Adoption of Non-White Children

The Experience of a British Adoption Project

Lois Raynor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032065571
• eBook ISBN: 9781000437638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Work

Can adoptive homes be found for non-white children? Will the children and their new families be happy together though of different race? Will they feel like a family? Originally published in 1970, this book is an account of a four-year project in which International Social Service of Great Britain joined with Bedford College, London University, to provide a first-class adoption service for babies born in Britain of diverse racial origins, and to study the outcome of the adoptions. In addition, a survey sought to determine the number of these children needing adoption homes, and a nationwide Adoption Resource Exchange was established to co-ordinate the efforts of the numerous agencies seeking parents for them.

The author examines the project's experience of interracial adoption and relates it to all good adoption practice. This title was a welcome addition to the literature on adoption at the time. It would have been indispensable to social work practitioners and to students and lecturers on social work courses, but it was more than a handbook for those professionally involved. The book is well-informed and written with style and compassion: many readers will be fascinated by the way in which children of Asian, African, West-Indian and mixed parentage became integrated into English families in spite of racial differences. It is a success story. Today it can be read in its historical context.

This book is a re-issue originally published in 1970. The language used is a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

CHAPTER 1 ORIGIN AND STRUCTURE OF THE PROJECT

The British Adoption Project grew out of concern about the lack of adoption resources for British-born children of diverse racial origins.

International Social Service of Great Britain knew that English couples had given a warm welcome to Chinese children from Hong Kong. Believing they would do the same for children born here in Britain, ISS set up the British Adoption Project to learn what is involved in placing healthy babies of Asian, African, West Indian or mixed racial background in good adoption homes.

To learn as much as possible from this undertaking, it was decided to use research methods to study factors emerging from the placement of fifty to sixty babies. Bedford College became interested, and agreed to take responsibility for the research, while iss, as the Registered Adoption Society, would be responsible for the adoption service. It was hoped the work would supply information about the social work methods and principles in the practice of adoption, as well as facts about adoptive parents and unmarried parents which would be of value to the further development of adoption services generally. The assignment was a large one.

As everyone knows, the decade of the 1950s brought a sharp increase in immigration from Asia, Africa and the West Indies. Included were large numbers of unattached young workers and students resulting in the problem of unmarried parenthood for a few of them. Unmarried English mothers often felt they could not face the future alone with a child of mixed race, while some Asian immigrant mothers were bound by cultural traditions which made a mother and her illegitimate child practically social outcasts. Girls from still other cultures expected their mother to care for the child as was the custom in their home country, but most maternal grandmothers were either far away or they were working outside their home in pursuit of the better life they hoped to find in Britain. The adoption agencies were accustomed to placing English babies with English adopters and found it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the requests to arrange for the adoption of these babies. Consequently, many non-white children were growing up in Children’s Homes and foster homes, virtually abandoned by their parents, while others were said to be kept by mothers who felt quite unable to cope and in some cases almost completely rejected them.

At International Social Service there was deep concern for these children and the feeling that something must be done. Perhaps a new adoption agency would be required. Would a temporary project to learn more about adoption for non-white children in Britain help the established agencies develop skill and confidence in this new phase of their work? Unfortunately, there were no figures available to help in planning. No one knew how many of these children needed adoptive families or how many had found them. Figures were not kept by race or colour. Such figures had been unnecessary earlier in a racially homogeneous society, and now some people felt they might be divisive.

An Action Committee was set up by International Social Service to consider the problem, and when a draft project was discussed with a working party of representatives from the Home Office and leading voluntary and statutory agencies dealing with the welfare of deprived children, strong encouragement was given to proceed with the preparation of plans. On December 5, 1962, a Memorandum stated that the purpose of the project would be to provide an adoption service specifically for children in Great Britain, who were of diverse racial origins, and to offer a liaison between agencies to facilitate the adoption of such children. In addition it was proposed to study some of the factors involved in the placements, and to prepare and publish a report of the findings.

Funds were raised and plans laid for a three- to four-year project. In addition to generous individual contributions, grants were received from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Hilden Trust, City Parochial Foundation, Buttle Trust, Whitbread Trust, and from more than seventy-five interested local authorities.

