National Adoption Week 2011

This week is National Adoption Week run by the British Association for Adoption & Fostering (BAAF) and sponsored by 1E to highlight the need for more adoption and fostering placements throughout the UK.

With a catalogue of events happening all over the UK, the week is meant to raise awareness of the thousands of children who annually need families in the country. With these events promoting adoption, the numbers should be growing. However, there has been a 2% increase in the amount of children waiting to be adopted in the past year, with a 5 % decrease in the amount of children actually being adopted. Furthermore, there seems to be a discrepancy between adoption numbers throughout the UK.

The London borough of Hackney has had the lowest adoptive rate in the country for the past three years. They have failed to find homes for 57 % of children up for adoption in a 12 month time period. This contrasts significantly with the adoption figures in York, where all children prepared for adoption were in fact adopted in the past year. While York mainly consists of a White population, Hackney is an extremely diverse part of the country. Is this a direct correlation to why York does so well with adoption while Hackney is suffering?

Inter-racial adoptions could be one possible explanation. Prime Minister David Cameron recently said that ethnicity should not matter when parents are looking to adopt, therefore this does not explain the reason behind Hackney's low performance. However, Children's Minister Tim Loughton said earlier this month, that making racial matches was still 'desirable', which could explain the longer waiting period experienced by BME children.

I believe that with adoptions, race shouldn't be a priority. It should be a considerable part of the complicated system, but not the only point to focus on. The aim of adoption is to create a loving home for a child in need of one. When you put ethnic matching as a basis for connecting a child with prospective parents, many parents are left without child. Therefore people looking to adopt children of a different race than themselves should seriously think about conserving the child's inherent culture. This way, they can still feel connected to their racial background and grow up cherishing their uniqueness, as well as embracing their adoptive family's.

Adoption is a complicated process but the fact that it is slowing is worrying. Throwing in racial discrimination into adoption is one of the areas where we need to improve upon, for racial inequality is still very much a present issue. The figures for 2011 show that 84% of adoptions last year where White and 10% were of children from mixed heritage. These are vastly higher than the 2% of Black, 2% Asian, and a low 1% of all other ethnic groups adopted. These figures have remained broadly the same since 2007. Even while accounting for the demographic make up of the UK, White children have been and are still more likely to be adopted, therefore it is important for more BME individuals to put themselves forward as prospective parents.

Ben Douglas wrote a piece for the Daily Mail about his experiences as a Black child adopted into a White family with two White children. The story is uplifting yet heartbreaking when you see the amount of harassment he has endured. There was a comment at the bottom of the piece that made my jaw drop, as it said, "The first photo looks wrong, a lovely sister and brother and then this child ruins the photo." It has since been removed off of the website.

Personally, I hope that next year National Adoption Week will have less stories of the racial imbalance in the system of adoption and more stories of hope for the future.

Oksana Trofimenko