, over 300 of whom had filled in an online survey for the researchers. Around 80% felt that their adoption was going ‘really well’ or that they were ‘managing’. 17% were struggling to manage and 3% had broken down or were likely to do so.

So far as contact is concerned, most had had some form of contact but where this was letterbox contact the responses were either mixed or negative as to its value. 25% of those children with siblings living elsewhere had some face to face contact with them, which was largely seen as positive, whereas a striking 59% of those with absent siblings had no contact with them at all.

Adoptive parents differed considerably according to how important they felt birth relative contact was for their child, with just under half (45%) of parents feeling it was very important.

The report’s recommendation about contact is:

‘Birth family contact. Contact emerges as an often unsatisfactory experience for a range of reasons, and a more proactive approach to establishing rewarding and sustained contact plans should be considered. Adoptive parents and the wider birth family (including carers of siblings) may need help understanding the value of contact for adopted children. Contact ideally needs to be reviewed periodically. There could be more consideration of other adult birth relatives – not just parents – being involved.’

In addition to the sources from which I have quoted, the 2021 Nuffield Family Justice Observatory report ‘Modernising post-adoption contact: findings from a recent consultation’[7] is of note in stressing the importance of contact and suggesting ways in which the letterbox model might be improved by the use of digital options.

I hope that the references that I have made in this address and in the earlier Mayflower Lecture demonstrate a consistent authoritative message that a new approach to post-adoption contact is now needed. In that regard it is clear that progress is being made. One of the four strategic priorities for Adoption England is that of ‘Maintaining relationships’; this priority is focused on modernising contact for adopted people so that they can maintain relationships with the people who were important to them before they were adopted[8]. The team at UEA, led by Beth Neil, have been commissioned by Adoption England to develop a theory of change to guide work around maintaining relationships and I am grateful to Professor Neil for giving me sight of a draft article which is soon to appear in the Family Law journal describing this work. This article will be a ‘must read’ for all who are interested in this topic and I am not going to spoil its impact by quoting from it today. What it is possible for me to say, however, is that the work that is currently being undertaken by UEA, and that underpins the article, demonstrates that the debate has already moved on from ‘whether’ there is a need for a new approach to post adoption contact, to ‘how’, what will be a wholesale change of culture, it is to be accomplished in practice.

The ambitious target of this work is to establish the default position for future adopters so that the clear expectation will be that of maintaining birth family relationships as the starting point for every child, only to be ruled out where it is unsafe or unhelpful, as opposed to the current default with contact only being ruled in in exceptional circumstances.

How will this cultural shift towards greater openness impact upon the work of the Family Court and how may the court support the looked-for change in the default setting so that maintaining relationships with a child’s birth family is the starting point, rather than the exception?

The court and the Family judiciary have an important part to play. Orders for contact made under ACA 2002, s 26 when making a placement for adoption order set the template for contact going forward. Where continuing contact in some form is ordered at that stage, this will be an important ‘known known’ about the child to be taken on board by any potential adopters with whom placement may be considered.

This address is neither a court judgment, Practice Direction nor other guidance from the President of the Family Division. These words are simply my thoughts as to the way forward for the courts. How we actually proceed will be down to decisions made, case by case, by individual judges and magistrates, on the evidence before the court and guided, no doubt, by decisions of the higher courts that may be handed down in time to come.

With that very clear caveat, I hope, understood, I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts on how that court may best support the changed approach which seems set to be coming.

A, if not the, central impediment to change, in terms of the law is the approach that has hitherto been taken to views of the child’s adopters on issues of future contact. The House of Lords decision in Re C (Adoption Order: Conditions)[9], made over 35 years ago in 1988, continues to dictate that, other than in the most exceptional case, the court should not impose contact upon an unwilling adopter[10]. As the leading opinion of Lord Ackner stressed, their Lordships determined the issue on the basis that the case-law at that time ‘rightly stress[ed] that in normal circumstances it is desirable that there should be a complete break’ with the child’s natural family.

I have always worried that the respect afforded to an adopter’s autonomy on issues of contact has set the bar too high. If the reality is that the court will not make a contact order against the wishes of an adopter, and, on the other hand, will not make a contact order if the adopter is in agreement with what is proposed, one is entitled to ask why Parliament has given any power to the court to make post-adoption contact orders at all.

