All Voices

My Voice

Throughout this campaign I have expressed a deep frustration about the inadequate support when families through adoption face crisis. I desire change and part of this is a need to find a way to alleviate my sense of failure and inadequacy. But for the most part I am angry at the harm done to children and families when the very opposite should be in place.

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Our Voices

These are not just stories; they are life experiences, woven with threads of hope, struggle, and crisis, and are written by people broken by the systems that failed them. It is imperative to approach these stories with a lens of kindness and empathy, recognising that behind every word lies a soul bared, a heart exposed.

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Annabelle Harris

My Life Changing Involvement With Social Care…. Why I chose to take a step to the side? Because my children’s behaviour was too hard to live with, for them and for me? Multiple incidents a day, support network diminishing, [...]

Florence Walker

I am immensely angry and frustrated. Even this afternoon something happened, and I tried to speak to the children’s home manager and again, I am ignored, treated like I am some annoying busybody with snotty bits of kids who have no training, trying to give me half-hearted feedback on my [...]

Jean Smith

My experience has been horrific. Accused of all sorts by professionals with no understanding of attachment issues. The result is a family torn apart, a child back in care and a broken parent. And still, they don’t listen as I try to hang on keeping a relationship with my child. [...]

Sally Miller

Our experience! We adopted 2 children, although they are not biologically related. She always had attachment disorders due to early life trauma (a pull/push strategy) and challenging behaviours, we attended Theraplay, therapeutic life story work and she’d recently started EMDR, we also attended many parenting sessions over the years under [...]

Alice Lea

For the want of appropriate, timely and professional support (that wasn’t a post adoption social worker coming round to craft or bake for an hour!!) our family broke down. We were left to flounder for months after saying we were desperately in need of more help as a result of [...]

Lesley Robert

Our family is in crisis, the system is broken, and we need our story to be heard. We’re calling for systematic change in the way children and families are supported through the adoption process and beyond. Two years ago, our family were the faces of a National Campaign to encourage [...]

Louise Brooker

Adoption breakdown is not failure to love or try to do your best for the child. Adoption breakdown is not abandonment, lack of parenting skills, or neglect. Adoption breakdown is in the sad reality that many hundreds of families up and down the country face each year due to the [...]

Rosemarie Lewis

We were misled from the start, a catalogue of errors in the PAR report, a child with FASD, years of asking for help, years of asking for respite, a refusal from CAMHS to even see the child due frankly to funding. Finally, my health and my partner’s fell apart, respite [...]

Other Voices

There are many professionals, friends, family members and beyond who walk beside us, who see the damage done and want their own voice, who can empathise, and understand the anger and frustration we feel. There are also those with contrasting views, and they also need to be heard. The more talking, the more listening, the more thinking the more likely change will occur.

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The Trauma Experts Voices

In our journey as adopters in crisis, we are not alone. Alongside us walk trauma experts, who have not only worked with us but have stood by us, sharing our frustrations and lending their support. They wish to be heard also to ensure that the central issues plaguing adoption crisis – the oversight of childhood trauma and the misconception that love within a forever family is sufficient for healing.

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The Social Care Voices

Some social care professionals recognise the limitations of current approaches and advocate for a more compassionate and holistic strategy. Blame and shame have no place in effective social care. Rather than casting judgment, these professionals advocate for a collaborative approach that seeks to understand and address the root causes of these specific familial challenges.

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Social worker 2

I have worked in social care for many years and have been faced with responding to many families at point of crisis. This is often when parents are at the end of the road and feel they have nowhere else to go and no more options left for them. The [...]

Social worker 1

As a social worker I have faced many issues with processes for those children who have been adopted and that after adoption services are absolutely lacking alongside specialist support for parents around trauma, managing behaviours linked with trauma. I believe anyone in the adoption process should have access to trauma [...]