Children of all races just need family love
‘Prioritising ethnic identity above all else was having a negative effect on children’
Once again, race has proved a bar to adoption in the UK. This time, Sandeep and Reena Mander, a British-born Sikh couple living in Berkshire, have reportedly been told by their local adoption agency that they need not apply, because only white children are available. The Manders, who are in their thirties, are taking the agency to court with the help of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. They say they were judged suitable parents, but advised instead to adopt from India, a country with which they have no close links.
There seems little doubt that the Manders are highly sincere about adoption. They have tried for seven years to have a child, through 16 gruelling IVF attempts. They made it clear that they would be very happy to provide a loving home for a child of any ethnic background. Yet because they are classed under their “cultural heritage” as Indian/pakistani, it seems that – in Berkshire, at least – they don’t stand a chance.
One can only imagine their frustration, yet the Manders are far from the first to experience such feelings. When Britain had a strict policy of “same-race” adoption, before legislation in 2014, it was more often white families that were denied the chance to adopt a child from a different ethnic group. The theory was that it was better for the child’s self-image to be placed with people from the same “cultural heritage”.
The reality was that black children in particular spent a far longer time stuck in the care system than white ones. This was not because white families didn’t want to adopt them – often they did, very much – but because the system demanded an ethnic match which wasn’t always available. The prioritising of ethnic identity above all other concerns was having a negative effect on actual children in real life.
Although I think such a policy was deeply short-sighted, I can partly see how it came about. Stories had trickled back from much earlier adoptions in which some black children growing up in white families reported feeling confused about their identity. Sometimes they were the only black child in a white family and a largely white area, in an era when children were broadly expected to be grateful and get on with things. In those days, personal feelings about race often weren’t openly discussed, but racist taunts from strangers were more widely tolerated.
If an alternative was adoption by a loving black family, I can see why this would have been preferable. Yet many transracial adoptions had also been great successes, and what the ban overlooked – as pristine theories often do – was that in cases where no racially appropriate match was available, that child would instead grow up in care, deprived of the assured love of any family at all.
This official elevation of theory over humanity happened to my own family, in Northern Ireland in the mid-sixties – a place in which, with a few exceptions, the ethnic mix was almost exclusively white. My parents, who then had two girls of their own, had home visits from a little boy of mixed African and white ethnicity, who was nearly two and in a care home. They loved him and wanted to adopt him, but the young social worker ruled against it. Her reason wasn’t openly connected to race, but some theory of sibling rivalry whereby she decided that my two sisters were more intelligent than him and the placement wouldn’t work.
My parents reported that he showed a lively curiosity when in their house, but nothing could alter the decision, not even appeals to their MP. Further contact was discouraged. Decades later, my parents discovered that he had remained in the children’s home, a place with a terrible reputation, until he was 16. The thought of the loving childhood he could have experienced instead is upsetting to contemplate.
The current policy is that “cultural heritage” should be a consideration when placing a child, but that they should not be kept waiting for a “perfect match”.
The website of Adopt Berkshire, for example, interprets this by saying that it will look first of all for prospective adopters that “reflect the child’s religion and culture of heritage”. This means that if a child was nominally white and Christian, say, with a large number of similar families on the waiting list, adoptive parents from another religious or ethnic group might not get a look-in.
Yet I wonder if even this policy always makes sense in a UK that has changed enormously. There are so many factors in each individual child’s needs. As a nation, we are increasingly tricky to categorise: our fastest growing ethnic group is now mixed race, a group that includes my own children. I am a white Northern Irish woman married to a man of Punjabi origin who grew up in the Midlands. His father is Hindu, his mother is Sikh. Our children celebrate Christmas and Diwali, eat potato bread and parathas, and seem perfectly happy growing up in London. All around me I see other mixed-race families, in their different combinations, doing the same thing.
Mixed-race marriage is not the same as transracial adoption, of course. Adopted children do need to learn about their “cultural heritage”, whereas most adults already know it. But the adoption process is now so demanding that surely education around these issues must be an important part of the package. And I can’t help thinking that a child of any background would be fortunate to have the Manders as parents. Such a child would at least experience what so many lonely children in our erratic care system never, ever get to feel – the confidence that they were, and are, dearly loved and wanted.