 Hello, my name is Julie Doughty and I'm from Cardiff University School of Law and Politics and I'm going to be talking today about adoption of children from care and human rights. I'm not using any images with this broadcast so please feel free to turn your screen off and have a little bit of a rest from looking at screens and you can just listen to the audio version like a podcast. OK, so why do I want to talk about adoption of children from care? Imagine when you were growing up as a teenager finding out that the state had made an order removing you from your birth family permanently and transferring you legally into a brand new family that had no connection with yours beforehand. Imagine as a teenager all those questions about questioning your place in the world, your identity, who am I, where do I fit in, why don't I get on with my parents etc etc. Imagine all of that and then a whole extra layer of where do I come from, why did my family give me up, why did the authorities steal me from my parents, where are they, are they OK, what is there about my birth family that's within me that I'll never be able to find out about etc etc. And also for quite a number of children who are adopted they will have already had some adverse experiences beforehand that they might need some extra help with. Now however much you love your adoptive parents and however brilliant they are and most adopters are absolutely brilliant those are the sorts of questions that are going to be asked by young people as they grow up or even into adulthood. Did the state do enough for me and my birth family before they took me away and transferred me to a different family? OK, so this is a relatively controversial topic in the law of England and Wales because there is a perception that in England and Wales especially in England we use the mechanism of adoption against birth parents consent too often and more often than in other countries. And you can read useful reports by Clifent and Glyn about comparing our use of adoption in England particularly with other European countries. I'm not going to be saying a lot about birth fathers in this talk because there is already a talk on the Cambridge University web page here by Brian Sloane focusing on birth fathers so I'm not specifically going to talk about them today. And I'm basing most of what I'm going to say on an article that was published in the International Journal of Law Policy and the Family in 2019. What I'm going to be talking about is the law and also based on some of the data that we gathered in a study in Wales called the Wales Adoption Study. So this Wales adoption study is led by a colleague of mine in the School of Psychology in Cardiff University, Professor Catherine Shelton. And I hope that also on the Cambridge University web page you'll be able to access the list of the publications that have come out of that study. So we've got very many publications, articles and papers about all sorts of aspects of the Wales adoption study. Different themes and issues and different aspects of theory and practice. So that study, the Wales adoption study, was funded by the Welsh Government and the first stage of that study was about us reading the case records of 374 children. All of the children that were from Wales were placed with adoptive families in the year 2014 to 2015. And the overall purpose of the study was to look at the characteristics and experiences of those children, what their adoptive families support needs were in the stages of early placement and what factors help those children to flourish in the early stages of placement. And just to mention some of the characteristics of the children involved, that a quarter of those children had mothers who were themselves brought up in the care system, so that's an immediate indicator or suggestion isn't it of the state having let down those parents and those children. And about half of the children in the sample had suffered a higher level of what's known as adverse childhood experiences compared to the general population in Wales, which is at about only 14% compared to nearly half. So other aspects, it was a mixed method study involving social sciences, psychology and law. And one of the aspects we looked at in the legal side was the legal process that the adoptive applicants had to go through and how that experience may have affected their relationships with their children. As well as the case file study, we sent out questionnaires to survey adoptive families in the early stages and we originally had 96 responses to that survey. We've had other waves of surveys since then, always slightly smaller numbers for obvious reasons, that always happens with this sort of empirical research that the numbers decrease over time. We also conducted in-depth interviews with 40 adoptive parents. And we looked at in the case study, the case files are also the contact plans that were in the case records, the post adoption contact plans for those children. And what we found was that almost entirely the only contact plan that was made for those children with their birth parents was something that's known as letterbox contact, which is where there's an exchange of letters between the adopters and the birth parents. Although looking particularly at siblings, a third of the children we looked at were placed in sibling groups so they were actually placed together with their own brothers and sisters. And those of those who were placed separately and had siblings elsewhere, there were contact plans for 70% of those children, but of those only about 20% were there any plans for face-to-face contact. So the whole issue of keeping in touch with your brothers and sisters over the years is another really important one. Okay, so what is the law about adoption in England and Wales? It's governed by the Adoption and Children Act 2002 that came into force fully in 2005. We do have some divergence in law and policy in Wales now, but most of our law is still based on the 2002 Act. Now, to comply with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, that's the right to respect for private and family life, the court's power to make an adoption order without a parent's consent must be exercised only when necessary. And under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, a birth parents consent can only be dispensed with when the welfare of the child requires it. So that is to comply with the necessity point in the European Convention. In a case a judgement delivered in 2012, YC against the UK, the European Court of Rights held that family ties can only be severed in very exceptional circumstances, permanently severed. Everything must be done to preserve and rebuild family relationships before getting to that stage. It is not enough to show that a child could be placed in a more