Cases for more local and overseas adoptions are different, but the same

International adoptions of foreign-born children in Australia have fallen to record lows. And the reasons are clear to pinpoint. Overseas adoptions are lengthy, costly and these seemingly interminable delays cause problems and stress for both adoptive parents and the children concerned.

The inability to adopt often drives childless couples to undergo repeat IVF procedures that are expensive, invasive — and heartbreaking in their failure rate.

Clearly, the demand for adoption is strong in the community. Policy makers should address this situation and the obvious impediments, which if removed, could allow many more thousands of both overseas and local adoptions — resulting in considerable benefits in the situation for the most vulnerable children.

The case for increasing the numbers of overseas adoptions in Australia is that in many foreign countries, children who can live with their parents end up spending their childhoods living in ‘institutional’ care, aka orphanages.

The case for increasing the number of local adoptions is different, and yet the same: more Australian children need to be adopted from care in order to prevent many of these children also spending their childhoods in ‘institutions’.

While we should welcome the current attention being paid to the low rate of overseas adoption – tonight’s Foreign Correspondent addresses the issue and activists including actor Deborra-Lee Furness have stepped the calls for reform – we must not forget that even more alarming is the pitifully low rate of local adoption in Australia each year.

In 2014, there were only 203 local adoptions.  According the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s annual Adoptions Australia report, 64 were ‘step-parent’ adoptions, 4 were ‘relative’ and ‘other’ adoptions, and in another 46 adoptions the child was not previously known to the adoptive parents, and the birth mother and/or father consented to the adoption.

The remainder were ‘carer adoptions’: only 89 children were adopted from out of home care in Australia. This was despite 29,863 children having been in care continuously for more than two years—69% of the total OOHC population of over 43,000 children.

Moreover, 84 of 89 carer adoptions were in NSW alone, and this despite more than 18,000 children living in care in NSW. The under-performance or non-performance on adoption from care by the rest of the states and territories speaks for itself.

In the early 1970s, there were more than 8,500 local adoptions in Australia. The dramatic decline is correctly attributed to social changes: widespread availability and use of contraception, increased abortions, and the introduction of government benefits for single mothers, which eradicated the practice of ‘forced adoptions’ of children of unwed mothers.

Yet this is not the full story. Anti-adoption attitudes in Australian child protection circles are much stronger than in comparable countries.

Take the United States, for example. On average in the last decade, more than 50,000 United States children have been adopted every year from out of care by foster carers and others wanting to become adoptive parents. If Australian children in care were adopted at around the same rate as in the United States, there would have been approximately 5,419 adoptions from care in Australia in 2013-14.

Given the harm that past child removal practices did to children, parents, and families, some might argue that the low numbers of adoptions in Australia is a mercy. It is true that adoption was done badly in the past: adoptions were ‘closed’, meaning children did not have contact with birth parents and extended families, and children were treated as ‘blank slates’ with no previous identity and heritage. This created a sense of loss, confusion, and isolation among some adopted children.

But we have learnt the lessons of the past. This is the reason adoptions, both overseas and local, are ‘open’ these days, with opportunities for continuing contact with birth families. Adoptive parents are also made aware of — and recognise the need to cultivate — children’s cultural identities.

This is to say, countries like the US have the same chequered past when it comes to flawed adoption practices. Yet the benefits of adoption, compared to the well-known, highly damaging experiences of many children in care are still recognised in many counties including the US and the UK, the latter of which also has a much higher rate of adoption from care than Australia.

The real obstacle to increasing local adoptions is that Australian child protection authorities are wedded to the idea of family preservation.

This means that action is taken to remove children from unsafe homes only as a ‘last resort’, and when removal does occur it is only temporary, with all efforts made to reinstate children in the home as quickly as possible.

The problem with family preservation is that child protection social workers give priority to supporting even highly dysfunctional parents via taxpayer-funded social service interventions in an often futile effort to address the serious and hard-to-resolve issues that impede proper parenting (welfare dependence, single-parenthood, substance abuse, domestic violence and mental illness).

The emphasis placed on keeping children together at nearly all costs profoundly harms children by both prolonging the time children spend in the custody of abusive or neglectful parents, and the time they spend languishing in foster care placements while awaiting family reunions that are highly prone to breakdown, forcing children to re-enter care multiple times.

This highly unstable process of entering and exiting care in many cases can consume the whole of childhood and, as one would expect, is highly damaging for children who need permanency to thrive. The kind of permanency that an adoptive family can provide, but which child protection authorities rule out because they will not take legal action to sever parental rights and free children in care for adoption.

It is children who pay the price for the over-emphasis on family preservation and prioritising the ‘rights’ of parents.

Children who experience prolonged exposure to maltreatment at home and then instability while in care develop ‘high needs’ – serious developmental, emotional, and/or behaviorial problems. By the time the ‘worst of the worst’ high needs children reach adolescence, their uncontrollable, threatening, violent and self-destructive behaviour is so bad they can no longer live safely with their biological parents or in normal foster homes, and the only suitable placement option is very high cost residential ‘group homes’.

Since 2005, the number of children and young people nationally living in residential care as doubled to more than 2300. In other words, Australian governments have been forced to ‘re-institutionalise’ to the out-of-home care system to a significant extent in order to cater for the increase numbers of children who have been damaged and disturbed by family preservation.

Many of these children, and many of the thousands more children in care, would have been better off being removed and adopted years before. This realisation has driven the adoption reforms legislated by the NSW government in 2013, which are designed to set time limits on when realistic decisions about whether children in care to be reunited with parents. Once it is determined that a child cannot safely go home, legal action will then be commenced to free them for open adoption by a new family.

We need to realise that what we are doing in the name of preventing the recurrence of past mistakes is damaging children today and into the future.

Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies who has written extensively about the child protection crisis in Australia. His work was cited extensively by the South Australian Coroner in his report on the inquest into the death of Chloe Valentine.