In March 1965, International Social Service entered into an agreement with Bedford College, University of London, to collaborate in the project, which then became a joint undertaking to be staffed by three full-time, highly qualified social workers with appropriate clerical staff, responsible to the Adoption Committee of the Council of ISS of Great Britain. It was agreed that membership of the committee would include people from the college and from ISS with the result that it became an advisory committee of professional men and women from related disciplines. Included were three of the staff of the Sociology Department at Bedford College, one of whom, a barrister, was also legal adviser to ISS, as well as several very experienced social workers, a paediatrician, a journalist and a former teacher. These specialists brought many different points of view and varied expertise to their task, meeting every four months as a policy group and being on call, as a case committee, to approve placement of children as required under the Adoption Act, 1958.

On April 1, 1965, the British Adoption Project began work with a professional staff of two and an office secretary. A third social worker joined the staff six months later, and during the second half of the Project an additional half-time social worker was employed for the liaison work which by that time had been organized as an Adoption Resource Exchange. Miss Mary King, who was appointed Director of the Project, got the work well under way in the first year and a half, giving particular attention to establishing it firmly within the family of social agencies concerned with child care and adoption. She left in September 1966 and was replaced by the author.

Original Plans and Later Modifications

Those who originated the Project wanted its influence to be spread as widely as possible with benefit to adoption agencies generally, so the staff participated fully in events in the adoption field, giving lectures, talks and seminars, advising journalists and students, and giving consultation to agencies setting up a new adoption service. In the day-by-day work, help and advice were offered in connection with individual children referred to the Project for placement, and to adoption agencies joining the Adoption Resource Exchange. In order not to spread themselves too thin, the staff found it necessary to limit the Project’s educational efforts largely to adoption of non-white children. Obviously, the basic principles and methods in adoption apply to all children, but some additional knowledge and skills were found useful in placing children across racial lines and in working with people from different cultural backgrounds.

The research had to be designed to meet academic standards without jeopardizing the value of the adoption service. It was recognized that findings based on the small number of children placed would necessarily be suggestive rather than conclusive. The numbers would be too small to produce more than the most limited statistical findings, so the experience should be studied in depth and every aspect of the work should be documented by detailed records. Some suggested studies had to be abandoned in order to concentrate time and effort on those that seemed most promising as the work developed.

One of the ideas that had to be discarded was a plan to establish criteria for predicting the ‘success’ of interracial placements. At first glance, this seems simple enough and something every agency would welcome as a blueprint. However, there is incomplete agreement about the qualities necessary to good adoptive parenthood and particularly about the relative importance of each factor. These criteria also are likely to reflect the middle-class values of the social worker and some may be quite irrelevant when applied to people of other classes and cultures. When efforts were made to set up some studies in prediction, it became clear that there were many different life styles into which an adopted child could be assimilated quite happily, but it would be almost impossible to measure these scientifically. For example, people adopting across racial lines surely require all the qualities of any good adoptive parents, yet obviously need an even higher degree of genuine acceptance of difference – but how does one measure this kind of variable?

Early in the Project, a comparison group of white babies adopted into English families was planned, but met with many obstacles and had to be abandoned. At first, it was thought the Project might establish such a group, but it soon became clear that this would require additional staff and funds. Then attention turned to forming a comparison group in the children’s department of one of the London boroughs, until exploration showed that a busy local authority office, with limited experience of direct adoption placements and harassed by staff shortages and frequent staff changes, would be unable to synchronize its placements with those of a small specialized project such as ours. Nor was any single office likely to have enough infants for adoption to be able to work within the time limit. When these difficulties arose in establishing an external comparison group, it was decided that the Project adopters who were of the same racial background as the children could constitute a small internal group for comparison with the Project’s larger group of interracial adopters.

The Memorandum of December 5, 1962, referred to earlier, stated as a fundamental principle that children should be placed whenever possible with adoptive parents of the same racial background as themselves. Yet it had been assumed that most of the applicants would be English families, as people from other lands might need longer to settle into the British way of life before being ready to accept the kind of formal adoption we know. Applications were studied as they were received and, actually, more than one in five of those who adopted babies through the Project were couples where the husband or both partners had come from Asia, Africa or the West Indies. Most of these applicants had been in Britain a number of years and were well established here. They had been through a period of hard work and adjustment but were ready now to plan for a family. As soon as the staff began to understand the aspirations and values these people had brought with them to Britain, there was no problem about these applicants accepting formal adoption or the study and procedures established to safeguard it, although it was all very different from the de facto adoptions they had known.