Whilst, legally, it is of course right that the adopters become the legal parents of their child fully and in every respect on adoption, and it is right that the State should not impose its views on how a parent should care for their child unless there is a proportionate need to do so, for example through care proceedings, surely the fact that the State has already intervened to a significant degree in the life of a child who leaves care to move to adoption is a relevant factor here. Where the State intervention, in the form of an order for contact, has taken place even before any prospective adopter has been identified for the child, the argument that this may conflict with the autonomy of a future adoptive parent is surely questionable. Phrases involving chickens and eggs, and tails and dogs, come to mind here.

Why should the possibility that some, as yet unknown, prospective adopter may not accept contact with a child’s birth family, be a trump card preventing the social workers and the court from insisting that such contact will be of benefit to the child? By the time that a child reaches the stage of being a candidate for a placement for adoption order a great deal will be known about their future welfare needs. Where those needs have been evaluated through the prism of the modern approach to post-adoption contact and the court concludes that it will be in the interests of that child to maintain a relationship with a member, or members, of their birth family, surely, in accordance with its duty under ACA 2002, s 1 to afford paramount consideration to the child’s welfare throughout his or her life, the court has a duty to say so in its order.

The needs of every child who is put up for adoption will be unique to that child. During the matching process prospective adopters will take on board each aspect of the child’s needs when deciding whether or not they feel able to offer them a home, for life, in their family. A child’s racial or cultural needs will be important, as will those relating to health or any disability. More basically, a child’s gender or physical presentation may be important in the adopter’s decision to commit or not. Be that as it may, each of these individual factors about a child will be largely immutable and not open to change. If an adoption takes place then they are to be accepted by the adopter as part of their child. While a need for future contact is plainly not immutable and could be re-evaluated, where a court has determined that this child does need to maintain a relationship with their family, why is that to be seen as being in a totally different category of need to, say, a specific health requirement for an asthmatic child, or support with reading for one who is dyslexic?

Separately, and with genuine respect for all those who adopt children from care, I would question the ability of most adopters to make an informed decision about future contact either at the time that matching takes place or, even, at the later stage of the adoption itself. No matter how thorough the briefing that they may have had from social services about their child may be, and no matter how good their training may have been, are they really in a better position, at that point, to determine issues of contact than the social workers or the judge?

The ability to understand, as the messages from research now understand, how later disruption in adoption may be ameliorated or avoided by increased support for maintaining family relationships at an earlier stage, may not readily come to adopters in the early stages of their journey. Surely, when it is in the child’s interests to do so, it is right for the court to insist, through its orders, that contact should take place?

Drawing this strand together, if there is to be a culture change with regard to future family contact, then, as part of that culture change, it is likely that the almost absolute autonomy currently afforded by the courts to the adopters in matters of contact will have to be reviewed.

Moving on, and finally in terms of this address, how should the court use its power to make orders to influence the future development of contact?

Firstly, and I would suggest most importantly, the likely template for contact arrangements post adoption should be set at the placement order stage. This is not a change in the current approach. A court making a s 26 contact order, in keeping with the duty under s 1 and its lifelong focus, should have regard not only to the short-term contact arrangements required in the pre-adoption stage, but also in setting the course for the maintenance of family relations over the longer term if that is in the child’s best interests. Also, there is nothing wrong, and I would suggest it should be good practice, for a s 26 contact order to contain a recital as to the court’s view on contact arrangements post-adoption.

I am confident that it is already the case that judges and magistrates give priority to the determination of contact arrangements when making a placement order. Given the growing move towards greater family contact, it is to be expected that, where social work evidence is lacking on this important area of a case, the court will ask for an appraisal of the options set against the background of the modern approach, and, if necessary, adjourn the case to obtain one.

As the only family members who are likely to be before the court will be the child’s parents, it is natural that the prospect of future contact with them will be considered. Courts should, however, look more widely in every case. This is particularly so when a child has siblings who are not likely to move with them to their adoptive home. I have described as striking the fact that some 59% of siblings did not have contact with them. All things being equal, siblings (and cousins) are likely to be alive for a greater proportion of a person’s life than any other family relation; this suggests that maintenance of such relationships should be a priority.

