Families who have adopted from abroad must struggle with the children's emotional issues after getting over the state's bureaucratic hurdles. Mary Evans reports
Earlier this month, children's minister Margaret Hodge announced measures to provide prospective adopters of children with better information and support. It was the Government's latest attempt to improve the adoption process and reduce the number of children brought up in care in this country. Yet some families have preferred to adopt from overseas rather than in the UK, and the Government has also made a commitment to more than halve the time taken to process such applications.
Children are adopted into Britain from all over the world. Last year, according to the DfES, more than 100 children came from China and around 20 from Guatemala, India, Russia and Thailand. But only around 300 such adoptions take place a year. By cmparison, France, with roughly the same population as the UK, has 'ten times as many,' overseas adoptions, accroing to director of the Overseas Adoption Helpline, Gill Haworth.
The time taken to process applications is just one of the deterrents facing prospective adopters. Two years ago the process took eight weeks; now it takes around six months. The Government wants this cut to ten weeks.
Bureaucratic nightmare
Prospective adopters go through the same initial process with their local authority as for a domestic adoption. Then their papers are passed to the Department for Education and Skills to gain the extra authority. The papers are translated, authenticated, and stamped by the Foreign Office and the relevant embassy, before a Certificate of Eligibility is granted. Although DfES staff are working overtime, there is still a backlog of applications, says Gill Haworth.
This can plunge families into a bureaucratic nightmare as some countries require official documents, such as Criminal Records Bureau checks, to have a currency of only six months, so an applicant's papers can become outdated before they are processed.
Another deterrent can be cost. Lucy, who with her husband Richard, has adopted two daughters from Russia, says the process cost about 20,000 per child.
Adoptions in Thailand are free; the major expense is the social services suitability assessment, which can cost up to 4,000.
The lack of a central advisory service makes the process more daunting. Pat Wordley, information officer of the Association for Families who have Adopted from Abroad, says, 'You cannot just ring up the DfES and say, "I want to adopt, what do I do?" There are information services rather than advisory services.'
The UK, unlike, for example, the USA, France and Sweden, does not have an accredited link agency handling intercountry adoptions. Some countries, such as Russia, only permit adoptions handled by official agencies.
Lucy and Richard used an American agency. She says, 'Half of the cost went to the country. Then there was the $15,000 fee for the agency. But when you see what they do, it is not over the top. They have people in Russia and people in America. They do all the organising. We were met and chaperoned everywhere. The agency fee covered our travel in Russia and accommodation.'
She says local social services can present a further hurdle. 'Social services departments should have someone who understands the process. You get social workers who are so against intercountry adoption that they tell people terrible things. They tell you that your child will never be emotionally OK, which is simply not true.'
Emotional issues
Given the obstacles, why do people adopt from abroad? 'You can adopt children at a younger age,' says Maxine Caswell, information and advisory co-ordinator at OASIS, the Overseas Adoption Support and Information Service. 'And people sometimes feel that intercountry adoption may be a way of avoiding the problems that a lot of children have when they have been in care. But even so, if you are adopting a baby from, say, China, you may be looking at a child who has spent their most crucial year for emotional development neglected.
'Typically, children can have emotional issues because they have not formed bonds, as they have not had one-to-one emotional care. You can get a lot of indiscriminate friendliness in institutionalised children, but they have a fear of attachment with their new mother because they can't trust.
'In China, there are more than a million children in institutions because families are not allowed to have more than one child in urban areas and two children in rural areas. These children are abandoned without a birth history because their parents would be in trouble for having them. When children start asking questions about their origins and you have nothing much to offer, it can be very painful.'
Rebecca and Andrew chose to adopt a younger child because they had no experience of children. 'We realised that to take on an older one would not have been fair to that child,' she says.
When they adopted Ben, almost four, from Thailand, he had spent nearly 15 months in an orphanage and was beginning to show signs of institutionalised behaviour.
'We noticed that if he hurt himself he wouldn't cry straight away. We had to teach him to cry. We had to make sure we picked him up, held him and fussed over him. But the orphanage really cared for him and still sends him birthday and Christmas cards.'
Carol's daughter was five months old when she brought her home from Guatemala last Christmas. Carol says, 'She seemed more like a two- or three- month-old. She was tiny and had no muscle tone. She was not used to being picked up and held.'
Intercountry adoptive parents like Rebecca and Andrew, who also have a daughter from Cambodia, have to demonstrate an interest in their adoptive children's country of origin and its culture. They have formed a support group with other families in the West Country who have children from Thailand and Cambodia.
'We celebrate the Thai New Year and Chinese New Year and the festivals. We go out together and the children are really good friends. The group goes to the Thai temple in Wimbledon for the children to be blessed.'
For prospective adopters, the procedure will become simpler following the UK's ratification this summer of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. It sets out a framework to ensure that children's rights and interests are safeguarded and to prevent the abduction, sale or trafficking of children.
Previously, families adopted their child in his or her country of birth and then had to adopt the child again in Britain. But the Government will now recognise adoption orders made by other signatories to the convention.
Pat Wordley says intercountry adoptions between signatory states should become simpler. 'In the past, some countries opened and closed their adoption lists almost willy-nilly. People have been halfway through an adoption and it has been stopped. The rules could just change.'