Originally, the Project expected to accept babies for placement from only one or two selected local authority children’s departments, but it did not work out that way, as healthy non-European babies needing placement were not known in large numbers to one or two agencies, but were scattered among many. In any event we wanted to try to find homes for a variety of babies rather than for children from one particular group in one section of London. So in the end the Project accepted children from a great many sources, giving the staff wide contacts with the people most concerned about them, and presenting the staff with a comprehensive picture of the children whom the agencies were finding most difficult to place. It had been planned to place young babies, certainly not over a year old, but as it actually happened many of the babies were several months old when referred to the Project, and in other cases a suitable family was not available for some months after agreement to place the child. So five of the children were over a year when adopters were found for them. Some of the babies would have been known to the Project much earlier if plans had included casework with their parents, but funds for this service had not been budgeted, so babies were accepted only when casework service was being given to the mother by another agency. Again, this had the advantage of wider contacts with the agencies which were struggling with plans for these children, and it provided learning opportunities in both directions.

As the work of the Project moved along, there was increasing awareness that following up the children to age two or three would not be adequate, as the most difficult time for them was likely to be much later. This led to plans for extending the follow-up interviews into the years ahead, making it a longitudinal study of the childhood and adolescence of these children in their adoptive families.

Another phase of the work that was modified very much and put into permanent form was the liaison service, which was written into the Project as early as 1962. The liaison between adoption societies started as the volunteer effort of a committee member, and it developed step by step into Britain’s first true Adoption Resource Exchange. This will continue to be at least partially self-supporting and is expected to grow in size and usefulness far beyond the end of the Project.

CHAPTER 2 SERVICE TO BABIES

The focal point in adoption is a child – usually a baby too young to speak for himself – so everything an adoption agency does ought to be in the child’s best interest. This involves help to natural parents and adoptive applicants, as well, but the work of the adoption agency will be out of focus if the needs of any of these people are allowed to take precedence over the needs of the child. So we shall consider, first of all, the children served by the Project.

Sources of Referral and Method of Selection

No attempt was made to find homes for as many children as possible, but rather to learn from a small number what was involved in placing non-European and racially mixed children in Britain, during the years 1965-69. Since the purpose of the Project was both service and research, we sought to serve the children most in need of homes, although a better defined intake policy might have produced a neater piece of research.

Fifty-three babies were legally adopted by applicants to the Project, and after adoption they were the subject of group discussions and a follow-up study. Two additional baby girls were placed but were reclaimed by their mothers before legal adoption. Over three hundred other babies, who were not placed by the Project, were given varying degrees of service, ranging from a single letter or telephone call to placement with adopters in another part of the country through the Adoption Resource Exchange. Only babies of Asian, African, West Indian or mixed racial background were considered. Chinese, though Asian, were not included unless complicated by the presence of other ethnic strains, because we were told that most agencies had been able to find English families ready to accept a Chinese child.

The Project was studying adoption across racial lines, so it was necessary to set limits based on age and health of the children in order to highlight the role played by racial difference in the success or failure of these adoptions. Hence, the babies who were placed had been medically assessed as being in good health and developing normally, but this is not to say that the older or physically handicapped child cannot find a family. Adoption has come a long way since the days when societies hoped to place perfect babies in perfect homes. A more liberal definition of the adoptable child might be ‘the capacity to form a relationship with new parents and develop in a family’.¹ Recent studies have confirmed what adopters have been trying to tell us: that a child with a health handicap can be a well loved and satisfying member of many adoptive families, especially if some improvement can be expected eventually in response to good care and medical aid.²

Originally the Project planned to place only babies under a year old, but this was raised to 16 months in order to honour our co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Foreword
• The Committee
• Honorary Medical Staff
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Origin and Structure of The Project
• 2. Service to Babies
• 3. The Natural Parents
• 4. Selection of Adoptive Parents
• 5. The People who Applied to Adopt a Child – a Study of their Characteristics
• 6. Placement of a Child
• 7. The Period from Placement to Legal Adoption
• 8. Post-Adoption Discussion Groups
• 9. Follow-Up Study of the Adjustment of the Child in the Adoptive Family
• 10. Agency Adoptions of Non-White Children in The United Kingdom – A Quantitative Study
• 11. The Adoption Resource Exchange
• 12. Conclusions and Implications for Practice
• List of Member Agencies of the Adoption Resource Exchange on March 31, 1969
• List of Tables
• Bibliography
• Index