A new study claims that 'politically correct' social workers who block mixed-race adoptions sometimes condemn a child unnecessarily to years in care “inspite of the fact that adopted children usually thrive whereas children left in the local authority care system are unlikely to do well”. The shortage of parents willing to adopt from the ethnic minorities and the establishment of the principle that transracial adoption is damaging to non-white children has meant that it is mainly these children which are languishing in care homes, becoming more and more damaged and therefore more difficult to adopt even if racially suitable parents were found.
The author of the report entitled ‘Adoption and the Care of Children’, Patricia Morgan, also shows how there has been a dramatic fall in the number of children finding new parents from 21,000 in 1975 to fewer than 6000 in 1995. Even the adoption of babies has fallen dramatically. Ms Morgan, in her report, attributes this development to there being prejudice against adoption as being “anti-child, anti-woman, anti-black, redistributing children from the poor to the middle class” and concludes that adoption should be removed from the control of the local authorities.
The report and Patricia Morgan's conclusions have, however, been rejected by both local authority social services departments and agencies such as the British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF).They point out that matching children, especially older children, to families is a critical process that requires a lot of time and careful analysis if the trauma that children in care have already suffered is not to be compounded.