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I feel the need to follow up on my last post regarding adoption, as the interpretation of my words by some was not what I intended. I did not mean to suggest that we are having a particularly trying time and I am sorry if that is how it came across. It is a huge emotional investment, for sure, but honestly I do not feel hard done by.

What prompted me to write about what is ordinarily a very private matter was the way in which people on the outside sometimes dismiss the complexities of the process as trivial. I have known friends—while we were still in the midst of our assessment—to shake their heads in disbelief and pronounce on the stupidity of the situation when we tried to explain why it was taking so long. In the most recent case I had taken the time to thoughtfully explain the nature of the process of child-placement, only for my words to be dismissed as an unhelpful interjection. It was this frustration that drove me to write.

People have a tendency to talk about unnecessary bureaucracy, incompetent social workers, race fixations, political correctness, government interference and so on. From my point of view, all of this is nonsense. The process is necessarily long and involved because the consequences of getting it wrong are so absolutely serious. It is easy to say that everything used to be so much simpler, but when you consider the cases of abuse perpetrated by some adopters and foster-carers during earlier periods—the very people entrusted to care for vulnerable children—it is even easier to see why the emphasis on the assessment is so important.

The vast majority of children who are adopted in the UK today are victims of physical or sexual abuse, serious neglect or parental substance abuse. Very few are orphans or children voluntarily relinguised by their parents. When children are removed from their families by the State it is because the situation is serious. While newspapers frequently report stories of children wrongfully removed from their families, the number of well-founded cases is vast. There are currently around 10,000 children in the UK awaiting adoption. In this country, the State considers the welfare and safety of the child paramount and the agencies of the State are duty-bound to act if they believe a child’s welfare or life is in danger (and we all know the consequences when they fail to discharge this duty).

Therefore, when a couple such as us come forward to volunteer as adoptive parents, it is vital that any child placed with us in the future is not only safe, but will also have the right support as they grow and develop. A child that has experienced abuse or neglect is always psychologically damaged and will require care well beyond the ordinary that any responsible parent would give their children. Thus it is wholly reasonable that social workers carry out a thorough investigation into how we deal with stress, our relationship as a couple, whether we are calm or angry people, how we view childrearing and education, in addition to carrying out the background criminal record checks and our ability to support a child financially.

Alhamdulilah, my wife and I were approved to be adoptive parents earlier in the summer and are now going through the process of looking for a child appropriate to our profile. The profile is not a simplistic snapshot of our ethnicity: it is the panorama built up in the course of our assessment. The task of the child’s social worker is to match the child with adoptive parents that can most meet their needs, culturally, emotionally and physically. It is the right of every adoptive parent to say that they would not be comfortable caring for a child that had suffered X abuse or do not think they have the skills to look after a child with Y disability, or to specify the age of the child. As a result, while a child and adoptive parents might match in terms of ethnicity or religion, there could be a multitude of other reasons why the two would not come together.

In my experience, social workers are striving to act in the best interest of the child. We have had our share of disappointments, but we know that it is only a matter of time until we are matched with the right child, and the bigger sets of challenges of raising a child begin. It is true that being white and Muslim restricts the pool of children available to us—those who can’t understand why a Somali baby should not be placed with us should put themselves in the place of an already troubled child asked by his school friends to explain why his mummy and daddy are white. The system undoubtedly has its shortcomings, but I personally think they have the balance just about right.