Looking beyond siblings, there may well be other relations, for example grandparents, uncles or aunts who may safely meet with a child, even where it is unsafe for parents to do so. In this regard I would mention the work the ‘Lifelong Links’[11] project which has been developed by the Family Rights Group to foster links between children in the care system and those from their family or earlier life who are important to them. The work of Lifelong Links, which has been the subject of a three year follow up study, is seen to make a marked contribution to the confidence, sense of identity and well-being of the children it has worked with. In a welcome development, Adoption England have provided funding to the Family Rights Group to consider whether Lifelong Links could be developed and adapted to support children and young people who have been adopted, who want to get in touch with members of their birth family and where their adoptive parents are supportive of this. Once a working model has been developed, Lifelong Links will be offered to a small group of adopted children.

When we move on to look at the court’s role at a final adoption hearing, where there is power to make orders for contact under ACA 2002, s 51A, I would like to stimulate discussion about quite a radical change.

Currently, the court’s order at this final stage is something of a ‘one-stop shop’ with a regime of contact being set on the basis that this is what will apply for the remainder of the child’s childhood. I would question the wisdom of this continuing to be the case. The stage of making a final adoption order may, indeed, be precisely the wrong moment to fix the contact arrangements for all time. A parent may still, at that stage, be opposed to adoption. The child and the adopters may only be just beginning to settle into their new relationship. The need to support the adopters’ confidence in their role may be at its highest and their knowledge of their child’s needs in terms of contact may be at its least informed stage.

Rather than fix the contact arrangements, once and for all, on the making of the adoption order, isn’t there real value in there being a formal review of contact with the birth family some two or more years later? By that time parents or other family members may have come to accept the situation and be more available, in emotional terms, to support the child in their adoptive home. The adopters will know their child well and may themselves feel more confident and secure in their role, and therefore more able to contemplate a greater degree of contact. The child will also be that bit older and may express clear views on the topic.

Whether it is legally permissible for the court, under the current law, to use its powers under s 51A to direct, at the time of making the adoption order, that the case should come back some years hence for a review of contact is not for me to pontificate upon in this lecture, but s 51A(2) does expressly provide that the court has jurisdiction to make a contact order ‘when making the adoption order or at any time thereafter’. It may, in any event, be a matter of good social work practice that contact will be kept under more active review after adoption than currently seems to be the case.

I do, however, put the idea out there. I suspect that many POTATO parents may agree, with the cruel benefit of hindsight, that giving greater thought to organised and supported contact might have seen off, or significantly lessened, their child’s interest in achieving such contact in a clandestine, unregulated and unsafe manner themselves.

In conclusion, I hope that what I have said has been of interest and may stimulate further thought and debate. As I have described, it seems clear that letterbox contact can no longer be seen as the appropriate regime for most cases, and should certainly not be the norm (as it has been for many years). Any contact arrangement will only be justified if it is for the benefit of the child, but that benefit is not to be confined to the short term. On the contrary the potential for some familial relationships to continue and be nurtured through contact may be of real benefit during the teen years and beyond into adulthood. Given the ‘life-long’ focus of s 1, adoption agencies and the court each has a duty to consider these matters more fully than may have been the case in the past. The question of contact should never be seen as an ‘add on’ issue, either at the placement order stage or at a final adoption. Rather, it should be centre stage and seen as an integral part of the child’s support package as they move on towards adoption, adolescence and adulthood in the years to come.

[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/speech-by-sir-andrew-mcfarlane-adapting-adoption-to-the-modern-world/ ; and see wider discussion of the future of adoption in ‘Is the wind of change about to blow through adoption?’ [Andrew Bainham] [2024] Fam Law 176.

[2] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201213/ldselect/ldadopt/127/12704.htm#a1 at paras 257-258.

[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/581/children-and-families-act-2014-committee/news/174947/children-and-families-act-2014-an-example-of-inadequate-implementation/

[4] Children and Youth Services Review 155 (2023) 107267

[5] Psychology, Public Policy and Law (2019) 25 p 57 (American Psychological Association)

[6] A Survey of Adoptive Families: Following up children adopted in Yorkshire and Humberside Region [UEA Centre for Research on Children and Families]

[7] https://www.nuffieldfjo.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/nfjo_report_adoption_connections_20210913v2.pdf

[8] https://adoptionengland.co.uk/

[9] [1988] 2 FLR 159

[10] Re R (Adoption: Contact) [2005] EWCA Civ 1128 ; and Re B (Post-Adoption Contact) [2019] EWCA Civ 29.

[11] https://frg.org.uk/lifelong-links/