As an adoptee, adopter and a social worker I have become overwhelmed by the experiences and challenges families are facing, and this website is about campaigning and pushing for change.

Adoption often fails to address the profound impacts of trauma. Impact of Trauma cannot be ignored, dismissed, predicted, or planned for. Parents and carers who care for children who have experienced trauma cannot address the profound impacts of trauma.

Parents/carers caring for children who have experienced trauma are being blamed/ shamed for not managing.

This negates the responsibility to the child and moves the focus elsewhere. Professionals* concentrate on the wrong factors resulting in the children being further impeded by the systems that are meant to support them throughout their lives. The focus on blame and shame means the children’s needs are being missed from the agenda and the family as a whole being given no consideration.

The love, the positives and the good stripped away in a shaming process set to persecute adopters for not managing. Adopters are not and could not be equipped with the skills to manage the impact trauma has left behind. Love when it comes to trauma is like a Band-Aids over the bullet wound. Zero empathy and understanding being paid to the child’s history and circumstances, and no real interest in why there are such challenges when parenting a child who has been profoundly traumatised.

It needs to be recognised that the parents living this are often experiencing child to parent violence, are managing complex sibling to sibling relationships including violence, managing complex mental health issues, and issues stemming from child sex abuse, as well as other devastating upsetting familial issues. Also where there has been issues through disability such as FASD and beyond.

Parents and carers are blamed and shamed for not managing yet must live with significant, adverse and complex issues which often leads to us having our own emotional hurdles.  Being blamed for behaviour and developmental issues ignores and contradicts base evidence that painful, and traumatic experiences early in life can alter brain functioning and can be at the central reason for many psychological and emotional problems throughout life.

Our words and experiences are being turned inside out and upside down, into something unrecognisable. Autonomy, rights, respect and fairness pushed aside to punish families for not managing. We are scolded, shamed and we have no representation unless costly. Declared situations twisted and manipulated to suit the professional’s obsession with blame as they have no clear pathway to manage otherwise. Parents requesting support due to these issues have and are facing discrimination, oppressive social work, and unethical treatment. These very professionals choosing the path of parental blame when the children weren’t in our care when the trauma and adversity was first experienced.

Child protection lens used is inadequate as history is ignored, context is missing, no fact checking, no advocacy, no independent reviews, no trauma expert oversight. Social workers as the lead professional – an absurd travesty. Like a train driver flying a plane, a different lens a necessity.

It seems we are in the midst of an unspoken war between so many perspectives (sides) on these matters. Each side (psychologist, therapists, social workers, doctors, adopters, mental health workers, and beyond), defending their stance, opinion, making justification, raising criticism of other views, yet the children and their families continue to break whilst watching on begging for a glimmer of something somewhere. Surely it would be better to create a new path where the first steps are laid through partnership, and neuroscience, psychology and lived experience.

Treatment refused, declined, dismissed, despite the child’s right for support. Practitioners being led down an incompatible pathway. Child protection initiated based on lies, manipulated information, and social workers lead the way seeking their preferred outcome of blame and condemnation. This issue is not faced by adopters alone but also throughout the world of permanence, the world of a child being in care. I.e. fostering, kinship care,  SGO, and beyond.

The pathway to support parents/ carers managing children who have adverse issues due to trauma or brain-based disability has not been built. Family’s fall apart, children end up back in care, parents fighting to parent from a distance. From the outside looking in it’s a family in crisis but there is so much more to this. The science, research, theory, and expert views ignored. Our lived experiences lost in judgement and confident incompetence, and narrow viewpoints.

There needs to be a fresh approach created and implemented to cease this. Without people going through petitions, judicial reviews, timely, lengthy processes. What will bring change to the inadequate provision of support, adverse oppressive treatment facing families when they should have the very opposite.

My Voice – Our Patch