Katya is so fiercely, flamingly angry that it is hard to imagine a rage so huge in a child so small. With bunched-up fists, the ten-year-old is systematically destroying her adoptive mum Sophie’s bedroom.
As the missiles fly, Sophie mutters a pre-arranged code word to Katya’s six-year-old brother, Ben.
It’s the name of his favourite action hero, and Ben swings into well-rehearsed response. He grabs the iPad and slopes off to an agreed place of safety in the home.
Upstairs, Sophie settles on the bedroom floor, her arms open: ‘I love you, I’ll keep you safe.’ And on a good day, it will take only two hours for Katya’s rage to burn down to hacking sobs.
This situation is unbearable for them all. But for many of the 38,000 adoptive families in the UK, this story would be met with weary recognition: Katya’s behaviour is their child’s, too. And they do bear it, because they have no choice.
It was not always like this. Not until adoption changed beyond all recognition.
Two generations ago, a typical case would have involved a teenage girl who had ‘got herself in trouble’.
She would have bloomed with health but, not wanting an abortion and fearful for the future, she would have ‘given up’ her equally healthy child.
Today, the babies ‘given up’ are too few to count. A teen mum nowadays tends either to opt for abortion, or keeps her child; shame is a thing of the past and she knows she will receive State support.
This means that the current pool, from which around 5,000 children a year are adopted in England alone, have been taken from birth parents not fit to care for them.
The children being adopted now are the offspring of our drunks, our derelicts, our damaged and our junkies.
And the result is an untold scandal, blighting the lives of thousands of well-meaning families.
Katya, who smashes up her mother’s bedroom, was born to a minor who was in care when she had her baby; she had to be, because her own mother was in prison. Katya’s birth mother was a heavy alcoholic by the age of 12, she took drugs and absconded from care to work as a prostitute.
Then there is Joe, seven, who had a mother addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine, while eight-year-old William’s mother also had a history of drink and drugs.
The irony is that these children, like thousands of others like them, have been adopted by the most dedicated of parents. After all, they would have to be to pass unscathed through the intense scrutiny prospective adoptive mothers and fathers must endure.
And yet, according to Hugh Thornbery, chief executive of the leading adoption charity Adoption UK, 25 per cent of adoptive families are what he calls, quite simply, ‘in crisis’, with the mental and physical health of the those families at serious risk.
They are also, for the most part, without so much as a helping hand.
When they decided to take on a child, they could not have predicted the hurricanes that would blow their way.
Sophie and her husband Tom — both teachers in leafy suburbs of London — had no idea of the difficulties Katya might face. As Sophie says: ‘There weren’t any signs from the medical profession. Although there was a caveat: “We don’t know about long-term effects of the in-utero experience.” That’s their get-out clause, isn’t it?’
In other words, the drugs Katya’s mother was thought to be taking when she was pregnant may have had a devastating effect on the foetus, but the doctors simply said they didn’t know how that would play out as the child was growing up.
Today, the babies ‘given up’ are too few to count. A teen mum nowadays tends either to opt for abortion, or keeps her child. Picture posed by actors
William’s adoptive parents, Sarah and Ryan, were more cautious. Sarah had worked as a child psychotherapist for 20 years, and when they were warned that William might have what their social worker called ‘problems with self-esteem’, Sarah thought that ‘it would take a couple of years before we’d be “normal” ’.
The only stipulation she had made was that the couple would not take a child with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome [FAS], which can develop when a pregnant mother’s bloodstream delivers alcohol to her baby.
‘That’s brain damage — a disability — and it will never go away,’ says Sarah. She felt that taking on a child with a lifelong handicap would be too much for her five-year-old ‘birth daughter’, Ellie.
Seven-year-old Joe was adopted by Simon and Alex. Simon is a City high-flier and Alex a home-maker. Joe had been removed from his mother at birth, due to her addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine.
Social workers told Simon and Alex what Foetal Alcohol Syndrome was and the effect it could have. But were they told that the figures show that as many as one in three children born to alcoholic women are affected?
‘God, no!’ says Simon. ‘We weren’t told that. Is it really that high?’
