Outrage over child photos ignores law and logic

This week’s non-story concerned the use of stock photos of happy kids and families by Barnardo’s Find A Family program to promote adoption. That this story was beaten up by ‘outraged’ anti-adoption groups is revealing of their agenda.

The simple explanation is that privacy laws prevent the use of real images of children awaiting adoption. However, this logical legality wasn’t good enough for the Australian Adoptee Rights Action Group, which reached into its stock bag of slogans to assert that the ads represented the “commodification” of children.

This slur, which implies that adoption represents an illegitimate trade in children, is wrong-headed. The alternative to adoption for children with no prospect of going home safely is to spend the rest of their childhoods in care.

The current child protection system truly turns children into valuable commodities. Those who spend the majority of childhood in care are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funding to the non-government charitable organisations that provide outsourced ‘out-of-home’ care services.

This is the system into which vulnerable children are eventually dumped after being profoundly damaged by prolonged exposure to abuse in the family home, before they are further damaged by spending extended periods in highly unstable ‘temporary’ care while efforts are made to reunite them with their dysfunctional families.

Adoption reform is about breaking this destructive cycle by intervening earlier to rescue children and provide them with the permanent and stable families they need to thrive.

None of this cuts any ice with anti-adoption groups because most of these activists were adopted and had negative experiences.

This was usually in the days when adoptions were ‘closed’, and lack of contact with and knowledge of biological families and heritages affected the sense of identity and belonging of some (but by no means all) adoptees. We have learned from these mistakes and harm done, which is why modern adoption are always ‘open’ in the best long-term interests of children.

Despite this, the anti-adoption movement encourages risk-adverse attitudes by arguing that because some adoptions have been unsuccessful, there must be no adoptions under any circumstances. In practice, this means taking a risk-blind attitude and overlooking the harm that the current system is doing to many children.

The seeming belief that successful adoptions will invalidate the personal experiences of anti-adoption activist’s verges on the narcissistic. It ignores the good that adoption would do for many children caught up in our flawed and failed child protection system.