ANOTHER VOICE
`Child-centred' a treacherous word to adopt
CHARLES MOORE
C
!early there are some people who simply do not want anything to do with "officialdom" if they can avoid it.' These words appear in paragraph 44 of the Gov- ernment's recently published discussion paper on inter-country adoption, their querulous tone echoing that of a headmas- ter who cannot quite keep order (`Clearly there are some boys who actually enjoy breaking the rules'). I wonder why there are some people like that.
Could it be something to do with what happens if you do try to adopt children in Britain? Suppose you start by trying to adopt a British child. You will be investi- gated by the authorities for your suitability. This will not be confined to questions about whether you are sane, in reasonable health, married, and so on. The regulations insist that your 'consumption of tobacco' be considered. In many areas, the authorities will prevent you from adopting if either of you is over 35, if you are trying to adopt a child of a race different from your own or even — I know of a recent case of this in Brent — if you are 'too middle-class'. Because of the huge numbers of foetuses killed by abortion, there are very few British babies available for adoption. The demand exceeds the supply. With all these discouragements, would-be adopters natu- rally look to other countries.
Until recently, they often found they could get no help at all from British 'offi- • cialdom'. Many local authorities simply dis- approved of all inter-country adoption; many others that had no ideological view would not give prospective parents the `home study report' which they needed to get permission from the baby's country to adopt; on the grounds that they did not have the money to do the study. The would-be adopters therefore commissioned individual social workers to produce such reports privately.
When they had succeeded in getting a baby in a foreign country, the adopting par- ents still did not want the help of British officialdom, because by the time the For- eign Office and the Home Office and the Department of Health and the local authority had all got through the bits of paper necessary to give the child entry clearance into Britain, six months or even a year would have elapsed. Instead they returned to Britain with the baby in their arms, assuming, almost always rightly, that the immigration authorities would not be so crass as to send it back. They then applied for entry clearance, which would normally take about a year. After that they applied for adoption under British law, which would take another nine months.
Some of this has changed because of the adoption of Rumanian children in 1990 and 1991, although the delays in entry clearance are no better. About 400 Rumanian babies reached Britain, compared with a mere 50 other inter-country adoptions annually con- ducted with full bureaucratic approval. The Government compelled local authorities to produce home study reports if required. The new discussion paper is partly the result of the Rumanian experience.
The paper does not actually regard inter- country adoption as wicked, which is some sort of advance, but if the line of its recom- mendations were pursued, and an interna- tional convention signed, it would in fact make it even harder than it is now. The report wants inter-country adoption to be subject to the same standards as adoption within Britain, which sounds very reason- able, until one considers the real situation.
The real situation is that, in much of Latin America and in the Indian subconti- nent, indeed in most poor countries, there are hundreds of thousands of children who are orphaned or abandoned, and that in the West there are tens of thousands of child- less couples who would like to adopt some of them. To impose the current British cri- teria would be to make the adoption pro- cess interminable, and therefore impracti- cable. If one recognises the desire to adopt as, in general, legitimate, and the need to be adopted as genuine, why throw obstacles in their path?
The answer from officialdom is that adoption should never be 'a service to pro- vide adopters with children' but 'a service to provide children with families'. The dis- cussion paper is full of a disdain for the feelings and even a suspicion of the motives of adopters — they tend not to think about the problems of adoption, they are 'impa- tient', they want to jump queues, they do not know enough about the cultures of the country from which they adopt etc. Its approach, by contrast, is 'child-centred'.
It has only gradually dawned on me what this phrase means in practice. It means giv- ing more power to officialdom. Adopters are grown-up, and therefore autonomous and liable to argue with officialdom. Chil- dren cannot argue. Any 'service' provided for them is not a service in the sense of answering their requests: it is a direction of them by officials according to what those officials believe to be their needs. 'Child- centred' is a rhetorically useful word. Par- ents in schools and would-be parents in adoption can be presented as selfish: offi- cials are `child-centred'. Paragraph 168 of the discussion paper enunciates 'a vital, underlying principle of adoption', which is that 'the judgment of fitness for the task is entrusted to others . . .' Those 'others' are chiefly bureaucrats. If adoption is not a ser- vice to adopters, all the pressure for speed and efficiency and answering demand dis- appears, and the bureaucrats have a free run. The orphans of the Santiago shanty towns cannot put pressure on British offi- cials to hurry up and find them parents. All that will happen is that the officials will devise rules which display their purity of intention, while the children stay in the slums and the childless lose hope.
It will be said = it is said often in the dis- cussion paper — that if you let people adopt without fearsome rules you will get unsuitable people adopting and, horror of horrors, you will find that some middle- men make 'improper financial gain'. No doubt this is true. But what makes financial gain 'improper', and do you get rid of it by imposing more rules? Are the profits of lawyers whose services are required to lead adopters through the tangle of officialdom more proper than those of freelance adop- tion agents? More important, is not the risk of unsuitable parents much less damaging to the abandoned children of the world than the virtual certainty of no parents at all? To officials it may seem appalling that children might end up with imperfect par- ents. To the rest of us, it seems rather bet- ter than that they might end up with offi- cials. No doubt the placing of so many unwanted children in Rumanian orphan- ages under Ceausescu saved them from unsuitable parents.
Behind this discussion paper, over which Mrs Virginia Bottomley has presided, is the. idea that officials should decide who may and may not be a parent. At present, this is confined to adoptive parents, but the prin- ciple is capable of exciting extension by the 21st century. Look out for a 'child-centred' government procedure, enshrined in an international convention, which decrees who may or may not give birth to anyone on the planet.
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