If these parents made a mistake, it was that they had expected that, because their adoptive children had been taken into care within days or weeks of their birth, the youngsters would be sheltered from the social problems of their birth mothers.
The number of children taken into care when they are very young is rising — in England and Wales, 2,700 last year were removed before the age of one to join our total of 70,000 in care; 1,200 of those before they were even a week old. But Adoption UK chief executive Hugh Thornbery warns that ‘there is a false perception that means they’ll be OK’.
Official figures say more than 70 per cent of children in care are there because of ‘neglect and/or abuse’ — but what do we think that really means?
The next Baby Ps? The bruised and hungry and unloved? Tiny fractured bones on tell-tale X-rays? Sexual abuse as first memories?
Such children exist, of course. But we are less aware of neglect and abuse that began before some children are born; abuse that means many of them are literally poisoned in the womb.
Family Futures is a charity supporting adopted children and their families. Its founder, Alan Burnell, estimates that 70 per cent of today’s adopted children have drugs and alcohol in their biological parents’ background, and these will become ‘children with invisible special needs’.
‘Parents think the low-risk option is to adopt a newborn baby, but with a three or four-year-old you can see what you are getting because the child has developed.
‘It’s naïve to think that if a baby come from a background of drugs, alcohol and violence, that child won’t have impairments. But you can’t see them at two months. Or even at two years.’
Katya’s mother, Sophie, had her first inkling when Katya was two and started at playgroups. ‘She used to grab children, knock them over, pour paint over them, wouldn’t sit in a circle. By the end of nursery we knew there’d be problems.
‘On her first day at school, her teacher said “She’s lively, isn’t she?” — which, as a teacher, I know is teacher-speak for “pain in the butt”!’
This means that the current pool, from which around 5,000 children a year are adopted in England alone, have been taken from birth parents not fit to care for them. File pic
Simon and Alex began to worry about Joe when he was four. ‘Other children found him a bit . . . different. Unpredictable, loud, excitable,’ says Alex. ‘Sometimes he would say at bedtime: “Nobody likes me at school”.’ Meanwhile, his school noticed his academic struggle; now, at seven, he has been held back a year but is still behind and can’t be held back again.
‘The teachers are having the Devil’s own task,’ says Simon. ‘One told me, heartbreakingly, that they give him really concentrated help — but the next morning it’s all gone. So they do it all over again. Like Groundhog Day. He has no memory at all. And all of this only properly emerged once he was six.’
Young William did not wait that long to exhibit his problems. He came to Sarah and Ryan when he was two. Within eight months, the family was in crisis.
William had fits, diagnosed as febrile convulsions, and he was always ‘in fight-or-flight mode’, recalls Sarah.
‘He would say: “I don’t need you. Go away.” Hitting out — at all three of us. And the attention was all on him, not our daughter Ellie.’
‘By the age of six, he had forgotten what a plate was called, and that Grandma was called Grandma. At seven — even though the adoption agency said they had tested him and found nothing wrong, we had him tested again. And there it was, the one thing we’d said we could not handle: Foetal Alcohol Syndrome.’
She and Ryan were, like many parents, ‘shocked, angry, upset’. No child, by birth or by adoption, comes with a guarantee. Nonetheless, the couple say, they feel ‘duped’ by the authorities that handed them this troubled child.
They believe social workers deliberately held back information that could have prepared them for what was to come; certainly, some of their notes recording alcohol and drug use in the birth mother were found during that later assessment and came as news to Sarah and Ryan.
An earlier warning might have given them an opt-out then, rather than now, when — because they love William to bits — they cannot bear to give him up.
Both the Adoption UK boss Hugh Thornbery and Alan Burnell, the head of Family Futures, say this is a common complaint.
Burnell says: ‘I’ve heard it a lot, and I don’t think parents have been told the full story. I don’t think social workers fully understand the impact that past significant harm will have. They think good parenting is the solution to bad parenting.’
They think that if you love the children enough it will heal them? ‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘But you don’t take the abuse out of a child by taking the child out of the abuse.’
Talk to anyone you like — adoptive parents, teachers, Barnardo’s, the NSPCC, and charities such as Adoption UK, Family Futures or the Post Adoption Centre — and they will all tell you the same thing: no one wants to deny the most needy children the chance of a family.
