Changing Ethnicities? Changing Paradigms? The Adoption of Black and Minority Ethnic Children in England

Abstract

The history of adoption for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) children in the UK has gone through distinct phases. The first can be located in the 1960s and 1970s, when initially ‘pioneering’ efforts were made to secure adoption for those previously regarded as ‘unadoptable’ due to the lack of potential adopters in minority communities and wider racial prejudice (Raynor, 1970). Following the pattern set by the British Adoption Project, a clear majority (around 80 percent) of BME adoptions were transracial, into white families, and this continued into the 1980s (Thoburn et al., 2000). A second phase began in the mid 1970s, challenging both the effects of transracial adoption (hereafter TRA) on children, and the notion that ethnically matched adoptions were not achievable. This critique drew significantly on Black Nationalist discourses from the US and gained institutional purchase in the 1980s as ‘same race’ placement policies were instigated in left-leaning urban local authorities and gradually came to be an orthodoxy within state and voluntary adoption agencies. This consolidation soon established clear battle lines, between the world of social work and a hostile media-political axis that branded adoption practice as rooted in a flawed ‘political correctness’ and demanded facilitation of TRA. However, despite perceptions of a ‘ban’ on TRA, research studies demonstrate that between a quarter and a third of BME adoptions have been into white families over the past two decades or so (Ivaldi, 1998; Dance et al., 2010; Selwyn et al., 2010).