beneficial environment than the one they're already in. But if the maintenance of those family ties would harm a child's health and development, the birth parents cannot insist that they are retained. In England and Wales, however, for a child to be placed for adoption, they will have had to go through care proceedings during which the local authority would have established to the court that the child was at the risk of significant harm if they remained at home with their parents. Also another European Convention case, European Court of Human Rights case, known as Kutsner KUTZNER against Germany, held that the state needs to show its offered support services to a family before being justified in removing children in that case because of the parents' poverty. Now, both parents' rights under Arsculate of the European Convention, there is a whole load of literature there about the requirement to look at the child's welfare and in exceptional circumstances to override the lack of parents' consent to the adoption, what's known in some quarters as forced adoption. But it's important to remember that adoption in England and Wales does go through due legal process. OK, what about any ongoing article 8 rights for the birth parents and the children? So traditionally, adoption was closed adoption in the sense that there was this completely artificial transfer of the child from one family to another. And until relatively recently, even keeping the whole situation secret, as though it was some sort of shameful secret to keep from the child, that's definitely changed over recent years and adopted parents are encouraged to bring up their child knowing that they are adopted and they go through very rigorous and it appears effective training before they become adopters to understand why that's important for the children and the birth family in general. But also adoption is becoming more open in the sense that there is this letterbox contact, although limited as it is, and encouraging encouragement of some face-to-face contact. Now, for practical reasons, that isn't happening as quickly as we might like. And what we found in the Wales adoption study was that there appeared to be a blanket policy of this letterbox contact of exchange of letters perhaps twice a year. More recent case, a judgement delivered in 2015 called REA, a High Court judgement. Mr Justice Peter Jackson, as he then was, held that following the adoption order, the mother in that case who was involved in letterbox contact, the birth mother, I mean, she was involved in letterbox contact but she was applying to the court under Article 8 for direct contact with her child. And Mr Justice Peter Jackson said that once the adoption order had been made, that the mother and child, the birth mother and child's article 8 rights were extinguished and therefore there was no ongoing claim possible under Article 8 to enforce face-to-face contact between the mother and the child. Okay, what about looking at children's rights and consent? Well, when an adoption order is being considered, the adoption agencies and the court must have regard to the child's welfare, must ensure that the child's welfare remains paramount and must have regard to a welfare checklist very similar to the welfare checklist, although there were some slight variations very similar to that in the children at 1989. And one of the items in the welfare checklist is that the court must have regard to the wishes and feelings of the child in accordance with their age and level of understanding. However, most children are adopted before the age of four, so their age in those circumstances means that there's some mislimitations on conveying their wishes and feelings about being adopted. With regard to contact, the welfare checklist also includes a duty on courts and adoption agencies to make decisions about the child's welfare throughout their life and to include the effect on them of becoming an adopted person. So this would suggest that local authorities, adoption agencies and courts need to consider long-term plans for what contact arrangements are going to be in place to meet the child's identity needs throughout their childhood and then to ensure their kind of healthy development into adulthood. I'll say a bit more about that in a minute. Under the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child, the child's rights continue after adoption, although their Article 8 rights have fallen away according to Mr Justice Peter Jackson. So that's the current understanding of the law there. So under the UN CRC, children's rights include rights to know and be brought up by their parents, rights to know their own identity and rights to be brought up within their own culture. So looking at it through the children's rights lens, looking at incorporating the UN CRC so far as we can within our own jurisdictions, it's important to think about a child's right to ongoing contact with the birth family, their siblings, their former carers. They could have formed a very strong attachment to form foster carers and that's something that needs to be handled carefully when they move on to an adoptive placement. All of this is really about helping the child form their identity within a stable and secure environment and that may require adoptive families to be able to access therapeutic and other support services. Okay, in our study in Wales, we noted some of the following points. I'm just pulling out some highlights here. There were shortcomings in the systems that were designed to give the child on their adopters' life story work in order to enable the adoptive parents and the children to share information about the child's history before they went into the adoptive placement as the child grew up and in later life. Adoptors tended to be sympathetic to birth parents rather than fearful or condemn nature of birth parents. However, letterbox contact wasn't easy to manage even when adopters saw it as important or as an obligation. Adoptors especially in general wanted to maintain and promote links between children and their siblings and extended family although they received little ongoing support to do that. And although we study in the Wales adoption study the early stages of placement, adopters appreciated that children's needs to understand their identity would probably develop and change in the future. But resources are very concentrated on the transition period around the court order being made and ongoing support is very hard to find and to access. OK, well I hope that short little snapshot and some snippets from our Wales adoption study have been helpful. And if you're interested in the study or interested more widely in children's rights and adoption then please do have a look at the reference list that accompanies this short talk. Thank you.