All anyone wants is to have some help. Especially the adoptive families, typically white, middle-class people who have never asked the State for anything, but now need it more than most of us ever will.
Yet when you look at what support is actually available, for most it is non-existent.
What the children need is fully understood. Professional intervention, as early as possible, may not ‘cure’ them as such, but multi-disciplinary teams of experts can initiate intense therapies that have been proven to transform young lives. If only someone, somewhere would pay for them. Instead, there is a charade of buck-passing.
Local authorities have a legal obligation to assess adopted children if requested to see what needs they have. But here’s the Catch-22: they don’t have any obligation to fund the treatment the assessments conclude is necessary, and successive governments have resisted calls for what is called a ‘duty to provide’.
As Hugh Thornbery says: ‘It’s like setting up an A&E to say, yes, you’ve definitely got a broken leg. Then saying: now go away.’
The Department for Education does provide a Pupil Premium of £1,900 a year for each adopted child. But it’s payable to the school the child attends, and administered as the head thinks fit, without even being applicable solely to the particular child.
Under the last government, extra money was made available to the NHS for child mental health. But because it was not ring-fenced, it got sucked into the general NHS fund and no one knows where it went.
In 2015, there seemed to be a glimmer of hope with the establishment of the Adoption Support Fund. But by the end of the first year, desperate parents of damaged adopted children were rapidly cottoning on to its existence — and halfway through this year, it ran out of money.
So it capped its funding to a maximum of £5,000 per child, and it’s expected to continue at that level. Better than nothing for a child with very mild problems, but useless for ones like William or Joe or Katya.
Katya’s adoptive parents did have her assessed, and the estimated cost of her treatment was £130,000. No one disputed the results or the recommended treatment. But no one would pay for it, either.
Sophie and Tom could not even claim the ‘drop in the ocean’ £5,000. Why? Because, Sophie was told: ‘That has been spent already — on the assessment!’
So what will Katya get? ‘Nothing,’ says Sophie, exhausted.
Every professional involved urges more help, if only for pragmatic reasons: we can either fund the costs of proper post-adoption support, or we can fund the consequences of an adoption breakdown.
This is what happens when the adoptive family simply cannot cope and has to give the child back. Should a youngster be returned to care, the bill for their whole childhood runs to a million pounds.
The children being adopted now are the offspring of our drunks, our derelicts, our damaged and our junkies. File picture
Although such breakdowns probably occur in as few as nine per cent of adoptions, that’s testament only to the resilience and determination of the parents, not to the fact that the child doesn’t need specialist help.
Government estimates suggest that one-third of all adoptions are perpetually difficult, while Hugh Thornbery points to the quarter which he says are at crisis point.
‘I know public funds are short,’ says Alan Burnell. ‘But they are still paying to put up Christmas lights. Yet who is the most needy in our society? It is these children.
‘The challenge is not financial — it’s moral.’
Sarah doesn’t cry for herself. But tears erupt when you ask whether, when she’s gone, she thinks her natural daughter, Ellie, will feel obligated to look after William, the son her parents adopted.
‘I can’t bear to think about it. I feel so bad because it was me who pushed for adoption. But the effect it has had . . . on my husband, Ryan, on our relationship . . . on Ellie; she’s lost her childhood to William. And I did that to my family!’
In another household tonight, Katya and her adopted family will curl up in front of the TV.
Unless, that is, Katya suddenly leaps up, hurls herself at Sophie and hits her, screaming ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ and, as Sophie told me, ‘dark, dark words I never thought I’d hear from a child’.
That might not happen tonight. Maybe not tomorrow, either. But it will happen again; it always does.
If you think that is more than they can reasonably bear, there is still more to come.
Because their children’s problems were confirmed so late in childhood, two of these three couples — Sophie and Tom, and Simon and Alex — had already gone on to adopt a second child. This year, both of those younger ones, now aged six and three, are showing all-too-familiar symptoms.
Five adoptions, five damaged children. And for them — and for thousands of other parents of adopted children — love will never, ever be enough.
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